Double Helix

Nissi

Wendy lay on the examination table--more of a padded slab, really--while I prepped my equipment. I wrapped a piece of surgical tubing around her upper arm and she opened and closed her hand without being asked. We'd been doing this same procedure about every other day. When I picked up the blood draw kit, a needle with tubing for attaching collection vials, she closed her eyes tightly, just like always. Wendy hated needles.

I filled up three vials with her blood and set them aside, then prepped her gene therapy injection. For months, I had been slowly and methodically altering the DNA throughout her body. The protocol that I had developed with my collaborators on the darknet was designed to give her body a chance to adapt to incremental changes in protein synthesis, metabolism, and cell growth. Our initial therapies had removed the developmental blocks that kept her at pre-adolescence, allowing a hormone cascade to begin changing her from a child into an adult, a process that we accelerated as much as we could safely manage, while introducing her gene therapy regimens in stages.

Wendy's body had responded beautifully. Her Standard Upgrade fertility mods kept her from ovulating and menstruating, but she was growing and developing rapidly. Her actual age was over forty, but her biological age had already increased from about ten to around fourteen in just eight months. We would complete the gene therapy treatments before the year was up, and by then she should be an adult in every way. I was looking forward to announcing our success on the darknet and making it available for ex-patriate Peter and Wendy mods in the overseas clinics we would open soon.

"All done," I said, as I retracted the needle from her vein and pressed a piece of cotton over it to stop the bleeding. I didn't bother with taping it. There was no blood flowing after just a minute.

"Good, I'm starving," she said, and hopped down from the table.

Eight months ago, it had been nearly a two-foot drop for her. Now it was only half that distance. She had a ravenous appetite, mostly due to her accelerated growth. Fortunately, with the greenhouse fully restored and our revenue from the Agora marketplace, keeping everyone fed hadn't been a concern for some time.

Wendy stopped on her way toward the passageway to the house. She slowly turned to face me. "We talked about this once before," she said. "I'd like to work with you here in the lab. I was planning to wait until my body's done cooking, but I think I'm ready now."

Before the Ban, Wendy had been a chemical engineer, working for a major pharmaceutical company. She had a deep understanding of drug and hormonal pathways, which could be a tremendous help as we developed new medical treatments.

"Alright," I said. "If you're ready."

Wendy chuckled. "It's just that I'm bored. I've been helping Stansy with the wedding plans, but we've basically got it all wrapped up now."

The wedding was just fifteen days away. Stansy had found a minister in the Agency who was willing to perform the ceremony to marry Tilly, Norm, and me into a three-way union. The marriage wouldn't be legal, strictly speaking, but we didn't care. What we all wanted was the commitment, our mutual promise to remain together, no matter what. A ceremony, in front of our community, our family, was what we needed.

"Well, if you want to jump in, I'd say let's start tomorrow morning."

She nodded. "Perfect. I'll catch you later, then."

She hurried off to get breakfast, the thick security door clanging shut on her way out.

I began testing Wendy's blood, looking for indications of problems in her hormone levels or indicators of poor liver function. As usual, all signs pointed to her being a healthy, growing teenage girl.

I spent the rest of the morning reviewing the research notes of my colleagues on the darknet. Since curing Nona of Alzheimer's, we had found three additional subjects to test the same protocol. Two had responded well, their cells rejuvenating to a younger biological age, lost function returning as their brains healed. The third, an elderly man in Chile, had regenerated some of his lost brain tissue, but hadn't fully recovered, suggesting that something about his condition was different from the others. My research team was working with the team in Chile to pinpoint the problem.

Nock had sent me several updates. He had negotiated a deal to open our first clinic in Bangkok in the fall, pending the outcome of the trials I had just been going over. Thailand was not a signatory of the Berlin Accords, so genetic engineering was nominally legal. It wasn't that the little country was some hotbed of genetic research but more about them thumbing their noses at the rules that the US and Germany tried to impose on the rest of the world.

