The Gene Miracle by Chakra Elan
This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions issue #2
The needle point was inches away from Semna’s right forearm. She gulped as the Phlebo-Bot gripped at the syringe, its other tough synthetic polymer of a hand holding her wrist down on the smooth surface of the armrest.
“This better not hurt.”
“The area is anaesthetized. You will feel no pain, the Phlebo-Bot said in its digital construct of a voice. Might I recommend some soothing music before we begin?”
Semna nodded. A song flowed from the overhead speakers; its melody causing a flurry of emotions to rise from within Semna. As the needle pierced through her skin, she felt no pain. But the music strummed the melancholy strings in her heart.
“The needle is in place. Beginning the enzyme transfer, the Phlebo-Bot said. It hooked the new needle and tube up to a clear liquid receptacle on the intravenous pole. The enzymes made its way into her body, an icy cold feeling creeping up her right arm.
She kept her mind anchored on the song. A year ago, that song would have stirred happy emotions in here. Now, it only caused a hollow percussion within her soul.
Semna could see three figures observing the procedure from outside the glass panel of her room. The geneticist’s eyes were more preoccupied with the monitor interfaces on her hand that remotely transposed her vitals. Avice raised his hands and waved at her. Semna waved back with her free hand. The third, a CiYer, floated next to Avice and the geneticist, looking at her in the room.
At least she thought it did. The alien’s face, or a lack of it, was always so hard to discern.
“Doctor Jarudi, your hormone levels have experienced a slight surge,” the geneticist said into the intercom. “Are you feeling uncomfortable with the procedure?”
Semna shook her head. She knew that the geneticist would not be interested in her emotional well-being. The geneticist’s job was to ensure the gene transfer happened smoothly. Besides, those who volunteered for the program were people who had lost someone. Her story was no different than theirs.
The woman tapped on the vitals monitor and conversed quietly with Avice. They then turned to the CiYer, who said nothing at all. It merely floated there, looking at Semna. Though its luminous faceless veneer showed no emotions, Semna could feel its fascination bearing down upon her.
“All set, Miss Jarudi,” the Phlebo-Bot said. “Would you like something to eat?”
Semna’s heart ached at the question. The song continued playing, and she had to hold back a tear. She would be choosing the last meal of her life.
“Pancakes.”
#
Food supply around the world was erratic at best. Countries that were once industrially dominant were now at the mercy of their agriculturally accomplished neighbors.
The food scarcity came from the exponential increase in the number of humans in the world. And with the proliferating famine came war. Nuclear bombs pummeled the surface of the Earth. Stories of mushroom cloud explosions became as common as car-jacking. The already fabricated rules of democracy now crumbled, and were replaced with a sounder, less inhuman principle – the survival of the fittest.
“To the end of the world,” Chris said, clinking his glass of wine to Semna’s. They sat in front of the television, watching the enemy tanks easily enter their country by its many borders. The news footage showed burnt down farm houses, and occupation of the invaders on the many hundred acres of cornfields in their country.
“There must be something we can do! She bit her lip.
“Nothing can be done,” he said quietly. “Get rip roaring drunk with me and wait for the soldiers to invade the city.”
Chris was always like that. He was always too content, too accepting with anything that happened.
They danced that night, and made love while the capital city was in perpetual panic, waiting for the enemy tanks to arrive.
Semna Jarudi was twenty-seven when her country was invaded. It seemed almost too funny to be reported in the newspapers; ‘WAR OVER CORN,’ but there it was. Her nation was a quiet people of agriculture and peace. And the neighboring countries took advantage of their military-less policies.
The youngest genetic engineer in her country, Semna was whisked away by her government in the dead of night. Her brain was too precious to be wasted away by a drunken enemy soldier looking for a kill.
She did not have the opportunity to say goodbye to Chris when two men from the government came for her. They had insisted that it was a top secret project, only for the best minds of the country.
They allowed her only a change of clothes and nothing else. There was to be no way anyone could ever detect her exact location. Semna knew then that she would be brought to a place safe from the war. But in doing so, she would be completely removed from the world.
From Chris.
#
The research facility was located twenty miles away from the city. An underground bunker half the size of a football field, it was impermeable to satellite signals, curious eyes, and most importantly, nuclear radiation.
