Genosimulation (A Teen & Young Adult Science Fiction): A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller (2 page)

This is how it will be done: I'll send you all that has
happened to me the last two years, and you promise to publish it as a book. OK?

But it must be a novel, an investigative journalism piece,
or something like that. When they begin to examine the facts, they MUST
discover that everything is complete fiction or something like it.

If they find that there is something real here, and start to
check it out, then we’re both screwed – you more than me, because I'm dead
anyway. As for you, some people you know will start to die… and who knows how
it will end.

I can swear on my father's grave that what I write here is
the absolute truth, but your readers must understand that it is an entirely
imaginary book. If you want out, say so now, and I'll find someone else to help
me.

I'll give you some time to think about it. If your decision
is to go through with it, post a message on the BDSM forum on the Hyde Park
site. Say you are looking for a female wrestler or something.

*

Well, what choice did I have?

 I went on and I posted the short message he told me
to. I wasn't surprised to find out that the message was deleted after day - the
man knew how to wipe out any trace, obviously. After two days I received an
email from him.

Thank you for taking this job. I'm sure you'll enjoy it
because I know you're quite a voyeur. Now, I have a little problem. I don't
know where to start. So I think I’ll start by telling you some details about
who I am and what I do, and hope you won’t be able to figure out actual true
stuff from my details. : )

OK.

It doesn't matter what my name is. What DOES matter is that
I work for a non-existent government institute, dealing with decoding the human
genome.

Now this is not what you might think from what you saw on
the news. Everything they sell you about Dolly the sheep and scientific
breakthroughs is actually old news.

We cloned a cow in the early nineties, and I know the
Americans did it too, so did the French and the Russians. It's not that
complicated.

The real trick here is:

1. Deciphering all the genetic code

2. Understanding what is written there

They tell you we’re not there yet – but it's all one big
lie. There’s a company called Celera which supposedly did a great part of the
work already. Moreover, the global genome project is working towards it too.
Yet it's all bullshit.

What Celera is doing now, we did 5 years ago. So either
we're so clever and advanced – or Celera is a fictitious project of the
Americans.

To cut a long story short - the genome has already been
decoded, and if you'll pay me a visit at the lab (it’s not possible of course)
you can see our genome-based computer.

Yet I'm working on something else completely.

Must finish now – talk to you soon.

*

I was VERY interested by then, but I was still skeptical.
Who wouldn’t be?

Yet it certainly looked like the beginning of a book. Still,
I had to remind myself, this man had access to all my past and present data,
from kindergarten to my last visit to the supermarket. I’d hoped this was not a
joke, but at the same time I hoped that it was - some not-funny practical joke
by one of my friends, who accidentally came upon me in a confidential database
and wanted to tease me a little.

And maybe it really was a bored office worker with access to
databases? A small time "analyzer"? Or a 14-year-old computer geek
who wanted to be cruel to me?

Those things were known to happen.

 Either way, I haven’t heard from him in two days.

 Again the little boy peeing on my screen! I laughed
quite a bit.

 "Sorry... boss disturbed me……."

*

Or was it your teacher? Or your mother?

Anyway, I waited patiently. And I got my reward the same
day.

I read that email carefully. Twice, thrice, ten times over.

It absolutely shocked me. Made me think a lot. Had things
gone the other way, I might as well share it with you, but as things turned out,
I cannot share it.

Not THAT email.

As a matter of fact, I can't share most of the messages I
had received from Mr. Chromosome. Why, do you ask?

There is more than one reason. Firstly, the correspondence
reveals too much personal information - such details that will make it easy to
track him down, to confirm (or disprove) what will be written here below. I
could try to rewrite it – I actually did try, but it turned out I'm not that
good a writer. It had to be done some other way.

The other reason is more to the point: those emails and chat
messages are mostly BORING. I can't make a book out of them. And this is what
you’re here for, isn’t it? To read a good book.

It's also what he asked me to do: to write everything in the
book. A novel.

So, in order to protect him and to entertain you, large
parts of this book will be written as a book.

I will start with the content of that email.

It was five minutes to death.

Everybody in that room knew it. The big, digital clock on
the wall said it clearly with big red numbers.

Every second, according to that clock, was made of a hundred
hundredths of a second, and every such hundredth of one was comprised of ten
milliseconds.

