The Cicada Prophecy: A Medical Thriller - Science Fiction Technothriller Page 19

“Well, maybe it’s nothing, but I noticed the signs the protestors were carrying and the chants they were shouting were more strident and threatening than usual.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Some of the signs read: ‘Our day of reckoning has come!’ and ‘We will take back our children!’”

  “That doesn’t sound so different from their typical modus operandus,” Rick suggested.

  “I think it’s more a matter of tone,” Tian said. “It used to be their slogans were more passive and critical, with words like ‘blasphemy’ and ‘abomination’. But now they’ve changed to a more active form—making actual threats.”

  “I still think they’re too small a group for you to worry about. I’m sure the U.N. security forces can keep them in check. There’s always going to be a fringe element that objects to any change in the status quo.”

  “Maybe, but all the same, I wanted you to be more aware of the threat and take appropriate precautions.”

  “You’re not worried about me?” Rick asked.

  “Well you and I are pretty much the public face of this program. I just think we should be more careful, especially with this unstable lunatic running around. And now he’s got all the more reason to lash out. It wasn’t so long ago that the world was ruled by testosterone-charged males—I remember what angry men are capable of.”

  “That’s a good point, Tian. I’ll put an extra watch at the hospital. In the meantime, it might be prudent to step up security here at the UN as well.”

  “I’ll get on it right away.”

  “How’ve you been managing otherwise? How is your father doing?”

  “As expected,” Tian said sadly. “It’s painful to be reminded of the natural cycle of life with someone so close. Such a terrible thing to see your loved ones withering away and know they will no longer be with you soon. It reminds one of the fragility of our existence and how we should never take it for granted. I don’t suppose you’ve made any breakthroughs on arresting or reversing the aging process with adults?”

  “I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever find a way to reverse the normal aging process—only arrest it, as we have for juveniles. All we can hope for beyond that is to find ways to extend the natural lifespans of individuals using knowledge and experience gleaned from the natural world.”

  “Like with your bonsai trees?”

  “In a way, yes. We still have a lot to learn from nature. After all, it’s had billions of years to practice and perfect its design within its organic laboratory—we’ve only had a few thousand years or so.”

  “Well, you keep working on it, Rick—if anyone can figure it out, I’m sure you can.”

  “I’ll keep you in the loop,” Rick said, clasping Tian’s hands as he stood to leave. “In the meantime, try to keep a wide berth from this unstable cult leader wherever you might encounter him—at least until I’ve completed his son’s hypophysectomy this Friday.”

  “You too—stay safe,” Tian said, as she reluctantly let Rick’s hands slip away from hers. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  As Rick stepped on the elevator and pressed the button for the main floor of the Secretariat building, he began to think about the operation he was scheduled to perform later this week. The hospital’s Chief of Staff had informed him about the circumstances surrounding Elias’s forceful removal from his home and the resistance his father had presented in defiance of the authorities. Elias had subsequently been interviewed by psychologists and clearly indicated that he wanted the hypophysectomy procedure, in spite of his father’s objections.

  Rick could only imagine what Calvin must be thinking, but he believed that in such life and death circumstances that the child’s health superseded the desires of the parent, much as in prior days when the wishes of children whose parents were on life support were subjugated to the living will of the patient. Walking through the lobby towards the exit, he resolved to take special precautions to protect himself and his charge from any unforeseen backlash. Just as he swung open the doors to the piazza, he was greeted by the loud roar of an angry crowd.

  Great, Rick thought, immediately noticing the familiar placards of Calvin’s Garden of Eden sect. This will be the last time I’m taken by surprise by these zealots.

  He briefly considered ducking back into the security of the General Assembly Hall and using a rear exit, but after scanning the crowd and seeing no sign of Calvin, he decided to make a confident show and demonstrate he wouldn’t be intimidated.

  But the crowd was thicker and more unruly than he recalled last time and about a third of the way through the thicket, he was recognized.

  “Killer!” someone yelled, pointing at him.

