Chapter 2:
Hank woke groggily the next morning. Bright sunlight streamed in his window, and he squinted at the clock. Almost ten o'clock! He almost never got up this late. He was usually up early.
And there was all of Amanda's research waiting for him in the labs. He got dressed hurriedly, shoving his feet into his pants, then grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen on his way through. No one else was in there, and he was glad, otherwise he would have to face the others' curious questions. He made his way down the familiar halls hastily, hoping to get to the labs without encountering anyone. He slipped into the labs, closed the door, breathed a sigh of relief, then turned.
Jubilee was sitting at her table, in front of the physical reaction chamber he had designed for her with her help, a smug smile on her face. "Well, what happened to 'early to bed'?"
He said, "I did not get in until rather late last night. 'Early to bed' does not apply if a reduction in the necessary amount of sleep is involved."
Jubilee giggled. "In other words, you got in late last night, so you're allowed to sleep late." She pouted. "So how come that never applied to me when I was younger?"
"Because you were not permitted to be out that late," he said. "Even if you had been out late…and believe me, we knew when you had sneaked out…you were still required to be up on time." He took the lid off the box and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers.
"Whoa," Jubilee's eyes grew round as she saw the tiny writing that covered the papers. "What's this stuff?"
"Something Amanda was working on before she broke off her 'working partnership' with our dear Dr. Garrett," Hank said sarcastically. "She believes if the research were to be carried out to its logical conclusion, there might be a way to reverse the mutant condition."
"Whoa," Jubilee said, impressed. She got up and stood behind Hank as he spread out Amanda's notes on the table and began to read. "Damn, she's thorough. I don't even keep records that detailed." Jubilee peered at the tiny, neat precise writing. "Her handwriting's also much better."
Hank didn't even hear Jubilee, he was looking at the notes. Jubilee shrugged and went back over to her lab table as Hank picked up the first page in the folder.
The original samples had been brought back from an obscure corner of the Brazilian rainforest, in a sample of water from some remote brackish pond. The 'plant' life was full of the virus. There was no hint as to where the virus might have originated, however.
The virus had been duly isolated and examined. At first glance it had seemed to react like a regular virus on amoebas and bacterium; then a virologist had added it, on a whim, to a sample of animal DNA; a mouse. The mouse happened to carry the dormant animal version of the X-factor.
The virus had reacted instantly, isolating and contaminating the cells containing the X-factor, the carrier cells. Within moments, it began reacting like a regular virus did, taking over the cells and inserting its internal material into the mouse's genes. Then the mouse's carrier cells began to produce more and more copies of themselves…copies of mutated cells. The mutated cells grew exponentially, its growth spurred on by the mysterious virus. When the reovirus came in contact with regular cells not carrying the mutant gene, it killed the cells, halting the regular cellular mitosis and wrapping viral proteins around the cell walls. In an hour, the normal cells in the mouse's DNA sample were dead, empty husks of cells, and all that was left were rapidly multiplying mutant cells.
Cells didn't normally act like that, and Hank had no idea what specifically made the cells do this. Something in the reovirus made the non-carrier cells die, and carrier cells to conduct mitosis on a much faster and larger scale than formerly. It was an astonishing discovery.
That much was summarized in the first page of Amanda's recent notes, as though she'd written it for someone who was to take over the research. Hank turned the page over and took the second sheet, being careful not to disturb the order of the pages. Amanda was a very meticulous researcher.
These next few pages were devoted to the sudden morphological changes in the rat. Hank picked up the first page.
I injected the first rat, subject 23, with a single sample of the reovirus. Then I watched for the results. At first nothing seemed to happen; then all of a sudden there was a noticeable protrusion, just before the first rib, behind the right forelimb. The rat appeared to be in some distress; it squeaked and thrashed about inside the isolation chamber I had placed it in to avoid contaminating any other subjects or laboratory personnel. The virus seems to need to be injected or spread by contact instead of being airborne or waterborne, but there is no need to take unnecessary risks.
Over the course of the next few hours, the protrusion became much more pronounced, eventually becoming an exact miniature copy of the forelimb. Hair did not begin to develop until almost an hour and a half following the initial injection. By then the subject seemed to be in extreme distress, and expired a day after the introduction of the virus.
Dissection of the subject revealed that every cell in the body of the subject had been converted to a mutated state. There was evidence of a vestigial liver, and a secondary, nonfunctional lung. The process was markedly incomplete in the adrenal areas of the subject, leading me to speculate that perhaps adrenaline slows or even stops the reaction. I will have to do much more research in order to verify this observation.
