Arcadia (Book 1): Damn The Dead Read online

  “Sounds exciting,” Sheena said.

  “Yeah, brilliant,” John responded with heavy sarcasm.

  He hated being posted out with brand spanking probationers. They showed too much enthusiasm, asked too many questions and frankly, were a liability when the proverbial hit the fan. If he’d wanted to teach newbies, he’d have got a job over at the training school.

  Inside the research facility, in a hermetically sealed sterile room, a geneticist stood peering into the twin oculars of a microscope. ‘Dr Raj Shah,’ said the name on the badge, attached by Velcro to the carbon-lined paper suit he was wearing. He lifted his head for a moment, blinked a few times, then bent down for another look, twisting the focus knob ever so slightly. The protective goggles, which lab policy forced him to wear, made a simple task such as this so much more difficult.

  The slide he was studying supported a thinly sliced cross section of rat abdomen, barely a few molecules thick. It must have been the fiftieth sample from this particular specimen he had observed today.

  The repetitive monotony of the experiments he and the others involved in this project were performing did little to quell their excitement. After all, the successes and advancements they had made thus far, served to show that they were well on their way to the greatest breakthrough in genetic science ever. Hell, what they were working on might well be considered the most important breakthrough ever in any scientific field. This, in Doctor Shah’s mind, was no small boast.

  He and the other doctors here were mere months away, a year at the most, from a cure for the big issues such as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, even cancer and AIDS. His project had started as research into the nature of stem cells, studies that had brought their understanding of the human body a long way - but this had been just the beginning.

  “Damn it,” Raj cursed into his facemask.

  “Doctor?” a technician asked, looking over at him.

  “The same as usual,” he told her, with a deep sigh of frustration. “The sample is necrotising at an accelerated rate.”

  The rapid cell death their manipulation of the genetic coding was currently causing meant the window for study was greatly diminished.

  He took the sample slide and tossed it into a large metal dish, labelled ‘Sally’, which contained a dissected rat. As the plastic slide landed in the open chest cavity of the animal, Raj saw one of its feet twitch. Odd, he thought. It was clearly nothing more than a spasmodic response of the nervous system but the animal had been dead quite some time. All bioelectrical activity should have abated by now. He dismissed it.

  Although no exact figure had yet been officially decided upon by the governing scientific bodies, it was currently being argued that the number of cells in an adult human was somewhere in the range between fifty and one hundred trillion, most of which were programmed to perform a specific role. Each and every one of these cells was an individual living organism in its own right. From one perspective, the body could be said to be a huge community of specifically programmed cells, some having been made into red or white blood cells, some into brain cells, others into lung, heart, or liver tissue. So specialised were they that, without their incredibly complex interaction within this community that was a living person, they would not be able to support themselves as individual organisms.

  No matter what their adopted specialisation though, each cell had started its life exactly the same, as an unformatted stem cell, capable of becoming any one of the innumerable specialisations. It was due to this pluripotency of stem cells that they were considered such an important area of study. It was the reason why AXA and the government were pushing so much of their revenue Doctor Shah’s way.

  It was already widely known that stem cells could be used to rebuild any damaged, missing, or diseased tissue within the body. Placed into the affected area, they would receive chemical ‘triggers’ from the native cells surrounding them and thereby adopt their function. The problem lay however, with the fact that stem cells were notoriously hard to acquire. The main process in current usage, the growth of cloned foetuses, was still a controversial matter to say the least.

  This raging issue was of no concern to Doctor Shah and his associates. He considered foetal cloning, for the purposes of harvesting their cells, to be backward, unnecessarily laborious and ultimately redundant, as he was sure his own studies would soon prove.

  He and his colleagues here had already shown that any cell, no matter how it had specialised, still held within itself the genetic coding that had been the blueprint for its initial construction. This meant that all cells, if this initial coding were accessed and reinitiated correctly, were capable of de-formatting themselves and returning to their blank state. In essence, every cell had the capacity to become a stem cell, and then to reinvent and rebuild itself into any other specialisation. The ramifications of this were virtually limitless.

  Given just a little more time, Doctor Shah would be able to not only replace damaged cells, but also rebuild lost organs or limbs. As if these things alone were not enough, this research could potentially be the cure even for aging – and therefore, for death itself.

  Dr Shah stood upright once more and rubbed the back of his neck, before preparing another sample. He’d been stooped over the microscope for some time, so intent on his examination that he had been unaware that the muscles in his back were beginning to ache. He arched his spine and stretched out his arms.

  Despite the room being maintained at a cool seventeen degrees Celsius, he felt sweaty in his paper suit and lab coat. His hair itched under the cap that he wore and re-breathing the moisture from his lungs, which gathered in his facemask, only added to his discomfort. The gloves were the worst though, skin-tight rubber that trapped the sweat inside and made the skin of his fingertips wrinkle with saturation.

  He felt the sudden need for a cigarette. He’d given up three weeks ago, giving in to the demands from his fiancé, but his yearning to feel that creamy smoke filling his lungs was now just as strong as ever. His mind raced, his thoughts whirling around inside his head like a tornado.

