PREVIEW FIRST CHAPTER

CHAPTER 1: CHARLES AND SALIM 

YEAR: 2029

1,600 MILES SOUTH OF EASTER ISLAND

     “Come say hi, Damien!”

     “...No,” said a faint voice from another room.

     The woman’s face on the monitor turned. Her eyes locked on her son, a game console in his tiny hands, his face obscured behind a mop of brown hair. Her smile faded. Her brow softened, and a defeated look flashed across her face.

     She returned to the camera, eyes pierced through the glass, and smiled again.

     “He’s just playing with his game machine. He lost his first tooth today. He’s been good–I mean…” She sighed and shook her head, “What am I even saying? The new doctor I took him to said his walking isn’t getting any worse, which is good, I guess, but it isn’t getting any better either.”

     She looked away.

     “Damien was well-behaved with the doctor. He likes her. She’s a nice woman down at the genetics lab on campus. They had this cardboard treasure chest full of candy by the door when we walked out. They let him take anything he wanted. Then, we walked down to the waterfront. Damien liked watching the sailboats.”

     She let out a heavy sigh that seemed to fill the thousands of miles of the space between them.

     “That was nice. But he falls a lot, you know. He’s weak. His legs, they’re just not strong enough–”

     She paused and turned to the camera.

     “I wish we could talk like normal people, not through this one-way machine, with these recorded messages. But I know, I know, we can’t do that. I know it’s not safe. We miss you, Salim. I…I miss you.”

     The screen went black.

     Yellow pixelated letters scrawled onto the screen: 

     END MESSAGE

     Salim took a breath. Rivet-lined metal walls and a desk cluttered with keyboards, cables, crumpled clothes, and empty coffee mugs glowed in the soft light. The room grew noticeably darker as the single source of light, the communications console screen, faded to black. 

     He pressed a button to queue up the next recording. 

     Yellow text on the screen: 

     4… 3… 2… 1… RECORDING STARTED

     “I miss you, Amy. I can’t wait to be home.” Salim looked directly into the tiny black dot at the top of the screen. He smiled and steadied his voice to control his trembling excitement. “We had a breakthrough last night. Our first viable subjects. A 99.97% match to a human lung. We’ve had full cellular oxygenation for over sixteen hours and a strong HLA match when adjusted for…” He paused, laughing softly to himself, “...it means it could work. I mean, it will work. I need to wrap up some loose ends here, but I’ll be home before you know it. Another few months, maybe. We’re so close!”

     He paused, forgetting that the machine was still recording. He saw his tired eyes in the reflection on the glass monitor.

     “I love you, Amy.”

     He pressed the red button.

     RECORDING ENDED 

     PROCESSING 

     ENCRYPTION BEGINNING 

     96 LEVELS 

     ENCRYPTION COMPLETE 

     MESSAGE SENT

     The screen went blank. Salim looked at the two framed photographs on his desk beside the terminal. One of him and Amy, before Damien was born. Big smiles on their faces, with the exploding colors of Massachusetts fall foliage behind them. Amy took the other photograph. It sat in a large silver frame. Salim himself in an ill-fitting blue suit, standing to the left of Charles Sloan, grinning ear to ear, with a leucite podium at their side. Memories of that evening rushed into his mind. The 2026 Global Nations Bioethics Alliance Conference was hosted at MIT that year, and Charles and Salim were the center of attention with their work on human organ production using a revolutionary method that could replicate muscle and tissue such that it was indistinguishable from the target patient even at the cellular level. He looked back at their faces, beaming with hope and ambition. They were three champagnes deep and talking about changing the world.

     Salim leaned back onto his metal cot. The digital clock beside the bed read 3:37 A.M.

     Yellow block letters glowed on the screen even in its idle state:

     PERSONAL TERMINAL OF DR. SALIM NARAM

     The cot creaked when he stood up. He reached for the wooden cane that leaned beside the door frame and tightened the drawstring on his loose sweatpants. Wearing a faded Boston Bruins t-shirt, gray pants, and thick wool socks, he walked down the hall toward the lab. 