One curious change that I noticed is that the fatty layer of the subject has been radically consumed by the virus. I postulate that the transformation requires immense amounts of energy, and that energy could only be found inside the fatty layer. The subject's death was due to complete system shutdown, quite possibly due to the lack of available energy to carry out biological functions such as respiration, heartbeat, and other functions necessary to support life.
Hank sat back on his stool. What Amanda had described on the paper was shocking, to say the least. The morphological changes had proven to be fatal to the test subject because of lack of energy available. What would happen if unlimited energy were to become available to the subject during the transformation?
He turned the documents over, searching through them, until he found the notes Amanda had made on the transformation of the second rat. He read this with considerable interest.
I have introduced a nutrient feed into this subject, Amanda had written. This has also made necessary the use of a restraint system so that the subject does not cause the nutrient feed to become disconnected until such a time as it is no longer needed. Once again I have introduced by means of injection the virus into the circulatory system of the subject.
Subject seems to be normal the first three hours. I am just about to declare this attempt unsuccessful when the tongue of the rat begins to protrude form the oral cavity of the subject, and I observe with fascination the sudden appearance of a great number of papillae on the tongue. The subject's nasal cavity suddenly swells, and the subject begins to squeal in discomfort. This continues on for nearly six hours, but the subject appears normal on the outside. At the end of twenty-four hours, the subject becomes once again docile, the tongue retracts into the oral cavity, and the subject resumes its normal behavior patterns, albeit quite hampered by its restraint system. I disconnect the nutrient feed, and release the subject from its restraints. The subject immediately runs to its food receptacle, which happens to be empty. I place into the empty dish a sample of cheese, Swiss to be exact, which is used as incentives for the subjects, but the subject, who formerly devoured the treat, seems to reject it now. The nose twitches, and then wrinkles as though in distaste. I replace the Swiss with a piece of Brie, from my own lunch, and this is accepted with great alacrity.
The subject seems to have developed a heightened sense of smell and taste, and I believe that this is the particular mutation encoded in its carrier cells. What is surprising is that this subject was composed of eighty percent normal cells and only twenty percent carrier cells (which I determined by testing a sample of the blood cells before beginning the experiment), yet in the space of two hours the carrier cells became dominant and completed the transformation.
Hank put down the sheet of paper, thinking hard. It had only taken a day for the transformation from normal to mutant for a rat; how much longer, then, would it take for a human? What would happen if it were injected into a human? He smiled sardonically. Exactly the same thing that happened to him, except that the morphological changes would take the shape of whatever was coded into the genetic material of the subject.
He was so wrapped up in what he was thinking about that he didn't even realize someone was speaking his name until a hand tapped him on the shoulder. "Hank?"
With effort, he tore his mind from the paper he was thinking about and focused on the face before him. "…yes?…"
"Earth to Hank," Jubilee said, clearly amused. "You there?"
He smiled. "Yes, I am here, Jubilee," he said. "What do you require?"
"I 'require' you to share with me the reason for that abstract look," she said.
It was almost a relief to share the thoughts swirling in his head. Jubilee sat pensively until he was done, thinking, and said, "I guess the next logical step would be to perform this on a sample of mutant DNA, carrier DNA, and normal human DNA. I wonder what the results would be like? How long would it take, what it would do. But to experiment on a living being isn't an option."
"No. It is not an option." Hank looked wryly at the back of his hands, at the thick covering of blue fur, and sighed. "I don't want her to spend the rest of her life looking like me."
Jubilee smiled. "Ah, the truth will out! I thought as much! You went out with her last night!" She sat down on air, on an invisible stool made of suspended air molecules, and laughed. "I thought that was where you were! Give give, give. Did you have fun? Where did you two go?"
Hank adjusted his glasses on his nose with an air of unruffled dignity, and said, "We did not go out on a 'date', Jubilee. I merely requested her company when I went to obtain nourishment."
"Yeah, yeah. Hank, when a gentleman asks a lady to accompany him out to a restaurant that usually qualifies as a date. I bet if I called Amanda she'd say you two went out on a date."
He smiled. "It was not a date, Jubilee."
She rolled her eyes. "Fine. It wasn't a date, it was just two friends going out and having a bite to eat." She tossed her long black hair back over her shoulder and leaned forward over her knees, hands clasped. "So where did you two go?"
"Della Notte," Hank said.
Jubilee laughed again. "And if that wasn't a date, then I don't know what is! Charles took Moira there the last time she was in town. That was definitely a date. Hank, we know you. If you were out there on your own you'd have driven through the closest fast-food drive-through, grabbed something greasy, full of calories and carbohydrates, and come home. You wouldn't have come home at two in the morning and made that giant sub that took the last of the French bread and all the deli meat. I know what kind of food they serve at Della Notte. It wouldn't have satisfied your hunger unless you ate like a pig, and I know you never do that. So admit it, it was a date."
