The Relic Keeper (13 page)

“Jamie, you’re in the clinic. We’ve got you away from those lunatics. You’re safe.” He looked up at Troy, the security guard who’d dragged him from the mass of protesters, who were now being forced to the ground by the police.

“I’m not with them,” Deon said.

Troy looked at him strangely. “I know you’re not mate, you’re inside now. You’re safe. Ok?”

Deon looked out at the carnage beyond the door. It was beginning; the end of days. It was soon going to be time to choose your path, he thought.

It was not too hard for Rei to know where to start looking this time. Although the room was similar in layout to the first one, with walls covered with racks of files, the far end had been cleared and a small table set up. From the trails of dust around the floor and on the racking Rei could see that many of the files had been recently moved and presumably unboxed and read on the table. On the far side of the table was a cabinet, with a security device which clamped down the lid. She noticed that it was just big enough for the paper files to fit into. The lid was locked and she saw no way of opening it. She picked up the box and spun it over, but it was secured, although she could hear the files moving inside it. She looked around her and started to examine the boxes that appeared to have been moved. The files seemed to contain details about a number of vastly different patients, but all were recent. These should all have been logged on the clinic’s system, but for some reason were being stored as paper files in a locked room on a level that she thought had not been used in years. Reluctantly she started opening each in turn. There just may be some point of interest in one of these.

Rei was about to stop her search. She’d been hauling through the files for nearly 3 hours and had not come across anything out of the ordinary. But something about this one struck her as familiar, although she didn’t realise why at first. She scanned the file with her c-pac and replaced it where she’d found it. It hadn’t been what she’d expected to find, but it must have some significance. She went onto the next file and carried on trawling through the remaining records, scanning what she needed before heading back to the apartment.

She’d been trying to decide how to proceed and reluctantly came to the conclusion that she knew who the best person to speak to was. She connected through her c-pac.

“Brading.”

“Hello Mr Brading, I need to speak to you urgently.”

“Hi Reiko, how are you? I was thinking of calling you to see if…”

“Yes well never mind what you were thinking,” she said curtly, “it seems I need some help, and although it pains me to admit it, you may be the best person to supply me with the direction that I need for what I’m looking into.”

Philip slipped off the bed where he’d been reading and focused his attention on the girl calling. He hadn’t expected Reiko to contact him at all, and the fact that she had meant that something was probably of major importance, or there’d been a disastrous calamity.

“Sure, glad to help. What’s wrong? Has De…, er James been up to much?”

“No idea, he’s been keeping a low profile the last couple of days. I think the protests today scared him, to be honest.”

“Yeah,” said Philip, making a note to check the story on protests. He was slipping, he should have known what she was on about from the start. “So what is it?”

“I’ve been checking the medical records. Not the official ones, understand, the more clandestine archives.”

“Yeah yeah, secret medical files. Load.”

“Well, I was looking for anyone other than Mathew who had been treated to posthumous near-absolute zero cryonic treatment, and two files were missing from the bulk store of the records. Then when I was checking for, well, for anything really, I came across a record which looked out of place. The details listed a 27-year-old Caucasian female with cardial arrhythmia and myocardial ischemia. The condition was treated with a course of the usual Beta-adrenergic blocking, which had…”

“Hold on hold on. I don’t understand any of this. You’ve got a file about a patient with a heart defect, yeah?”

“Yes,” snorted Rei, “that’s what I said. She had a, well, an irregular heartbeat, and a problem whereby there’s a lack of oxygen reaching the muscles that pump the heart.”

“Ok, keep it at that level, I can understand it so far.”

“So, they’ve treated her with a series of drugs that subdue the ventricular ectopy, because the beta-blockers have anti-arrhythmic properties and reduce myocardial oxygen demand by reducing heart rate and ventricular inotropy.”

“Lost again.”

“The cardiac muscles differ from the muscles around the bones of your body because of their cardiac inotropy. Basically, the way that they contract is different so that your heartbeat remains more stable when it’s exerted.”

“Ok, so, this woman had a heart that beats irregularly, yeah?”

“Yes! Anyway, that’s not the important part. She wasn’t reacting to the treatment properly, it happens sometimes, and instead of treating her through a different rate or type of beta-blocking drugs they replaced the defective area of the ventricular muscles.”

“They gave her a heart transplant.”

“Not as such, no, but they did replace the part that was working incorrectly. And this is the strange part. The transplanted part was genuinely human; not pseudogenetic, which is how it would normally be processed. But at the same time it doesn’t seem to have been cadaverously retrieved.”

“No no, gone again.” He was beginning to think that this girl was just calling him up to make him feel stupid.

“Most organs for transplants are synthetically manufactured, yes?”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“Well this one wasn’t. But it wasn’t retrieved from a recently deceased person either. And I know that because the file would have to reference the donor. A donor is a dead person whose body parts or organs have been used for medical…”

“Yeah, I
do
know what that means. So where did it come from?”

