Confessore
When Christ was in the garden at Gethsemane, he asked if God his father could let the burden pass from him onto another. And the voice of God told him, no. It is your burden. Go to the hill at Golgotha and die, and be reborn. I am not Christ, of course not, I know that. My Gethsemane is my penthouse overlooking the park; my Golgotha the medical wing on the floor below, set up for no one but me at great expense. It is there I will go to die and, hopefully, to be reborn.
Yet I wish I could hear that voice, and receive that certainty. For I too, at this last moment, wish this burden to pass to another. A lifetime preparing for this moment, this miracle, and now I wish it were not mine. Even believing in resurrection, it is a discomfiting thing to die, and a voice from above commanding me to go through with it would be welcome. Even Christ received that much, but not I. I must find my own courage, or fail.
I am recording this before I go because, if I do not wake, I wish for someone to understand me. I have been alone all my life, alone with nothing but this task, and now tonight, no matter the outcome, I will leave even this task behind. It is my great hope that I will wake from the treatment I have invented and a new chapter will begin, with new tasks, and perhaps— well, perhaps I should not even dare to hope it, but perhaps a new and better world.
But if I should not wake, and I know that is a real possibility, then this will be all that someone has to go on, to make sense of what I was, and why I have done as I have done. No one knows the full story, for I have of necessity hidden parts of it away, but I am not ashamed. I am a no hypocrite. Let someone find these words and judge me, if I do not live to judge myself. Now to begin.
*****
I was born in one of the original Starfire towns, and I was lucky enough to be away at camp when the first cases hit. I was ten years old. I wanted to go home but my parents wouldn’t let me. By the time camp ended they were dead. Six hundred fifty one people in my town and I was the only Uninfected. I don’t tell you this to make you feel sorry for me. It was decades past, and I shed my last tear for them long ago. I only tell you this so that you understand that I never had any real choice in who I was going to become. Looking back, it’s easy to think of other paths, but at the time I was in a tunnel and a dark one at that.
There was a lot of media attention, so I got placed with an adoptive family right away, and there were enough donations to pay my way through university when the time came. By twelve I was studying O-chem on the weekends. I would cry about my parents and I would read textbooks. I didn’t go to a real high school, I just sat in a room, reading. In a way I had become biochemistry. It’s what I had instead of an emotional life.
My adoptive parents were kind, but they’re not the point here. By the time I got to them I was too fully made anyway. I give them credit for not trying to control me. It wouldn’t have worked. They just made sure there was dinner on the table and otherwise left me alone in my room. By eighteen I had read every important paper ever published in biochemistry, genetics, and anything else that seemed like it might be important in curing disease. I couldn’t name three professional sports teams and I had never kissed a girl, but I did have that one thing going for me.
I got to MIT and realized that I was much more advanced than the other kids. I wasn’t the smartest kid there—I’ve almost never been the smartest, just smart enough and more committed than anyone smarter. I’ve realized since that most people are just never fully prepared. In fact, most people don’t even meet other people who are fully prepared. Everybody is half-assing everything, all the time, but I wasn’t.
I fell in love with the lab. The quiet of it, the rhythms, the atmosphere. The banks of esoteric equipment whirred and spun and calculated, and I threw myself into it, observing and learning and experimenting. At some point I realized I wasn’t even doing it for my parents anymore. I wasn’t doing it for me either. I wasn’t doing it for anything, it was just literally what I was. Three years at the world’s greatest technical college and I never went anywhere but my dorm room, the dining hall, the library, and the lab. I had a few friends but I’d only see them when we were working. I got a girlfriend for a little while but she said I was boring and left, and I didn’t blame but but I didn’t chase her either.
After MIT I went to a commercial lab, in search of the most advanced equipment and the biggest budgets. They gave me a tiny apartment sixty-one steps from my workstation, and I didn’t leave the building for over a year. That year was when I invented spiral sequencing. As I sit here now and contemplate the reality of possible death, that is one of the moments that still stands out clear in my mind. I was dozing on my cot when the compiler finished and spit out the code, and we started running it on known samples and it worked. My god, it just worked, and I knew how it felt to turn water into wine.
I wonder if Christ knew that his miracles would work. I like to think of him standing up at the Wedding at Cana, hearing the request of the bride and asserting that he could produce more wine from their water, without knowing for certain that he could. The idea of Jesus sweating the outcome appeals to me so much more than a cocksure Jesus, who knew he had the miracle in the bag. He certainly didn’t know at Gethsemane that the resurrection would come, else there would have been no burden from which to beg relief.