"I will not admit to something that is not true."
"It was a date."
"It was not."
"It was so--"
"If you two are done, then perhaps we could all go upstairs and grab a bite?" came an amused voice from the door. Jubilee and Hank both whirled, to see Xavier in the doorway.
"Oh! Sorry, Charles, we were just discussing whether Hank really did go on a date last night or not."
"I was wondering where you were last night, Hank," Xavier said. "With whom did you spend your time?"
"Jubilee's friend Amanda. And it was not a date."
Jubilee stuck her tongue out at him. "Now, now," Hank said smugly. "No need to regress into childish behavior patterns," and he grinned.
Jubilee made a face and said, "Fine. I'm going to leave you two down here, and I'm going to go up to lunch." She sprinted up the stairs, leaving them behind.
* * *
"Guess what?" she plunked down on a stool and grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table, biting into it as Remy stirred the pot of chili on top of the stove. Logan, Remy, Scott, Jean, and Ororo were the only ones in the kitchen for lunch today. Everybody else seemed to be off somewhere.
"What?" Jean said, taking three bowls on a telekinetic 'tray' to the table, where they floated down to land on Scott's and Ororo's placemats.
"One minute, chere," Remy said, halting Jean and Jubilee's conversation. "Jubes. Spicy or regular?"
Jubilee sniffed the aroma in the air. "Is that your Cajun sausage chili?"
Remy gave her a naughty look. "Is dere any ot'er kin', p'tite?" Jubilee giggled.
"Regular then. The Greenwich Village butcher puts too much pepper in the sausage as it is." She accepted the bowl Jean floated her way, then Remy grabbed the crushed red pepper and added a generous pinch to the steaming pot. He and Logan liked theirs spicy.
"So go on ahead," Jean said as the six of them took a seat around the kitchen table. There weren't enough of them to justify using the informal dining room. "'Guess what', what?"
"Hank went on a date last night." Jubilee informed them.
Jean leaned forward, very interested indeed. "Really? With who? I thought he just went to the post office to mail his research paper!"
"Please," Jubilee rolled her eyes. "Like it takes three hours to mail anything."
"He was gone that long?" Ororo's eyes widened. "Then that was why I did not hear him come in last night. What time did he come in?"
"Two this morning," Jubilee said. "And he went out with Amanda."
Expressions of surprise ran around the table form the girls. The guys rolled their eyes. "Come on, Hank's our friend," Scott said. "We shouldn't be dissecting his life like this."
"Ain't none o' our business, Jubes," Logan said.
Remy nodded. "Hank date whoever he want to," he said. "He don' need us to embarrass him by discussin' his love life."
Jubilee grinned. "No, he doesn't. We discuss yours enough as it is." They all broke up laughing at his uncomfortable look.
"Anyway," Jubilee said, "He's not calling it a date, so don't refer to it as one. Hank insists that he was only 'requesting' her company while he ate. But they went to Della Notte, according to him."
"Huh," Jean snorted. "That was a date, all right, no matter what he wants to call it." She cocked her head. "What has he been doing down there all this time?"
Jubilee sobered. "Amanda gave him the notes on the genetic research project she was working on. Hank showed me her notes; she found this virus that triggers mutations in carriers. She's hoping if she can figure out how it works, she can reverse it so that people who are already mutants can go back to being non-mutants."
There was an indrawn breath from everyone, and speculative looks passed from one to another around the table. Jubilee shook her head. "I don't know if that's such a good idea," she said. "Maybe when I was younger I might have wished my mutation gone, but I think I'm pretty happy being the way I am. I don't think I'd change it."
Jean shook her head. "I like being me," she said. "Maybe when I was younger I might have wished for a solution like that, but not now."
Ororo looked uncertain. "I do not know," she said. "I am the way I am because it was meant for me to be this way…but there are times when I would trade it all for a chance at being normal."
Logan shook his head. "Not me. I'm happy bein' who I am; an' anyway, I been a mutant too long. I like who I am. I ain't changin' it."
"Me neither," Remy said. "But Rogue…" They were all silent for a moment. If the technique were perfected, Rogue would do it in a heartbeat. They all knew that. So would Hank. And there were likely a lot of mutants out there who would chose to be other than they were.
Ororo broke the silence. "There may not be a way to 'reverse engineer' a mutant. If or when the technique becomes available, we will all need to make that choice. However, now is not the time."
"Yeah. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it." Chatter, and eating, resumed around the table, and conversation turned to lighter topics.