Still, it was a dangerous game we were all playing. Once word got out that there was a clinic that could cure Alzheimer's, I could see international pressure coming down on the Thailand government for experiments in genetic manipulation. The gamble was that the country would see an explosion of medical tourism that would bring both wealth and goodwill into the region. It was hopefully a start towards loosening the grip that the US-German alliance had on most of the rest of the world.

The next big update was something we've been waiting weeks for. We had finally gotten the information that Tilly's mother had promised us. She had done exactly as she had planned, dead-dropping a storage device for an Agency person to find. They had sent us the full contents over the darknet, and my colleagues were already digging into it and discussing the implications of what they saw, which were many.

Increasing intelligence isn't easy. There's a reason that it took decades for biotech companies to really start to move beyond what a small percentage of humans were already capable of. It isn't just about adding greater processing power, increasing the number of neurons and possible synaptic connections, although that helps. Tilly's genome incorporated crow DNA, resulting in smaller, more tightly packed neurons in her cerebral cortex. This both increased her brain's computing power and slightly sped up processing speed.

However, intelligence also depends on the brain's efficiency and connectedness, how different regions of the brain can be made to work together to solve a problem. The lesions that Gena's brain had sustained in the reversion process were largely aimed at disrupting these neural networks, reducing her ability to integrate data across her cerebral cortex. One of the consequences of that had been a long convalescence as her brain learned how to operate with its new, less efficient architecture, adapting other areas of her brain to take over functions that had been disrupted.

The other type of damage the reversion had done had been aimed at particular regions of her brain, parts of her cognition that were optimized towards specific tasks. I already knew that we could repair the damage to her brain's connectivity with stem cells, but these specialized regions had to be carefully reconstructed. That's where I hoped that the data from Tilly's mother could help us.

I opened the file and scanned through it. It was comprehensive, describing every feature of the G model and the various human genes that had been inserted, deleted, or modified to get the result that the engineers were after. This information alone was a treasure trove, as it could potentially allow us to create new Gs. They were rare, as the model had only been available for a short time before human gene editing had been outlawed. They were also expensive. And while there would be a delay to await their growth and development, Gs were universally known for being prodigies, able to operate at a high cognitive level from a young age.

Looking at my notes from my foreign colleagues actually dampened my optimism. Embryonic development of these brain structures was one thing. Promoting and directing their growth in vivo, in a living human adult, was something else entirely. There was no technology that currently existed that could do what we needed it to, forcing brain cells to grow into the unique structures described in the data dump.

When Gena arrived, I gave her the good news, but tempered it with my concerns.

"Okay," she said, "how long do you think it might take to develop new therapies for this?"

I didn't have an answer to that, but I did my best. "Years, possibly. My team is already working through the problems, but this is a lot more complicated than repairing the damage of Alzheimer's. The G model brain is a work of art, and we have to try to fix what has been very deliberately broken in yours."

"I understand," she said, a little glumly. "Please do your best. I need my mind back, Nissi. Not just for myself. I could help all of us."

Gena's ongoing treatments were not dissimilar from Wendy's. I had recently begun gene therapy to give her the enhancements of a Standard Upgrade. The drug pathway that triggered ovulation on demand had already been restored, but she'd confided in me that she and Nock wanted to wait before starting a family. Now we were moving on now to metabolic enhancements.

Unlike Wendy, who got anxious and went silent around needles, Gena chatted all through the procedures, telling me about her work on the mesh network, her excitement over the wedding, even current events on the outside that, since I'd been living on the farm, often seemed like they described some other world.

It was past noon when I finished and she went back to work at the west house. Norm hadn't come to see me yet, I noted with a frown. Normally he made it a point to come down to the lab and bother me on his lunch break. I went up to the kitchen to make some food, then headed outside to find him.

