Anthem's Fall (3 page)

Kristen shot Steve a piercing look to prove to him she was not alone in her concerns, and took the last sip of melted ice from her glass. “Yeah well, too bad no one else feels the same way we do, Cara.”

“It’s been a few months now since the last meeting. Professor Vatruvia is probably going to make a big announcement,” Steve said in an obvious attempt to subdue the rising tension between them.

Cara nodded. “I hope so.”

Kristen turned and looked to the growing number of people gathering by the bar. It was primarily an undergraduate crowd—she could tell from the overly eager aura radiating from their slightly inebriated faces. As she watched their lighthearted exchanges, Kristen could not help but feel a sense of disconnection. There was a group of frat types waiting for pints of beer. The bartenders and servers were attractive girls with low-cut shirts and snug jeans. A line stemming from the bathrooms grew longer by the minute with buzzed students. Looming above them all, big screen televisions blared out the week’s football highlights. Kristen’s attention was drawn to two girls, giggling and leaning against a couple of guys. They were telling some mundane story about an off-campus party the other night. Kristen could only catch bits of the idiotic drunken narrative. But as she gazed at them, she could not help but feel somewhat envious of the carefree look of it all.

Kristen returned her attention to the late twenty-somethings sitting with her in the booth. They had an old, tired, and professional look to them. Steve had a receding hairline and a gut from spending too much time sitting at a computer and retaining a stellar attendance at weekly bar trivia nights. Cara was sporting a subtle diamond engagement ring. Certainly neither of these older colleagues would consider staying out late and enjoying a casual night of raging and forgetting about reality—and ultimately neither would Kristen. There was a full day of work in the morning, and that was all there was to it. The ever-present weight of work to be done was a force that had long since claimed authority of Kristen’s life. Tomorrow, while all of these silly and simple peers would be sleeping off a long night, Kristen would be acting vanguard to a modern marvel of discovery.

An unsettling sensation of disquiet surfaced in the back of her mind as Kristen stared across the prosaic happenings of the bar and considered what had been nagging her for the past few months. What Steve had quipped about was partly true. She had made somewhat of a spectacle at the last research meeting with Professor Vatruvia. More and more as the weeks progressed Kristen was beginning to grow anxious about the Vatruvian cell, though she could not rationalize her concerns with any tangible justification. For the time being Kristen decided to keep her thoughts to herself.

“I’m going to head back to my place,” Cara said at last, breaking the silence of their table and jarring Kristen from her thoughts. “It’s getting late and way too loud in here for me.”

“Okay. See you at the meeting tomorrow.” Kristen smiled and rose from the table, allowing Cara to pass.

“Have a good night,” Steve said to Cara, and after she left turned to Kristen. “Another drink?”

“Eh, I don’t think so. I have to be up early tomorrow.” Kristen said, not wanting to send even the slightest false impression of interest to the rotund computer scientist. She looked back to the undergraduates by the bar and noticed several of the more confident, or perhaps more intoxicated, guys attempting to catch her eye. Kristen took care not to meet their stares and grabbed her purse. She put a twenty-dollar bill down on the table. “I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Steve said. “See you tomorrow.”

Kristen made her way through the increasingly rowdy crowd and out into the cool nighttime of New York. If Professor Vatruvia was preparing to announce what she was expecting, there was going to be a lot of media attention focused on their lab in the forthcoming weeks and months. Kristen cursed to herself as she walked under the humming streetlamps, passing dingy alleys and a few bustling restaurants and dives on the way to her apartment building. How could her research partners—and seemingly everyone in the world—be so obtuse to the inherent danger of the Vatruvian cell?

K
risten walked down the crowded Amsterdam Avenue sidewalk, immersed in the sounds and smells of Manhattan’s morning rush hour. She tried to think of anything but the congestion of pedestrians, car horns, and yelling taxi drivers engulfing her. There was a cool touch to the morning air, and Kristen took some comfort in the knowledge that autumn was claiming the city. She could not abide one more day of the sticky claustrophobic swelter of summer in New York.

Her thoughts turned to the research meeting scheduled that day.