  “There he is!!”

  “Don’t let him through! He’s the one butchering our children!”

  “Don’t let him defile Elias! Stop him!”

  Tian wasn’t kidding. These guys really do mean business.

  Apparently there would be no civil debate or respectful passage today. Rick resolved to get out of there quickly—by any means necessary. As he tried to force his way through the crowd, he was pushed and jostled, almost falling to his feet several times. One juvenile even tried to throw a punch at him. Only his quick reflexes avoided it landing squarely on his jaw.

  What the hell is going on? Rick thought. This isn’t normal juvenile behavior—even for Calvin’s belligerent sect.

  Redoubling his efforts, he lowered his center of gravity and bulldozed his way through the crowd until he burst through at the top of a flight of stairs. Scrambling down the steps, the group followed him like a swarm of angry hornets. He managed to flag down a cab and quickly jumped in.

  As the taxi pulled away from the frenzied crowd and the UN complex quickly faded away in the distance, the last thing he noticed was the iconic sculpture by Fredrik Reutersward, titled ‘Non-Violence’. Fashioned in the form of a gun with its barrel tied in a knot, Rick couldn’t help wondering if it symbolized a newly polemic phase in an age-old conflict.

  27

  The dockyards of the Port Elizabeth Marine Terminal in Newark Bay were cloaked in mist Tuesday evening as a lone figure wearing a hooded jersey made his way toward a giant container ship parked at Pier 38, where longshoremen were untying its heavy mooring lines from the iron bollards on the jetty. Stopping at the bottom of the ship’s gangway, he paused briefly to exchange a few words with a crewmember, and after furtively passing the sailor a thick envelope, he was quickly motioned onboard. The Panamax-designated vessel, designed to maximize size and capacity for passage through the Panama Canal, was almost a thousand feet long and carried five thousand city-bus-sized steel cargo containers stacked ten stories above the waterline. But the huge freighter would not be passing through the Isthmus of Panama on this trip; its next port of call was Algeciras, Spain—just across the Gibraltar Strait from Morocco.

  The ship’s manifest listed twenty-four crewmembers in addition to eighty thousand tons of freight. The unregistered visitor would be holed up in cramped and noisy quarters below deck for the duration of the ten day journey across the Atlantic, carefully hidden from sight from the probing eyes of port authorities and other crewmen. But this stowaway paid no mind to his uncomfortable temporary lodging, because very soon he would be relaxing in the sunny, open-air markets of central Morocco then heading onto his final destination: the isolated resort of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. He had enough money to live a quiet life of comfortable leisure or start up the independent business he’d long dreamed of operating: a charter boat company in the tropics. All that mattered now was that he was far from New Jersey, where the law enforcement authorities would soon be looking for him.

  As the senior quality control officer at Endogen, he’d gone to extraordinary lengths to cover-up the tampering of hormone ingredients yesterday, and he knew that it wouldn’t take long before the inevitable consequences of his actions would be making headlines around the world. His complicity in the act would mean serious repercussions for thousa
nds—potentially millions—of patch users, and all eyes would have been on him to explain how such a significant defect got past his team’s rigorous controls.

  But by the time the breach would be discovered, he’d be thousands of miles away, safely ensconced in his newly adopted home country, sheltered from the international outcry and the daily grind of corporate politics. He’d paid a steep price to have his identity changed and his passport altered, and he spoke enough Spanish to blend in with local population fairly quickly. All that remained for him to make a clean escape was the safe transit of this trans-oceanic freighter then one final clandestine charter from the mainland to the islands.

  Hearing the sound of two powerful tugboats maneuvering into position to nudge the container ship out of port, he propped up his feet for the long voyage to a new life on the other side of the world. As he opened his favorite historical novel about the medieval battle for Christianity in the Mediterranean—Empires of the Sea—he felt the lumbering vessel slowly lurch from its quayside berth.

