2084 The End of Days Read online

  “Sorry, Ruthie, can you clean up that mess for me. Please? Ah gotta go or Buckley’s gonna bucking have me for breakfast…!”

  As Jill rushed down the corridor to Senior Investigative Editor William J Buckley’s office her thoughts raced over the shitty morning that she had had so far and how it just seemed to be a reflection of how her whole life was at present. Everything had been so different just a short ten months ago. Jill had been an up and coming investigative journalist at the Glasgow Herald when the job came up in the London Times. She had just won the prestigious Scottish Journalist of the Year award, particularly for her explosive exposé on the ‘sex, lies and videotape’ scandal involving the seriously aged Scottish First Minister and the gorgeous young Chinese Attaché. Buckley and his News Editor were like putty in Jill’s hands and she literally breezed through the interview and into the job at the Times. Jill’s promotion was perceived in the British journalistic community as being a particularly meteoric rise. She moved down to an overpriced little flat near Kew Station. Soon after Jill met the handsome, ambitious property dealer Khan al Ahmed at a summer press party on one of the slick floating club-restaurants on the Thames. Khan moved in with her and life, sex and her job had been going just fantastically. However, in the last few weeks things had cooled down between her and Khan. Jill had been working long hours on a story about a sex trafficking cartel operating through the Dover – Calais ferry routes. Khan had been away most of the time up in Manchester working on a potentially huge property deal. They had hardly spent any time together. Then two days ago Jill had received that strange lovey-dovey text message from Khan. It was not the kind of thing that he normally sent her. The text had plagued her since she read it, but she had not raised it with him - yet. Khan was due back from Manchester tonight and she needed to broach the subject with him.

  Jill arrived at the glass door of the office which was marked ‘William J Buckley – Senior Investigative Editor’ and she sheepishly pushed it open. Six heads swung round to glower at her and totally out of character Jill blushed slightly as she made her apologies.

  “Sorry, Buck, the bloody Tube was frazzled again. I was actually thinking that I could do a piece on it…”

  Buck Buckley cut her short and jabbed his finger at an empty seat.

  “Oh, sit the fuck down, Jill!”

  As she did so her ruddy-faced boss continued his rant towards the whole editorial gathering.

  “Anyone else late this morning because the Tube was frazzled…? No!? Didn’t fucking think so? So – Jill - can we get on with this morning’s fucking agenda? Lot’s to do. Can we just get on with it?”

  “Yes, Buck - ah’m sorry Buck.”

  That ‘bucking’ word flitted across her mind again as Jill snaked herself into the empty chair, feeling all eyes still burning on her. Everyone else basked in the triumphalism of making it to the meeting on time. Christ Almighty, Jill thought to herself, Khan is going to feel her wrath tonight. As her favourite Scottish poet Robert Burns had penned 300 years ago, “nursing her wrath to keep it warm”. The thought then crossed her mind on the name of that decades old Star Wars movie that she watched as a wee girl back in Glasgow. What was it called? Oh, yes - ‘The Wrath of Khan’. A crooked little half-suppressed smile crossed her lips.

  “Geeson? Are you at this fucking meeting or what? Do you find something funny?”

  “No, Ed.”

  “Look, Jill, we need to have a talk sometime this week, yeah…?”

  Jill nodded lamely in agreement knowing she would face another bollocking from Buckley.

  “Now, everyone, can we get back to business?”

  *

  Earthdate: Wednesday 09:37 January 22, 2081 GMT

  Dr Marcie Bloom Venters stood impatiently in the corridor outside her genetics lab at London’s St Bartholemew’s Hospital, known as Bart’s to all and sundry, with her mobile pressed to her ear. She kept glancing at her watch and thinking to herself, I really don’t need this. On the other end of the line was her daughter Ruthie who was calling from her office phone at the London Times. Marcie could detect that Ruthie was near to tears.

  “She treats me like some sort of paid servant, Mom. I don’t think I can take much more of it.”

  “Who do you mean, Ruthie? Is it that Jill?”