The director of the research facility, Avice, was a great geneticist Semna had only heard of but never met.
The bunker had fresh air pumped in to ensure survivability of its denizens. Though powered by a generator, Avice confessed that it was not enough to ensure the pinnacle of comfort for its geneticists.
“We have to direct the power to more important equipment.” He pointed to a large machine in one room.
Semna recognized the machine immediately. It was the size of three large refrigerators lined side-by-side. Thick fibers of electrical cables ran down one end of the machine and exited the other.
“You have a DNA splicer,” Semna said in a hushed voice. “And not just any DNA splicer – this is the grandest of them all.”
Avice smiled. “I’m sure you know what it can do.”
Semna rubbed her hand along the smooth metallic surface of the machine. “It can segregate precise sections of DNA. We can insert random genetic sequences and reattach them without damaging the original DNA.”
“Nothing gets by you, Doctor Jarudi.”
“There is only one such machine in this world, and you have it?” Semna asked, awed.
“Trust me. It took our government a long time to secure the rights to this machine. We wanted to make sure…” he stopped for a moment to deliberate his words.
“To make sure what?”
“To make sure that you had all the necessary equipment to complete your research.”
“My research?”
Avice led a puzzled Semna into his room. Diagrams were strewn meticulously on many chalkboards. Piles of research books were stacked from the floor right up to the level of her eyes. His table however, was devoid of a cacophony of information – a single black book on the table laid there. The way it was placed on the pristine surface made it clear to Semna that Avice treated the book with a kind of reverence that was almost fanatical.
Avice lifted the hard-bound black cover of the book, his other hand tracing the spine of the book with his palm. Semna recognized it to be the thesis she had submitted for her doctorate program.
“Your work, your thesis,” he said, weighing the book in his hand, a look of rapture on his face. “It is amazing.”
“It is a mere hypothesis. There can be no practical application for my thesis.”
“Always the humble geneticist, Doctor Jarudi.” he laughed. “Do you know what you can achieve if this project is successful?”
It was a rhetorical question. Of course Semna knew.
Her Autotrophic Gene Transfer theory, if executed perfectly, could create the next breed of Humans. The theory, as controversial as it was, became known as the ‘New Human Project.’
People could have their chromosomes spliced and re-spliced with a gene responsible for chloroplast production. The success of the program would give birth to the Novo Humans; humans who were able to generate their own food sources by absorbing sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.
It would solve the food crisis problem that was proliferating uncontrollably around the world.
“The AGT theory is just that, Avice. A theory.”
“But is it possible for it to be executed?”
“Possible?” Semna raised her voice. “It is as possible as me throwing a bullet into the air and have a wind of 200 miles per hour blow it into my opponent’s body!”
“So, it is possible then.” Avice smiled.
Semna grew exasperated. She hated the look of deliberate superiority on this man’s face, as though he knew more than she did. She stepped forward and grabbed the book from his hand.
“This thesis was researched down to the last bone. And if you read it, you would know that there is a glaring obstacle in the way.”
“The absence of the necessary enzyme to splice the human DNA in a specific sequence, to allow the insertion of the Chlorophyll Gene,” Avice chanted out verbatim from her thesis.
Semna nodded. “Such a configuration of enzyme does not exist! At least not in this world. It was the very reason I was laughed at by the academic community!”
“I don’t see why,” Avice said. “It was amazingly written.”
In another time, Semna would have been mollified by such a compliment. But, this was no such time to wear that praise. Food was scarce globally. Her country was at war. She was separated from Chris.
“I don’t want to talk about possibilities, Avice. This is pure madness.”
“It’s funny you should mention that the proper enzymes do not exist in this world,” Avice smiled again.
And that was when he introduced her to a CiYer.
#
Semna had seen the alien CiYers in the news, when they had landed on that very fringe of the city ten years ago. From a distance, they looked more like crumpled plastic bags floating in the air.
Planet CiYe was a cosmic body which was almost similar to Earth in its relative distance from a white star. Its atmosphere consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and hydrogen gases. Though large bodies of water existed, the atmosphere itself did not have much oxygen gas.