     The floor swayed gently with each step. He imagined the turbulent waves crashing against the hull, but the ship’s careful engineering reduced that force to a subtle sway inside the ship. 

     Man conquered nature once again, he thought.

     He bumped his shoulder against the wall. It had been thirty-seven long months, and he still hadn’t gotten his sea legs.

     But nothing ever went according to plan.

     Salim descended a long metal staircase onto the lab’s lower floor, his cane tapping softly on each step with a muted clang. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see the entire length of the ship.

     It was a three-hundred-meter cargo ship Charles had purchased from an entrepreneur in Brazil who had specialized in the business of logistics. The old man was slowing down and wanted to spend more time with his grandchildren. He was looking to retire from a life of running freshly manufactured Volkswagens up the coast from their factories in São Paulo to the storage garages in San Diego, California. Charles bought five ships from the old man for a price that should have been illegal and, within a year, had them retrofitted to become a fleet of the world’s most advanced seafaring scientific laboratories on the open seas. Operate freely, invisible to radar. It was the perfect site for cutting-edge research that pushed the boundaries beyond anything the GNBA could stomach. Wild experiments designed to peel back the mysteries of death, consciousness, pain, and identity while tossing ethical boundaries out the window. Experiments on primates, prisoners with terminal illnesses, and “re-acquired” human trafficked victims. Those five ships floated beyond any country’s oceanic jurisdiction. It was the ideal plan, with the only vulnerabilities keeping Charles up at night being the unforgiving limitations of time and sea pirates.

     Within the first three years of operations, four ships were captured by pirates, their entire crew of scientists vanished, and ships sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

     And then there was one ship left.

     Salim looked down into a sprawling area in the belly of the vessel, lined bow to stern with three hundred illuminated glass cubes as tall as his chest and a meter deep. Each cube was filled with a liquid solution of saline and glucose to closely approximate the environment within the human body. Some cubes held artificial human hearts, others lungs, livers, eyes, and partial sections of brains. Vibration-dampening devices at the base of each cube held the tank level as the boat swayed.

     Columns of bright green vines cascaded from the ceiling. They wrapped around pipes that snaked down the walls and fed into a grand reservoir slightly smaller than an Olympic-sized pool at the center of the room. The pool was full of flowers and patterned leaves of brilliant colors. A layer of viscous oil floated on the pool’s surface.

     Salim reached the bottom of the staircase and breathed in the humid air. It smelled like ocean water and decomposing leaves. To the uninitiated, the sight in front of him looked like a half-square-mile rainforest was plucked out of the Amazon jungle and set afloat on a ship in the Pacific Ocean.

     He stopped to examine a round, flat leaf suspended from the wall and heard his mother’s voice ringing clear in his head. A distant memory clawed its way to the forefront of his mind in a haze of sleeplessness. When he was just a boy, his mother would stroll with him along the rows of plants in their backyard garden in Cairo and say good morning to each plant. She would take his small hand in hers and guide his fingers along the ridges of the leaves, tracing each stem. 

     “My Salim,” she would say, “Plants are our brothers and sisters. They are born, they grow, and they die, just like us. They accept the love of our earth and sun, just like we do.”

     He breathed in the fecund air. Could almost taste the soil on his tongue. He brushed his fingertips along that round, flat leaf and thought of those days long ago. 

     He sidled up to a glass cube. The steel plate mounted on the side read SPECIMEN 004. An immaculate human spinal column hung suspended in a clear liquid. He pressed his eyes inches away from the glass, letting his focus follow along the millions of striations of muscle tissue that make up a tapestry of cells. Accelerant lamps glowed bright azure as their light washed over the spinal column’s extruded tissues, helping speed up cellular production.

     The specimen levitated in a ghostly glow as if cradled by God’s own hands.

     “My gift,” Salim whispered to himself, “to our world. And my Damien.” He stared with reverence at the specimen.

     A faint sound broke his concentration.