  28

  After his recent run-in with the Garden of Eden sect at the U.N., Rick had contacted Mount Sinai’s Chief of Staff and made arrangements to boost the hospital’s security patrols and place their private force on heightened alert. He wasn’t exactly sure what Calvin’s group was up to, but he didn’t like their aggressive new tone, and he wanted to make sure there would be no further escalation of tensions. His biggest concern was that the group might try to disrupt Elias’s hypophysectomy operation scheduled for Friday, and Rick hoped the hospital would be able to keep further protests at bay, or at least maintain a secure perimeter around the facility. He believed that once Calvin saw his son was safe and healthy after the procedure was finished, he might finally accept the situation and return to the peaceful practice of his faith.

  Now quietly resting at home in his townhouse on Tuesday evening, he decided the best way to unwind after the day’s turmoil was to begin work on cultivating the Methuselah seeds that he and Jennifer had collected over the previous weekend. His first step upon returning from California had been to place the harvested items in his refrigerator in order to maintain the temperature and humidity conditions of their native habitat. Like any live organisms, the still viable appendages of the ancient tree had closely adapted to their native surroundings, and any abrupt change in external conditions might prove too great a shock for their sensitive biological systems to continue surviving.

  The art of bonsai was a painstaking and precarious craft, largely because it involved the replantation and cultivation of delicate organic material from its natural environment to a decidedly unnatural one. Trees normally had a great deal more space to spread their roots and crowns in the wild than they did in the limited confines of a tiny bonsai tray, and once they were transplanted to the artificial environment of an arboretum, they became entirely reliant on their capricious human caretakers instead of the far more reliable rhythms of their natural ecosystem.

  Like any other domesticated species, bonsai trees were fully dependent on their horticultural hosts for the provision of food, water, oxygen, and sunlight. To complicate matters further, bonsai enthusiasts went to extraordinary measures to artificially restrict the growth and development of the normally tall and majestic plants, bending them into unnaturally twisted and stunted forms.

  The first challenge was to persuade the captured seeds to germinate. In the natural lifecycle of Rick’s harvested specimen, the initial phase of ontogenesis had already begun when the floating pollen grains made contact with the ovulate seeds in the female cone. With the encouragement of a sticky fluid secreted from a tiny opening near the base of the ovule, the pollen grain spontaneously formed an elongated tube, which penetrated the canal and delivered its sperm to the egg. The incipient embryo then went into a period of suspended development over the ensuing long cold winter, awaiting environmental cues to begin germination in the more hospitable spring growing season.

  How incredibly similar were the reproduction habits of humans and plants, Rick thought.

  Normally, the fertilized seed would lie dormant for six months or longer in the high elevations of the White Mountains, insulated by its hard coating in the protective shadows of its indigenous limestone rocks. But, as with all aspects of bonsai, there were various methods to accelerate this process through artificial means. The first step was a procedure called scarification, whereby the thick seed coat was thinned to make it more permeable to water and air, and to facilitate the release of its enclosed embryo. This would normally be a slow process directed by the natural movement of windswept sand and ice crystals across the barren high Sierra soil, but Rick could simulate and expedite this process by rubbing sandpaper across the seed coat until it became as thin as a sheet of paper.

  Once the embryo was ready to plant itself in a hospitable growing medium, all it needed was an environmental cue to signal when it was time to start growing. In the natural landscape of the Inyo Forest, this would normally be supplied by the warming temperatures of spring, which caused the snow to melt and brought water to the seed. In this case however, Rick would have to replicate these conditions by immersing the newly thinned seed in a jar of distilled water, then storing it in his fridge overnight.

  Even then, however, the embryonic seed would be reluctant to emerge, since its internal biological clock had pre-programmed an additional period of dormancy, knowing the first snowmelt didn’t always signal the end of winter. The final act in preparing the seed for germination was a process called cold stratification, where the seed was placed in layers, or strata, of a cool moist growing medium such as peat, to signal it would be safe to sprout in another thirty days or so.

