Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
EN World Short Story Smackdown - FINAL: Berandor vs Piratecat - The Judgment Is In!
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 4222669" data-attributes="member: 2810"><p><strong>Round 1 Match 7 -- Rodrigo Istalindir - "The End of the Line"</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>The End of the Line</strong></p><p></p><p>Would I do things differently, if I knew then what I know now? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think I couldn’t deliberately set in motion the course of events that would result in the eventual extinction of the human race.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>Marie was the rarest of creatures. Her brain operated on an entirely different plane than the rest of us, yet she was warm and funny and not at all what one expected of the world’s foremost geneticist. Yet despite her genius, or perhaps because of it, she could be the most delightfully scatterbrained person I’d ever met. They used to say that Einstein was so preoccupied thinking great thoughts that he’d show up to work with two different colored socks. Sometimes, Marie didn’t even manage that.</p><p></p><p>The first time I saw her was in the library at the University. She was walking through the stacks, fingers running along the spines of the books. It was early in the morning and she was dressed in her nightclothes, bare feet padding along the carpeted floor.</p><p></p><p>I should have left her alone, but behind me I heard several students entering the hall, and I thought to spare her some embarrassment. I called out to her, and she turned, startled. (Picture 3). I mimed covering myself up. Shaken from her reverie, she glanced down and blushed. </p><p></p><p>I grabbed my coat and scurried behind the bookcases. I held it out to her, like a child feeding a skittish deer. She laughed, twirled, and stood there waiting for me to drape it about her. We left the library through the back stairwell.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>I was smitten from the start. I was a man of science, and if asked I’d have said that the entire notion of love at first sight was a romantic, hormone-fueled delusion, silly but harmless. We were definitely silly. </p><p></p><p>Our friends and colleagues just looked at us and shook their heads. I think it amused them to see two devoutly logical people acting like a couple of addled teenagers.</p><p></p><p>I can’t deny that our work suffered, at first, but after a few months the first blush wore off and we stopped being one of ‘those couples’, mooning about, holding hands everywhere we went. You know what I’m talking about – those couples no one can stand to be around for more than five minutes.</p><p></p><p>But the attraction and the love and respect didn’t fade. Not after six months, not ever.</p><p>The first time we worked together on a project was as heady as our first date. Our skills complemented each other perfectly. Her theoretical knowledge and uncanny knack for isolating gene sequences, combined with my groundbreaking work with viral delivery systems made us the hottest thing in the rapidly growing gene therapy community.</p><p></p><p>Our first breakthrough was a remarkably effective treatment for Parkinson’s. It wasn’t a complete cure, but it was a damned good start, and I had no doubt that it would buy time for those afflicted while someone else refined the process. I would have preferred to keep working at it – I’m a hopeless perfectionist – but Marie was already anxious to move on. So she did, and I followed.</p><p></p><p>Success followed success. Had we worked for a major pharmaceutical company, we’d have been millionaires several times over. But we were happier in an academic environment, where Marie had enough clout to ensure that the processes we developed were kept affordable for those that needed them.</p><p></p><p>Time Magazine called us ‘the greatest scientific couple since the Curies’.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>The first sign that something was amiss was on her 40th birthday. I’d arranged a surprise party, the kind of thing most of our peers would have laughed at, but they knew Marie almost as well as I, and they knew she’d love it. </p><p></p><p>The party was in full swing. Gifts were piled on the dining room table, music was playing a little too loud, and some of the grad students were already drunk enough to start dancing in the living room. Someone – I never did find out who – had paid Hisoka and Ozuru to dress up as ‘genes’. Hisoka was the ‘S’, and Ozuru the ‘N’ (an inside joke – Marie and I had recently published a paper on using variant of the N bacteriophage to alter the ‘S’ gene expression in hepatitis). Their revealing costumes were frightful, especially when they started dancing, but Marie laughed like a delighted child. (Picture 2)</p><p></p><p>When I tried to get everyone’s attention, I had to shout, but most heard me and gathered around the coffee table as I carried in the fiery cake. Someone started singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and the entire crowd joined in, more or less on key.</p><p></p><p>Marie was beaming from ear to ear. She picked up the knife and cut off a huge slice of cake. She extended it towards me, still holding the knife in one hand. As I reached for it, her arm spasmed, and the knife sliced deep into my hand. </p><p></p><p>I gasped in pain and clutched the injured appendage with my free hand, the forgotten cake trampled underfoot as the crowd erupted in chaos. Finally someone returned from the kitchen with a dishrag, and the dean of the medical school wrapped it tightly around the wound before leading me to his car for the trip to the emergency room.