Genetics Science Fiction - Essay Example

Free at last. Jason pulled his scarf tightly over his mouth and eased his way round the corner. Floodlights illuminated the grass on the right but the long pathway ahead and to the left was in deep shadow. He jumped in fright when the Chicago to Memphis train roared past on the Amtrak line nearby. You would think that by the year 2000 they would have worked out a way to keep down the noise of trains at night. He crept forwards, feeling his way along the rough brick wall until he reached the metal door at the end.

The keypad number Jimmy had sent him by email that morning was etched into his brain. He had to use the torch to illuminate the keypad, but in five quick seconds he punched in the numbers and the door slid almost silently aside. Once in the building, Jason closed the door with a satisfying “click” and looked around. He was in an ordinary corridor with several brightly colored steel doors labelled “LAB F”, “Compressor Room”, “Lab G” and one door that had no label except a hazard warning sign.

At the far end of the corridor there was an unusual oval door under a large black sign which said “Maximum Containment”. It had a metal wheel and rubber seals all around it like the entrance to a submarine. Along the walls ran a series of colored pipes. Jason headed for the oval door, turned the wheel and entered. Thinking back to his semester three biotech procedures class he examined the suiting up facility and selected a cumbersome outfit in a fetching lime green color that looked to be about his size.

He dropped his jeans and jacket, slipping into the jumpsuit with some difficulty, as it had a single and rather small opening at the front. The fitting for the air hose was at the back, and so he had to slide the top half of the suit off again, in order to connect the nozzle with a green fitting on the wall. It did not fit the pink or yellow fittings, and so he was sure this was the correct attachment. A green switch on the wall indicated the air flow mechanism and so he pressed it and felt a reassuring whoosh through the suit.

Green arrows led him to heavy green door, and he followed this into a sparkling new lab, dragging his air hose with him as he went, and slotting it into a new fitting once he was inside the green room. The lab was permanently lit by a ghostly grey-blue light source on the ceiling. He approached a bank of incubators and took out one or two of the trays. All the samples inside were in test tubes with complex identification codes. He had no idea what they all were and realized that his mission could fail at this last hurdle if he could not identify the virus.

There were computer terminals on the workbench, but he was not confident that he could access any data on them. An old-fashioned ring-bound notebook was stashed on a shelf under the incubators and grabbed it eagerly. Flicking open the first pages, he was desperately hoping for something that would give him a clue to the identity of the samples. He was not disappointed. A list of codes and names was on the first page, followed by a log of tissue cultures, incubation times, and then some numbers that looked like results.

One column was circled in red, with an exclamation mark, and so Jason tracked it back to the serum code number. With his finger on the number, he found a matching test tube in the incubator tray, and held it up to the spooky light. This would be the key to the whole operation and he pocketed the tube before making his way back the way he had come. Five hours later in the university microbiology lab Jimmy broke the plastic seal and opened the tube in one of the containment hoods. He took some of the material in the test tube into a syringe and injected it into four eggs one by one.

Jason watched him place a large “X” on the four eggs with a marker pen, before returning them to their place in the animal room. Jimmy explained that it would take about ten days for the eggs to become filled with the virus, and then two months for the post grad part of the team to work on a proper vaccine. The liberation team would inject this into the animals they planned to rescue in exactly nine weeks from now. The rest of the semester passed uneventfully and they all gathered outside the biotech facility in a mood of suppressed excitement.

Jason pointed out the back door that he had used to enter the maximum containment lab, and guided the liberation team to the hangar where the animal facility was housed. Jimmy handed out the syringes full of vaccine and wished them all luck. They crept off to enter the building, vaccinate the rats, and release them into the surrounding countryside. This was animal liberation with a difference: the imprisoned creatures would not only be released from their torment, but also cured: free at last to live the lives that nature intended.

Jason felt pleased and proud to be part of a movement that made good the cruelty that was done to innocent creatures in the name of science. The break-in was reported on television the next day, assumed to be the work of animal rights protestors, and a local politician was making a big point about alleged safety and security risks. The director of the biotech facility was quoted as saying that the released animals did not present a security risk because they came from the yellow zone, which was used for harmless vaccines that could not affect humans.

Four days later Jimmy Langton checked into the Chicago Freeman Hospital with a high fever and painful swellings under his arms. To this day no one knows what caused the Chicago Bubonic plague outbreak.