Chapter 6

The Immortal

The New Wilderness, Upper Michigan: Winter 2016

Little Dominic grew quickly into what was expected, a blue-eyed boy with wavy blonde hair. Fall turned to winter and they doted on him, insuring that he received lots of stimulation through the darkest days. And dark they were. The climate change brought copious snow every winter now. They found themselves snowed-in about Christmas. The All Wheel was parked out by the highway in its lean to and the snowmobiles were fully fueled for an emergency, but they were never used—the wilderness and conservation required it.

Albert, Anne, and Ping took turns with sleepless nights until the little guy figured out he wasn’t hungry during the dark of night. Ping breast-fed him at first. They gradually substituted goat’s milk when he could be bottle-fed. He loved the snow from the start. They took him out with them to the experiments whenever they could. Ping, unused to the wilderness in winter, took to the peace and solitude well—motherhood became her.

They were not entirely alone. The Internet kept them in constant touch with Rao Khundi and others at Johns Hopkins, Albert’s family, still centered in Iron Mountain, Anne’s family in California, and Ping’s family in Taipei. They shared with them their white Christmas and new family before a roaring fire with homemade gifts. Albert and Anne dressed up like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Ping became a winter wood nymph. There were no elves. They sang carols together continents apart. Dominic enjoyed all the attention, but he would have to wait until he was older to see the hologram of his first fun holiday.

By mid-January, there was thirteen feet of snow on the ground. While it put food in reach, deer suffered most as they wallowed through the deep stuff. The moose and elk too, were confined to areas where they could find food under the heavy snow cover. The hibernators and wolves faired well. The weakest easily fell prey to the packs of wolves that now ranged well into Wisconsin and Northern Michigan. If this kept up as predicted, glaciers would return to this part of the globe. Glaciers were already building south of Hudson Bay. Canadian settlements north of there had either been abandoned or adapted to living on moving ice.

Adapting to the changing conditions, Albert built arbors of vine and bark to the work sheds, greenhouse, and lake. In the summer they were covered with morning glory and grapevines. The almost tropical summers insured rapid growth. In the winter, after a little sealing with new bark and icing after the first snows, they became tunnels. Low watt lights were strung so that Albert could go about his business lightly clothed day and night. By December, the temperature could stay below forty below zero for weeks, so going outside required Artic gear and snowshoes. It didn’t prevent them from going out, though. On sunny, bitterly cold days after a storm, they’d pack little Dom in a warm backpack and venture out on snowshoes to observe how the animals and birds were doing. They’d come upon grouse so tame or unaware in the deep snow that they could grab them. “There’ll be fresh roasted chicken tonight!” Albert loved to boast when he caught one. Cottontails, unable to run in deep, soft snow, were also easy to catch. Shoeshoes could be caught sleeping, but they were adapted to snow could easily escape the wolves in deep snow. Their camouflaged white winter coats also protected them.

Albert was able to grow vegetables and greens all winter long in the greenhouse. Biogas digesters, supplemented with wood or fuel oil during the coldest periods, insured that it remained warm inside. Artificial lighting sometimes had to be employed to trick the plants into growing, developing, and maturing. Ice fishing provided hours of enjoyment and fresh fish. Many of them would have frozen or starved of oxygen during the long winter anyway. Albert always left the mature fish to reproduce.

With much of the world starving, they froze, dried, or radiated everything they didn’t eat. The barren winter months in their little wilderness enclave provided them with enough food for fifty people. In the spring, Albert always took loads to Marquette to be given to the Salvation Army. Some of the dried and radiated food ended up in Africa and Asia. The frozen game and vegetables often went to people whose allergies prevented them from eating genetically modified food. Albert was far from harvesting the potential of his little wilderness to provide healthful food. That would come with time. The experiments on the range were already bearing fruit. Buffalo now rivaled beef as a preferred choice at meat counters nationwide. Venison, elk, moose, antelope, boar and other wild game meat were available in specialty shops and some super markets. Sophisticated electronic tagging, surveillance, and sting operations were preventing poachers, anarchists, trophy hunters, and thieves from engaging in poaching, Alpha harvesting, and a black market in the wild meat trade.

Sometime in the dead of winter while he was ice fishing, he got the idea. It was small at first, but grew in him like a sickness. He was musing about how great it was to have little Dom, now crawling all over the place and sticking everything in his mouth. “What about Esther? She was too young to die. … Dom needs a baby sister. ….” The diabolical idea was burning a hole in him by the time he lugged his catch back to the cabin through the arbor tunnel.

That evening, while Anne was off to the green house, he broached the idea to Ping. “Ping, I don’t know how you feel, but what would you say to a sister for Dominic.” He knew what her answer would be; he just had to hear her say it.

“Well, having Dom has been more incredible than I ever imagined. I’ve been thinking the same thing. It wouldn’t be too much trouble for me if it wouldn’t for you.”