“The reference links the file to record P-MPS.2.5.2002. Now that file is one that I know. It was for a man named Mark P S Palmer, the second of May 2002 was the day he died and was brought to what is now the Walden Centre.”

“And now you’re going to tell me that he was cryogenically treated like Mathew Lyal, yeah?”

“Exactly. Although the process is cryopreservation, so it’s cryonically treated, not cryogenically.”

“Yeah, either. So they’ve used 70 year old organs for transplants, right?” Now Philip was beginning to see his story really take shape.

“No, not exactly.”

“Well, what exactly then?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but as I checked through more of the records I came across several other similar files. People treated for a host of congenital problems, and referenced back to two people, Andrews, S T, and Palmer, M P S. But there were too many people donated to, unless these two people had more than one heart each. The same body parts were being used repeatedly.”

“So how’s that possible?”

“Under normal circumstances obviously it isn’t.” She thought before continuing, “If you could revive a part of a person, from their tissue or DNA, for example, and create a living organ, or limb, it is possible, in theory at any rate, to graft it onto another person. You could theoretically
make
human organs to be used in place of the pseudogenetic, artificial ones. There was some research into it decades ago, but was declared illegal by the Ethics Commission in 2027. There was a rumour that some artificial parts companies put pressure on the Commission so as to keep their supplies running. But these people…well, they were dead before that came into effect, so I suppose that they could be used for genetic experimentation and DNA grafts, because they wouldn’t come under that section of the law.”

“I don’t follow.”

“In layman’s terms, Philip, I think they’ve been growing body parts for transplants.”

“You mean working on parts of real people?”

“Yes. Totally illegal and unethical under normal circumstance.”

“But you’re saying that the people that were being experimented on had been dead for seventy odd years.”

“That’s what I think. I don’t know the details pertaining to the law. I’m not even sure if there are any. It may be covered under copyright law, but with 70 years since death that won’t take effect. There is no precedent for any of this.”

“So why would they want to do this in the first place?”

“Pseudogenetics is highly in demand, but expensive and takes a long time to work with. The nano-technology involved is developing in Asia, but here in the West we’re quite a way behind, it might take another 20 years for Europe to be where East and South East Asia is now. Many people still travel to Mexico to have transplants because they are cheaper there, even though they often, well, let’s just say appropriate the parts they need from unwilling donors. If anyone could discover an alternative it would be a major breakthrough. The kudos is amazing, and the stock prices would soar.”

“Which is a bit weird,” said Philip, thinking out loud. “’Cos Warwick’s busy selling shares at the moment.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, I know. Not if he intends announcing it, at any rate. When did these ops take place?”

“All of them were performed about 2 years ago. They had a period of 4 months when, as far as I can ascertain, they undertook about 12 of them. They were all double-blinded; none of the patients know what was done, nor did the surgeons from what I can see. It’s only because of the pharmacovigilance records that I know about them. The operational records, they are the ones that would prove absolutely what happened, they are all held as classified, but somehow the cross-referencing failed to classify some associated records.”

“Who would know about this?”

“Well, us now. Otherwise, Warwick, whoever discovered the process itself, that couldn’t be many people here. Maybe only three people in the country, and only one associated with the clinic, Dr Malik. It is quite possible that the doctors involved in the operations did not fully understand where the organs were from, which would be in keeping with the double-blinded classification. Providing that I’m correct in this of course, and I have no proof.”

“So how does Mathew fit into this?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m going to find out.”

The more he thought about the story with Mathew, the Walden Centre, Deon and now this new aspect of the cell donors, the more Philip could feel the piece becoming obsessive. The girl, Reiko, could be useful, as long as he played her right. She was aloof and unsociable, but while she could keep him informed he needed her, and he suspected that she realised that she needed him too. Of course life would be easier if she’d just stop talking in jargon, but he may just have to live with that. But he still couldn’t connect all the parts, and see where the story was going, although he was sure there was a connection. Warwick was involved in a process that was ground-breaking, but teetered in the balance between ethics and legality. If he’d published his findings 2 years ago he could have been the talk of the medical world, well, in the West at least. But he hadn’t. He’d worked on it in underground experiments and kept it quiet, and it had only come to light by Reiko looking for something else. In the meantime he’d used some of the same technology to bring a man from the twentieth century back to life. Which was amazing, but, let’s face it, it seemed a little pointless really. Lyal himself wasn’t important, Philip was sure of that. There was nothing remarkable about him. It was just the fact of resurrecting
someone
that was the concern. Now maybe Warwick was just boosting his ego; Philip knew that he had one of those. But there had to be more. Sure, he’d brought the clinic to the attention of the world’s media, and bolstered his personal wealth, through some stock sales that pointed to an illegal acquisition of stock years earlier. Perhaps this was all just the prelude to the release of the findings on the tissue regeneration process; but why did he feel he needed to produce a whole living specimen before publishing the work undertaken two years previously. It neither rational, nor in keeping with what he knew of Warwick’s character, and Philip hated things that didn’t make sense.

