Blood Music (3 page)

He had talked to them on as high a level of chemical training and had built them up as far as he was going to. Their brief lives were over—he had been ordered to kill them. That would be simple enough. He could add detergent to the containers and their cell membranes would dissolve. They would be sacrificed to the caution and shortsightedness of a group of certifiable flatworm management-types.

His breath grew ragged as he watched the lymphocytes going about their business.

They were beautiful. They were his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they were busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on…

Like Washoe the chimp teaching her child to speak in American Sign Language. They were passing on the torch of potential intelligence. How would he ever know if they could use all their potential?

Pasteur.

“Pasteur,” he said out loud. “Jenner.”

Vergil carefully prepared a syringe. Brows knitted together, he pushed the cannule through the cotton cap of the first tube and dipped it into the solution. He pulled back the plunger. The pastel fluid filled the barrel; five, ten, fifteen cc’s.

He held the syringe before his eyes for several minutes, knowing he was contemplating something rash. Until now, he addressed his creations mentally, you’ve had it real easy. Life of Riley. Sit in your serum and fart around and absorb all the hormones you need. Don’t even have to work for a living. No severe test, no stress. No need to use what I gave you.

So what was he going to do? Put them to work in their natural environment? By injecting them into his body, he could smuggle them out of Genetron, and recover enough of them later to start the experiment again.

“Hey, Vergil!” Ernesto Villar knocked on the doorframe and poked his head in. “We’ve got the rat artery movie. We’re having a meeting in 233.” He tapped his fingers on the frame and smiled brightly. “You’re invited. We need our resident kludge.”

Vergil lowered the syringe and looked off into nothing.

“Vergil?”

“I’l1 be there,” he said tonelessly.

“Don’t get all excited,” Villar said peevishly. “We won’t hold the premiere for long.” He ducked out of the door. Vergil listened to his footsteps receding down the hall.

Rash, indeed. He reinserted the cannule through the cotton, squirted the serum back into the tube and dropped the syringe into ajar of alcohol. He replaced the tube in the rack and returned it to the Kelvinator. Before now, the spinner bottle and pallet of tubes had had no Label but his name. He removed his name from the pallet and replaced it with, “Biochip protein samples; lab failures 21–32.” On the spinner bottle he placed a label reading, “Rat anti-goat lab failures 13–14.” No one would mess with an anonymous and unanalyzed group of lab failures. Failures were sacred.

He needed time to think.

Rothwild and ten of the key scientists on the MABs project had gathered around a large-screen projection TV in 233, an empty lab currently being used as a meeting room. Rothwild was a dapper red-haired fellow who acted as a controller and mediator between management and researchers. He stood beside the screen, resplendent in a cream-colored jacket and chocolate brown pants. Villar offered Vergil an avocado-green plastic chair and he sat at the rear of the room, legs crossed, hands behind his head.

Rothwild delivered the introduction. “This is the breakdown from Team Product E-64. You all contributed—” He glanced uncertainly at Vergil, “And now you can all share in the…uh, the triumph. I think we can safely call it that.

“E-64 is a prototype investigator biochip, three hundred micrometers in diameter, protein on a silicon substrate, sensitive to forty-seven different blood fraction variables.” He cleared his throat. They all knew that, but this was an occasion. “On May 10th, we inserted E-64 into a rat artery, closed the very small incision, and let it pass through the artery as far as it would go. The journey lasted five seconds. The rat was then sacrificed and the biochip recovered. Since that time, Terence’s group has ‘debriefed’ the biochip and interpreted the results. By putting the results through a special vector imaging program, we’ve been able to produce a little movie.”

He gestured to Ernesto, who pressed a button on the projector’s video recorder. Computer graphics flashed by—Genetron’s animated logo, stylized signatures from the imaging team, and then darkness. Ernesto switched off the room lights.

A pink circle appeared on the screen, expanded, and distorted into an irregular oval. More circles appeared within the first. “We’ve slowed the journey down six times,” Rothwild explained. “And to simplify things, we’ve eliminated the readouts on chemical concentrations in the rat blood.”

Vergil leaned forward in his chair, troubles momentarily forgotten. Streamers appeared and shot through the fluctuating tunnel of concentric circles.

“Blood flow through the artery,” Ernesto chimed in.

