“You’re telling me there’s cocaine in that sludge?” Juan said, waving the analyst’s report. “And urea? There’s piss in it?”
John Hendrickson, the FBI analyst assigned to help him on this, nodded. “I ran both gas chromatography tests as well as an infrared spectroscopy analysis on that stuff you sent me. The test results both agreed on the overall chemical makeup of that stuff. It’s a concoction that would probably give folks nightmares.”
Sitting on a tall metal stool, Juan leaned his back against the lab bench and skimmed the rest of the report. “So, it looks like you detected the key components of beer and animal urine, both acidic ingredients, yet the overall pH is still neutral?”
Hendrickson nodded as he flipped through his own copy of the report. “Turn to page twelve. You’ll see there’s a bunch of organic compounds that offset the acidity.”
Flipping through the forty-page report, Juan paused when he reached the microbiological analysis. “So, this stuff is also teeming with bacteria.”
“Yep. And if you skip to page thirty-five, there’s also a bunch of rather tiny spores. We’re still processing those, but they look like the same spores we found in the water sample you sent. Not sure what those are, but they’re about four hundred nanometers in diameter and have odd filaments coming off the protein coat.”
Juan looked at the micrograph pictured in the report. “That’s… that’s a capsid,” he exclaimed. “What the hell is in it? Maybe a virion? If so, coded to do what?”
With a confused expression, the lab tech asked, “Sorry, Dr. Gutierrez, but virion? Capsid?”
“Sorry. A capsid is just a protein shell that’s created within the life cycle of a virus, and a virion is basically a complete virus with a protein shell around it. We use these in genetic research, because it’s a convenient way to introduce genetic material. Basically, if we have a virus that we eventually want to have merge with certain targeted cells through a lysogenic process, we take that virus and induce capsid self-assembly such that it’s surrounded by a protective protein shell. It can then be placed in water so that test subjects will drink what in essence are spores, and then the acid in the stomach helps activate the viral agent, which will seek out its target and merge its DNA into the host cell. That’s all there is to it. Pretty simple in concept.”
The lab tech snorted. “If you say so.”
Juan tapped on the report. “Can some of your guys process these virions and give me a breakdown of what the DNA payload is?”
Hendrickson nodded. “Yes, but we’ll probably need a few days to figure out how to process that. It’s not the kind of thing we do on a day-to-day basis, if you know what I mean.”
“Understood.” Juan’s mind drifted to the biocontainment lab where he kept samples from the water dispenser and the sludge. “Hey, even though the micrographs look identical, please run separate tests on the virions from both the sludge and the water. I want to know if they’re actually the same.”
The tech gathered up his papers and as he walked toward the exit, Hendrickson said, “Day after tomorrow. I’ll get the results then.”
The stool made an annoying squeak as Juan turned so that he was facing the biocontainment lab. He hated suiting up and despised the cleanup process on the way back out. With a deep sigh, he stood, walked to where his pressure suit was stored and tried to psyche himself up.
“The mice are probably not going to go anywhere near that stinking glop. So let’s try out the water and play a little genetic roulette.”
Juan grabbed his blue suit out of his locker and said, “We’ll see what happens.”
###
As usual, Juan felt claustrophobic as he sat in his pressure suit inside the level-four biocontainment lab. Beside him was Jennifer, one of the few FBI lab techs that was authorized to enter, and together they looked over her report.
“How can you know the mouse is pregnant?” Juan asked. “I didn’t think there was a reliable non-invasive test.”
Her voice crackled through the speaker in his pressure suit. “Urine-based pregnancy tests don’t work on mice, as you likely know. It’s actually a rather recent development that fecal testing has proven to give us a pretty reliable indicator.” She tilted the papers so that he could see them through his visor and said, “In this case, the progesterone levels in the fecal matter are clear. Our girl is definitely pregnant.”
“Do you know how far along?”
Jennifer pointed at one of the graphs which showed the beginning of the progesterone spike just over two weeks ago.
“About seventeen days.”
Juan studied the mouse, which was in a cage in the biosafety cabinet before them. “Well. Let’s see if you’re thirsty.”
He grabbed the nearby canister of the spore-filled water and swirled it around. With an eyedropper, he extracted five milliliters of the water, and placed the liquid in the mouse’s water dispenser. Using tongs, he slid the dispenser across the lab bench and into the biosafety cabinet where the mice was isolated.
“Since we’re so close to the end of the twenty-day gestation period, I think we need to start doing twelve-hour shifts. We should separate the two mice into adjacent cages and keep watch. Also—do we have any cages with wire mesh?”
“I think I can find something, but why?”
“Just a precaution. I know that newborn mice can’t walk at first, and even if they could, they probably couldn’t squeeze through the bars of this cage. But given what we’re dealing with, we can’t make any assumptions.”
She nodded. “Understood, Dr. Gutierrez. I’ll go get two new cages right away.” She turned so that they were facing each other and with a worried tone asked, “Do you really think we’re going to have something dramatic happen?”