Anyway, I ramble. I promised myself I wouldn’t ramble, lest this message become an avoidance of what I must do. This is my last miracle, whether it works or not. If it works, I will need no further miracles, and if it does not then I am a murderer and a charlatan, who deserves none. Time will tell, and my time grows short.
*****
In the ten years I studied and invented, we battled Starfire to a stalemate. Infected populations were quarantined and eventually all those vulnerable to the disease died out, leaving only the Carriers, who could never again be allowed among the Uninfected. Those who resisted or denied its existence were rooted out as terrorists, and breakout infections were treated with firebombs.
In time, the Carrier zones stabilized and started to reconstruct their parallel society, mostly on Australia and in Southeast Asia. They planted farms and elected legislatures and reopened hospitals for labor and delivery, bringing children into the world who were doomed to live only behind that infected curtain, either Carriers for life or dead from Starfire before they were five. It was a horror show, but it was a kind of detente. It seemed survivable.
And yet we all lived in fear of the thing really breaking loose. Hell, we all still do live in fear of it, up until this very day. But no more. After today, there will be proof positive that the Uninfected can be turned into Carriers, with no ill effects. If everyone undergoes my treatment, then there will be no more need for the quarantine. Starfire can spread all over the world, and we will all have it, but it will not hurt us. It will really, truly, finally be over.
I said that I no longer mourn my parents, and I do not. That time has long passed. But the thing I still do think about is the possibility that they could have been Carriers instead of Vulnerable. They could still be alive, living in some town in Australia, forbidden even to call me because building rapport leads to attempts to break quarantine and so is forbidden. Just the idea of that tortures me; worse that they should be alive but as good as dead than to actually just be dead. But I digress. Soon there will be no more such distinction.
And of course, it is far from just Starfire that my discovery will affect. The new viral delivery I have invented can be used to change anything without damaging the DNA. That is why it will be my last miracle, for we will need no others, at least none that my expertise can provide. There will be no condition we cannot correct as easily as a computer spellchecks a student’s term paper.
That is a miracle worth dying for, if it came to it. To only risk death for it? A laughably small price, I say. I do not wish to die, and I hope I do not, but if I knew it would guarantee success, I would guarantee my death as well. I am no hypocrite.
I do feel regret at the deaths that have been necessary to bring us to this point. One thousand, eight hundred, eighty-four people. I used to know all their names by heart, but at some point it became too many and was taking focus away from the work. Saying that number out loud, much less writing it down, feels like a massacre, but it happened slowly.
After spiral sequencing I turned my attention to base pair splitting, then to viral manufacturing, then to efficient encoding of proteins. I did not kiss, I did not love, I did nothing but the work. I had become biochemistry, motivated by nothing but striving for everything like a boulder rolling down a hill. I set out down this path because of what happened to my village, but the path had become its own reason for walking.
But each time there was the testing, and the arguing, and the boards and the advisory committees, and they took something out of my work. They called it safety but they were filled with ego and with envy. There was a place for everyone in their hierarchy, and there were cocktail parties where that hierarchy was established without overt discussion, while I was in the lab doing my work.
Until I wasn’t, because the lab was taken from me and given to someone else who played the hierarchy game, and I was told that I needed more emotional balance and mental health, and forced onto a sabbatical it was clear would never end. It is impossible to describe the rage I felt then, hotter and whiter and deeper than any sadness I had ever felt, even when I heard that my parents had died.
It was then I realized that most of the Uninfected had entirely given up on reunification with the Carriers. They had given up on real progress. They had given up half the world and were fighting over the scraps of the half we had left. I told them what they could do with their sabbatical, started learning Spanish, and moved to Argentina.
*****
Of all the things Christ did, the one that troubles me most is letting Judas betray him. Not because the act itself was so horrible, it was only the necessary prelude to his sacrifice. But because Judas was only a man, just a craven and finite and fallen being, and because of what Christ needed from him, his name rings out through the ages as a dead soul. Forty pieces of silver, a price that echoes through eternity. Priests will speak of free will and condemn Judas while leaving Christ blameless. Not I. Judas was the price of the miracle. A price worth paying, in my view, but a price worth paying is a price worth admitting.
Hence my writing this missive before my own reckoning with my fate in my sterile Golgotha downstairs. The part I am about to say is the hardest part, the one that most grinds at my soul, and yet if I am honest it is the point of this whole thing. I do not ask for forgiveness, as Christ did not ask Judas, but I do want my sorrow recorded. I am no hypocrite.
They were mostly farmers, mostly displaced, and mostly they signed up for the tests of their own accord, for money. These are the facile excuses with which I have been armed, but they are acid in my mouth. Here is the truth: If no one had volunteered, I would have gone to the villages and dragged them away.