  “Uh, huh - I’ve just finished mopping up coffee from all over her desk. Sometimes I feel that she never gives me a proper job to do.”

  Marcie, under pressure to get off the phone, reverted to the New York Jewish momma that she was and became singularly unhelpful to her daughter.

  “Well, Ruthie, you know papa and I wanted you to become a doctor like us and - grandpapa before you…”

  Ruthie cut her mother short.

  “Aw, momma – I don’t need this. You know I always wanted to be a journalist -”

  “I know Ruthie, but you had the brains to do better.”

  “Momma, you’re not helping me. Look, I’ll talk to you at home tonight, okay?”

  “Okay, baby, I’m sorry. I gotta go. I’m due at a presentation in five and I’ve gotta grab my notes. See you tonight?”

  Marcie hung up first. She felt a small pang of guilt clench her stomach and she told herself that she would make it up to Ruthie tonight. Marcie would cook her daughter a nice Yiddish meal and show a real interest in her new career in journalism. But Marcie’s father, Dr Ezra Bloom, the Nobel Prize winning geneticist, would be turning in his grave in Brooklyn’s B’nai Jeshurun Jewish Cemetery to know his only granddaughter Ruth Bloom Venters left as a straight-A student from high school and decided not to enter medicine. Marcie shot into her office. She grabbed her papers and the memory stick containing her presentation on the ‘Techniques and Advantages of Super-storage of Human Procreative DNA’. She went at a gallop down the corridor frantically checking her watch as she ran. Two minutes! Fortunately, the small auditorium that had been set aside for her talk was on the same floor as her lab. A little thought niggled at the back of her mind. Her administrative boss Dr Angela Mortimer had implored her to try and keep the presentation low key.

  “Please, Marcie, don’t give the gutter press a headline.”

  Marcie literally crashed through the swing doors. The small audience of doctors, clinicians and journalists, which had been lazily chatting together, had their attention drawn to her by the hasty entrance and swiftly fell silent.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Just give me a moment to get set up and then we can get started…”

  Marcie tailed off the end of her sentence as she set out her papers and inserted the memory stick into the auditorium’s computer. As she loaded up the presentation on the large screen the small hum of chatter rose again from the audience and she looked up towards the auditorium. More journalists than medicine men, she thought, they’ll be looking for that controversial headline as usual. Don’t give them the headline, she warned herself. Marcie finally had her presentation ready to go and she dimmed the lights.

  “Okay, then! Good morning everyone again…”

  The audience fell silent and all eyes were on her.

  “…My name, as most of you will know, is Dr Marcie Bloom Venters. As most of you also know, I’m originally from New York City and I studied for my doctorate in genetic sciences at Harvard Medical School. For the last three years I have held the post of Collegiate Professor of Clinical Genetics at Bart’s specializing in fertility and embryology. I am here this morning to deliver my presentation to you on the ‘Techniques and Advantages of the Super-storage of Procreative DNA’. In particular, I will discuss the mass storage of human stem cells, male sperm, female eggs and fertilized embryos. I realise that this might be a very controversial subject, as I can see from the swollen ranks of the men and women of the press.”