The big clock displayed them all.

Time is a relative thing. As Einstein discovered, if you
move faster, time slows down.

But it is not the only way to slow down time.

Time, according to Zomy, was not only relative to the
velocity of the event. It was proportional to the size of the event, too. To
its complexity. To the attention it drew. To its importance. And in those
moments before death, Zomy found any second is made of hour-long thousand
milliseconds.

Five minutes before death. Three hundred thousand
milliseconds before death.

Zomy looked at the clock again. It was the only one
installed in the laboratory. The only one that actually mattered, in a place no
one expects to leave.

Five minutes left to go, and who knew what would happen when
they’d gone? No one. Maybe God.

Four minutes and fifty-nine seconds before death, a slight
tremor of excitement passed through Zomy. Small electric fingers, caressing,
climbed up his veins. These were the most important minutes of his life.

He knew that.

The laboratory was very huge. The largest in this
underground complex, in fact. Normally, thousands of animals lived there:
flatworms, fruit flies, various beetles, small mammals, and one friendly
chimpanzee whose name was Bobby.

Today Bobby was the only one there.

Bobby, and twenty-six people, of course. Among them were ten
out of the fourteen people who knew this lab actually existed but were not a
part of its staff.

Three of the other 14 were in Washington. And the extra
member was at the Kirya, Israel's military headquarters in Tel Aviv. He had no
choice: he had to supervise a complex raid in southern Lebanon. Nonetheless, he
monitored the lab – including the clock – on one of the personal screens in
front of him.

Four minutes, fifty-six seconds to death.

In sharp contrast to Zomy, Bobby did not seem nervous at all.
He was in his favorite cage, hooked only to a minimal number of medical
instruments, rapidly consuming a hill of bananas (and steaks!). Yummy. Bobby
loved bananas, and more than that - he loved steaks. This time, for some
reason, mama Lia decided to give him extra.

Oh, mama Lia. Bobby looked at her with love and took a
mouthful of the meat, savoring the feeling of it melting in his mouth. Oh, the
steak was delicious. Oh, Bobby loved mother Lia.

But why did she look so worried?

Four minutes, fifty-three seconds to death, mother Lia
sneaked a cold hand inside Zomy's hand. And he, embarrassed as ever, looked
down at her for the briefest of time (17 milliseconds, to be exact) lingering
on her wild, golden hair before falling into her green eyes.

Sad green eyes.

"That's the way it's meant to be, Lia," Zomy
whispered.

"I hope that this experiment will fail," she
blurted back. And meant every word.

This very phrase seemed to raise every hair on his back. No,
he definitely did not want the experiment to fail. Four minutes, thirty-nine
seconds before death, he was NOT willing for this experiment to fail.

Failure of the experiment meant canceling the project.
Decisively, without arguments. The chiefs wanted results. The only way they
were able to confirm the continued unbelievable funding of this godforsaken pit
was to get results. Here and now. Unlike other projects, such as nuclear and
space research, his project had no apparent military significance.

Apparent, he reminded himself.

Who am I kidding? OF COURSE it has military implications.
And if I don’t know them yet, it's because I shouldn't. They don’t want me to
know them. But I know, unfortunately.

It was not important to him. Military stuff meant nothing to
him. He trusted the government and the IDF to do the right thing. We already
have nuclear bombs. No one dares to really mess with us. The same thing will
come out of this project, if anything. Less reason to mess with us.

Four minutes and twenty seconds just before death, even
Bobby began to understand the meaning of the experiment. He felt something.

Lia felt it before he did.

One slight movement on the monitors made her fingers tighten
lightly around Zomy's hand. She took a quick breath.

Little more than a second later, Bobby felt the first twinge
of pain. In a way it reminded him of one of those countless needles pecking
him, even from infancy. But no, this was not exactly the same feeling. The
needles were something external, probing in. This twinge appeared inside out,
sending a sharp beam of pain along his back.

His jaws opened. The steak fell to the floor of the cage.

Lia's body tensed.

"It begins," muttered a voice from one of the
respected officers, and was met with an mmmm of agreement.

Bobby was going to die, and here they were, clapping their
hands, she thought.

