“As I’ll ever be.”
Executive Director of Science and Tech, Mae Lin’s face loomed on the gigantic screen in front of them. “On behalf of Director Roanridge, we send our congratulations. This was the breakthrough we’ve been looking for. We’ll be moving to human and inhuman trials immediately.”
This was unheard of. It was unethical. They needed to reproduce these results again and again, they needed years of data before moving to human trials. But this was Bureau 7, and they operated outside the laws of men or gods. She knew this was wrong. She wanted to say so, but found she couldn’t move her mouth with the cold, sharp eyes of the Executive Assistant Director boring through her.
“Is that a problem, Dr. Wollstonecraft?”
She debated how best to answer. “Protocol—”
“We don’t have time for protocol. The cells you’re working with right now are from Isla Roanridge.”
The Director’s wife.
“Your volunteers will be arriving within the hour.” EAD Lin smiled at her. “We’ve been waiting for this. I trust you won’t disappoint us?”
EAD Lin didn’t really want an answer. If she had, she’d have stayed on the comm and waited for one.
Elizabeth scrubbed a hand over her face. “This doesn’t feel right.”
“What did you think you’d signed up for when you took this job?” John asked her. “Just look at it like this. Usually, you present your results to a board. You apply for funds, for grants. You have the money. The board said yes.”
“We don’t have enough information to move to human trials. We both know what these neurodegenerative diseases can do. If we infect people with this, and what happened just now was a fluke, we’ve murdered them.”
John took her hand gently, as if she were a child asking about the monsters in the dark. “It’s a better fate than whatever else Bureau 7 has in store for them. Or the ugly death waiting for them with these other illnesses. I guarantee that half of these people don’t know their own name, let alone where they are or what’s happened to them. You’ll be the cure for their pain one way or another, Dr. Wollstonecraft.”
This wasn’t what she wanted. “How are our supplies?”
“You mean do we have enough pentobarbital to put them down if it fails? We do.” Polidori began gathering files. “You should know, the other half of our experiment group? The ones who do know what’s going on? They’re all dead men walking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Death penalty cases slated for execution. Don’t get too soft in your feels over them. They’ve done terrible things.” John smiled. “Terrible, terrible things.”
That didn’t mean they deserved this, but Elizabeth didn’t speak. Instead, she peered back down through the electron microscope and saw that the glioblastoma had been obliterated. All that was left was healthy, functioning, living cells.
Cells that should’ve been long dead.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure anyone was ready for the effect this would have on a human being. He gut knotted with fear, but coiled around that fear was something she was ashamed of.
Excitement.
The curiosity that had pushed her toward this field and the drive to succeed that made her accept this job also had a dark side. The end should not justify the means, but sometimes, it did. She didn’t like to stop and examine that in herself, but she had to.
If this went sideways, she couldn’t claim ignorance. She’d have to own her part. It was her hands administering the drug. No one could force her to do it. There was always a choice.
Elizabeth would like to say that it was a hard choice, that she was going to wrestle with it and ultimately decide that her ethics were more important, but they weren’t. She knew the Director’s pain. Her own mother had died of a brain tumor.
“Having a bit of a crisis, are you, Elizabeth?” Polidori fixed his predator’s eyes on her and, for the first time, she felt like prey.
“Maybe I am.”
“Did you think we were the only team working on this project?” His tone was gentle—too gentle. Almost as if he pitied her and she was a child wandering in the dark.
Maybe he was right, because she had thought this was her project. “Of course I did. I’m the one who pitched it to EAD Lin.”
“Who knows how many little research facilities like this Bureau 7 has? How many minds they have working on the same problem? You may have pitched this version of the idea, but they’ve been working with prions for years. Since the 60’s and Gajdusek. You’re the one who managed to reprogram them, though.”