The journey down the rat artery lasted thirty seconds. Vergil’s arm-hair prickled. If his lymphocytes could see, this was what they would experience, traveling down a blood vessel…A long irregular tunnel, blood smoothly coursing, getting caught in little eddies, the artery constricting—smaller and smaller circles, jerks and nudges as the biochip bounced against the walls—and finally, the end of the journey, as the biochip wedged into a capillary.

The sequence ended with a flash of white.

The room filled with cheers.

“Now,” Rothwild said, smiling and raising his hand to return order. “Any comments, before we show this to Harrison and Yng?”

Vergil bowed out of the celebration after one glass of champagne and returned to his lab, feeling more depressed than ever. Where was his spirit of cooperation? Did he actually believe he could tackle something as ambitious as his lymphocytes, all by himself? So far, he had—but at the expense of having the experiment discontinued, perhaps even destroyed.

He slid the notebooks into a cardboard box and sealed the box with tape. On Hazel’s side of the lab, he found a masking tape label on a dewar flask—“Overton, do not remove”—and peeled it off. He applied the label to his box and put the box in a neutral territory beside the sink. He then set about washing the glassware and tidying his side of the lab.

When the time came for an inspection, he would be the meek supplicant; he would give Harrison the satisfaction of victory.

And then, surreptitiously—over the next couple of weeks-he would smuggle out the materials he needed. The lymphocytes would be removed last; they could be kept for some time at his apartment, in the refrigerator. He could steal supplies to keep them viable, but he wouldn’t be able to do any more work on them.

He would decide later how he could best continue his experiment.

Harrison stood in the lab door.

“All clear,” Vergil said, properly repentant.

They watched him closely for the next week; then, concerned with the final stages of MABs prototype testing, they called off their watchdogs. His behavior had been beyond reproach.

Now he set about the last steps in his voluntary departure from Genetron.

Vergil hadn’t been the only one to step beyond the bounds of Genetron’s ideological largesse. Management, again in the person of Gerald T. Harrison, had come down on Hazel just last month. Hazel had gone off on a sidetrack with her E. colt cultures, trying to prove that sex had originated as a result of the invasion of an autonomous DNA sequence—a chemical parasite called the F-factor—in early prokaryotic life forms. She had postulated that sex was not evolutionarily useful—at least not to women, who could, in theory, breed parthenogenetically—and that ultimately men were superfluous.

She had gathered enough evidence for Vergil, peeping into her notebooks, to agree with her conclusions. But Hazel’s work did not meet the Genetron standards. It was revolutionary, socially controversial. Harrison had given the word; she had stopped that particular branch of research.

Genetron did not want publicity or even a tinge of controversy. Not yet. It needed a spotless reputation when it made its stock public and announced it was manufacturing functional MABs.

They had not been concerned with Hazel’s papers, however. They had allowed her to keep them. That Harrison had retained his file bothered Vergil.

When he was certain their guard was down, he went into action. He requested access to the company computers (he had been put on restriction indefinitely); quite properly, he said he needed to check his figures on structures of denatured and unfolded proteins. Permission was granted, and he logged onto the system in the share lab one evening after eight.

Vergil had grown up a little too early to be classified as an eighties whizkid, but in the last seven years he had revised his credit records at three major firms and made an entry into the records of a famous university. That entry had practically guaranteed his getting the Genetron position. Vergil had never felt guilty about these intrusions and manipulations.

His credit was never going to be as bad as it had once been, and there was no sense hi being punished for past indiscretions. He knew he was fully capable of doing Genetron’s work—his fake university records were just a show for personnel directors who needed lights and music. Besides, Vergil had believed—until the past couple of weeks—that the world was his personal puzzle, and that any riddlings and unravelings he could perform, including computer hacking, were simply part of his nature.

He found it ridiculously easy to break the Rinaldi code used to conceal Genetron’s confidential files. There were no mysteries for him in the Gödel numbers and strings of seemingly random digits that came up on the screen. He slid into the numbers and information like a seal into water.

He found his file and switched a key equation for the code in that section only. Then he decided to play it safer-there was always the possibility, however remote, of someone being just as ingenious as he was. He deleted the file completely.

Next on his agenda was locating the medical records for Genetron employees. He altered his insurance designation and hid the alteration. Queries from outside sources would find him fully covered even after his termination, and there would never be any question about his not paying premiums.