He swilled a large straight JD around a glass and went over the facts in his head. Lost in his thoughts he was suddenly brought to by the beeping of his c-pac. He activated it and checked the screen. It was broadcasting an interview that he’d set it to remind him about. The BBC was hosting a series of discussions on the ethical dilemmas of the day, and today’s was the Lyal case. It was precursor to the debate that the Ethics Commission would chair between health officials, the major religious community leaders and the ministry on the last day of the month. The stream of letters to the press that Philip had been reading showed a varied reaction, and the story was gathering momentum. He switched on to watch live, something he hardly ever did, preferring to replay programmes later so that he could forward through the parts that didn’t interest him. There may be something in this, he hoped, that would allow him to get an angle on his story before the whole piece became last week’s news.

The debate had inevitably fallen from its austere scientific commencement and declined into a philosophical and ethical argument. The representative from the Church of England had gently condemned the process, while maintaining that the issue to be dealt with was a human one as there was a person at the centre of this to be considered. Both the Roman Catholics and the Muslims agreed in principle with this, but argued that the medical world was yet again taking into their hands the responsibilities that only God or Allah should truly have. Despite this, Philip noticed that they still managed to find room to disagree with each other. Rabbi David Ford was backed into a corner and at one time suggested that so long as no Jewish people were involved it was not an issue that the Chief Rabbinate would feel compelled to make judgement on at this time. However, if that situation did arise, he suspected that they would feel obliged to condemn the procedure.

“At the moment we have to remain aware that we live in fragile times,” the Rabbi added. “The factionalism within many religions, especially I feel the Christian faith, is highly volatile. On top of this there seems growing intolerance between faiths, while there are also burgeoning schisms within them. We need to remain very conscious of where we stand on issues, especially contentious ones like this, if we are going to ensure that our respective followers do not fall into the violent fundamentalism we have seen in North America over the last few decades. The last thing that we need across Europe now is a repeat of the vigilantes and pitch battles seen 20 years ago in countries like Virginia and the Republic of Louisiana. People become polarised on issues like this, and unless our voices are clear and united, we send a confused message to the populace and that, in a worst case scenario, may result in inter-religious combat.”

Leading doctor in philosophy from Oxford and author on Vedic Hinduism Moksada Chandra claimed that, although she could not talk for Hindus as a whole, the process of artificially bringing life back to a person, after such a time from the initial death could have an effect on the soul and interfere with the samsara of the individual. If the cycle of the soul was interrupted and reversed then the karmic effects could be seen to be disastrous.

The governmental ethics spokesperson was suitably noncommittal. “We could be watching a major breakthrough for the West,” she claimed. “This could be the start of a renaissance of Western medicine. Although obviously we need to fully investigate the ethical dimensions of this, the implications for this cannot be understated. Also, of course, the process could have long lasting and advantageous repercussions for humans as a species and it’s important to keep track of this and remind ourselves that this has occurred in Britain and under the incumbent government.”

Philip watched as the debate opened up to the public, and was unsurprised when people claimed that this was the modern-day version of Voodoo and witchcraft, and that doctors were once again playing at being God; a phrase that was always brought out at moments like this. A shrieking woman from Leeds joined the discussion to say that she would have given anything to have her recently deceased brother returned to her, and a man who sounded drunkenly-slurred claimed that the public were not able to accept reality today, and now we were seeing the results of this in these preposterous processes.

“And what about jobs,” he carried on in his alcohol-fuelled rant. “There ain’t enough jobs now, what if everyone has two lives, an’ wants a new job, what about the people ’ere already. Ain’t enough to go round now. We need less people, not more. We don’t want dead people coming back, taking our jobs. And where will they all live?”

“Has anyone considered the diseases that these poor dead souls could bring back from the past,” said the anonymous caller from Edinburgh.

“Where will it all end?” the last caller of the day asked. “Which people from the twentieth century are we having back? How about Hitler, or Pol Pot? Who is going to decide which of these frozen dead we have and what we should do with them?”

Philip switched the screen off as the studio faded into theatrical darkness. A second debate was now scheduled for the 1
^st
of June. The most vociferous of the British public were out in force, and they were definitely not on the side of the Walden Clinic. He poured himself another JD and considered the thoughts he’d heard expressed over the last half-hour.

“I bet Warwick’s glad he’s sold those shares in the clinic now,” he muttered as he began searching through his material for something that may help him to focus on the direction of the story now, ’cos I can see this wrecking the Walden Centre.”