Baltimore, MD
November 2032
She, an angel of fate and accomplice to premeditated murder didn’t move, feel emotion, or eat. She had no name. The file on A537-23 indicated the experiments on her were over. Her prolonged life doomed to slip into the darkness of death in the name of scientific research, a life without the experience. Her glass encased crib housed a tangle of wires and tubes connected to a monitor bank. Computers tracked her progress, temperature, nerve impulses, and movements though her body could be classified among the clinically dead. A537-23 opened her eyes, a mere reflex of neurologically initiated muscle stared into space above her sequestered world.
Over the past four months under Dr. Arlan’s assiduous scrutiny the child cried once, the night he found her in the garbage bin near his tenement, her umbilical cord bitten off, tied in a haphazard knot before disposed of like a bag of unwanted trash. Dried blood caked her naked body, one wrapped in the remains of a plastic grocery bag. Violent shivers racked her tiny frame to produce heat.
Dr. Arlan knew she’d be the perfect specimen, one needed to take his experiments to the next level and bring his vendetta to fruition. He snatched her from the steel tomb, smuggled her into his lab where he nurtured her for a long, tiring sixteen weeks. He monitored her vital signs.
Kept her alive with intravenous solutions, most of them augmented with different strains of viruses he cultured from dozens of Petri dishes. Throughout her brief, painless life in Dr. Arlan’s
private lab, she provided him with valuable information. The weeks passed neither fast enough for her or the saints watching over her.
Dr. Arlan stole A537-23′s identity, not her soul. He took stem cells, DNA, and tissue samples during her sequestered stay in his makeshift lab located at the rear of Toby’s Storage Complex. He worked for nights on end while he toiled at BioMed Research Center during the day. Regardless of where he functioned, he lost track of time. He ate only when his stomach begged for a reprieve from emptiness. On Fridays, though, Dr. Arlan frequented Robbie’s Steak House, King of the Baltimore BBQ, only because bus seven stopped in front of the popular restaurant.
Like hundreds of other Friday nights, he worked late on his trial assignments at BioMed. He shared a robotic existence like his co-researchers. His assignments included possible cures for cancer, the common cold, myriads of experiments on yet to be approved FDA medications, all the while he understood the billions of dollars spent on research for cures amounted to a waste of time. Cancer employed doctors, lawyers, politicians, insurance companies, nurses, an unimaginable number of support industries, ones which provided a corporeal existence for the waitresses in coffee shops, the taxi drivers, the beauticians, along with everyone else. The trickle-down economic effect existed and reached deeper into the economic engine of the industry than anyone could imagine, so profound and prudent the likelihood for cures teetered on the razor-thin line of nonexistence.
The curly-haired researcher’s dark hair, deep complexion, tired eyes, and slumped posture gave him the appearance of being average while his genius mentality went unnoticed. Disease, mortality rates and the ill-effects of drugs, fascinated him, as he repeated all the study designs repeatedly for the last fourteen years without fanfare while at night he worked on his own genetic engineering project in a makeshift Level Two laboratory. Unlike his ill-kept home, his lab remained immaculate. His mind raced with thoughts of cell recombinants, DNA technology, cloning, and embryonic stem cell manipulation. For the past two years, he mixed traits of dissimilar organisms together and studied the results. He spliced immune systems, charted the effects of genetic therapy, built non-contagion viruses, cured them, and conducted experiments on thousands of white mice. The idea of manipulated life by genomic science consumed him, as did the properties of bacteria-made proteins and their effect on human organs.
A537-23 expanded his horizons, allowed him to solve mysteries, ones which led him to discover what eluded other research scientists, the ability to grow and reprogram cells by adapting their heritable components to bring him closer to vengeance.
Dr. Arlan propped his head in tired palms, strands of curly hair fell over his forehead while bloodshot eyes fought to remain open, yet the experiment danced in his cerebral cortex. A second later his chin struck his chest. The millisecond of sleep startled him. Lights blinked when the lab’s emergency generator started. Dr. Arlan glanced at the array of monitors along the south wall, focusing his attention on the single bacteria cultures inside each of seven environmental chambers. From a separate terminal, he checked the temperature of each of the experiments, its growth rate, measured phagocytes and antibodies, as well as symmetry, capsid thickness, those super thin protein coats of viruses, before checking lyse rates along with the amount of time each virus took to break through a membrane. His concern though focused on chamber six, level nine, rows forty-one through forty-nine. Each of the nine bacteria cultures contained specialized stem cell growths.
He studied the data from the compartments before backing the statistics up on a titanium cube disk. He slipped an encryption card into the USB port and pressed his right eye against the rubber eyepiece of the iris scanner. Once the encrypted information unlocked he slipped the encryption card back inside his shirt where it dangled from the nylon cord wrapped around his neck. Satisfied everything he moved his slender fingers over the touchpad, placed the titanium disc into the safe, pressed his thumb against the fingerprint pad and locked it.