In the past when Professor Vatruvia had brought the whole research team together, it had always been to make a big announcement, either a new source of funding or a breakthrough in their work. But ever since the global media’s fascination with the iconic Vatruvian cell, funding had become a dead issue; the research team’s coffers were brimming. The meeting had to be a breakthrough in their work. This prospect filled Kristen with mounting angst she fought to conceal. Head down, she focused on the dirty sidewalk with an expressionless gaze. What was the breakthrough?

Professor Vatruvia’s team had recently branched out to other fields, and it made Kristen uneasy. How could seemingly every subspecialty of academia be working on the same research project? Biologists, engineers, computer scientists, medical doctors, and zoologists: all working separately in the same venture. It was remarkable how carefully—and Kristen thought, subtly—their leader was keeping the individual members of his team in the dark. Professor Vatruvia seemed to be gradually cloaking his long-term goals for the Vatruvian cell, concealing his intentions without anyone noticing the furtive transformation. But Kristen had noticed. She also knew the goal of the research had to be lofty, whatever it was. Kristen resented that he was hiding the truth from her of all people, considering she was one of the founders of the technology. Yet she could not help but wonder if her feelings were just misconstrued resentment at being sidelined from her vital involvement during the early Vatruvian cell developments the previous winter.

A growl in her stomach reminded Kristen that she had forgone breakfast, and she turned into a corner café. The door of the shop opened with the tinkling of a bell, and Kristen stepped in line behind half a dozen people. A television mounted on the wall drew her attention from the pastries. A CNN reporter was talking about an international flight over Canada. A commercial jetliner had undergone engine failure at thirty thousand feet. The anchors were stressing the bravery and quick actions of the pilots, who masterfully righted the plane and avoided certain catastrophe.

A passenger was talking into a microphone held by a reporter. “You aren’t
listening
to me!” The man was exasperated, his face flushed. “The engines didn’t start back up! I was sitting right behind the wing. I would have felt o-o-or
heard
them reengage. You know the roar of engines when you’re behind the wing? Well there was no roar! They were puttering! Look . . . all I know is we fell like a rock for a whole minute. God, it was a nightmare. Oxygen masks dangling, luggage crashing out of overhead compartments. People were screaming. I remember my seatbelt digging into my stomach as it held me to my goddamn seat! And the passengers who weren’t wearing seatbelts . . .” The man trailed off. “I thought we were goners.”

“Well, we are all thankful the pilots were able to reengage the turbines and take control of the plane before any serious injuries occurred.” The reporter chirped.

“No!” the passenger yanked back the microphone. “That’s not what happened! The plane slowed to a stop in midair. It didn’t
right itself
, and the engines didn’t reengage. The plane
stopped
! I’m telling you, we were floating in the air all the way down to the ground. Look at the field where the plane landed, for god’s sake! Do you see any landing tracks?”

A replay of a helicopter bird’s-eye view depicted an enormous blue-and-silver jetliner parked like a beached whale in a cornfield. There was no indication of any landing. Surrounding the huge steel girth, tall corn stalks stood intact, the organized rows unmarked.

The broadcast returned to the colorfully decorated studio.

“Well, as you can see, the passengers are still in shock from the incident—no doubt shaken from the traumatic experience. Fortunately, the near disaster was safely avoided. Although crewmembers have declined comment, spokesmen for the airline have issued a statement that the engines reengaged at approximately fifteen thousa—”

“What can I get for you, sweetheart?” asked a café worker with a Brooklyn accent and cigarette smoker’s growl.

Kristen shook her head and brought her attention back to the breakfast options.

“One of the blueberry muffins and a coffee. To go, thanks.” Kristen said. She looked back to the television to see that the topic had moved on to a decline in European financial markets.

On the street, Kristen sipped her coffee and ruminated over a thick spiral notebook of her research observations she had pulled out from her backpack.

The Vatruvian cell. The
artificial
cell.