</p><p></p><p>Hours later, we returned, my hand heavily bandaged. My wife was mortified, and kept apologizing over and over. The repetition stopped mid-sentence when she opened the door to our bedroom. She let out a squeal of delight when she saw the puppy I’d gotten her for her birthday. In the confusion and haze from the painkillers, I’d forgotten about the little thing, but fortunately he’d just gone to sleep in his crate. One look at the radiant smile on Marie’s face and the accident was forgotten.</p><p></p><p>I think it was the last time I saw her completely happy.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>Within months, the tremors became more frequent and undeniable. The doctor’s were at a loss, until one of them ran a test for mHtt, and it came back positive. It was a one-in-a-million event, liking hitting the lottery in reverse. Huntington’s is almost unheard of where neither parent has the gene.</p><p></p><p>Marie threw herself into her work with abandon. In a strange way, we were lucky. There was probably no one in the world more likely to develop a treatment, and now there was no one more motivated to find it. Except, maybe, for me.</p><p></p><p>The progression of the disease is inexorable, but slow, and over the next few years she remained largely unaffected. She insisted that I I take over more of the delicate lab work; she was worried that she’d flinch at the wrong time and invalidate a test. </p><p></p><p>We hit dead end after dead end. Marie had never failed at anything before, and the realization that she might come up short at the most critical point in her life was devastating. She became increasingly driven, spending twenty hours a day at the lab. On those rare occasions when I managed to pull her away for a few hours of a normal life, I could tell she was with me only in body; her mind was elsewhere.</p><p></p><p>By her forty-fifth birthday, the disease had progressed to the point where she was doing almost no hands-on work, and her speech had started to deteriorate. She became a near-recluse, working through me, and never interacting with the other researchers and assistants except through email. </p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>The breakthrough, when it came, was so obvious in retrospect I almost felt guilty for not having seen it sooner. Previous efforts had been fruitless because in trying to reduce the polyQ glutamine chain, the treatment either went too far, eliminating it entirely, or snipped off a single repeat of the gene and then stopped and wouldn’t repeat. </p><p></p><p>One of our previous successes gave me a brilliant idea. Rather than using one of the modified viruses we typically worked with, I modified the hepatitis virus to serve as the delivery mechanism. I hoped it would follow its typical path, taking up residence in the liver and continuously act to keep the glutamine chains in check. HepB was nothing to laugh at, but compared to the alternative, I figured it might buy us the years needed for a complete cure.</p><p></p><p>There was one hitch.</p><p></p><p>FDA approval to even start clinical trials for such a risky protocol would take years, and might never be approved. The Huntington’s lobby was damned effective, but no one had ever tried to cure someone by intentionally infecting them with a contagious disease. Marie didn’t have years.</p><p></p><p>When she almost choked to death in her office because she couldn’t swallow the chocolate pudding that had become one of her few remaining joys, I began preparing. When I was cleaning out our bathroom and found the bottle of carefully hoarded pills, I acted.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>The reversal wasn’t dramatic. No Hollywood-style ‘go to bed sick and wake up cured’ nonsense. But over the course of a year, her life returned to normal. It wasn’t possible to hide her hard-won health even if we wanted to. The FDA was suspicious, but they couldn’t prove it was anything other than an accidental exposure in the lab. We paid the OSHA fine without complaint.</p><p></p><p>The clamor in the medical community couldn’t be ignored, though, and eventually the government caved to the pressure and fast-tracked clinical trials. A thousand of the most desperately sick patients were infected with the mutated hepatitis. Almost ninety percent showed noticeable improvement within the first three months.</p><p></p><p>Marie’s sparkling personality had returned with her health, and she was a hit on the morning news shows. The brilliant doctor who’d triumphed over a horrible disease like no other in history. The publicity was worth its weight in gold.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>We were on our way back from the airport after another appearance on ‘Good Morning, America’ when we got a call from the senior lab assistant. There was a note of panic in her voice, and she urged us to return to the lab as soon as possible. She met us at the door and hurried us to the room where the lab animals were kept. We were startled when she closed the door behind us and locked it.