The sentient life forms native to the brown-blue planet were CiYers, jellyfish like creatures floating in a semi-lucid membranous structure containing nebulous gases of blue and green. They thrived without oxygen. The non-oxidizing atmosphere prevented damage to the CiYers’ cells, with some being able to live for thousands of years.
However, upon their discovery of Earth, the CiYers were extremely infatuated, if it could be called that, with the nature of oxygen and its oxidative properties.
Thus, the first peaceful treaty was established between the CiYers and the Earthlings. In lieu of genetic technology, the CiYers wanted something simple in return – oxygen.
Green plants were first sent to CiYe, but it did not have the capacity to thrive in such an environment. So, the very first Cyanobacteria were introduced into the large bodies of water in CiYe. The photosynthetic bacteria absorbed light from the nearest white star, and turned water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen.
The project was a success. In return, the CiYers provided alien technology from their planet, random AutoBots made of almost life-like, durable polymers.
#
Avice led her into a small meeting room where a CiYer and a Tranlato-Bot greeted her. A small table with two glasses of water and two small stools were placed around it. Semna occupied one, Avice the other. The CiYer floated a foot above the ground. Close up, it could be described as a reverse jellyfish, with a pendulous blob forming the bottom of its body, moving upwards in a tangent, making it seem like a floating, undulating semi-luminous tear drop.
Its body was partially transparent, and Semna could see the nebulous gases unfurling and moving within in random patterns. When it spoke, the gases came out in different colors through its many pores. Colors and positions of the exit points of the gases were its verbs, nouns, adjectives.
The Translator’s eyes were quick to dart around the many exit points of the CiYer’s mouth, coming up with a translation within ten seconds.
When Semna spoke, the translator keyed in the information into a computer, which sent a signal via an electrode transmission to one of the many anemone like tendrils atop the CiYer’s head.
“This is Kren,” Avice said. “It has volunteered to help out with the New God Project.”
Semna looked at Avice in puzzlement, her face warranting a need for thorough explanation.
“We believe that the CiYers have the very elusive enzymes you are searching for,” Avice said.
#
There was selfishness in Semna that was almost admirable. She cared not for the fate of the world, but for the completion of her research. Avice often came into the laboratory, the excitement in his eyes obvious.
“If you can pull this off, imagine how famous you will be!” he gushed one day, just when she had successfully removed the sections of DNA without damaging its monomers.
Semna couldn’t care less about what happened outside. Often, they would receive news from above in the form of volunteers for the project. They came with sad tales of destroyed homes and lost families. The soldiers had extirpated her hometown and stripped their crop fields bare.
Though thoughts of Chris formed in her mind, it elicited no emotions within her. He was compartmentalized in a box deep in the annals of her mind.
When the soldiers invaded and bombed the cities above them, their underground bunker shook. But, Semna was more preoccupied with making sure her Petri Dishes containing the precious CiYer enzymes did not fall and shatter.
Her life was engulfed by nitrogenous base sequences. She saw them in her dreams, her nightmares, her fantasies, her incubuses. The emotional significance that was Chris had been replaced by the solution.
#
She found Avice smoking in his room one night. He was having a long chat with a fellow CiYer. A Translato-Bot stood in the middle, bridging the communication between these two species.
He was surprised to see her at the front door and invited her in.
“Want one?” he offered her a cigarette. “Helps me calm down.”
She shook her head and smiled. “What do you have to be stressed about?”
Avice laughed and showed her a chair. There were photos on his table, each one showing their now destroyed city. She recognized, with a pang of sadness, her own university now porously ridden with bullets and the marks of mortar shells.
Six months in the underground bunker had given her a sense of detachment from the world above. All that mattered to Semna now was the manifestation of her research.
The CiYer let out a series of colored cloud puffs from its membrane, which the Translato-Bot conveyed.
“What made you inspired to attempt the creation of the Novo Humans?” the CiYer asked.
It did not have a face for Semna to remain fixated upon, so she focused instead on the tendrils on top of its head. She would learn soon enough, with a little mortification, that she was actually staring at its genitalia.
She could see that even Avice was interested in its question. He leaned forward and prodded the end of his cigarette butt into the ashtray. He seemed to detect her hesitation.
“You don’t have to tell us if it is too poignant.”
“It isn’t,” Semna said, sipping at her glass of water.
