COSMOS magazine

Monday, July 7

The computer store had a sign in the window that read "Internet 24/7." Paul's back and neck ached a bit from his uncomfortable sleep on the train. Still, all things considered, he was feeling fine. More benefits of the auxosomes. Guilt pinched at him. Wayne was presumably on the run somewhere, and he still hadn't had his final regulator shot. Paul could think of no way to get it to the man in time. Roberta might provide the transfection proteins, but neither of them had any idea where Wayne might be, by the man's own design. He shook his head, went inside the store with the others.

In newly purchased skirt and blouse, her hair held back loosely from her face with barrettes, Jill looked lovely. Enviably energetic, Alex had run in ahead of them, eager to find out what sort of computer games people played in Mexico. As Jill and Paul gazed about them, he was already conversing in broken Spanish with one of the clerks.

"You'll have to help me with this, buddy," Paul called to him.

"'Course." Obliging as usual, Alex got him set up on an internet computer and went back to his games. Genius or not, super genius maybe, the kid was still a ten year old. Jill sat on an empty table top, reading through a book of Spanish phrases.

"Jill, look at this," Paul said after a moment, glancing up from his gmail. "From Rachel. You know, my office mate."

hey Paul, hope everything's okay with you. you'll never guess who called looking for you. Drew Chang. he has some adventures to tell you about, but he's out of the hospital now and doing fine. have something strange to report about the mice. you'll recall I brought 3 of yrs home w/ me. my kidz have a couple pet gerbils, were in the same room with yrs but not in the same pen. few days ago kidz gerbils got a little sick. seem to be over the illness today but acting a tad like your mouses. seem more alert than before. is it possible yr intelligence transposon is transmissible across species barrier? are we all gonna catch smartness or somethun?

Jill read the email over his shoulder. "Oh my god, Paul. Last time I talked to her on the phone, Roberta thought she was just coming down with a cold. But in fact—"

"Yep." He thought fervently: Thank God I got the regulator codes inserted into the mouse auxosome. Immortality's catching! "Gotta get in touch with her. Before she gets any younger." Paul looked over at Alex, who had already made friends with another boy. The two sat close together, absorbed in a computer game. "So much for our concern that Alex'll be lonely."

"Without anyone else smart enough to talk to?"

"Yeah. At least one problem we won't have to worry about any more."

Jill looked unhappy.

"Paul, I'm late. I haven't had a period since the shots." Breath caught in her throat. "How I'd have loved to give Alex a brother or sister."

He knew without another word spoken that she'd followed the unnerving logic: the repaired, modified auxosome contained its own regulator operons, but also the Terminator code. People might be catching immortality in a wave spread from the infected, like Roberta, but they'd be contracting sterility at the same time. In the same instant, he saw the flaw in her personal reasoning.

"I think your period has just been delayed by this non-stop stress. We're not sterile," he said. "Neither will Alex be, or Wayne for that matter. The auxosome we injected doesn't have the Terminator code. I'm pretty sure AUX-1's not infectious, either, or everyone else we've been in contact with would have come down with it by now."

He watched Jill gaze across at her son, chattering away in Spanish.

"All right," she said. "I'm glad of that, on a selfish level. But the fact remains: you've changed the world forever, without asking anyone's permission. No more death from illness or age, yes, but also no more children, if this thing does become an epidemic." She shook her head, face creased by sudden misery. After a moment she went back to her book, but looked up again. "What was the phrase you once used? Post mortal syndrome? I think I've got it, love. Severe moral cramps."

Distressed, Paul began keying an encrypted message to Roberta.

We're in Guadalajara, Jalisco, doing fine. Have received the money you wired. Lots more than we need, on top of the cash you sent with Ambrosio. But thanks much. Have appointment to talk to W. Gruene at the Universidad de Guadalajara tomorrow. Jill and Alex are well. Once enough time has passed, she'll see about letting Alex's dad know what's going on. Meanwhile, Jill's planning to enrol in law school here, once she learns Spanish. Shouldn't take long. Jill and I aren't as fast as Alex, but we're picking it up as we go.

Wayne Elliot left an interesting legacy for Alex. In the early 1990s, if this note is to be trusted, he was a subject in an experiment run by Blick Pharmaceuticals testing a psychoactive drug to enhance suggestibility and military prowess. Claims they tried to build on an existing personality disorder to turn him into an assassin. Manchurian Candidate sort of thing. Pretty far-fetched story, but hey.