</p><p></p><p>The animals were kept in clean, larger than normal cages on the far wall. Marie had recognized the need for animal testing, but she had taken a personal interest in their care. The lab assistant pointed her towards the far wall, where the animals from the earliest tests were kept for continued observation.</p><p></p><p>With a gasp, Marie reached inside one of the cages and withdrew a mouse lemur named Marcy. The animal was horribly deformed – it looked like it had aged ten years overnight. The skin was wrinkled and most of the hair had fallen out, the eyes were rheumy and blind. She shivered uncontrollably. I went to get a needle to take a blood sample while Marie cradled the pathetic creature in her hand. (Picture 4)</p><p></p><p>Marcy died that morning. An initial post-mortem revealed no aberrant pathology; it appeared she had died of old age. This would have been unsurprising, except that Marcy was only three years old, and mouse lemurs in captivity had a life expectancy in excess of fifteen years. Other than the fact that she was dead, and the blood test showed the presence of our modified hepatitis virus, she was completely normal.</p><p></p><p>The true horror of what had happened didn’t become apparent until a month later, when we returned home after another marathon session at the facility. Marie went upstairs to fetch Muttley for a walk, and found her beloved dog dead, his muzzle grey with age.</p><p></p><p>*</p><p></p><p>The hepatitis virus I’d used as the vector for the gene therapy had mutated. There had been strict warnings to prospective patients because hepatitis B could be transmitted through bodily fluids, but most considered the risk acceptable given the alternative. But casual transmission was unheard of.</p><p></p><p>Normally, the virus was only present in blood and semen, and to a lesser extent in saliva. And transmission only took place when there was contact with a mucous membrane or open wound. The mutated version, however, was present in overwhelming quantities in perspiration, and could even be transmitted via airborne particles after a cough or sneeze. </p><p></p><p>And it carried the Huntington’s genes along with it.</p><p></p><p>There was no predictor for the unset of what we referred to as ‘Huntington’s B’ and what the press dubbed ‘Methuselah Syndrome’. In some, it triggered within weeks of infection, while a rare few, including Marie, showed no signs of the disease even years after infection.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>The outcry was unprecedented. Fortunately, the FDA bore the brunt of the blame; Marie’s media appearances had endeared her to the public. They were more willing to focus their ire on careless bureaucrats and politicians than a woman who’d been desperate to save her own life and others.</p><p></p><p>Still, there was enough anger to go around. The University rallied around us, shielding us from the protestors and hiring guards in response to the numerous death threats. No expense was spared, no resource denied. We had the best and brightest working to find a way to halt the epidemic even as it killed by the tens of thousands. </p><p></p><p>Society was on the brink of total collapse before we found a possible avenue of attack. In our early research, we’d identified a secretion from a rare Pacific eel that seemed to have a retarding effect on the progression of Huntington’s. I’d discarded it in favor of more likely approaches as it was highly unlikely we’d have found a way to modify the gene to work within the human body.</p><p></p><p>Now, though, we were grasping at straws. Even a partial treatment that bought us some time was worth pursuing, and our techniques had improved in the intervening years. And at least in the Petri dish, it seemed to be working. I pulled out all the old research and asked the cold-storage facility to send over the remaining gene lines from the eel. They called back an hour later and told me they’d lost that storage locker in an electrical fire three years ago.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>The scramble to find a replacement for the destroyed material proved fruitless, until at long last we found a rich ichthyophile in Russia. He indicated that he’d part with what appeared to be the last surviving specimen for an unreasonable amount of money. We didn’t hesitate.</p><p>Thirteen hours later, a courier arrived with a padded cooler. We rushed it to the animal section, where we’d painstaking prepared an aquarium to house our serpentine savior. We opened the sealed container and instead of a water-filled bladder containing a jet-lagged eel, we found a single aluminum tin on dry ice.</p><p></p><p>Numb with shock, we opened the tin to see the remains of our last, best hope. (Picture 1) We picked it apart cell by cell, but the brining process the Russian had used made it impossible to extract anything useful from the remains. Turns out there was a mixup in the translation, and the Russian wasn’t a fish collector, he was a wealthy gastronome with a taste for endangered species.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">*</p><p></p><p>I found Marie this morning, slumped over her desk. Her beautiful sable hair had gone gray overnight. In her hand was a picture I’d taken the night of her birthday party. It showed her laughing and smiling, her new puppy cuddled against her chest.</p><p></p><p>I smiled as I thought about our life together , as I rummaged through the bathroom cabinets until I found what I was looking for. I swallowed the whole bottle, and then went back downstairs, I carried Marie to the sofa and sat down with my arms around her.