COSMOS magazine

Monday, June 9

Every time Wayne dozed off, he found himself in a circular metal vault with only one way out, a locked door. Enclosed in the vault with him was a creature Wayne was afraid to look at.

But sleep crept up on him, and the monster approached with slow, sly, terrible steps. Wayne shuffled away, scuttled sideways so he could watch the monster out of the corner of his eye. The horrible thing kept pace, maintaining a consistent distance between them; but Wayne knew that the instant he fell asleep, the thing would be on top of him.

He broke into an all-out panic-stricken run. The creature's breath fell cold upon the back of his neck, an odour of dead fish. He tried to scream, to reach out for Fern. His arms wouldn't move, his voice was a hoarse squeak.

He ceased to exist.

"Wayne, honey, are you okay?" Fern put a hand on his arm.

Payback drew back, as from a slimy crawling thing. "I can't sleep," he said. "Think I'll go for a walk." He could hear her crying softly as he left the room. He dressed quickly in the bathroom, pulled on Wayne's boots, went out into the night. When Gretchen nosed curiously at his foot, he kicked the dog away.

Payback liked the old farmhouse with its squeaky floor boards and musty door. He especially liked being here at night. When him and Wayne were kids, he used to prowl around when everyone else was asleep. In the night he was king of the place. He'd tell himself that if Wayne's daddy ever caught him, he'd kill the old coot on the spot.

Tonight he had no time for aimless prowling. He went straight for Wayne's childhood bedroom. His most vivid memory of this room was of Wayne whacking off under the bed covers, worrying that it might be true that you'd go blind if you did it too often, or turn into a moron. Payback snorted to himself. Wayne had turned out so fucking stupid it wasn't even funny!

The secret place in the closet had been Wayne's, but Payback knew all about it, as he knew everything about Wayne. You pushed at a section of the door moulding from several different directions, gradually working it loose. When a gap widened enough to slip a knife blade in, you gently pried the moulding out, and there was a hole big enough to hold several Playboy magazines and other more personal secrets.

Shining the light into the hole, Payback angrily thought for a moment that the hiding place was empty, pilfered in his absence. No, wait, it was still there, curled and faded with age, the colour photograph of a pretty teenage cheerleader caught in mid-leap, her mouth open in laughter, wheat collared hair fanning out like smoke around her head, well formed legs spread wide. A bright red megaphone rested on the ground beside her. Along its length, white letters spelled out: GO TIGERS! Signed at the bottom of the photo in peacock blue ink, barely legible now: To Wayne, My love forever, Melody.

Payback wept over the photograph. Even though Melody never even knew he existed, he loved her.

"I'll make them pay, baby. Like I did before."

Time to go to work seriously on Doctor fucking miracle medical science Chang.

Wednesday, June 11

High ceilings, green tiled walls, and an overpowering odour were Jill's first impression as she pushed open the door of the Experimental Science Building. A guard sat in the entryway behind a sign that advised "All Visitors Must Sign In."

"What's that smell?" Alex wrinkled his nose.

"Acetone, I think."

"What's acetone? Oh, look, Mom!" He pulled Jill toward a colourful display on a bulletin board as the guard handed her an ID badge. Grinning, she followed him. These days he spent so much time lying around listlessly, it was wonderful to see him interested in something. The chemo had knocked the poor kid around, and he got depressed every time he saw his bald reflection or heard some other kid sniggering at the way he looked.

He pointed to a series of photographs of white mice and read aloud, "'How To Make a Knockout Mouse'... Hey Mom, look at this! They're changing the DNA in this mouse." He seized her hand, "Dr. Collins says I got cancer because some of my DNA got messed up. He says scientists like Drew and Paul are trying to find ways to fix it up again. They'll figure out a way to make me better, Mom, I know they will."

"I think you're right, sweetie." Guiltily and conflicted, Jill remembered the petition she had drafted for Nature Forever, asking Congress to outlaw the very research that might yet save her son's life.

They rode a creaky elevator to the third floor, found the open door to Paul's office partially hidden between two large wooden crates labelled with low-level chemical hazard signs. Jill paused to collect her thoughts, fingers dragging through her hair, but Alex barged in gleefully.

"Alex! Where's your Mom?" She watched Paul set aside the paper he had been reading and put an arm around her son.

"I'm right here." Hearing his voice, seeing his affection, Jill was suddenly optimistic, confident that she could deal with any problem. Paul had that effect on her, she realized.

"We've come to see the mice!" Alex shouted.

"Well then, let's go to the lab."

The lab Paul used was in the pharmacy annex, a much newer building than Experimental Sciences, with spotlessly white walls and highly polished vinyl flooring. In a white, somewhat stained lab coat, Paul showed them the built-in room-sized cooler, the warm room, and his lab bench, cluttered with plastic and glass bottles.

"Science labs are only neat and tidy in the movies," he told them. "This is what they look like in real life."

"Where are the super mice?" Alex asked impatiently.

"This way." Paul opened a door at the end of the lab. "We have stricter housekeeping procedures for this room. With so many animals living in a relatively small area, we need to keep it very clean to minimize the danger of infection. Right now each mouse shares a pen with another mouse, because we're watching to see how their auxosome treatment affects social behaviour." Two walls of the room were lined with stainless steel mesh pens. "You know what that means, Alex? How they get on with each other."

"Can I pet them?"

"We prefer not to handle them any more than necessary, Alex. We don't want to cause stress."

"Well, I wasn't planning to hurt them."

"Of course not. I know you weren't. But imagine how you'd feel if a twelve foot tall giant reached down and picked you up. Even if it was the nicest giant in the world, it'd be scary."

"Like King Kong."