On exiting the back of the house, I saw immediately what had kept him away. Someone had been operating one of the excavators, driving it downslope into the massive pit where the new living quarters were being built, but it had somehow overturned. It now lay sprawled out, like a half-squashed bug, the cab on the downhill side. Steve had brought their other excavator in, and they had attached chains to the fallen one to try to lever it back onto its treads. They had it balanced up on the edge of one tread, but judging by the sound of the yelling coming from the pit, things weren't going well. Fortunately, it looked like no one had been hurt, and the equipment didn't appear to be damaged except for one cracked window in the cab.

I could see what the problem was with their plan. With the excavator turned over and the cab on the downhill side, they couldn't get the leverage they would need to pull it up upright using the other excavator from the uphill side. Instead, the overturned earth mover's treads were just digging into the slope, causing the working excavator to pitch up each time it tried to back up.

"Looks like you guys could use some help," I called, setting our sandwiches down on the little table that the crew used for breaks.

"Oh, good," Norm yelled. "Maybe you and Stansy can lift it if you work together."

"Smart ass," I called back. "Does it still run?"

Stansy went around to the cab and climbed awkwardly in. The engine hesitated, but then started with a blast of black smoke.

"Stay there," I called. "I'll be right back."

I came back a few minutes later with the pickup truck and bounced down the slope, coming to a stop on one side of the fallen digger, facing downhill.

"Alright, what's your plan?" Norm asked, all business now as I jumped out and came over to them, getting a closer look at the minor disaster as I went.

I pointed to the truck. "We'll hook up to the frame and connect to the front end of the excavator. Steve will lift it back up to get the cab off the ground and I'll pull slowly downhill. Stansy will slowly, slowly move the track forward. With Steve holding it up and me pulling on the front, it should turn downhill. We'll need you to coordinate our movements. I'll move in a semicircle so we can turn it parallel to the slope, and then you should be able to pull it back upright."

Steve, the only human on the team, spoke up. "You, uh, you know this thing weighs about thirty tons, right?"

I nodded. "I didn't, but what's important is the leverage. I'll also be moving downhill, so gravity will help. I'll need you to balance that thing up on one track as much as you can. It should take less force to get it turned downhill than it takes to tip it upright."

Norm looked at Tia, Steve, and Stansy in turn, who each nodded their agreement or shrugged their indifference. "Alright, we'll try it."

We hooked up the chains and I got back in, putting out of my mind the thought that Tilly would kill me if I damaged her truck. Norm called out directions, first getting Steve to lift the excavator as far as it would go, which perched it on the edge of the tracks. Once it was in place, he ordered me to begin moving forward.

The engine revved as I slowly lowered the pedal. Just when it was close to red-lining and I thought I would have to let off and try something else, the vehicle surged forward. I cursed and let off the gas, but Norm yelled at me to keep going while signalling me to turn the wheel. I did as he instructed and the truck edged forward once more into a turn, moving in a more controlled manner as the excavator's treads came unstuck from the dirt. Steve did an admirable job, turning with the fallen excavator while keeping it supported. It took us twenty minutes of starting, stopping, and re-evaluating, but once the thing was pointed downhill, Steve was able to pull it slowly the rest of its way up onto its treads.

Norm and Tia were looking the excavator over for damage when I approached. "It'll need to be checked over by our mechanic," Tia said, shaking her head ruefully. "I'll give him a call."

"No big deal," Norm said. "It only sets us back a day or so." He turned to me. "Thank you, love. That was good thinking."

I sidled over and gave him a quick kiss. "Why not take a break, join me for lunch?"

I drove us back out of the pit and we sat together at the break table, enjoying our hummus sandwiches. Norm talked about his progress on what we'd started calling the bunker, the underground habitat that would be home to dozens of people once it was finished. It was slow going, though. With only five people on the job, it had taken months just to dig out the pit. They were working on the foundation now, but again, that would take months of work.

"It's a paradox," Norm said. "We need a lot more workers to get this job done quickly, but we don't have the space to house them, or the food to support them. We'll need to break for winter--you can't pour concrete in the cold--but even working all the rest of next year, I don't see how we'll finish before December next year. That's two whole years, Nissi. And that's assuming that Steve and Tia decide to stay on for that long. They might want to leave after the summer."