  Rick set out to work by first retrieving from his fridge the ziplock bag containing the large ovulate cone, then carefully removing the specimen from the bag. Peering inside the cone through its fanned scales, he could see ten to fifteen ovules still clinging in oval-shaped depressions to the undersides of their individual scales. Knowing the most viable seeds would be the larger ones attached to the scales near the middle of the cone, he reached inside with long needle-nosed pliers and gently twisted one from side to side by the leading edge of its appended wing. Gradually, the seed and its attached integumen provided some play, until finally it shimmied free.

  As he performed this delicate operation, Rick’s mind wandered again to Calvin and his band of followers. He’d been surprised by the newfound fervor and ferocity of the group he encountered at UN headquarters, and was perplexed by their intent.

  What could one man and a small group of renegades ultimately hope to accomplish?

  Returning unsteadily to the task at hand, Rick removed five other large seeds clinging to the interior scales in the center of the cone. He examined each one to ensure there were no cuts or scars, then placed them all in a clear, water-filled bowl. Three of the seeds floated on the surface of the water, and the other three slowly sank to the bottom of the container. Knowing the floaters were likely unfertilized hollow gametophytes, he threw them away. After draining the water from the bowl, he donned surgical gloves and dried the remaining seeds with paper towels. Then he carefully filed down their seed coats with fine sandpaper until he could see the delicate white embryos through their translucent casings and placed them back in the fridge in a beaker of distilled water.

  Tomorrow, he would move the seeds from their baptismal pre-soak into the sterile moist peat bed to complete their embryonic development, then prepare them for final planting. When the seeds sprouted, Rick would send clippings to the genetics lab at Mount Sinai Hospital to see if the collected ovules were pollinated by Methuselah or by another tree.

  But even if he were lucky enough to have found a seed self-pollinated by the old patriarch, he knew it wouldn’t be a true clone, because the genes from the pollen and egg would have intermingled in a different sequence during the natural process of meiotic recombination. The only way to build a true clone of Methuselah would be to unite the fully deve
loped diploid DNA from its collected shoot to the rootstock of another plant of the same species. To this end, Rick had conducted an online search of the various nurseries and bonsai clubs in the area to see if they had any bristlecone pine seedlings in good condition and had picked one up in the afternoon that looked to be about ten to twenty years old. Standing only a few inches tall, it already had developed a craggy overcoat around its trunk, but appeared robust and healthy.

  His first step in attempting to join the harvested shoot to the purchased seedling’s rootstock was to ensure the meristematic ends of each component were properly exposed and bonded. Using a long fork, Rick began to carefully loosen and remove the soil around the base of the seedling, until he could begin to see its exposed roots. Delicately, he took a trowel and worked it around the inside perimeter of the pot to separate the caked-on soil at the edge, as he would a pie crust from its pan.

  Then he slowly pulled the seedling out of its pot and inspected the soil and roots for signs of root rot or insect infestation. Other than a natural coating of white mycelium fungus, which helped provide necessary water and nutrients to the roots, they appeared healthy and free of infestation. Rick gently shook off the remaining dirt clinging to its hanging appendages then rinsed the roots under lukewarm water until they were completely bare and whitewashed.

  Placing the entire plant on its side on a clean cutting board, he separated the thick central taproot and cut it off about an inch from the distal end using a sterile surgical scalpel. Then, very slowly and delicately, he cut a tiny “v” shape into the center of the truncated root cap, exposing the fleshy apical meristem on the inside of the stem. He removed the shoot that he and Jennifer had collected from the branch of Methuselah, and cut a tiny inverse v-shape from its clipped end. Rick couldn’t help thinking how similar this process was to the cloning procedure with humans, where the DNA from a mature skin cell was inserted into a hollowed out egg cell. Merging the prepared ends of the root and its scion, being careful not to mash them together so firmly to damage their sensitive meristematic tissue or their outer protective casings, he applied a small drop of organic grafting compound to seal the lesion around its circumference, then wound a thin layer of cellophane tape around the joint to seal in the moisture.