The possibilities of their new technology were nearly infinite, the potential uses and applications limitless. Far more limitless than the casual readers of various magazine and news articles, or the people who watched the
60 Minutes
special, or even most accomplished PhDs could grasp. Over the past few months Kristen had begun to realize her team had willfully entered a technological realm of unbounded promise. Sure the Vatruvian cell was microscopic in size and seemingly insignificant against the grand scale of most tangible technologies. Many authorities were even beginning to voice skepticism and proclaim that its initial significance had been greatly overvalued. But Kristen thought of a singular gamete—a sperm or egg cell—compared to the entirety of human existence. Those singular minuscule cells blossom into the full spectrum of what it means to be man: from skin and bone to intellect and creativity. Those individual cells, microscopic and unadorned as they are, give rise to
ideas
. Power of that magnitude was impossible to quantify. And now the incomprehensible capabilities of genetics had been harnessed by modern science. Harnessed, stripped bare, and reassembled by the whim of man. They had manipulated the altered blueprints of biological genetics to generate a distinctive wonder of their own: an artificial cell crafted by the human hand. Life, though on a microscopic level, had been twisted from the inanimate.

The Vatruvian cell balanced just on the imprecise threshold of what biology defined as a living organism. Most scientists equated the Vatruvian cell to a cancer cell or a virus: neither living nor dead, and containing attributes of each distinction. Having been one of the essential minds behind its conception, Kristen was familiar with how the Vatruvian cell had been constructed. She knew the mechanics and the novel proteins of the Vatruvian cell front to back, as well as even Professor Vatruvia.

Yet despite her familiarity, Kristen Jordan could not truthfully say with any sense of conviction what the Vatruvian cell really was.

Could the Vatruvian cell merely be the most recent instrument to be created by man in an ever-evolving progression that dated back to the first brandished stick? Or perhaps the lifelike invention would prove only to be a microscopic trophy for the contemporary intellect, serving little more purpose than for scientists to pat themselves on the back and applaud their own marvelous ingenuity and craftsmanship. But what if the Vatruvian cell was something far more than either? What if it was a scientific revolution so pioneering and radical that it was difficult to even grasp the full gravity of its future influence? It was this last notion that caused Kristen Jordan’s constant disquiet, this thought that kept her up in the still of the night, images of cancer cells, viruses, and the Vatruvian cell dancing in the darkness of her cramped studio apartment.

Meanwhile Professor Vatruvia was pushing full steam ahead, scheduling a meeting that very day where he no doubt was planning to announce advancement in their research. Despite the sun rising above the graffiti-covered brick rooftops to the east, Kristen felt herself shudder, gooseflesh rising on her arms in the morning air.

The featureless glass building containing the Columbia Vatruvian Cell Research and Development laboratory looked more like an office building than an ivy-adorned historic structure one might normally associate with prestigious collegiate tradition. But their research was far from traditional, and although the exterior of the austere midrise left something to be desired among its more affluent-looking neighboring buildings, the interior contained some of the most exclusive and costly research equipment in the nation.

Kristen passed by the security checkpoint and smiled a terse hello to the guards. Earlier in the year, several religious extremist groups had openly criticized the Vatruvian cell research as working against the will of religion. “Man was not meant to play god” had been the consistent mantra of the shouts and strongly worded letters Professor Vatruvia received. He tacked up the more amusing of the letters on a hallway bulletin board for the team to see. Though after the threats began to amass, a sizable security team had been acquisitioned with the considerable funding Professor Vatruvia had been able to garner.

Kristen walked past several laboratories to her workspace and slumped into her chair, turned on the computer, and typed her login information. In her inbox was an email, the subject reading,
RESPOND ASAP
, from Professor Vatruvia. There was only one line in the body of the message:
See me before the meeting today
.

With a drained sigh, Kristen decided to get it out of the way before it disrupted her morning concentration. She swung around in her chair and headed upstairs to Professor Vatruvia’s floor, exchanging words with several coworkers as she passed the open doors to the other well-accommodated labs. Sunlight beamed through the wide windows of the lobby as Kristen circled the stately main staircase. Professor Vatruvia’s office and his private labs were on the third floor. Most of the research team members saw little of his floor, but Professor Vatruvia often called up Kristen to weigh in on various topics. As she passed the cold polished tiles and locked doors of the third floor hallway, she sensed undertones of secrecy.