  A small ripple of subdued laughter drifted out from the dimness of the auditorium. Marcie always liked to inject a little humour
into her presentations. It was a good way to engage the audience and check they were still awake in what could be a dry and technically complex subject matter. She pressed on into the presentation and demonstrated her sublime knowledge of the subject. Marcie drew the audience into the scientific world of human DNA. The geneticist outlined the growing problem of infertility across the globe, which in some of the Western developed countries was approaching 1 in 3 men and 1 in 4 women. In some developed countries, such as the UK, serious genetic abnormalities in embryos and foetuses were as high as 1 in 30. Marcie explained that although many of the causes of the high instances of infertility and abnormality which had emerged in the late 21st century had still not been fully identified it was generally accepted that the causes were in the main man-made. The causation elements were not really the area that Marcie was dealing with, although she retained a strong concerned interest in the outcomes of the investigations into that sector of genetics. The area she felt needed development and funding was for a vast network of storage facilities across the globe, a superstore of human DNA, which had screening facilities to check for the purity levels of fertility of sperm and eggs and the screening out and removal of DNA with genetic defects, disease and abnormalities. The advantages, she argued, would be, in the short term, to help the growing army of couples who currently had fertility problems to tap into a vast storage bank of DNA to enable them to conceive and, in the long term, to progress towards the eradication of certain diseases and abnormalities, providing humanity with a future purification process for its gene store. Marcie discussed the funding issues allied to setting up this network and outlined the key centres around the world where she envisaged a DNA network being sited. There would be three in the UK, ten across Europe, twelve each in the USA, India and Russia, twenty in China and various others to be sited in Japan, Africa, Central and South America and Australasia. A key disadvantage to the system, in Marcie’s opinion, was that it was foreseen that the League of Islamic Nations would not participate in this genetic undertaking and, in fact, would be positively excluded from the network. As a scientist Marcie explained that in some ways the DNA superstore network would be politicised by this exclusion.

  Marcie finalised her presentation by summarising all her key points and then prepared to open up the auditorium for questioning. She took a gulp from the bottle of water she had brought with her and raised the lighting in the room. As her audience came into focus out of the diminishing gloom she felt a little quiver of nerves and a small knot tied itself in her stomach. Marcie was a good presenter but this was the part that made her most uncomfortable, particularly in having to deal with those bloody journalists. They always twisted her conclusions by quoting them out of context. The question flashed across her mind as to why Ruthie had discarded a medical career to becoming one of those bloody journalists.

  “Well then, I hope that you all found that enthralling? Can I throw the room open to any questions?”

  There was the usual awkward silence, but it was only momentary.

  “Dr Venters. Dr Broinn Mulholland, I’m attached to the Boston Center for Genetic Sciences. As you can tell from the accent I’m Oirish, but it doesn’t make me a bad person!”

  Again a ripple of light laughter flowed out from the audience and the little knot in Marcie’s stomach eased.

  “Dr Venters, I was privileged to have studied many years ago under your distinguished father Dr Bloom and can I say that the work that you have carried on in the science of genetics is a credit to your father’s memory.”

  “Thank you, Dr Mulholland. You are very kind to mention my father.”

  “Dr Venters. I believe that your proposals are highly laudable, particularly given the current state of infertility and gene pool defectiveness. Why, even in the State of Massachusetts where I’m based, the forecasts for infertility in men alone are worse than even those that you described in your own presentation. My concern is how do we pull this network of DNA superstores together?”

  Marcie took a sip from her bottle of water, taking time to digest Broinn Mulholland’s question.

  “Dr Mulholland, I am very well acquainted with the excellent work that the Boston Center does in the furtherance of human genetics. In fact, I have visited it on numerous occasions, although I do not think that we personally have met each other…?”

  Mulholland shook his head to agree in the negative that they had indeed not met.

  “…In fact, Broinn, the Boston Center is actually earmarked to be upgraded to be one of the 20 DNA superstore centres in the USA. I should clarify that I believe the 20 centres actually cover North America, i.e., USA and Canada.”

  “That is also my understanding, Dr Venters, but again how do we pull this all together?”

  “Well, I have to state that there is still a lot of detail to be sorted out in this area. It will be a huge undertaking to administer. But, in principle, the idea is to run it from a new administration centred in New York under the auspices of the UN. The proposal is to call it the United Nations Organisation for Human Genetic Sciences. All the databanks of human DNA materials will be administered by this new UN department and the computer systems required in maintaining this network will be controlled by this department. It probably does not fully answer your question, Dr Mulholland, as there is much work still to be ironed out. Will that suffice at present?”

  “Yes, thank you, Dr Venters.”

  Marcie awaited the next question much more relaxed and confident.

  “Dr Venters. Cordelia Sommers, Daily Telegraph. You talk about this being a worldwide network and imply that it is something that will serve the whole of humanity. But would you not agree that in actuality this is just another wedge being stuck in between the UN, who you say are going to run this, and the LOIN, who are actually being excluded from it?”

