Virus
Based on Trigun Maximum.
by Sailor Lilith-chan
To My Dearest Daughter Rem,
They say to start at the beginning, for the beginning is where all things start and it usually the ending of another sad story. Another sad story that we tell over and over until our voices crack and fail at the final telling.
Forgive me; I tend to distract myself when talking of my sin. It is a grave sin, one that I can not undo no matter how many times I tell myself that I can. I should tell you that by the time you find this letter and are reading through it… I will be dead. This is my destiny and fate, to die by the hands that brought Them nothing but grief and sadness.
We could blame the times for what has happened to her and her kind. Of course, by her and her kind, I mean Seraphim Mirabilis. Or Angel Miracle if you prefer. We had to give them a name and calling the Helacyton Gartleri Seraphim would be admitting what we had done. Such a shameful thing, when we took the chance that we did. We have saved humanity, but at what cost?
At what cost?
Times were tough on that earth, you knew it, I knew it, and the whole damn world knew it. The funny thing was, we weren't even trying to save mankind, dearest one. We were scientists, dreamers, men and women playing with microscopes. We got up in the morning, showered, ate our breakfast, grabbed the nearest train, and worked in the labs. After work, we went to bars, pachinko machines, and rented rooms in karaoke halls before stumbling off to the nearest capsule hotel to sleep away the sake and plum wine. I always sang this one song, because it reminded me of you at lot. Along with this letter, you find one flash drive containing said song. Listen to it well and remember what I have told you.
But I digress.
We worked with HeLa cells. They are marvelous things, HeLa cells. You should be working with some in your classes at this moment, unaware of their importance. But HeLa cells do come into this.
Normal human beings like you and I have 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. HeLa cells, the hybrid "children" of virus and human have 82. We were fascinated by these cells, mutated beyond human into a single celled life. Helacyton Gartleri was what we called it and we were fascinated by the sheer amount of potential this hybrid species of cells had for us.
We talked of what could be done with such immortal cells with childish fascination. Yes, Rem, we were like children with magnifying glasses, pointing them at ants while waiting for them to burst into flames. We were nothing but mean and cruel children, but at the time, I liked to think that we were well meaning.
What fools we were. We were babes compared to the universe and yet we convinced ourselves of humanity's might and power. It is nature for a species to want to crawl to the top, regardless of what might lie below it. Therefore, humanity did crawl to the top over endangered animals, shrinking rainforest, and growing city. It was a difficult crawl, from out of the jungles to over the backs of our kin. And when we reached the top, we shielded our eyes from the sun only the sky was cloudy, so there was no sun to block.
Lamely, we lowered our hands and observed the muck and filth that coated our world. The Earth will survive as will what species will remain after. Nevertheless, the message was clear as we coughed and chocked. We were no longer wanted or needed. Mother Earth had made it clear with the virii she had sent forth from her wounded jungles.
Ironically, it would be virii that save us and provided us with those precious HeLa cells, our twisted and deformed children. Henrietta Lacks was a black woman, her race once bound by both Europe and the United States for use simple pack mules. At one point in time, we denied them the right to be called human. Only for tax's sake were the black people declared 1/3 human.
Human. Such a word for fragile beings on a world much heartier then we suspect. But what the world can take we can not and it for that reason we leave her. She has already made that message clear.
One day, we were sitting, drinking our morning coffee, discussing events on the news, and the quality of the capsule hotel we had stayed at last night. By we, I mean myself and a colleague. William Conrad, you remember him, had brought a comic about that hero. The one from the country I was originally from. We turned over the pages in boredom in between shifts of watching the microscope.
"Wouldn't it be neat if we could create Supermen?" I asked out of the blue. It was an innocent question and I was bored. That's my only excuse. "That would be cool."
"Out of what?" Conrad asked.
I looked around and finally pointed at the microscope. "Out of that."
"The microscope?"
"No," I said, "The HeLa cells."
He stared at me as if I had grown a second head. "The HeLa cells? You've got to be kidding me."