Her hands balled into fists as she gripped at her knees. There was something more human-like in the CiYer than any person she had recently met on Earth.
“A few years ago, I was in a terrible car crash. I was six months pregnant at the time and the baby did not survive. The doctors had to remove my uterus too, I was hemorrhaging badly.”
As the Translato-Bot keyed Semna’s words in, the electrode transferred the message to the CiYer. It seemed to gyrate and ripple like the surface of the pond. It let out a puff of yellow cloud on its left pore, followed by a red cloud through the bottom pore.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Avice said. The CiYer echoed its sentiments.
Semna smiled. “My lover, Chris, did not look at me the same way ever again. I felt less of a woman, of a human. What was the use of being a woman when I could not bring life onto this planet? What more do I have to offer in this lifetime?”
“How did you get over it?” the CiYer asked.
“By watering a potted plant every day,” Semna smiled.
“I don’t understand,” Avice said.
It was a different kind of relationship. Semna was not looking at the plant for validation. She didn’t need to feel superior to know that the plant relied on her for its survival. It was the act of watering it which made all the difference. How quaint it was that life came from the joining of simple compounds so miniscule, but when joined and arranged, formed a potent polymer of life.
That much potted plant became a reciprocal simile. It gave life to her by allowing her to give it life.
“That was how the idea of my thesis came to be,” Semna said. “I wanted to be able to create life.”
She looked at Avice, and then at the alien sitting in front of her. There was nothing in the CiYer’s body that had the layers of emotions that befuddled and blinded humans in this reality. Its construct was simple. The color of its luminous skin was a light green. She had read somewhere that the original CiYers themselves had no such green pigmentations. Only with the introduction of the Cyanobacteri on their planet had they amalgamated those life forms into their own genome.
The CiYer extended an amoeboid pseudopodium, its membrane stretching with a slight rustling sound. From the tip of the extended false hand, gases were emitted out from its many pores. It was blue, green, yellow, followed by red.
Semna looked at the translator, who smiled and spoke.
“Thank you for your story.”
Avice leaned against his chair, feeling embarrassed at having excavated such a personal story from Semna. Flustered, he decided to change the subject of their conversation.
“How is the research coming along?”
Semna smiled with such brilliance, it made the man perturbed. Being in an underground bunker isolated from the war-torn world above gave no reason for anyone to smile with such intensity. It was unnerving, almost unnatural to the verge of being considered psychotic.
“It is done,” Semna announced. “I have amalgamated the Chlorophyll Gene into the human DNA.”
#
Semna volunteered herself as the first test subject.
The Autotrophic Gene Transfer procedure involved a series of injections. Enzymes tore apart sections of her DNA, and the chlorophyll gene was inserted.
The first day of the procedure was the roughest. It destroyed the normal construct of her melanin. Her once mocha skin became a blunt grey, then a sickly white, staying that way for the next three days.
A few of the test subjects could not handle the transformation, begging to be reverted to their former bodies. The geneticists were quick to remind them that the re-spliced DNAs could not be reversed. Those rendered psychologically volatile had to be sedated. Semna herself could not help but scratch at her chalk-white skin.
It took a few days for the chlorophyll gene to amalgamate into the human DNA.
Semna’s skin reverted to its light brown complexion, with tinges of green speckled all around her body. The green dots were the size of a ten-cent coin. As the green colorations matured, variations of yellow appeared around it.
To the average human, the spots on the skin would have looked like blemishes not worthy to be seen in public in. But Semna was ecstatic to see the yellow and green chlorophyll pigments formed around her body.
When the geneticists were satisfied with the chlorophyll composition in her body, a certain type of bacteria was introduced into her cell to act as a host to the chlorophyll. It was with the bacteria that the process of photosynthesis could then occur.
However, this was a tricky process. The foreign cells were bacteria-like in their structure. To prevent her own body’s defense mechanisms from kicking in, she was given a heavy dose of immune-suppressant and placed in an isolation chamber to prevent opportunistic infections.
During this time of isolation, Semna kept to herself in the bland, beige room. She had to be kept in the dark, pressurized chamber for three days, during which she was given a sedation to prevent claustrophobia.