“I’ll send some of that lock of hair I have to Rao and see what he says. I was planning to snowshoe out to the highway next week anyway to get those packages waiting for us in Ishpeming. No need to tell Anne until we find out.”

It was a beautiful bright sunny day when he set out, only twenty below at 7am. He’d made this walk before, but there was a lightness in his step and a song in his heart as he thought of the possibility of bringing her back. He was warm and so happy that he startled the stillness as he occasionally broke out in song. His graphite snowshoes made walking in the soft snow easy, and his pack was light, so he reached the All Wheel by 11am. A half-hour of digging with a light shovel, and he had her cranked up and headed east on 28.

The two-lane highway appeared almost like a canyon. The sight was amazing as the high banks rose, almost vertically, clearly marking the boundaries of the road. Any wind and it easily drifted shut. Powerful snow blowing machines kept it open, the only route to the west through the center of the U.P. By noon, he mailed a letter with the hair in it at the Post Office and stopped for lunch at Martha’s Café. Martha served the traditional pasties. Albert bought one and listened to the local talk. It was always the same this time of year—how much snow we were having. There were always those that said, “I’m gettin’ outta here. Headin’ south to Mexico. I don’t care if it’s dirty and crowded. I’m tired of slugging it out against this. This time next year won’t find me here.” Albert noted that the lunch crowd of retirees—escapees from Chicago—was smaller each year. They weren’t dying, just heading south during the winter.

After delivering his food pack to the Salvation Army, Albert drove back to the lean-to that he kept the All Wheel in. It took almost as much time to dig it in as it did to dig it out. Sheltered, plugged-in, and locked until the next time he needed it or spring, he put on his snowshoes and followed his tracks back. The trail was wide because it was a road, but he often had to duck and dodge tree branches because the snow was so deep. The sun went down in a ruddy glow while he still had two hours to go. His exertion kept him warm and the moon off the white snow clearly marked his course. He was happy to see the cabin and smell food cooking.

It was three weeks before Kundi called. “Great news, my friend! We analyzed that hair sample you sent. Yes, we can clone her, but you’ll have to get a tissue sample for us so that we can get the full sequence. You know that I’ve been working with the Egyptians to clone a mummy—not just any mummy—but one from one of the pharaohs at the museum? Remember when the Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank in Manchester, England, concluded that mummified DNA was too fragmented to clone? Our work with your Dominic leads us to believe, given enough DNA, that we can repair any fragmentation—actually we don’t do it—the DNA repairs itself, making the right connections until it is whole. Then, we can perfect it. Yes, my friend, perfect it and remove all known genetic diseases—incredible!

Your Esther, from our preliminary analysis, appears to be of Nubian origin. Cloning her with a pharaoh will help us determine how closely related to the Egyptian kings and Nubian queens she may be.”

Albert was flabbergasted. He knew she had the classic beauty of the people of northeast Africa, and the Horn, but he never dreamed she could be related to the Nubian queens of Egypt! His response was cautiously enthusiastic. “Wow! That’s good news! I want to help, but it will be another month before I can get out of here and ….” He stopped, not wanting anyone listening in on their conversation to know what he was thinking.

Rao covered nicely. “Why don’t you come out East in April. I want you to personally go to Cairo to be sure we are getting the real thing. Ping can come with you. The little guy will be a handful by then, but I’m sure Anne can take care of him alone while you are gone?”

“Yes, I was there once. There’s one mummy I remember, Seti II. It was as if I could recognize him if I saw him on the street. Let’s see, its March 10^th, we should be able to leave by April4 20^th. It is noticeably warmer already.”

Anne and Ping were listening to the whole conversation, so the word was out. They all hugged and cried and began making plans. David, Albert’s younger brother, agreed to come from Iron Mountain to help Anne with the experiments. Dominic was climbing up on anything he could get his hands on and babbling words like “Mommy” and “Daddy” as he crawled about the cabin.

They didn’t need their snowshoes as Ping and Albert pulled the sled out onto the logging road to 28. Daily melting, followed by nightly freezing, had caused the snow pack to recede to a mere eight feet. The surface was hard and crusty, allowing the cramp-ons to dig in as they took turns pulling. By noon, they reached the highway. By 1pm, they caught the tail end of the lunch crowd at Martha’s. At 4pm, their flight left for Dulles from Sawyer International. By 10pm, they met Rao Khundi in their hotel room in Reston.

“You don’t know how much this means to me,” Rao was saying. “Are you sure that your devices are turned off?”

Ping and Albert checked their ephones to make sure, then nodded. They were in Khundi’s hybrid on a side road near the Potomac because their room was likely bugged for security and the public areas under sound camera, recording their every move. Public hotels had become notorious for gathering personal information. Using a holoscan search, Ping had to periodically find and remove nude pictures of her taken by hotel security cameras from Internet files. Big Brother was a two-edged nefarious sword. Security was mandatory for all public places, but the ubiquitous Internet made personal words and movements very public. Even the wilderness was being invaded by prying eyes and ears.