"Well, Tilly's aquaculture farm should be finished soon. If you want more workers, that should solve your food problem."

Norm conceded that with a nod. "And I guess we could buy a bunch of tents or something."

"Storms would be an issue," I said. "Why not just put them in the barn? Or use the greenhouse. We could set up bunks in the central corridor. It might not be super comfortable, but it'll keep the rain off."

He looked at me askance. "You really think we should do this?"

"Why not? Like you said, at the rate you're going, it'll be another two years before you finish. If we get another dozen, maybe two dozen people helping, you train them up and maybe finish in months instead. And that gives us a bigger labor pool for other projects. We could build another greenhouse, maybe plant more grain and raise more livestock. That would generate more income, allow us to support more people and we could expand our operations even more."

He stared into the distance for a moment, chewing his bite of food. "I don't know if we want to get too big. We need to stay self-sufficient. No need to truck supplies in all the time. But even with that, the bigger we get, the greater the risk that the outside world finds us."

I understood his reluctance. Stansy's stunt last month had put us all on edge. Portland wasn't that far away, and we didn't know what kind of resources these hostile genemods possessed. As the weeks had gone by, we gradually relaxed. We had been lucky once more. Or maybe that was all SamIAm, still looking out for us. The enigmatic hacker hadn't spoken to anyone since Norm had demanded answers from him, but he might still be protecting us, for all we knew.

"What's our endgame here, Norm? What are we trying to accomplish? If the whole point was to stay hidden and safe, we should have stopped with the greenhouse. It was enough to support us indefinitely. So why didn't we stop there?"

He shrugged. "I've never been content to sit idly and watch the world burn. That's why I got involved with helping genemods. Especially after what they did to my sister."

His tone had an edge of bitterness. I reached over and touched his hand. "I'm glad you two came to an understanding. She looks up to you, you know. But let's get back to the question. Why are we always expanding? To what purpose?"

He thought for only a moment. "Because there's a chance that we can make things better. Tilly, Ed, Stanley, and Dawn are working on a cure for Rot. You're working on new medical cures. Stan, Gena, and Stanford are working on their communications network."

"And you are working on the facilities to house the people who can help us push forward on those projects. And don't forget all the people around the world that we're leveraging to help us. The more we have here, the more we can convince others to join in. Also, we're a symbol. Think of all those people trapped in safe houses, just waiting for the day that the FBI breaks down their door and drags them off to be... to be made into slaves like Stansy's son. We're like rock stars to those people. They look at what we've accomplished and it gives them hope, a reason to keep going."

I could see from his thoughtful expression that I had shifted his perspective. Spending all your time staring down at the dirt could make you forget the big picture.

"Alright," he said at last. "Tilly's new farm is almost done, but it'll take time for the plants to grow and the fish to mature. Months yet, if I recall correctly. But maybe we can speed things up. If we take on, say, twenty new people, pull them out of Agency safe houses and bring them here, then maybe we can get the Agency to divert additional food shipments as well, at least until we can stand on our own. Gena has her heart set on bringing in everyone who was caught because of her actions in California. I suppose we should start with them. We'll just have to ensure that they understand they'll be put to work."

"I think that's an excellent plan," I said. "Maybe bring them in a few at a time so we can adjust. We might want to scale back our calorie rations for a while, try to build a bigger surplus."

"I'll get Nock on it. We've got the wedding coming up, but this is too important to wait. Our new facilities are going to be fantastic. Tilly plans to move all her work to the new lab, which will free up all of the old one for you to use. A few of our current residents are already talking about moving into the bunker. I would love it if we could get it finished this year."

We quickly finished eating, and I gave him a hug and a kiss before I let him return to work. I decided not to head down to the lab just yet, swinging by Tilly's work site to see how things were going. I hadn't come for a close look in some time, and things had changed considerably. Tilly offered to show me around.