     Beyond a shelf stacked with trays of sprouting seedlings, one of the IT server rooms was open, the door slightly ajar. A sliver of cold white light glowed from within the room.

     He turned his head and heard a mix of voices coming from beyond the door. They exchanged words back and forth in real-time. Salim knew that only a direct channel unencrypted video call could do that. That type of transmission would breach ship security protocol and open up the entire operation to the prying ears of pirates.

     “...The GNBA will convene next month,” said a young woman, her voice compressed and tinny from the audio compression, “We have reason to believe they will move on article 530.”

     “An unprecedented overreach!” said another voice, a loud man trembling with anger.

     “You’re not immune, Charles,” repeated the woman, “even at Point Nemo. If article 530 passes, you know we can’t protect you. They’ll throw everything they got at you. Life in prison. They’ll seize your ship and everything will–”

     “I know!” Charles snapped, then paused to take a breath.

     The room went silent. Then Charles replied in a hushed tone, his voice an unmistakable rumble, dry as rocks, “I’m aware of the risks,” he said.

     “And your partner,” the woman asked, “Is he aware?”

     “I’ll talk to him, I’ll–”

     “Charles,” the woman interrupted, “you have an asset of immeasurable value on your ship. We’re prepared to provide you with unlimited resources. Labs, personnel, the best scientists from around the world, and an army of lawyers to keep the GNBA at bay. Our syndicate is prepared to commit a starter fund of $65 Billion for the first two years and a guaranteed $80 Billion after that.”

     The sound of rapid keyboard taps echoed from behind the door. Salim turned to head back toward the staircase and up to his room. He took one step, his foot brushing against the floor with an audible scrape. Then his cane tapped heavily on the stair step. A metallic ring cut through the ship’s silence like a bell in the darkness.

     Salim froze mid-step.

     From behind the cracked door, the typing on the keyboard stopped.

     A moment passed. The silence was expansive and deafening.

     Salim slowly stepped forward and returned to his room to chase sleep again.

***

     The next morning, the ocean was gentle and the floor of the ship was steady. Salim stood on the suspended metal walkway, his oversized white lab coat weighed down by tools in his pockets. He leaned on the railing, walking cane balanced against his hip. He unfastened a segment of the hose system that moved green fluids from the biological vats down to the organ-growing chambers below. He turned a wrench while holding a digital meter, watching as a glowing line danced across the screen. It was erratic at first, but after a moment, it slowed and hovered at the center of the screen.

     Heavy footsteps approached from behind. The suspended walkway swayed. 

     “Recalibrating the flow valves again, I see?”

     The smell of freshly brewed single-origin coffee filled the air.

     “It’s got to be the key, Charles,” said Salim, not looking up from the hose, “I know it has to be.”

     Salim unlatched the wrench and turned around.

     Charles stood at the end of the platform in his usual lab coat with an inquisitive smirk. He handed Salim a silver mug.

     “You haven’t been sleeping, my friend. I’m worried about you,” said Charles.

     Salim could feel Charles’s eyes snaking across his face. His eyes must have looked tired, his hair barely kept, and day-old bandages grew crusty on his arms from harvesting multiple blood samples.

     “We’re on the doorstep of greatness, and we… I need you at your best.”

     “I know, you’re right. I’ve been sleeping… fine.”

     Salim sipped the coffee. The sweet aroma cut through the musty air. He tasted the toasted flavors as the coffee hit his tongue, and the caffeine b-lined towards his bloodstream.

     “It has to be the flow speed. It’s the key. It must be,” said Salim. He shook his head, mind sorting through formulas, searching desperately for the solution. “A perfectly regulated flow will increase the efficiency of the extruder wands and reduce lost-sector completions and nano-stitching errors. I know the field tensors are highly sensitive, but this will–”

     “You think too small,” Charles snapped, a whisper of anger rising behind his words. His brow pinched into a frown. He took a step back. “You look for greatness in minuscule things, but we both know this…” he waved his hands, motioning at the steel trellis above and the growing chambers in the ship floor below, “This will never be enough.”