  “Ms Sommers, is it? Yes. Well, Ms Sommers, I am not a politician, I am a scientist. And as a scientist my ethos, as was that of my father before me, has always been to work for the good of all humanity. At present the politics and the ethics of the Mullahs running the League of Islamic Nations has precluded them from entering into any agreement to be part of this DNA network. It was proposed to them and they declined, but it is not part of my job to encourage the League to join this network. I am satisfied that four-fifths of the world’s population will be genetically protected if this network is put in place. I only hope that in time diplomacy will prevail over the many issues that divide the UN and the LOIN and that the League will one day become a part of the integrated DNA network.”

  Marcie fielded a few more questions which tended to be more of a technical nature on the ability to superstore DNA, the technicalities of mass screening to separate the “good DNA from the bad” as one questioner put it, the programming and storage of all the data on a UN supercomputer and some further clarification on where centres would be sited. Marcie dealt with these with ease and she was feeling pretty upbeat as she eyed the clock on the auditorium wall behind her audience. It was time to wind up the presentation. In fact, she had run over time a little.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I see that I have kept you a bit longer than booked and your stomachs will be beginning to grumble. I can take one final question before you all rush off to lunch - anyone else?”

  “Dr Venters. Mahmoud El Kharroubi, journalist for Al Jazirah. Don’t you think this whole concept of a vast network of human DNA, only, as the questioner before called it – good DNA – is something straight out of a Frankenstein horror movie?”

  That knot in the stomach quickly returned. She thought whether she should even grace the questioner with an answer, but Marcie felt compelled to defend her work.

  “Mr El Kharroubi. I realise that many people around the world will hold ethical, political and religious views which will make them disagree vehemently with the type of work that I and many of my colleagues in genetics are conducting around the world today.”
/>   The journalist tried to interject with a ‘but’. Marcie raised her hand and stopped him in his tracks. Marcie continued.

  “But, nothing, Mr El Kharroubi - I am not the Frankenstein’s monster that you may have your readers believe. Many parts of the world are facing a genetic crisis. Right now males and females are being born infertile in their droves. Babies are increasingly being born with inherited defects and diseases. Now, we can guess at the reasons for this crisis. We may think we know what the reasons actually are. But until we do, we need to find a method of retaining pure DNA across the world until we can eradicate the causes of mounting infertility and abnormality…”

  Mahmoud El Kharroubi decided that he was not going to be cut short again and seized on a word in Marcie’s unfinished answer to his question.

  “Yes, Dr Venters, that is the word you geneticists strive for, isn’t it!? Pure - pure DNA - genetic purity - the Aryan Race! That is the kind of pureness that the Nazis strove for back in the early 20th century. The kind of work that Dr Josef Mengele did for his beloved Adolf Hitler, would you not agree?”

  The auditorium fell into a deathly silence shocked at El Kharroubi’s rude and undignified outburst but also awaiting an answer from Marcie. The answer surged out like the pyroclastic flow from a huge volcanic eruption destroying everything in its path.

  “MR EL KHARROUBI. I AM A JEW! For you to compare me and my work with that Nazi butcher Mengele – der Todesengel - is a total and complete insult to me. I cannot and I will not give you the satisfaction of an answer! Good day, ladies and gentlemen!“

  Marcie grabbed her notes furiously and crashed out of the auditorium as quickly as she had entered it. There was a very small ripple of applause, which the now long gone geneticist failed to hear, mainly from the clinicians, but the remainder of the audience sat stunned at the conclusion of the presentation. Eventually everyone began to either leave for lunch, return to work or to go to other meetings. As they all milled about waiting to exit through the swing doors that Marcie had crashed through, Mahmoud El Kharroubi surreptitiously slipped Marcie’s memory stick from the computer and into his pocket. He thought to himself, maybe it’s not that controversial, but what the hell, might as well take it for background material. Back in her lab office Marcie sat slumped and beaten behind her desk. She thought resignedly - well, the gutter press got their headline!