"They used to be human," I pointed out smugly.
If only I hadn't said that.
But I had.
We scientists spend our lives coming up with an answer. At this point, the answer had no application to our lives and the world in general. However, we could never guess what those cells had been hiding. In each and every one of those mutated chimera cells is the complete human genome. Therefore, you see, dear Rem, those were the cells that gave birth to her and her kind.
We took it and we adapted it for our own use. If we had known the potential that one deformed yet powerful child held, we wouldn't done it. What is done is done.
You were middle school then, Rem, and went to school with your hair in pigtails. Then you would come home with one or both undone, screaming at the top of your lungs that Alex was a jerk, and no amount of coaxing would have convinced you otherwise. You used to make that pouting face and your brow would wrinkle up and it made you look like you were getting ready to laugh.
So, we gathered our materials. We knew we needed a sample of HeLa cells along with a human ovum in order to replace the genetic information with HeLa's own. I was the one to insert the syringe into the fragile human egg. Then, Conrad and I watched as it began to divide.
Dolly the Sheep died of old age prematurely, because her DNA was middle aged when she was born. What would happen when we used the immortal cell line? Would the being age? Would it even look human? These questions and more filled our minds.
From the start of the experiment, we decided to let the creature live for only a year before killing it. It would have been a mercy kill, Rem… we didn't create them to be used as they are now. As you already know, that didn't go according to plan.
The embryo created from the ovum with its precious cargo of unique DNA thrived in its artificial womb on a bed of cells designed to mimic the nutrients that an infant would receive from their mother. Conrad and I watched as the fetus rapidly grew over the hours and days. First there were the buds of limbs and then it… no, she had fingers and toes. Day by day, we watched as her form expanded and filled the tank. By this time, we had grant money and a team of elite scientists working under the two of us. Day by day, we waited until we could release the resulting being.
We decanted her on New Years Eve. The sound of her thin wails distressed several nurses so much they had to be taken away, but for us, it was music to our ears. We carefully sponged the girl off (it was a girl for all HeLa cells are genetically female).
She was small and pale. Even the beds of her nails and nipples were pale. Her ears were long and pointed. Her fingers were long and not clenched in fists as you see in human infants. This was fortunate because she had long sharp nails on both her fingers and toes. I couldn't see her eyes, because they were shut tight with her wailing.
I didn't pay much attention to her eyes, but both Conrad and I noticed the growth on her back. It appeared to be a mass of cysts and wing-like growths. We ran our hands over the growth, trying to make sense of it.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I don't know," he answered and none of the underlings knew what the growth was.
We asked each and everyone to run their hands over the wailing infant's growth. It was an odd feeling, slimy in places and dry in others. Comforted by the touching, the infant's wailing left off and she opened her eyes. She had no iris and pupil, just a milky-colored eye that glinted green in the lights when looked at from the right angle. Then she blinked with a set of third eyelids. Like birds, we soon discovered, she used these to blink and closed her eyes to sleep.
Sadly, she was blind. Our tests and scans later revealed her optic nerve was there, but the retina had never formed. Unlike later Plants, bred to be stupid and ignorant of their slavery, this new being which we named Hope had a brain in the head of hers topped with feather-like hair.
On the day, Hope said her first word (it was kitty), you had your high school entrance exams. I had promised to be there to buy you a steak dinner, but I wasn't. You sulked and cried for hours, according to your mom with that face that looks joyful no matter what.
Hope was a joy to the all of us for it meant that our experiments were a success. We would win the Nobel Prize for it, a prize I no longer deserve. She was our doomed and sweet prototype. Feeding her caused her to admit an electric charge that mildly zapped the person that was dumb enough to touch her after any feeding. Nowadays, the Plants (Or Plant Angels as they call them now) generate enough electricity to kill on contact. How times have changed.
Her days were spent listened children's television as she grew up in leaps and bounds. She couldn't see the shapes or the letters of the alphabet. She cooed at the screen with her toothless mouth and babbled.