"This experiment must not fail," Zomy commented on
what Lia said just few thousand milliseconds ago. "This experiment is life
itself."

Three minutes and fifty-four seconds off death, Zomy allowed
himself a light smile. Finally an experiment that uses no chemicals, uses no
physical action, no external interventions. Pure experiment, as life should be.
An experiment without an experiment.

"Zomy, he’s suffering ..." Lia whispered loudly,
pointing to the chimp, who had collapsed to the floor of his cage.

"Stay out of this."

This time it was Zomy who squeezed her hand.

She did not mean to interfere, of course, although her
entire soul urged her to go to the chimp - who took her for his mother - and
give him the kiss of life in the form of some adrenaline.

She didn't really mean to interfere with the experiment.
True - she was a doctor. True - she had the power to save lives. But not now.
Not this life.

Three minutes and forty seconds before death, Bobby
whimpered.

And all the people in the room, even those who never knew
Bobby's name was Bobby, tensed up. There is something chilling in the howl of
death. Even when the death was caused entirely by aging and natural causes. For
many seconds, there was no other voice in the room, except the beating of the
digital clock.

Bobby whined. Strong, weak. And strong again.

Two minutes and eighteen seconds before death, he fell
heavily to the ground of the cage, holding his chest and back in a very human
gesture. He began to grunt and utter strange sounds. His eyes were bulging,
mysteriously white.

For a brief moment they met Lia's green eyes and then parted
again. Bobby could not have known that the end of his pain was just one shot
away, a shot his mother could have given to him. Luckily so, or else Lia would
be tempted to read his gaze as a plea for mercy, and would have destroyed the
experiment without giving it another thought. Bobby was more precious to her
than this experiment. Dear to her as a son.

Then a stronger stream of pain flashed through his chest,
and his eyes lost any hint of love for Lia.

The side monitors indicated the progression of a cardiac
arrest. Lia could almost envisage the collapsing heart muscle, ceasing to push
blood to the right places.

Bobby's weary heart reached the end of his path, slowly and
surely. The people around were excited. Zomy was not that ecstatic, but he let
go a smile.

He, too, felt a certain closeness to Bobby. Not like Lia, of
course. After all, to him Bobby was little more than a laboratory rat. True, he
enjoyed playing with (it) him from time to time, but that was all, more or
less. To him, Bobby was THE laboratory rat. The most important one that ever
lived. And now, the experiment, THE experiment, was over.

Amazingly so.

Simply amazingly so.

A minute and forty seconds before death, Bobby died.

*

The laboratory was silent for a moment. The flat line on the
monitor was too sudden to be understood at first. Then a fairly senior person,
her commanding officer (and Zomy's, for that matter) approached Lia.

"Can you confirm its death?" Saul asked, reminding
Lia of her role in this event.

And she remembered. Her fingers let go of Zomy's, and she
stumbled towards Bobby's cage.

There wasn't much to determine. A flat line is a flat line.
For one last moment she toyed with the thought of using the adrenaline syringe
lying (just in case!) in the pocket of her lab coat, but eventually she left it
there, and only used the stethoscope hanging on her chest.

Dead. Officially.

A single hand clap broke the silence of death, followed by
another, and then by a barrage of applause with various depths and rhythms.
After a few seconds one of the cellphones applauded too, and another
congratulated Saul and his staff for a work well done.

Other cellphones reported the death to the three people who
had to be in Washington at that time. From somewhere a bottle of champagne
popped open, and the bubbling wine was poured into paper cups.

A champagne cork, Zomy found out several hours later, landed
right next to Bobby's body.

*

In short, Bobby died two minutes before the clock reached
zero. It was close enough, though, so we started to clap hands and open bottles
of champagne. The entire room was on its feet, everyone applauding and clapping
hands and shouting and whistling.

Only Lia stood outside, crying, and I felt like crap because
of this.

It was the first time I thought I wanted to stop all this.
But this moment was over when all the chiefs tapped me on my shoulder and said,
"Well done," and, "Wow," and, "It's a great honor to
meet you," and all that shit. Today such words make me sick, but then I
took it in without thinking twice. We cracked the code - and it was the most
important thing that moment.

If you have any questions, go to NANA
chat tomorrow at three o’clock.

I went there, of course. Who would have behaved differently?