</p><p>Despite the suffering, I wouldn’t have traded those extra years with Marie for anything. </p><p></p><p>Would I do things differently, if I knew then what I know now? I’d like to think so.</p><p></p><p>But God help me, I don’t know that I would.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Rodrigo Istalindir, post: 4222669, member: 2810"] [b]Round 1 Match 7 -- Rodrigo Istalindir - "The End of the Line"[/b] [b]The End of the Line[/b] Would I do things differently, if I knew then what I know now? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think I couldn’t deliberately set in motion the course of events that would result in the eventual extinction of the human race. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] Marie was the rarest of creatures. Her brain operated on an entirely different plane than the rest of us, yet she was warm and funny and not at all what one expected of the world’s foremost geneticist. Yet despite her genius, or perhaps because of it, she could be the most delightfully scatterbrained person I’d ever met. They used to say that Einstein was so preoccupied thinking great thoughts that he’d show up to work with two different colored socks. Sometimes, Marie didn’t even manage that. The first time I saw her was in the library at the University. She was walking through the stacks, fingers running along the spines of the books. It was early in the morning and she was dressed in her nightclothes, bare feet padding along the carpeted floor. I should have left her alone, but behind me I heard several students entering the hall, and I thought to spare her some embarrassment. I called out to her, and she turned, startled. (Picture 3). I mimed covering myself up. Shaken from her reverie, she glanced down and blushed. I grabbed my coat and scurried behind the bookcases. I held it out to her, like a child feeding a skittish deer. She laughed, twirled, and stood there waiting for me to drape it about her. We left the library through the back stairwell. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] I was smitten from the start. I was a man of science, and if asked I’d have said that the entire notion of love at first sight was a romantic, hormone-fueled delusion, silly but harmless. We were definitely silly. Our friends and colleagues just looked at us and shook their heads. I think it amused them to see two devoutly logical people acting like a couple of addled teenagers. I can’t deny that our work suffered, at first, but after a few months the first blush wore off and we stopped being one of ‘those couples’, mooning about, holding hands everywhere we went. You know what I’m talking about – those couples no one can stand to be around for more than five minutes. But the attraction and the love and respect didn’t fade. Not after six months, not ever. The first time we worked together on a project was as heady as our first date. Our skills complemented each other perfectly. Her theoretical knowledge and uncanny knack for isolating gene sequences, combined with my groundbreaking work with viral delivery systems made us the hottest thing in the rapidly growing gene therapy community. Our first breakthrough was a remarkably effective treatment for Parkinson’s. It wasn’t a complete cure, but it was a damned good start, and I had no doubt that it would buy time for those afflicted while someone else refined the process. I would have preferred to keep working at it – I’m a hopeless perfectionist – but Marie was already anxious to move on. So she did, and I followed. Success followed success. Had we worked for a major pharmaceutical company, we’d have been millionaires several times over. But we were happier in an academic environment, where Marie had enough clout to ensure that the processes we developed were kept affordable for those that needed them. Time Magazine called us ‘the greatest scientific couple since the Curies’. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] The first sign that something was amiss was on her 40th birthday. I’d arranged a surprise party, the kind of thing most of our peers would have laughed at, but they knew Marie almost as well as I, and they knew she’d love it. The party was in full swing. Gifts were piled on the dining room table, music was playing a little too loud, and some of the grad students were already drunk enough to start dancing in the living room. Someone – I never did find out who – had paid Hisoka and Ozuru to dress up as ‘genes’. Hisoka was the ‘S’, and Ozuru the ‘N’ (an inside joke – Marie and I had recently published a paper on using variant of the N bacteriophage to alter the ‘S’ gene expression in hepatitis). Their revealing costumes were frightful, especially when they started dancing, but Marie laughed like a delighted child. (Picture 2) When I tried to get everyone’s attention, I had to shout, but most heard me and gathered around the coffee table as I carried in the fiery cake. Someone started singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and the entire crowd joined in, more or less on key. Marie was beaming from ear to ear. She picked up the knife and cut off a huge slice of cake. She extended it towards me, still holding the knife in one hand. As I reached for it, her arm spasmed, and the knife sliced deep into my hand. I gasped in pain and clutched the injured appendage with my free hand, the forgotten cake trampled underfoot as the crowd erupted in chaos. Finally someone returned from the kitchen with a dishrag, and the dean of the medical school wrapped it tightly around the wound before leading me to his car for the trip to the emergency room. Hours later, we returned, my hand heavily bandaged. My wife was mortified, and kept apologizing over and over. The repetition stopped mid-sentence when she opened the door to our bedroom. She let out a squeal of delight when she saw the puppy I’d gotten her for her birthday. In the confusion and haze from the painkillers, I’d forgotten about the little thing, but fortunately he’d just gone to sleep in his crate. One look at the radiant smile on Marie’s face and the accident was forgotten. I think it was the last time I saw her completely happy. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] Within months, the tremors became more frequent and undeniable. The doctor’s were at a loss, until one of them ran a test for mHtt, and it came back positive. It was a one-in-a-million event, liking hitting the lottery in reverse. Huntington’s is almost unheard of where neither parent has the gene. Marie threw herself into her work with abandon. In a strange way, we were lucky. There was probably no one in the world more likely to develop a treatment, and now there was no one more motivated to find it. Except, maybe, for me. The progression of the disease is inexorable, but slow, and over the next few years she remained largely unaffected. She insisted that I I take over more of the delicate lab work; she was worried that she’d flinch at the wrong time and invalidate a test. We hit dead end after dead end. Marie had never failed at anything before, and the realization that she might come up short at the most critical point in her life was devastating. She became increasingly driven, spending twenty hours a day at the lab. On those rare occasions when I managed to pull her away for a few hours of a normal life, I could tell she was with me only in body; her mind was elsewhere. By her forty-fifth birthday, the disease had progressed to the point where she was doing almost no hands-on work, and her speech had started to deteriorate. She became a near-recluse, working through me, and never interacting with the other researchers and assistants except through email. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] The breakthrough, when it came, was so obvious in retrospect I almost felt guilty for not having seen it sooner. Previous efforts had been fruitless because in trying to reduce the polyQ glutamine chain, the treatment either went too far, eliminating it entirely, or snipped off a single repeat of the gene and then stopped and wouldn’t repeat. One of our previous successes gave me a brilliant idea. Rather than using one of the modified viruses we typically worked with, I modified the hepatitis virus to serve as the delivery mechanism. I hoped it would follow its typical path, taking up residence in the liver and continuously act to keep the glutamine chains in check. HepB was nothing to laugh at, but compared to the alternative, I figured it might buy us the years needed for a complete cure. There was one hitch. FDA approval to even start clinical trials for such a risky protocol would take years, and might never be approved. The Huntington’s lobby was damned effective, but no one had ever tried to cure someone by intentionally infecting them with a contagious disease. Marie didn’t have years. When she almost choked to death in her office because she couldn’t swallow the chocolate pudding that had become one of her few remaining joys, I began preparing. When I was cleaning out our bathroom and found the bottle of carefully hoarded pills, I acted. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] The reversal wasn’t dramatic. No Hollywood-style ‘go to bed sick and wake up cured’ nonsense. But over the course of a year, her life returned to normal. It wasn’t possible to hide her hard-won health even if we wanted to. The FDA was suspicious, but they couldn’t prove it was anything other than an accidental exposure in the lab. We paid the OSHA fine without complaint. The clamor in the medical community couldn’t be ignored, though, and eventually the government caved to the pressure and fast-tracked clinical trials. A thousand of the most desperately sick patients were infected with the mutated hepatitis. Almost ninety percent showed noticeable improvement within the first three months. Marie’s sparkling personality had returned with her health, and she was a hit on the morning news shows. The brilliant doctor who’d triumphed over a horrible disease like no other in history. The publicity was worth its weight in gold. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] We were on our way back from the airport after another appearance on ‘Good Morning, America’ when we got a call from the senior lab assistant. There was a note of panic in her voice, and she urged us to return to the lab as soon as possible. She met us at the door and hurried us to the room where the lab animals were kept. We were startled when she closed the door behind us and locked it. The animals were kept in clean, larger than normal cages on the far wall. Marie had recognized the need for animal testing, but she had taken a personal interest in their care. The lab assistant pointed her towards the far wall, where the animals from the earliest tests were kept for continued observation. With a gasp, Marie reached inside one of the cages and withdrew a mouse lemur named Marcy. The animal was horribly deformed – it looked like it had aged ten years overnight. The skin was wrinkled and most of the hair had fallen out, the eyes were rheumy and blind. She shivered uncontrollably. I went to get a needle to take a blood sample while Marie cradled the pathetic creature in her hand. (Picture 4) Marcy died that morning. An initial post-mortem revealed no aberrant pathology; it appeared she had died of old age. This would have been unsurprising, except that Marcy was only three years old, and mouse lemurs in captivity had a life expectancy in excess of fifteen years. Other than the fact that she was dead, and the blood test showed the presence of our modified hepatitis virus, she was completely normal. The true horror of what had happened didn’t become apparent until a month later, when we returned home after another marathon session at the facility. Marie went upstairs to fetch Muttley for a walk, and found her beloved dog dead, his muzzle grey with age. * The hepatitis virus I’d used as the vector for the gene therapy had mutated. There had been strict warnings to prospective patients because hepatitis B could be transmitted through bodily fluids, but most considered the risk acceptable given the alternative. But casual transmission was unheard of. Normally, the virus was only present in blood and semen, and to a lesser extent in saliva. And transmission only took place when there was contact with a mucous membrane or open wound. The mutated version, however, was present in overwhelming quantities in perspiration, and could even be transmitted via airborne particles after a cough or sneeze. And it carried the Huntington’s genes along with it. There was no predictor for the unset of what we referred to as ‘Huntington’s B’ and what the press dubbed ‘Methuselah Syndrome’. In some, it triggered within weeks of infection, while a rare few, including Marie, showed no signs of the disease even years after infection. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] The outcry was unprecedented. Fortunately, the FDA bore the brunt of the blame; Marie’s media appearances had endeared her to the public. They were more willing to focus their ire on careless bureaucrats and politicians than a woman who’d been desperate to save her own life and others. Still, there was enough anger to go around. The University rallied around us, shielding us from the protestors and hiring guards in response to the numerous death threats. No expense was spared, no resource denied. We had the best and brightest working to find a way to halt the epidemic even as it killed by the tens of thousands. Society was on the brink of total collapse before we found a possible avenue of attack. In our early research, we’d identified a secretion from a rare Pacific eel that seemed to have a retarding effect on the progression of Huntington’s. I’d discarded it in favor of more likely approaches as it was highly unlikely we’d have found a way to modify the gene to work within the human body. Now, though, we were grasping at straws. Even a partial treatment that bought us some time was worth pursuing, and our techniques had improved in the intervening years. And at least in the Petri dish, it seemed to be working. I pulled out all the old research and asked the cold-storage facility to send over the remaining gene lines from the eel. They called back an hour later and told me they’d lost that storage locker in an electrical fire three years ago. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] The scramble to find a replacement for the destroyed material proved fruitless, until at long last we found a rich ichthyophile in Russia. He indicated that he’d part with what appeared to be the last surviving specimen for an unreasonable amount of money. We didn’t hesitate. Thirteen hours later, a courier arrived with a padded cooler. We rushed it to the animal section, where we’d painstaking prepared an aquarium to house our serpentine savior. We opened the sealed container and instead of a water-filled bladder containing a jet-lagged eel, we found a single aluminum tin on dry ice. Numb with shock, we opened the tin to see the remains of our last, best hope. (Picture 1) We picked it apart cell by cell, but the brining process the Russian had used made it impossible to extract anything useful from the remains. Turns out there was a mixup in the translation, and the Russian wasn’t a fish collector, he was a wealthy gastronome with a taste for endangered species. [CENTER]*[/CENTER] I found Marie this morning, slumped over her desk. Her beautiful sable hair had gone gray overnight. In her hand was a picture I’d taken the night of her birthday party. It showed her laughing and smiling, her new puppy cuddled against her chest. I smiled as I thought about our life together , as I rummaged through the bathroom cabinets until I found what I was looking for. I swallowed the whole bottle, and then went back downstairs, I carried Marie to the sofa and sat down with my arms around her. Despite the suffering, I wouldn’t have traded those extra years with Marie for anything. Would I do things differently, if I knew then what I know now? I’d like to think so. But God help me, I don’t know that I would. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
EN World Short Story Smackdown - FINAL: Berandor vs Piratecat - The Judgment Is In!
Top