"Exactly. Tell you what. You can help me feed them and give them fresh water. Watch me do the first one, then you can try it."

"He's looking at me!" Alex laughed delightedly. "Come 'ere, Mom!"

Jill peered into the pen. A brown mouse was standing on its hind legs watching Alex, nose quivering.

"I think it likes you, Alex." Jill felt a burst of happiness.

"You know, I believe it does," said Paul. "I've never seen the mice so excited. I think they realize they have guests they've never met before. Since they've been getting the retrotransposon, they seem to crave novelty. I should set up a telly for them to watch." He gave a snorting laugh.

"What's that lump in its neck?"

"That's the osmotic pump, Alex. We use it to deliver exactly the right dosage to the brain at constant levels."

"Doesn't it hurt?"

"No, I'm glad to say. As far as we can tell the mouse can't feel it at all. But we're working now on a better way to get the synthetic chromosomes into the mouse's brain cells. Then we won't have to use the pump at all." He stepped to the end of the block of pens. "These mice in the pens with the red tags are special. I found these five very old mice—"

"How old do mice get?"

"Well, these ones'd be sort of like eighty or ninety year old people. Not expected to live much longer."

"Like me," Alex said in rare burst of bitterness.

Looking uncomfortable, Paul reached out and squeezed the boy's arm. "Don't give up just yet, mate. Most of the untreated mice in this group already died of old age. These guys've been getting treatment for three weeks so far, and something surprising's happened. Look closely at them. Do you see anything strange?"

Like the rest, the five mice in the specially marked pens seemed excited to see their guests. A couple stood on their hind legs, poking eagerly twitching noses through the wire mesh; another ran back and forth across the front of its pen.

"Look just the same as the others to me," said Alex, his thin face still dreary.

"Right. That's what's strange. Before I treated them, the hair around their faces was losing its colour. Two were getting quite bald. They'd all lost muscle mass—you know, they were skinny, even though I gave them plenty of food. And they had very little energy. Mostly they just lay around. See the white one there?"

Alex nodded, suddenly smiling as the mouse in question jumped into the exercise wheel and set it spinning.

"That old fellow had a tumour on his stomach the size of my fingernail." Paul held out a pinky.

Alex squatted down and peered into the pen. "I can't see it. He's running too fast.'

"You wouldn't see anything even if he were standing still. Tumour's gone without a trace."

"That's amazing!" Jill glanced from the mice to Alex. "When will you be authorized to try it on people?"

Paul gave her a bleak glance. "Not for a while, sorry, we shouldn't get our hopes up too much. I'll need to watch these animals for at least a year, if they live that long. It's the only way to check the long-term effects of the drugs." He rubbed at his beard, peering into the cage in front of him. "There are another two teams trialling this general method at other labs. What's strange is, they report some retardation of the aging processes, but neither of them mentions reversing it. Jill, these animals are showing every sign of getting younger. Genuine rejuvenation." He coughed, rolling his eyes. "I speak loosely, you understand."

"I won't quote you in court, doctor. What's causing the difference—the artificial chromosomes, right?"

"That's my strong suspicion. I expected the auxosome to boost their intelligence by stimulating brain cell abundance, but the effect seems to have generalized. The gene enhancements seem to reverse at least some parts of the aging process. Regeneration. Might be the mitochondrial proof-reading. Sorry, mitochondria are—"

"What an 'oxuh-zohm'?" Alex asked, still watching the lively mice. "Does it make them as strong as an ox?"

Paul laughed with delight. "Where have you seen an ox, cobber? On TV?"

"At the petting zoo," the boy said blandly.

Comically rueful, Paul reached down and ruffled his bald head. "Well done, my good man. It's a word I made up. 'Auxo-' is Greek for 'growth'." He looked at Jill across the top of the cage. "We synthesized a double chromosome strand. An auxiliary string of genetic code that does what the preacher ordered. Is that an American phrase? I think I heard it in a movie."

"What's a chromosome, Mom?"

"They're the part of your cells that contains your genes."

"Jeans?" Alex looked down at his own Levis.

"Different kind of gene, Alex," said Paul. "This kind is like an instruction that controls the way the cells in your body grow."

"Like DNA?"

"Exactly. In fact, chromosomes are made of DNA and protein."

"Dr. Collins told me about DNA. He said my DNA gave me my blue eyes."

"Yep. We get a set of 23 chromosomes from our Mom and another set of 23 from our Dad. The two sets match up and work together, but they're not exactly the same. That's why you can inherit your Mom's blue eyes and your Dad's blonde hair."

Alex frowned, his fingers tracing an imaginary diagram. "What does the auxosome match up with?"

"Excellent question! We built a pair of auxosomes, matched with each other. In this case, they carry the same genetic information on both chromosomes. That makes it easier for proof-reading enzymes to repair any genetic mistakes. They can compare one against the other."

"Paul, this will be incredible if it works," said Jill. "But what if it doesn't. God, what if it goes wrong? Isn't it possible you'd be releasing a horrible plague?"

"If the auxosomes did turn out to offer any danger to future generations, we could just edit them out from germ cells. Besides, Reba Jenkins at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a technique to selectively activate or disable inserted genes even in somatic cells."

"And you'll own the patents?"

"Well, we've done most of this on our own time."

"My God, Paul, if this works you'll be filthy rich!"

"Don't think the idea hasn't crossed my mind—but that's the least of it." His gaze was bright, and he smiled at her, and at Alex. "Staying young and healthy for a hundred and fifty years interests me more than any amount of money." In an obvious effort to restrain his own enthusiasm, then, he shrugged. "Let's not get too excited just yet. The mice might suddenly fall over dead. Just have to wait and see." He put a hand on Alex's shoulder. "Ready to go to work, sport?"