by Lily Black
The buzzing of a flickering bulb is drowned out by constant beeping of apparatuses. A man in a lab coat, with hair sprinkled with gray, studies the monitors and flips through printed out charts, making notes here and there. The sound of working machines is accompanied by loud wheezing coming from the only bed in the room.
A boy of ten, sleeping in the said bed, looks like anything but a pretty child. His face is wrinkled, his cheeks hollow, his skin sickly pale and covered with liver spots. He stirs uneasily and blinks his eyes open with effort.
“James,” he says with a hoarse voice, barely above a whisper. The man sits down and leans over him to listen. “Please,” he shifts slightly, stifling a moan of pain, “promise me… Promise that this is the last time.”
James raises his eyebrows in surprise.
“What are you talking about?” he asks incredulously.
“Maybe—” The boy pants, straining to catch his breath, but James waits patiently for him to continue. “Maybe there’s a reason why this doesn’t work. This,” he spits the word with contempt, “is not how God intended it.”
The man snorts with amusement.
“You’ve gotten religious all of a sudden?”
“Well, in my age…” The boy gives a low chuckle, which turns into a cough.
While James waits for it to pass, his smile gives way to a more serious expression. There is a glint of dogged passion in his eyes when he leans lower to hold the boy’s gaze.
“God does not dictate the fate of a scientist. You’re the one who taught me that.”
He feels a weak grip on his wrist and glances down. It’s a macabre sight – ashen skin and bones, the hand looks like that of a skeleton.
“Son.” An aged wisdom shines through the boy’s tired eyes. “Enough is enough. Just let me die already.”
“What are you saying?” James exclaims with irritation. “We are getting so close—”
“Are you?” the boy snaps, cutting him off.
“You’ve already lived three years longer than the last time!”
For a moment, the boy just stares at him, his chest heaving.
“This is no progress, son,” he manages at last.
“Father, please!” James raises his voice, frustrated. “I can’t give up now!”
“Then you will find yourself another subject.” The boy’s words – albeit in a thin voice – are spoken with all the authority of an old man. “I’ve made my decision and you will respect it. Swear it to me now.”
James clenches his jaw angrily and silence stretches between them.
“Swear it to me, James,” he insists.
The son buries his face in his hands. A heavy sigh follows.
“Fine,” he breathes. “You have my word.”
The boy gives a satisfied nod and his eyes close as he drifts off to a more peaceful sleep.
James goes to his office and slams his palms furiously on the desktop. Grand headings from newspaper articles pinned to the wall scream at him. The first one reads:
Memory Gene discovered.
Geneticists found a sequence in the DNA responsible for encrypting memories throughout our lifetime.
“Every experience, even every single thought, is recorded in our genetic material,” explains Dr. James Stone, the lead scientist of the research. “The gene remains inactive – we obviously don’t have access to memories passed on to us by our forebears – but if we could find a way to activate it in the growth phase of the cell—”
The rest of the text disappears under another clipping. His own face, nearly thirty years younger, smiles at him from the yellowed paper. He’s surrounded by a group of colleagues but his gaze automatically goes to the woman standing on his immediate right, and he’s reminded of how pretty Dr. Sara Brown’s natural red hair looked before she started dying it.
Gods of science, the title above the picture proclaims. A research team puts an end to death. In the photograph next to it, they’re presenting a toddler to the world. A path to immortality – First man reborn in a copy of his own body with all his memories intact.
The last clipping, however, makes his fists clench. A failed experiment or God’s intervention? The ‘immortal’ man couldn’t live past his seventh birthday.
James cards his fingers through his hair in exasperation. He thought his success was guaranteed with the activation procedure, but the Memory Gene presented unexpected complications. Apparently, it carries memories not only of the mind, but also of the flesh. Cells begin to age when the subject is still in his childhood years, and organs, just barely developed, already give out.
Since cloned organisms can have a shorter lifespan, this time he decided to implement the isolated Memory Gene into a fresh cell provided by a fertility clinic. His father was reborn into a new body, but it merely gave him three more years before it started falling apart. He’s not likely to live until morning.
He doesn’t. When they come to dispose of the body, James hears the clicking of Dr. Brown’s high-heeled shoes as she enters the room.
“Shall we start with the DNA samples?” Sara asks methodically.
“No,” he says to her mild surprise. “We go back to the original material.” They still have more than enough of it after all.
Yes, he promised his father he wouldn’t bring him back to life again. But if he extracts the Memory Gene from test subject number one, technically, that promise will have never taken place for him. To him, it will be the first rebirth anew.
Nobody dictates the fate of a scientist – neither God, nor his father.
~
Bio:
Lily Black is a civil engineer from Poland who enjoys writing speculative fiction when the sun goes down and the world is asleep. Her work has appeared in Flash Point SF (co-winner of the 2024 Drabble Contest) and A Coup of Owls.
Philosophy Note:
In high school, I was fascinated with genetics and used to spend way too much time thinking up hypotheses on the still undiscovered aspects of the DNA. What if it was possible to find a sequence responsible for storing memories? Could that be a path to immortality? Yet history has shown time and again that “playing God” is not as simple as it might seem; and that scientific ambitions, although essential for progress, can often lead to terrifying consequences.
