Chapter 9: First Blueprint
1408 Words
The withdrawal from the Genome Nexus was no brutal eviction, but a gentle, unobtrusive dissolving away. The sand dunes crept into the rough nap of the mat beneath him. The stardusted, wordless heavens dissolved into the smoke-grained ceiling of home. The whine of the cosmic DNA strands dissolved into the muffled, steady sounds of the camp—a barking dog, a crying child, the dull hum of people.
He was home. But he was different.
The GeneCraft System no longer existed as an external event, something that had occurred to him. It was a layer of his perception, as integral a part of him as sight or hearing. A glowing, soft status bar still floated in the bottom of his field of vision, a steady, comforting—and terrifying—reminder of the altered world.
[Host Vital Signs: Stable.] [Nutrient Reserves: 18% - Recovering.] [Neural Load: 5% - Normal.]
He sat up slowly. His body was different. The crippling, low-grade fatigue that he'd had since childhood was gone. The adjustment to his iron absorption was already taking effect. It was a small change, one line of code, but the difference was incredible. He had a sense, an energy that he never did before. He was, quite literally, an improved version of himself.
His aunt slept in a chair beside his pallet, her face folded with worry and exhaustion. Youssef slept on his own bed, his chest still an alarming rattle, but his rest more peaceful than before. The crisis had passed. He had survived the System's integration.
Quietly, not to wake them, Dawud got up and walked out onto the small flat roof of the house. The pre-dawn air was cool and tinged with wood smoke and fresh bread. The camp stirred slowly to life, a creature awakening to another day of struggle.
He needed to know. He needed to experiment with this power in the world. Closing his eyes, he concentrated the System interface to manifest.
It did so at once. The world didn't vanish, but it was overlaid with the same gorgeous, Arabic calligraphy he'd seen in the Nexus. It was translucent, a heads-up on reality itself.
[Select Function:] [Genome Visualization] [Pathogen Identification] [Basic Edit] [System Diagnostics]
He chose [Genome Visualization] and focused on a resilient, wiry weed pushing its way up through a c***k in the rooftop concrete. His consciousness plunged inward. The plant's genetic code lay out before him, a simpler, tougher program than that of the human genome. He sensed the programs for water storage, for deep rooting, for hardness against the sun. It was beautiful in its Spartan, stubborn determination to live.
He turned inward, to himself. His own genome appeared, an immense shining city of code. He saw the freshly made edit—the improved iron absorption sequence—glowing with a firm, healthy light. He saw other, less luminous areas: a predisposition to nearsightedness, a marginally increased risk for cardiovascular disease later in life. Flaws. Bugs in the code. All of them, now, perhaps editable.
The authority was intoxicating. It was also a burden, a duty that leaned in to suffocate him. Where did one even start?
And as if in answer to his silent question, the System thrummed gently. A new instruction manifested, not as a menu item, but as a raw data-stream into his mind. It was a sequence. A certain, beautiful string of nucleotides.
He recognized it immediately. It was a modification of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system, a clever adaptation to a cell surface protein that would make the Hepatitis B virus incapable of binding and infecting a cell. It wasn't a cure for those already infected; it was a vaccine, inserted into the genome. A lifelong, hereditary immunity.
The same illness that had taken his mother before him, not as some unknown, unassailable force of nature, but as an editable script. A dilemma with an answer.
His heart ceased. Air departed his lungs. He stepped back, catching the hard parapet of the roof as he stumbled.
Yumma.
He thought of her again, not a memory, but a genetic fact. He could see, in imagination, the virus replicating in her liver cells, the slow, inexorable breakdown of function, the jaundice, the confusion, the final, agonized silence. He pictured the thousands of others in the camp, in the world, under the same slow death sentence, not because the science was not known, but because the delivery of the science was too expensive, too logistically involved, too unremunerative.
And there it was. The ideal delivery system. Not a vial, not a syringe, not a cold chain. A thought. A rewrite.
The template was perfect. It was stable. It targeted a precise vulnerability in the virus's mode of entry with great precision. The [Basic Edit] function pulsed, awaiting his command. He could do it. He could immunize himself. Now.
His fingers shook. This was no longer a theory. This was the origin of his agony, the cause of his driving failure, boiled down to a mere yes/no question.
But a shiver of uncertainty crept into his head. This was his body. He could try it on himself. But others? The edit was labeled [Basic], but what did that mean? Were there unexpected side effects the untainted logic of the System could not predict? Long-term consequences? Did he have a right to make this change, even for the good?
He remembered the child, Amina. He had retyped the active infection in her. That had been a desperate, reactive act. This was different. This was proactive. This was changing the very blueprint of a human being to avoid an eventual risk. It was a boundary not even the most sophisticated gene therapy in the world would cross.
The System, sensing his hesitation, provided him with more information. It demonstrated to him a simulation of the edit taking place, the changed cells replicating, the immune system regarding the new protein as "self." Perfect. Elegant.
[Edit Stability: 99.97%.] [Projected Efficacy: 100%.] [Energy Cost: Minimal.]
The logic was unavoidable. It was the ultimate in medical treatment. Preventative, permanent, and gratis after the system had been installed.
But medicine wasn't logical. It was ethics. It was terrifying. It was the recollection of his mother's hand becoming cold in his.
He looked out at the camp. The sun was beginning to rise, turning the flimsy shelters orange and grey. The line at the clinic would soon be out the door. Soon, another family would get their diagnosis that would destroy them. Another mother would start her slow descent into yellowed oblivion.
He was not a doctor. He didn't have a license, no authority, no right.
But he had a weapon. A weapon which reduced all those outdated permissions to nothing.
He thought about his instructors in Cairo. They would call this abominable. Playing God. They would prefer to uphold their pure, powerless ethics and see people die rather than use a power which they did not understand and could not control.
A cold anger settled over him, burning away the last spark of doubt. Their conscience was a luxury of the belly-fed, the robust, the strong. A code written by those who never witnessed their mother die for want of a pill.
On this earth, the only immoral action to take was nothing.
He acted.
Closing his eyes, he called up the map of hepatitis immunity. The gene sequence glowed in his mind's eye, a beautiful, lethal device against an old enemy.
He took a breath of the coldness of dawn.
"Execute," he whispered.
No display of grand pomp. No light show. Simply a gentle, aching warmth feeling that coursed through his body, a feeling of something falling into alignment, another instruction being issued to each cell that divided. It took all of a few seconds.
[Edit: Successful. Hepatitis B Immunity: Acquired.]
He stood there for a long, long time, watching the sun rise on the horizon. He was no different. And yet he was irrevocably, irretrievably altered. He had crossed a Rubicon. He had taken the first deliberate step along a path from which he could never turn back.
He had not only edited a gene. He had edited his own destiny. He had proclaimed war against the old world and its gradual, tolerable losses.
He was no longer a healer asking for approval.
He was a code writer. And he had just typed his first line of code in a revolution.
—-
- Writer