It was during her isolation that Chris appeared in her dreams. He was angry. He blamed her for being childless. In another dream, he would cuddle next to her, just like they did on Sunday afternoons. Once, he screamed at her for leaving him in the dark.
“I am trying to save us all here!” Semna screamed at the image of Chris.
She watched him shake his head and walk into the darkness. Semna woke up in cold sweats frequently. She would touch her skin to make sure that the rough green spots were still on her hands.
#
By the twelfth day of the procedure, the bacteria and chlorophyll had amalgamated in her body to form chloroplasts, just like it did in green plants. Semna was now a jade green color from head to toe.
Avice came to visit her on that day. He stood across the glass barrier of her room, standing there with a small smile and wave. He was accompanied by a floating CiYer.
“How are you feeling?” he asked over the intercom.
By this time, all her hair had fallen out. Small pustules on her skin spread like poxes which the geneticists say were temporary discharges of excess food storage. Her body was still trying to get used to its autotrophic nature.
She got up and sat in the chair across him, her bald head wrapped with a scarf. The rest of her body was covered with a simple, shapeless garb.
“Not too human-like anymore,” Semna replied. “But alive.”
“Christ. You look like you are in a bad way, Semna,” Avice said. But he did not look at her with disgust. Instead, there was only veneration radiating from his eyes.
Semna felt touched to see the burly six-foot man look away and wipe his tears.
She had already experienced photosynthesis for the first time. Yesterday, when the scientists shone a beam of white light upon her body, it was pure bliss. When she exhaled, there was little pain from the increasing oxidation and hunger, but the AGT program also included a surgical stomach stapling to reduce her stomach size by 80%. She did not need to eat any more.
The pleasure of just going through the day without having to insert food into her mouth was exhilarating to say the least.
She became her own sustenance, not having to rely on another person for her food. There was no need to hunt, to shop, to grow her food anymore. All she needed now was a steady supply of carbon dioxide, water and sunlight.
#
When the Novo Humans were revealed to the world, it was a bittersweet victory. Half the world’s population had already been removed by then, and hundreds of acres of fertile agricultural lands were now a fallow nuclear wasteland.
Semna and the new breed of Novo Humans were paraded in the eyes of the policy makers of the world. Their jade-green presence was looked at with the same reverence Avice had once fixed upon her.
By undergoing photosynthesis, the Novo Humans were able to sustain themselves with only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. It was also thanks to the CiYer’s assistance that Semna and her team of geneticists were able to create protein sequences which resisted radiation from the nuclear fallout around the world.
With their autotrophic nature and ability to resist radiation, the Novo Humans were considered the pinnacle of the human race. More and more survivors of the war volunteered to have their genes reconfigured in an attempt to transcend their need for food.
Thus, the food scarcity problem of the world was solved.
#
Though peace had now broken out with the advent of the New Human Project, it had happened at the cost of many lives; Chris included.
By this time, 80% of her country’s survivors had converted into Novo Humans, and the results were fantastic. Not only did it reduce the carbon dioxide concentration, it began to lower the average global temperature, eradicating global warming. The increase in the concentration of oxygen also made the CiYers happy.
More and more CiYers came to Earth from their home planet, CiYe, to mine the now rich oxygen from Earth. Large, nebulously shaped CiYer-crafts hovered at the atmosphere peacefully, absorbing the required amounts of oxygen to bring back to their home planet.
Green Novo Human children now ran around the destroyed playground, emitting a sound Semna had not heard in a long time – happy screams and laughter.
Semna stared at the imploded concrete that was her former home. A fellow CiYer and its accompanying Translato-Bot were next to her. They watched as the Novo Humans began the process of clearing up the rubble.
Chris was nowhere to be found. Their apartment building was now a pile of broken bricks, destroyed in the war.
“I left him, without even a word of goodbye,” she said.
The CiYer considered her words for a moment, and then let out a long puff of yellow and blue gas, stimulating the Translato-Bot circuitry.
“At the cost of saving the human race, Semna. He would have understood.”
As the sunbeam washed over Semna’s body, she could feel her cells producing organic materials for her sustenance. There was truth in the CiYer’s words; she did almost single-handedly bring the world into a new era of peace.
She gave life to an entire planet. But she could not bring her lover back to life. And that was the duality she would take to her grave.