Blick & Co. could still cause problems for us, even down here. But I'm sure we'll be able to (coff coff) outsmart them.

I hope you're feeling better, Roberta. There's extremely important news. I'll tell you in detail when you get down to set up the new MTJ labs, but see the attached preliminary report. The mice are contagious! We might have a containment problem after all, though maybe only with AUX-2. Our friend Carol Glassman was in close contact with Alex and Jill but tells us she hasn't contracted it.

Later, Paul

He hit Send, and saw that Jill was weeping silently. Uncannily, Alex had noticed already, was crossing the room with his arms outstretched. Wretchedly, Paul took her left hand.

"Roberta has caught it," Paul told the child.

"Right," the boy said with dazzling insight. "Cross-species infection. The Terminator gene?" After a comforting moment of embrace, he drew back, looked from one to the other with his clear, penetrating gaze. "Don't worry," he said. "If you can do something, you can find a way to undo it. That's what Carl Clueless always says, and he's the man with all the frangimuffles." He grinned, and his still over-sized adult front teeth were charming. "Trial and error and improvement, right, doctor?"

"I hope so," Paul said. He was not entirely convinced. Sometimes you really can't get the toothpaste back into the tube, no matter how much effort you expend. And nobody had yet learned to unscramble eggs. Especially human eggs. "I will surely do my best." He looked at the two people in the world that he loved best, loved fiercely, and swore that dedication to himself.

Monday, July 7

They rolled the body from the refrigerator room to the examining table on a gurney with one squeaking wheel, which set Graham Shelby's teeth on edge. He pulled on his long rubber gloves, one pair over the top of another, and adjusted his face shield while the diener checked out the documentation.

"Elliot, Wayne. Funny. Why's it taken this long to authorize the examination?"

"Damned if I know, Bill." Shelby glanced at the flimsies. "Paperwork's from Harris County Sheriff's Department. I guess they must have asked for the body to be held for positive identification."

"I dunno, the decedent's wife okayed it at the scene. It's been here in the cooler since Saturday."

"Hmm. Turf wars higher up the chain, Bill, that's my guess. See there at the end, the FBI was involved. Give it here." He flipped the sheets, frowned, flipped back to the top.

"How come they didn't ship him to Bethesda or Walter Reed, then, doc?"

"Looks like... hmm... BlickPharm was trying to get them to waive the autopsy. We're to ship him to their facility in San Marcos after we finish. They're not likely to enlighten us. 'Some things man is not meant to know.' Hoist him over here on the slab."

His assistant unzipped the heavy mortuary bag, heaved the cold flesh on the aluminium autopsy table. The cadaver was a young man in good condition, skin pallid but without lividity, rigor long since gone off, clotted blood in the hair and eyebrows but no visible signs of damage. Someone else's blood? He matched ID against the name on the toe tag.

"I thought he'd been shot to death during a stakeout?"

"Slug alongside the left temple, says here. Copious bleeding. Died within minutes from shock trauma."

"I find no penetration site, not even a graze." He palped both sides of the dead man's head, rolling it from side to side. "Bill, we've got the wrong body. God damn it, can't those thumb-fingered dolts get the slightest thing right! We'll be here for hours setting this straight. I have a Rotary meeting at seven."

"Don't look at me, Dr. Shelby, I just haul 'em in and haul 'em back after you've hacked 'em up."

"Come with me to the office. I want the Harris County office on the line."

"Do I put him back in the freezer?"

"Just throw a bag over it."

They walked with echoing tread across the hard tiles. The heavy rubber-edged doors slapped shut.

On the mortuary table, with its raised edges on either side of the hip-high aluminium platform and the cold fluorescent lamps casting their shadowless light from above, Wayne's unmarked body warmed in the cool air. Inside his tissues, auxosome pairs in their trillions continued the function for which they had been designed, accelerating as warmth again suffused his flesh. Assembled as their coding directed, amino acids moved in cells where the ancient rituals of decay and decomposition had been blocked, bleeding stilled, all higher brain function shut down at the moment of maximum trauma to protect against shock and blood loss. Now they continued to build proteins, accelerating repair routines that in a child quickly healed a skinned knee or scratched hand. When he woke, he would be ravenously hungry and thirsty.

Faintly, from the office. Dr. Shelby's voice rang out in wrath.

On the autopsy table, in waking reflex spasm, Wayne's fingers twitched.