Juan shrugged. “I don’t know. The results that Hendrickson gave me on the viriol’s genetic makeup is insane. I’ve got the computers running 24/7 trying to trace what the makers of the viriol have done. Let’s just be prepared for the worst. Constant monitoring through video surveillance. If we stick to the protocols, there should be no reason to worry.”
“I understand.”
As Jennifer left for the decontamination shower, Juan turned back toward the biosafety cabinet and watched the mouse drink the infected water.
“What is that baby of yours going to turn into?”
###
Bleary-eyed, Juan watched as the female mouse fastidiously groomed herself. He glanced at the wall clock and sighed. Five a.m. Still two more hours before Jennifer would come in to relieve him.
A buzzer sounded, indicating someone out in the lab wanted his attention. Juan pressed the pickup button on his pressure suit. “Day nineteen, and all is well,” he said drily.
“Dr. Gutierrez, it’s John Hendrickson. I just came over to leave some reports for you, but I see that one of your workstations is beeping with a message saying ‘Match found.’ I figured you’d want to know.”
“Oh, hey, John. I’m stuck in here for another two hours before Jennifer relieves me. Can you hit a key and tell me what the screen says?”
“Uh, sure.” Hendrickson sounded uneasy. “If you’re sure I won’t mess anything up. I know you’ve been running these simulations for a week.”
Juan looked at the concrete wall separating the men and sighed. “It’s okay. You can’t mess it up. Just hit any key.”
“Okay…”
Juan counted his heartbeats as he waited for the tech to say something. One… two… three…
“Okay,” Hendrickson said. “I’m reading it to you word for word. ‘This annotation has four of nine introns confirmed by evidence of alignment. Ninety percent of the annotated sequence is confirmed by isoform expressed evidence. The total length of this annotation is 1,533 bases—’”
“Hold on, hold on,” Juan said. “I’m sorry, did you hit page down when you cleared the alert? Never mind, hit page up and go to the summary portion at the top.”
Another pause. “Okay, the summary says:
“‘Peak pattern matches achieved across 1,965 annotations.
“‘Matches began after 18,500 evolutionary cycles and progressed to the peak pattern match count at 201,023 evolutionary cycles.’”
Hendrickson asked, “Is that what you were looking for?’”
Juan did the math in his head. “Holy crap. Three million years?”
“Doc?”
Juan shook his head. “Never mind, John. Thanks for letting me know about the computer results. I’ll look at the reports as soon as I get out of here.”
“Okay, doc, I’m headed home. My shift was supposed to be over hours ago. Good night.”
The speaker went silent.
Juan immediately dialed Agent Carrington.
Nate’s gruff voice came through the speakers in Juan’s helmet. “Juan? Everything okay?”
“Nate, we just got a match on the stuff that was in that water dispenser. That means it’s confirmed: they used my algorithm. And it gets worse. They created genetic fragments that we probably won’t see in humans for another three million years.”
“Whoa, are you telling me—”
“Yeah. Whatever I’ve fed this mouse, it’s for a genetic experiment that’s beyond anything I could imagine. There are almost two thousand different genes involved in this change. I can’t even begin to express how dangerous this can be.”
“Yet they were feeding it to cancer patients.”
“They were what?” Juan exclaimed.
“Shit, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. But yes—at both incident locations, it seems that a cancer patient was drinking from each of these units.”
“What happened to the cancer patients? Did they survive?”
“One of them died from being exposed to one of the calves. The other one I think is still kicking.”
Juan’s mind raced. “Nate, I can’t even begin to express how uneasy I am about what’s in that water dispenser. It’ll probably take me a couple years, with a full staff helping me, to try and figure out what the hell those DNA changes will…”
Juan trailed off as he noticed the pregnant mouse burrowing into the bed of her cage and licking at her genitalia. He leaned in closer, his visor up against the entrance to the biosafety cabinet.
“Juan?”
“Nate… the mouse is giving birth.”
“Right now?”
“Right now. Hang on.”
As Juan watched, a hint of pink appeared. Almost instantly the mother stopped licking at herself and fell onto her side.
A pink, hairless baby mouse heaved itself onto the floor of the cage.
Grabbing the edge of the lab bench, Juan felt the blood drain from his face. “Nate, we’ve got trouble.”
The mother mouse, her limbs twitching uselessly, pushed out a second baby. Suddenly, the other adult mouse, the father, caged on the other side of the cabinet, began showing signs of distress.
“Juan, you still there?”
Juan was transfixed by the sight. Both adult mice were dying while the infants squeaked in blind protest.
Feeling lightheaded, Juan gasped for breath, not realizing he’d been holding it as he watched what should have been impossible.
“Juan, are you still there?” Nate’s voice broadcast loudly. “Do I need to call a rescue team?”
“No,” Juan said, forcing himself to take deep steady breaths as he backed away from the biosafety cabinet. “Nate, I know what happened at those ranches. And the people who were given this stuff… they could be a danger to everyone around them.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
###
Juan waved away the glass of ice water he’d been offered. “I think you’ll understand if I have somewhat of an aversion to water right now.” He grabbed a bottle of Diet Coke off the table instead.