Tonight, he planned to carry A537-23 with him to the BBQ pit for disposal. Despite the nauseous smell of embalming fluid, Dr. Arlan finished preparing the body. He wrapped the body in blue cellophane and put it inside a layer of cotton maize before bundling it all up in an old sheet. He placed the body in a plain paper bag. Rigor mortis started by the advanced coagulation of muscle protein heightened by alterations in DNA.
Dr. Arlan slouched against the corner of the bus stand in a desperate attempt to keep the torrent of windswept snow from his bag. Twenty-two minutes later the bus pulled up to the curb. “BBQ Pit,” he said to the driver as he took his usual seat two rows back. He double-checked the soggy burlap between his legs as he reminded himself how much he hated winter, snow, and cold buses.
Dr. Arlan gathered his bag as the driver maneuvered the SCAT through a tricky sliding stop. He waited until the bus the pulled away before he scanned the outside of the restaurant. He picked the perfect night to dispose of the body. He shuffled his way through heavy, wet snow before he reached the huge, green waste bin a few yards away from the BBQ pits’ south wall. The plastic top sagged under five inches of snow and two inches of ice. He struggled with the bin’s lid for three minutes, managing to expose its rancid inners wide enough to dump the contents inside. He pulled the lab coats aside, trying not to lose them in the howling wind. A brief thought crossed his mind as to how the girl had gotten in the dumpster at his apartment complex. He dismissed the sanctimonious idea as fate.
Dr. Arlan trudged to the front door as the owner locked it. Dr. Arlan stared at him for a moment, one of the rare times he ever made eye contact with anyone.
“Go home, doc. I shut everything down for the evening. No one wants to brave this crap for a late-night sandwich.”
Dr. Arlan stared icily and kicked the bottom of the door.
The owner relented, “Dammit, hold on, I’ll see what I got, come in here before you freeze to death.”
Dr. Arlan stomped the snow from his shoes on the filthy doormat as he uttered a wimpy, “Thank you.”
The owner headed for the kitchen. Several minutes passed. Dr. Arlan listened to the owner foraging in the kitchen and panicked when the wind slammed the back door shut. Fifteen minutes passed before the owner returned with a white Styrofoam container. “Here, doc. This is all that’s left. I tossed everything else out for the night.”
“I heard you go out.” Sweat gathered on his forehead.
“Nope, I looked out, deemed it too damned windy to walk to the dumpster tonight. I left the trash inside until tomorrow. Take the special, on me. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Good idea.” Dr. Arlan said with a sigh of relief.
“Are you walking?”
“Yes.”
“Come on, let me drop you off. I know the walk is a short one. It’s too miserable out there tonight, I insist.”
Dr. Arlan thought better than to refuse the generous offer considering the storm. The owner went back to the kitchen; he with a plastic bag. “Here, doc, put those stinky lab coats in this before you have my ride smelling like an experiment from hell.”
They rode in silence for the entire sixteen-minute drive to the tenement. The restaurateur slid to a stop and said, “Good night, doc. Enjoy the Special.”
“Thanks.” Dr. Arlan clambered out of the rust-encrusted Chevy and lumbered to the front door without looking back. Wet, tired, and hungry, he punched in the security code, waited until the buzzer sounded, stepped inside the soiled foyer and fumbled for his apartment keys. He sauntered back to unit A5.
He came and went without being noticed. No one ever asked him questions. He paid his rent in cash, always slipping his rent under the superintendent’s door with an extra twenty for a tip.
Dr. Arlan tossed the lab coats on the floor and turned on the hall light. Immediately the bare, sixty-watt bulb blew out. Dr. Arlan cursed, retreated to the bedroom, and scanned the room for the August issue of The Journal of Genetic Medicine. He found the magazine under a dirty shirt and climbed on the bed, fully clothed. After a few pages, he rested the magazine across his chest. His thoughts turned to A537-23, how he found her, abandoned, naked, near death in the filthy dumpster. He knew of several pregnant women in the complex, any one of them could have tossed the girl in the dumpster. The child proved hard to forget. He wondered why he blamed himself.
Dr. Arlan reminisced about his two-year tour in Africa and the village where married Charia. Charia, his sweet Charia, became ill and died a year after their return to America. Pesticides dumped into the well contaminated the village’s water killed her. The U.S. government’s insecticides cut her life short, killing the only woman he ever loved.
He cut the negative thoughts off only to find himself thinking of his parents. His father, a career soldier and drunk beat his mother after every alcoholic adventure. The beatings started the minute he opened the front door. Mother bore the marks of the inebriated soldier; eventually, he did, too. Now the opportunity to teach the bureaucrats a lesson would soon be his. He blamed the government for everything. Thank God, he had found the baby. What he learned from his research on her DNA would change the world. Dr. Arlan fell asleep mumbling “My bastard father and the government will atone for the death of Mother and my beloved Charia.”