I'm sure that if what happened next hadn't happened, Hope would be alive and talking to you now, Rem. She was a dear sweet child… if you find a Plant child like that, never let it go. Because if you do, you make the same mistake as me. I don't want you to live like that ever.
Where was I?
Hope cut her first tooth when she was few weeks old. We celebrated before we noticed it was pointed. It was supposed to be an incisor, yet this tooth was fang-like as well as sharp. We thought that all her teeth were merely pointed. They were, yet where all of them came from surprised us all.
Teeth grew from her gums in rows like a shark's fanged mouth, but teeth also grew from the roof of her mouth, below in the place where tongue rested in a small pocket of tooth-free tissue, and even in the soft flesh of her cheeks. Within a week, she was unable to speak, and gibbered helplessly. She drooled constantly and sometimes her spit was pink with blood from where her sharp teeth had cut into her tongue.
Conrad scheduled impromptu dental surgery and yanked as many teeth as he could from her mouth. Hope wailed throughout the procedure since with her hybrid chemistry we didn't want to risk an allergic reaction. I packed her small mouth with gauze to stop the bleeding and read to her stories about princesses in locked towers. I stroked her deformed back until her colorless eyes slid shut and she went to sleep.
For whatever reason, either by the trauma of the surgery or damage done to the nerves of her mouth, Hope never spoke again. Her teeth somehow grew back as sharp as ever and out of options, we filed them down and opened up the bottom of her mouth to find a layer of what seemed to be teeth producing substance. We scraped it clean, suctioned the blood away, before closing the incision. Hope was a brave girl that time. We couldn't give her pain medication for risk of injuring her unstable body.
We explained it to her and oddly, she understood, shaking her head quickly up and down in agreement. "This is will hurt," I said, "We don't have to do it."
Still, she said yes by nodding. Thankfully, whatever we had removed from the bottom of her mouth prevented those teeth from growing back and cutting into her tongue. She seemed to thank us for it in her own way.
Hope matured even more over the weeks and months. The mass on her back grew into what appeared to be pulsing headless babies with tiny useless wings and ambiguous genitalia as well as long thick pulsing tendrils. We scanned the mass thinking this might be how Hope reproduced. In fact, this turned out to be the case in later generations. In Hope's case, the cherubim on her back were fat-filled and useless.
She was our first try, after all.
On her thirteen month of life, Hope grew breasts and body hair that was so white it was translucent. Scans revealed a uterus and a well-developed set of ovaries. Two weeks after breast development ceased, Hope gained her monthly cycles. Her cramps from menstruation were painful that at times she curled around herself, her limbs and her back organs twitching.
Her only relief was to sun naked in the sun or if the weather was too cloudy, she would use a sun lamp. Touching her after she sunned herself painfully shocked anyone who dared touch even more then eating did. Hope rarely wore clothes with her thin skin and deformed back and this made the problem worse. Compared to later Plants, this was a mere zap.
One of the worst zaps anyone got was after Hope had gotten the bright idea to eat fruit while stretched on in the sun over a four-hour period. She loved oranges and showed great disappoint when each orange I brought to her became smaller and smaller.
You were a freshman in High School then and kept demanding where the full bowl of oranges kept disappearing. The scientist kept Hope on a sugar water and cream of wheat diet, so I had to give her some citrus to prevent scurvy. So now, you know where the oranges went.
Year Two was her year that she shined like a bright star. You shone yourself in your high school production of Romeo and Juliet, so says your mother. Alex stayed over to help you memorize the lines of your part and you told mother that maybe he wasn't so bad after all. You resented me not being there a little and asked her why I wasn't I there to help you on your lines. You said that if I wasn't there, what was the use of trying.
From what your mother told me in mostly Japanese, the language she was most familiar in, you began skipping classes and trying your hand at smoking hand-rolled joints behind the bleachers at school. Alex saved you then, when that man nearly raped you at the nightclub near the subway. He took you home, you wrapped in his wool coat and you forgot the boy who pulled your pigtails. You shaped up then, Rem, and I apologize for being the reason you acted up. By the time you read this, I will be gone and there will be no need to worry.