  The problem he currently faced was that the re-programmed amoeboid cells, as he had dubbed them, were doing their job too well. As they had been designed to, rather than accepting the chemical triggers of the cells that surrounded them, they instead passed on their own coding and thereby converted every cell that they came into contact with. Unfortunately, keeping this process under control was proving difficult and such a rampant unchecked spread of cellular de-specialisation was of absolutely no use. It was evident from the tests so far that introducing the amoeboid cells to any living host would cause such a radical breakdown of organ tissue, they would kill a patient far more efficiently than whatever illness or injury they might be suffering from.

  So far, Raj’s people had managed to include within their recoding, the ability for the altered cells to recognise tissue specific to the nervous system and some areas of the brain. As the doctor’s studies on the rats showed, the re-programmed cells were now leaving these particular types of cells unaffected, even if injected directly into those areas.

  It was dramatic progress, but it failed to impress their governing bodies as much as he had hoped. It seemed that they would not be happy until Raj and his team were able to programme the amoeboid cells to ignore any given type of cell. Only then, would his research be of practical medical value. Only then, would the financers be able to start marketing the product, to see a return for their investments.

  Raj looked over at the clock on the wall and sighed heavily. Was it really six thirty already? That was enough for today, he decided.

  His passion for his work often caused him to labour far later into the evening than this. Tonight however, his partner, Kate, was meeting up with her old University friends for a girls’ night out, and he wanted to see her briefly before she left. Both his work here and her shifts as a surgeon at Barnet General meant they spent precious little time together. He knew that they had
to make every effort they could to prevent the two of them from becoming strangers.

  Raj removed the sample slide he had only just prepared from the viewing stage of the microscope and tossed it into the metal tray, with the remainder of the rat carcass. Picking up the tray that contained Sally, he carried it over to the incinerator.

  The rats were not named through any level of sentimentality. That would be ridiculous. It was simply that the human brain found it far easier to associate a specimen by name, rather than the string of digits beneath the barcode on their cage.

  As he was walking with the tray held out in front of him, the rat carcass suddenly convulsed violently, almost flipping over the rim. The dead animal’s limbs thrashed out, the blood that had pooled in the tray splashing up the front of Raj’s protective suit. A foot caught hold of the man’s thumb. Gripping tight, the rat’s claws scratched at him and snagged his glove. It was enough to pierce a miniscule hole in the rubber.

  Crying out in fright, Raj threw Sally and the tray into the incinerator and slammed the glass door shut.

  “What’s going on?” Another Doctor asked with surprise, as everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and stared over at Raj.

  “My specimen just had a convulsion,” Raj told them, breathing heavily. “It seems the new Omega Six cells are working better to protect the nervous system than we anticipated.”

  “Good,” the other doctor replied. “Let’s just hope we can learn to control them just as well in other regards.”

  The puncture in Raj’s glove was so small that he didn’t even notice. Nor did he feel the tiny cut in the tip of his thumb.

  With the rat locked inside what looked like a large microwave oven, he pressed the red ignition button. In the brief moment before the violent blue-white flames burst into life, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Sally lift her head, her teeth chattering wildly at him. Before he could turn to look properly though, she was consumed by raging fire.

  Within a matter of seconds, everything but the metal tray had been reduced to a fine ash. The fire then extinguished itself, with the same sudden certainty with which it had ignited, and a powerful fan extracted the ash through a number of small vents.

  “You all done?” asked another fellow geneticist, whom he had headhunted from a Canadian pharmaceutical company two years before.

  “Yeah, I’m done for,” Raj replied wearily. “I’ll complete my report on the spectroscopic analysis of Sally tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough. See you bright and early in the morning,” the doctor responded, her cheery words a contrast to the level of fatigue in her voice.

  She knew just how Raj felt. The woman wished she could take some of the huge amount of holiday time she was owed. To even ask at a time like this though, when they were so close to full fruition, would not be met well.

  “I’ll be back in before the first sparrow fart,” Raj said, causing the woman to laugh.

  It was good that he was still keeping up his sense of humour, she thought. Raj was one of those people that could lift the mood of a room with a few choice words. It was a quality that helped to keep them all going and made him such a good Head of Project.

  The exit from the lab comprised of an ‘airlock’ type system of two doors that could not be opened at the same time. In the small room between them, Raj stripped out of his long coat, uncomfortable paper suit, and ever so flattering government issued underwear and plimsolls. Because of the blood on his suit, he left his gloves on until he had opened what looked like a garbage disposal shoot and placed the clothes inside.

  Peeling off his gloves and throwing them on top, he failed to see the tiny spot of blood on his thumb. Some of it was his, some was not. Of the mere thirteen rodent blood cells that slipped through the rat scratch into his capillaries, only four had not completely necrotised. It was enough. Sally had got her revenge.

  Raj closed the door of the clothing compartment, hearing the sounds of it locking in place and flames roaring into life.

  “Ready, Doctor Shah?” said a voice, via the speaker in an upper corner of the room.

  “Ready.”