He was sitting in a conference room in FBI headquarters, along with Nate and at least a dozen other FBI agents and staff he’d never met before. Nate had only had time to introduce him to one person—Jeff Binghamton, the assistant director of CID—before the door opened and the room went quiet as a clean-cut man in his fifties walked in.
The man walked straight over to Juan and shook his hand. “Dr. Gutierrez, I presume?” He had a velvety-smooth voice and a firm grip. “I’m FBI Director Neil Wilson. I’m really glad you’re helping us on this.”
“Of course, sir.”
They all took their seats at the table, and Binghamton began the meeting by summarizing everything that was known to date. Though Juan was familiar with most of this, some of the details were new to him—such as the fact that agents were scouring databases at hospitals worldwide, trying to track down where the unauthorized cancer treatments had been taking place.
When Binghamton was done, the director turned to Juan. “Dr. Gutierrez, can you give me a layman’s view of what you think is going on? What exactly are we dealing with? I understand that it’s some kind of genetic mutation through a virus being used on cancer patients?”
Juan cracked open the Diet Coke and took a long swig, trying to relax his nerves. “Sir, it’s not really a mutation. These viruses are different than your normal viruses that gives you a cold. These are the kinds of viruses we use for gene therapy. They target cells and modify the genetic material within in order to fix whatever is ailing a given patient. Unfortunately, with these viruses… I can’t really say what they’re doing. Almost two thousand genes are being modified at once, and that’s going to cause cascading effects.”
“Would one sip of this water mean you’re infected?”
“I can’t say for certain yet. It could be. But I suspect you’d have to get a regular infusion of these viruses and as time goes on, more and more of your cells are modified.”
The director nodded. “It’s similar to chemotherapy where you inject a targeted poison of sorts that attempts to eliminate the cancer in the body.”
“Yes, that’s exactly right.” Juan was impressed with the apt analogy. This man was no idiot.
“And how does what you saw this morning relate to that? According to my briefing, the adult mice weren’t affected by the virus at all, just the babies. Do you have any theories on that?”
“I do. Gene therapy has traditionally been limited to somatic cells, meaning the genetic modifications are not inherited by the child. But clearly this virus has some germline modification in place, meaning it does affect the sperm and ovum. That being said, we observed no effect at all on the adults who ingested the virus, other than a slight fever. Yet clearly something dramatic happened in the babies. As soon as those babies were in the open air, the mother began convulsing. Only seconds later the father, who was at least a foot away in a separate cage, began to convulse too.”
“How that’s even possible?” one of the men sitting across from Juan asked.
Juan shrugged. “I hate to state opinion, but I have a hypothesis. Whenever you smell something, what that means is that you’ve ingested particles floating in the air. When you walk into a men’s room and smell the unpleasantness, that’s an indication there are volatile particles floating in the air and you’re ingesting them.”
The expressions on faces told Juan he’d hit on an analogy that people understood.
“So my hypothesis is that the infant mice, and the infant calves, are giving off a scent—that is to say, they’re sending particles through the air—that’s causing a severe reaction to anyone around them. We haven’t yet autopsied the dead mice, but we have autopsied the human victims from the ranches, and they all appear to have gone into anaphylactic shock, which fits with my hypothesis.”
Nate spoke up. “But the mice didn’t have any reaction to the samples I collected from the calves. Wouldn’t you think that a smell that powerful would linger?”
Juan tapped his thumbs on the conference room table. “I would. For now it’s just a hypothesis—one that requires study. But I will say this. Whoever did this is using a model of highly evolved DNA fragments, from very far in our future. And it’s conceivable that by that time, in this predicted evolutionary path, all creatures will have evolved immune systems that are so aggressive, they don’t wait for an infection to penetrate the body; instead they seek out things to destroy. Things outside the body. If that’s the case, it would make sense that the calf samples would have no effect. Because once the calf died, its immune system would have shut down.”
The silence in the room was lengthy… and unnerving.
Finally the director said, “Okay, folks, I think that’s all that I need. I’m meeting with the president later today. I want you to continue to track down these viruses. We have to put a stop to this before it ends up being an absolute nightmare. We don’t want these viruses to get into the water supply of a major city.”
As the meeting broke up, Juan pulled Nate aside. “Nate… this has gotten bigger than I expected. Jennifer and I are not enough to handle this. I’m exhausted as it is, and—”
Binghamton, who was hovering nearby, cut in. “Actually, Dr. Gutierrez, I’ve already gotten permission to increase your staff, effective immediately. Go home and get some rest. By the time you come in tomorrow, they’ll be waiting. Some of them will be there tonight.”
“Thank you,” Juan said.
Nate put his hand on Juan’s shoulder. “Your car’s still back at the lab, right? I can drive you to your place, and we can arrange to have someone pick you up later. Just give me a minute to talk with Jeff.”
Juan sighed and nodded. He was so exhausted, he would have agreed to anything.
Worse, he was worried. This genetic material was already out there, in the wild. He could analyze it, sure; maybe even understand it. But what on earth could be done to stop it?
We’re screwed.