You can guess, I imagine, what I’m speaking of. Once in Argentina I joined a military-aligned corporation doing genetic research at a lab in the shadow of the Andes. There was no red tape. We needed to test things, and from somewhere my handler brought in people who verbally consented to be tested, and I did not look hard at their faces to be sure before testing my ideas on them.
One thousand, eight hundred, eighty four souls during the two years I spent in the Andes. Two point five eight souls per day, for the entire two years, although the actual distribution was much lumpier than that, since many days were spent planning or analyzing data rather than actually conducting experiments. I do not know what they were paid, but their lives were my silver pieces and I was their Judas, this much I do not deny.
But oh, what I learned in those two years. The pressure of their blood cracked open lockbox of the human genome and laid its contents bare before me, the person most equipped in the world to understand it. I made the highest and best imaginable use of every day that I stole from one of them. I did not leave that building for the entire two years, I slept four hours a night, and I worked as hard as a man has ever worked.
Even now, in my most reflective of moments, for I assure you I am not often so searching and reflective as this, but even now, I cannot regret my choice to do these things. The bifurcation of the world into the Carriers and Uninfected has thrown tendrils everywhere, stolen something from everyone. No one knows exactly how many died before it was achieved, but billions, anyway.
And that is how many lives my research will save, when the next Starfire comes along. Not millions but Billions. Each of the one thousand, eight hundred and eighty four lives I took could save a million lives, all on its own. Perhaps you would not commit one murder to save two lives, but surely you would commit one murder to save a million lives, wouldn’t you? You’d be a monster if you didn’t. And that is all I did. So I want to be understood, but I do not want forgiveness.
I know what some will say, that when I took those lives, I was not sure of what my research would bring. My success was still a glimmer in the future’s eye then, enough to power a dream but not bind reality. They will say that even sitting here now, about to go down a set of stairs and inject my ideas into my own bloodstream, I cannot be sure of my own success. Perhaps in an hour I will be only a foolish, dead murderer.
Those people are right, of course. My success is only a probability. But, if I have even a one percent chance of success, then in expectation, each life I took will have saved ten thousand others, and that is a ratio and set of assumptions I am comfortable with. But it is time to find out. If I am a fool and a murderer, then let me be a dead one. I am no hypocrite.
*****
Even for those who remain Uninfected, able to move freely now once again between Northern Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere, something is different. The Uninfecteds’ infection is spiritual, a malaise generated in the bones that seeps out into the flesh and the bloodstream, eventually polluting the eyes and becoming visible to the world. They have the kind of eyes that politicians have always had, focused but fake, seeking connection but without a proper target.
Yet so many have accepted this state of affairs. It still shocks me as much as it did the first time I realized its presence, in the academic circles of my youth. Whole generations writing themselves off as shut-ins, pretending members of their own family do not exist, meekly submitting to government mandates against contacting them. We send ships of supplies on holidays and we pray for them and we do not speak about them at parties under threat of social censure.
I find myself rambling now, for the first time perhaps genuinely starting to avoid the long steps down to the ad hoc medical floor below my feet, where I will either successfully undergo a virally-delivered gene transplant for the first time in human history, or I will die in the attempt. I want to be understood, and if this does not suffice, I fear nothing I possess the capacity to write will do so. I ask no forgiveness, and will assume you offer none.
Once I am officially a Carrier, assuming I survive, the final work begins. I will write the gene redesign onto a self-replicating virus designed for a long incubation time and high infectiousness, then travel to a number of airports throughout the world and release samples. Given the low-to-no symptoms or side effects, it’s very likely that the entire world will be infected before the first case is even detected.
I will do this because I am not, of course, foolish enough to think that all the Uninfected will volunteer to transplant their genes. The entire question will become political. Even once I announce that the entire world has already been transplanted and give governments proof, I expect that removing the blockade and allowing the Carriers to rejoin the rest of the world will be a fraught political question that will take a generation or more to resolve. Alas, I am not a politician but a humble scientist, and I will not myself spread Starfire among the Uninfected. Even I have my limits. But I can make it possible for a change to begin, and so I must.
I go now to face what waits. I think of the one thousand eight hundred and eighty four people who have walked to this test before me, never to return, and I know I am just like they. I could not sacrifice myself before else there would have been no one to do the research, but the sacrifice of me for this goal is well worth the cost, and if I have failed, then I will be the last to pay.
If I die, I hope that at least one person reads these words and understands why I have done as I have done. Glory to God, and always to His creation on earth. Glory to the light of human consciousness. Goodbye to the old world and hello to the new.
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please like, comment, or share with others. Have a great week!
Does he die or not????
Great story, Owen!
Good Read and a base to extrapolate so much more!