  With that, jets of hot water sprung from the several recessed showerheads in the ceiling of the wet-room. Raj jolted slightly and bared his teeth in shock. The heat of the steaming spray caught him out every time. Anally meticulous cleanliness was a necessity when working in the conditions he did.

  “Don’t forget all the nooks and crannies,” the voice said.

  Raj ignored it, washing as quickly as he could. He hated the sharp odour filling his nostrils from the copious amounts of disinfectant in the water. Even the air he was breathing had a chemical taste, as it was completely renewed in the decontamination chamber every twenty-two seconds. The shower stopped and a second later, a hatch in one wall opened, revealing a towel and his own shoes and clothes.

  Once he had dressed himself, a green light appeared over the second door in the room and it unlocked.

  “See you again tomorrow, Doctor,” said the voice. Was it his imagination, Raj wondered, or did that comment have a lewd element to it.

  On his way out of the building, he passed the specimen holding rooms. He paused and looked through the glass panel, watching the vet going about her business. Various animals were housed in cages: rabbits, mice, rats, monkeys, and chimpanzees. All along one wall, there were aquarium tanks containing axolotls, an odd species of salamander that never matured from their tadpole form. The amphibians were an incredible anomaly of nature, able to heal without scarring, grow back entire lost limbs and remain perpetually youthful. They had proven invaluable to the doctor in his research.

  Some of the chimps and monkeys reacted angrily to his staring, shaking the bars of their individual cages and screaming aggressively. Others remained curled in dejection and fear in the rear corners of their small confines.

  Raj focused his attention on the rats. Those that were host to the amoeboid cells were chewing feverishly at the bars of their cages, in an apparent attempt to get at the other animals around them. This uncharacteristic behaviour concerned him.

  Studies of the live hosts, prior to them expiring, had shown unusual and unforeseen cellular activity in some individuals. Some native cells that received the foreign cellular re-programming managed to maintain their specialist integrity, while simultaneously and bizarrely behaving more like stem cells, developing the abilities necessary for their individual autonomous survival. The resulting effect of this was that although the host was still able to function as a complex organism, it also adopted some of the traits of single-celled organisms, such as amoebae. Hence the name with which Doctor Shah had labelled his microscopic creations.

  Amoebae were extremely resilient organisms. Like more complex life, a community of them could be comprised of trillions of individual cells. In a mass of amoebae however, every cell was identical, unspecialised. Because of this, amoebae were an unremarkable-looking blob of living tissue. These simple forms of life could be cut clean in half without any adverse effects. All you would have for your effort would be two smaller healthy amoebae communities. If you were to take a gun and shoot a large enough mass of amoebae, the result would be a healthy community with a hole through it.

  As miraculous and unexpected as these traits in the exposed specimens were, they also came with the unfortunate detrimental effect that the brain cells of the host also developed an amoeba-like predisposition towards autonomy, and therefore, found it difficult to communicate with each other. This was still the case even in the specimens that had more recently been exposed to the latest version of the amoeboid cells, which were capable of withholding their programming from some areas of brain tissue. Cognitive communication was thereby greatly reduced and limited to the rudimentary necessities for the animals’ immediate survival. Higher cognitive functions in the rats, such as social awareness, were lost. This, coupled with the hosts’ insatiable need for proteins in an effort to rebuild rapidly necrotising tissue, led them to
cannibalise each other.

  As Raj continued to watch the frenzied activity of the rats in their cages, one shuddered and fell suddenly limp. As was the certain fate of all her sisters, the rat had died of multiple organ failure. Raj rapped on the glass, alerting the attention of the vet within the room.

  “Can you freeze Lucy?” he shouted, pointing at the dead animal. “And have her prepped for dissection first thing tomorrow.”

  The vet gave a thumbs-up and said something in response that Raj couldn’t make out through the glass and the facemask the woman was wearing.

  Leaving the building, Raj climbed into his eight-year-old Skoda and drove from the car park at the rear of the premises to the front entrance. Unlike most men, he cared little for cars. As long as whatever he was driving got him reliably from A to B, it was good enough. Kate however, was a different story. She loved the flash motors and often berated him for not upgrading to ‘something more befitting his status.’

  “Good night, Doctor,” said the security guard, as he pressed the button that opened the squealing gates.

  Raj didn’t respond. His mind was still racing with so many problems that he was barely even aware of the man’s presence, just as he was completely oblivious to the foreign altered cells coursing through his blood stream, rapidly passing on their specialist programming to any of his own cells that they came into contact with. Even his white blood cells, the body’s defence against infection, which initially gathered in smothering force upon them, were able to put up little fight, as they too were readily assimilated.

  The drive home to his three-bedroom new-build in Mill Hill was short, barely three miles. The rush hour traffic had already thinned out and he was home in a little over ten minutes. Yet, even as he was driving through the automatic gates of the private community, he was already beginning to experience the initial symptoms of the spread of cellular chaos through his body.

  Having pulled up onto his driveway, he hunched over and grimaced against a building ache in his stomach. Mistakenly, he rued having eaten that chicken teriyaki wrap for lunch.