He worried about such things. His health was never completely satisfactory.

He thought for a moment about other mischief that could be worked, and decided against it. He was not vindictive. He shut the terminal off and unplugged it

Surprisingly little time—two days—passed before the deletion was noticed. Rothwild confronted him in the hall early one morning and told him his lab was off limits. Vergil protested mildly that he had a box of personal belongings he wanted to take with him.

“Fine, but that’s it. No biologicals. I want to inspect everything.”

Vergil calmly agreed. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” Rothwild said. “And I don’t care to know. I vouched for you. So did Thornton. You’re a great disappointment to us all.”

Vergil’s mind raced. He had never removed the lymphocytes; they had seemed safe enough disguised in the lab refrigerator, and he had never expected the boom to be lowered so quickly. “I’m out?”

“You’re out. And I’m afraid you’re going to find it hard getting employment in any other private lab. Harrison is furious.”

Hazel was already at work when they entered the lab. Vergil picked up the box in the neutral zone beneath the sink, covering the label with his hand. He hefted it and surreptitiously removed the tape, balling it up and dropping it into the trash basket “One more thing,” he said. “I have some lab failures laced with tracer that should be disposed of. Properly. Radionucleides.”

“Oh, shit,” Hazel said. “Where?”

“In the fridge. Not to worry—just carbon 14. May I?” He looked at Rothwild. Rothwild gestured for the box to be put on a counter so he could inspect it “May I?” Vergil repeated. “I don’t want to leave anything around that could be harmful.”

Rothwild nodded reluctantly. Vergil went to the Kelvinator, dropping his lab coat on the counter. His hand brushed over a box of hypodermics, palming one.

The lymphocyte pallet was on the bottom shelf. Vergil kneeled and removed a tube. He quickly inserted the syringe and drew up twenty cc’s of the serum. The syringe had never been used before and the cannule should therefore be reasonably sterile; he had no time for an alcohol swab, but he had to take that risk.

Before he inserted the needle under his skin, he wondered briefly what he was doing, and what he thought he could gain. There was very little chance the lymphocytes would survive. It was possible that his tampering had changed them sufficiently for them to either die in his bloodstream, unable to adapt, or do something uncharacteristic and be destroyed by his own immune system.

Either way, the life span of an active lymphocyte hi the human body was a matter of weeks. Life was hard for the body’s cops.

The needle went in. He felt a dull prick, a brief sting, and the cold fluid mixing with his blood. He withdrew the needle and lay the syringe in the bottom of the refrigerator. Pallet of tubes and spinner bottle in hand, he stood and shut the door. Rothwild watched nervously as Vergil put on rubber gloves and one by one poured the contents of the tubes into a beaker half-filled with ethanol. He then added the fluid in the spinner bottle. With a small grin, Vergil stoppered the beaker and sloshed its contents, then placed it into a protected waste box. He slid the box across the floor with his foot. “It’s all yours,” he said.

Rothwild had finished turning through the notebooks. “I’m not sure these shouldn’t remain in our possession,” he said. “You spent a lot of our time working on them.”

Vergil’s idiot grin didn’t change. “I’ll sue Genetron and spread dirt hi every journal I can think of. Not good for your upcoming position in the market, no?”

Rothwild regarded him with half-lidded eyes, his neck and cheeks pinking slightly. “Get out of here,” he said. “We’ll send the rest of your stuff later.”

Vergil picked up the box. The cold feeling in his forearm had passed now. Rothwild escorted him down the stairs and across the sidewalk to the gate. Walter accepted the badge, his face rigid, and Rothwild followed Vergil to the parking lot.

“Remember your contract,” Rothwild said. “Just remember what you can and cannot say.”

“I am allowed to say one thing, I believe,” Vergil said, struggling to keep his words dear through his anger.

“What’s that?” Rothwild asked.

“Fuck you. All of you.”

Vergil drove by the Genetron sign and thought of all that had happened within those austere walls. He looked at the black cube beyond, barely visible through a copse of eucalyptus trees.

More than likely, the experiment was over. For a moment he felt ill with tension and disgust. And then he thought of the billions of lymphocytes he had just destroyed. His nausea increased and he had to swallow hard to keep the taste of acid out of his throat.

“Fuck you,” he murmured, “because everything I touch is fucked.”