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The infinity chromosome coiled like a snake around the slack human genome. I cracked its code of genome guardians and anti-apoptotic genes, but they moved too fast. Sequence to population-wide transfection in fifteen years. My co-conspirators sent me to investigate alone. Perhaps they thought me tainted, or their own souls too precious to risk.
The map stopped at basement 1, but my flashlight already illuminated five flights of rough descending concrete. Water dripped in steady trickling echoes but the stale air carried no hint of life that damp undisturbed confines might otherwise have yielded to. I leaned over the railing, poured light into the well and discerned a lower landing through my clouded breath.
Operation ceased once the chromosome achieved complete parasitic replication, but we needed evidence; lab books, sequence files, a list of names even.
My co-conspirators raised concerns so academic they were almost infantile. Professor Irving Johnson didn’t mind reciting passages from his own Critique of Immortality:
Protracted life has been morally outlawed since classical times. Beings who grab the elixir or grail fall to pieces and are cursed in some unalterable way. What of humanity then, which has swallowed these relics whole and woven them into their deepest fabric? Antiquity dictates the highest cost!
“God forbade us to eat from the tree of life,” archbishop Ahern reminded us. “Without death, believers cannot be rewarded.”
His superseding fear that non-believers might go unpunished remained unspoken, but betrayed itself every time our eyes met.
The vague doom their ruminations implied never swayed my motivations. How many orphans had disappeared before my name was called by the men in white coats?
At the bottom of the stairs was a thick metal door; surely locked. Resignation swept me, or perhaps relief.
I knew the longevity literature, but mice surviving ten percent longer couldn’t account for the new infinitude of human life. The chromosome gave immortality to an organism, but what of cellular immortality? What of cancer? Something medical science conquered was now embraced.
I stepped forward and pushed at the metal. It gave maybe a centimetre and nothing more. I made to walk away, to report I’d gotten this far—something stirred on the other side.
The water stopped, had frozen, a distant faucet squeaked shut. I heard it again. Not footsteps but a wide dragging chafe I couldn’t discern. I pressed my ear against the cold metal, and felt every shuddering inch of skin.
Injecting cancer genes to make humans immortal? Surely something so reckless—the door boomed in tree distinct knocks.
My legs gave way. Hands clawed behind me for the first stair. No wonder the secrecy. How difficult it had been to find this place.
The conspirators chose me, first Alpha sequence, to reveal the chromosome’s evil to the world. But I couldn’t move. The secret was too great.
Orphanage catechism flooded my brain. God cast himself in immortal flesh. Our own attempt was beyond this door.
From what we’d already discerned, the chromosome altered our drive to curiosity and creativity. For the first time, I felt it. I was on my feet, arms in motion. The door thudded and shook. The struggle of the entity behind it. For an instant my own hands stopped, thudded and shook. Finally, they sealed over the handle.
I opened the door as a child turns some long-seated rock in a stagnant pool.
Eyes in filial collage saw me. A writhing immortal.
I fled like a neanderthal before the fraternal terror out of the south. The line between heredity and contagion now too much blurred.
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I wake to see etchings on the wall. Inane warnings that escape me in sleep, so the conspirators tell me.
The domed lens of a cyclops
Catches infinite self-portraits in relative stasis
falling eternally past dark horizons
Warnings are useless because that door is still open, and our sequence has no will to close it.