     Salim sipped his coffee. Felt the surge of liquid energy. It was more potent than usual today.

     “The Agency says we have less than ninety days before the GNBA comes after us,” said Charles.

     “The Agency?” said Salim, “So you’ve been talking to them again? Charles, we agreed years ago not to engage with them. That’s the entire reason why we took the risk of coming out to Point Nemo. You know what they’ll do with this technology if we achieve–”

     “When we achieve 100% match,” said Charles, “see for all your genius and empathy, that’s your blind spot. You cannot dream big enough for what this technology will become.”

     “But that’s how mankind has always built great things: by mastering the details. Perfection in each stone at Giza,” Salim glanced over the railing at the grid of glowing glass cubes in the distance, and below them rows upon rows of metal vats filled with liquefied plant matter, bubbling under a haze of steam, “and soon, very soon, this will change everything. We will change everything, Charles! The end to senseless suffering. We will take the power from God’s hands, and every child will know a new future of compassion and equity. Because of you and I! Because of us!”

     Salim took a sip of his coffee and smiled.

     “Every child… like Damien,” said Charles.

     Salim felt a tightness bloom in his chest. The massive room that overflowed with electronics and plastic tubing suddenly felt small.

     “Yes,” said Salim, turning to face Charles, “like my son.”

     “Then can’t you see we are running out of time?” said Charles, his neck tense and words sharp, “That’s why we need the Agency. The whole world, the future of our species, is within our grasp, Salim. We can solve this. And if the GNBA shuts us down before we finish our work…” Charles pauses to take a breath, a futile attempt to hide his frustration, “then we’re not fulfilling our responsibility to the species.”

     “Not with the Agency, Charles. I will not stand by and let them pervert our technology for, for–”

     Salim paused. The air in the room thickened, and Salim turned to look at Charles, a tall man with a trimmed white beard in a long gray lab coat. Salim watched Charles as his jaw twisted and the skin on his cheeks began to sag. His white lab coat stretched like taffy, and his arms, ears, and nose blurred at the edges until he became a cloud of colors and movements and was no longer Charles.

     “I’m sorry, my friend,” said Charles, “it’s our duty to the species to become stronger and smarter and to achieve things we cannot even imagine today. That’s going to take discipline and difficult decisions.”

     Salim felt his throat tighten.

     “And the uncomfortable truth is: not everyone can be a part of that future.”

     A stinging sensation flooded his sinus cavity, and a splattering of blood erupted from his nose, painting his white lab coat red.

     “This is the only way,” said Charles, “and I couldn’t have made it this far without you, and I promise to honor your work and contribution by seeing this through.”

     Salim’s pulse grew heavy and pounded in his chest.

     “You have my word that Amy and Damien will be taken care of.”

     Salim groped in the pocket of his lab coat and wrapped his fingers around a sharp metal pen. He gripped it with a crushing force. His hands shook violently. He turned to Charles and reached out with a desperate thrust to the jugular, but his vision faded, and he lost his balance.

     “I’m sorry, Salim,” said Charles.

     The coffee cup slipped from Salim’s fingers. It bounced on the metal walkway, spilling steaming liquid through the grating onto the laboratory floor below. Nearly blind, Salim reached in the dark for anything to hold him up.

     He grabbed the railing and tensed with all his remaining strength to hold himself up before the chemicals in his coffee suffocated his nerves and his knees buckled.

     “This was necessary,” said Charles, more a whisper to himself, “it needed to be done for the good of the species.”

     Salim felt a hand impact his chest, pushing him over the side of the metal railing. As his senses faded and his lungs collapsed, he felt the last rush of air sweep across his face as he plummeted toward the vat of steaming green liquid below. His body splashed, and steam swallowed him. Blood vessels ruptured, and organs were released from the tension of their cellular walls. Human and plant matter fused in a slurry of organic compounds that would soon begin their journey through a labyrinth of tubes into extruder wands of the specimen cases deep within the ship.