Hope was learning to writing now with her long fingers. Her limbs had grown beyond humanly possible and made it difficult to walk with the hump on her back. But she hummed tunelessly as she filled page after pages with mathematical formulas, day in and day out. I never knew what formulas she worked out as she ate her puny orange and licked her fingers dry. I never thought to ask her what went on in that head of hers. However, I did wonder how she could see what she was writing.
Conrad believed that she could feel the paper's texture as well as texture from the wax crayon she used. I felt a pity for her. She could never see the looks of praise on our faces and never see the beauty of each color she picked.
For her third birthday, I normally gave her two oranges. This time, I couldn't bring her any. There was a fungus that attacked citrus trees that year and oranges were too expensive. "Perhaps with the way things were going." I told her. "You might as well want to remember how they taste as long as you can."
That weekend, I went with your mother and you on a camping trip. I realized as you told me about your life, how little I knew you. You said something that surprised me. "I want to be a scientist like you."
You immediate wondered why I did a spit take. I didn't expect you to want to be like me. I figured you had already dismissed as scum of the earth. Whatever Alex did to help you, he must have done it right.
That weekend… was the last enjoyable weekend I ever had.
That Monday I arrived at my lab to find a shock. In the middle of the lab there was a thick tube filled with goo or a liquid of some sort. There was something in it, however too many of my fellow scientist crowed around it for me to get a decent view. In a bowl, that of one the scientist was holding, were several large oranges like none I had ever seen before. How could anyone produce oranges such as those when oranges had been small and withered for years?
And where was Hope?
I pushed my way through the scientists before Conrad waved me over to the tube. "I'm sorry," he said, "But after what she did this weekend, well, I couldn't stop them."
Horrified I looked into the tube.
"She produced matter out of nothing."
I could see Hope's writhing form, her tendrils attached to wires at the ceiling.
"That made her useful."
"God, no," I said and touched the bulb.
And useful she was. Hope wasn't powerful, being the first of her kind. But what she provided them was years and years, perhaps even decades of data. These bastards sliced her open to inspect her organs as well as sliced off bits of flesh in order to clone her. The clones, tweaked to stupidity thrived in their glasses prisons.
Conrad and I were both given massive bonuses. My own was used to put you into this university. Forgive your father for selling his soul like that. Forgive him for what he has done. Think of him fondly and do not curse his name.
Hope, regretfully, never saw her fourth birthday. Her body was simply too weak and too tired. Tumors were found on every major organ in her body and every bone. Her body grew weak and frail. Out of stress her hair, which has somehow begun to turn black, and her teeth began to fall out. I could do nothing to ease her pain and could no longer help her. I turned my back on her one day when she stretched her hand out to glass as if she could somehow see me, although I know that could never be possible. The next thing I knew the monitoring alarms had gone off.
After all of her torment, the first Plant had died. They said she looked like a dead angel lying there and so from that day on, we no longer called her kind simply Plants, but Plant Angels. Angels plucked from heaven and made to dance at our whim.
Six years have past since then and you are a lovely young woman now. You're old enough to understand why I have to do this. I can't live with myself. The papers and newspapers will wonder why one of the creators of Plant Angels killed himself. But you should know why I did this…
Everywhere I go; I see the Plants in their glass cages in their dual-layered environments of liquid and gas. Moreover, everywhere people thrill at the clean energy of Plants. I see their pale blind eyes looking back at me; I see Hope's eyes, blaming me silently for not speaking up on her behalf for her poor lonely children. I see myself turning away and letting her die alone.
I wish to be buried in California and not in Maine with my family. I want to have my coffin facing the ocean so that I might look at you in Japan. There was an ocean's distance between us in life, so there might as well be one between us in death.
I don't ask much of you… just remain smiling.
All my love,
Dad
P.S.: Burn this message once you read it.
The End