He continued. “I want you to go to Cairo and absorb as much history as you can. Going as tourists is a perfect cover. My colleague, Fawzia Hussein, will get you the special access you need. The samples you acquire this time will not need refrigeration, but I’m going to have you use the same case to keep them uncontaminated and get through all the security checks. As to the other matter, I want you, Albert, to do that alone. We will prepare some tools for you and rent a brown wrapper Chevy for your trip.”

The next morning, Albert and Ping boarded the Dirigible Dayton for an Egyptian tour to Cairo. It was the best time to go, before the hoards of families with school children and summer heat. The Holy Land was in ruins. After the schism with the Palestinians had brought the Israeli State down, Muslim factions tore at the pieces, obliterating history and driving Christians out. Egypt, after a long period of bad government and alliances with the various warring parties, had emerged to capitalize on its strength—its history.

Tourism had become more than an industry in Egypt, it had become the primary source of income for its burgeoning poor population. Disney Studios had been hired and the country cleaned up for the trade. Ping and Albert arrived to a superdock surrounded by a complex rivaling Disney World. Off in the distance in the glowing desert sunset, old Cairo sprawled from escarpment to escarpment, white-bleached buildings belying the filth, black smoke rising from numerous garbage fires. Camels and donkey carts still plied the back streets. The main streets were abuzz with electrotaxis, headlights ajar from the potholes.

Instead of a dusty relic of British occupation in the center of downtown as he remembered it, the museum had been moved to an ultramodern building at the base of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza. You could still ride camels aside its entry.

For a week they took shuttles to Alexandria, Memphis, The Valley of the Kings, and Abu Simbel. Whenever they could, they left the beaten path of the primary tourist attractions for the lesser-known sites, like the Tomb of Seti II, KV 15. It appeared that this lesser known despot they were interested in had attempted to steal the burial vestments of Tutankhamen. The museum, with its millions of artifacts, was as formidable as ever. However, the Internet made it a lot easier to study and navigate nearly 8,000 years of history. Except for holograms, the mummies of the kings were off limits. Albert remembered paying an Egyptian pound to enter the Mummy Room and view the dusty remains of twenty kings in the same glass and wood display cases the British had put them in, way back in the 1880s. It was close up and personal then. The room was quiet and almost deserted the two times he went there.

The Mummy Chamber, as the attraction was called, was filled with the screams and laughter of children as holograms of various kings and queens appeared and unwrapped for their admiring fans. The Curse of the Mummy was alive and well in that room. The kids especially liked interacting with King Tut. For $20 US, at their command, he would unwind his wrappings, show them his jewels, describe what he did for fun, and even do a little dance. The Egyptian had learned to stoop to anything for the money. Serious students had to go elsewhere.

Finally, after a week of touring and study, they got to meet Dr. Fawzia Hussein at dinner. They found Fawzia as affable as his friend Rao, and eager to help them.

“We had long thought that the mummies could not be cloned. Now, Khundi gives us hope. I am glad that the baby will be born in America. If he would be born here, he would be King! The one you seek, Seti II, is somewhat of a mystery. He does have a good-looking face—for a mummy—but he appears to be younger than the man who died in 1194 BC. The priests unwrapped, repaired, and rewrapped some of the mummies, looking for gold wrapping and amulets hidden on their bodies to steal. Yes, the very priests charged with guarding the dead were thieves, as were most of the kings! It is a shame and disgrace that we are such thieves. Now we steal the tourists’ money, just like the hawkers in the market!”

Dr. Hussein composed himself. “Forgive me. I get so emotional when I think of what has been lost. We Egyptians are adaptable. That is why we have survived so long. It is just too bad that we have only the tomb of Tutankhamen to show for eight millennia of civilization. Even the Royal Mummies are suspect. Beginning with Harris and Wente’s studies of craniofacial morphology in the 1990s, confirmed by later MRIs and DNA tracking, we’ve determined that the mummy labeled Seti II is most probably the younger Thutmose II. Based on the large-jawed facial morphology of the 19^th Dynasty pharaohs, his presumed age at death, and DNA, we believe we have found the mummy you seek. His is the badly damaged, heretofore unidentified one, in the Deir el-Bahri cache that we have been studying for shistosomiasis. You are welcome to use samples from his remains.

Albert was well aware of the Shistosomiasis Research Project. The Medical Service Corporation International, of Virginia, USA, and the Egyptian Organisation for Biological and Vaccine Project (VACSERA), working with Dr. Khundi in 2006, had created a vaccine for the parasite. The biggest problem was distributing the vaccine to the estimated two billion people potentially exposed to Bilharzia. Seti must have come in contact with the snails when he spent those years commanding the army in the Delta, bathing in the Nile. What a horrible way to die. The parasite, transferred from snails in the water, traveled to the bladder, intestines, and liver, damaging their tissue. He deserved a second chance.

That night, long after the museum had closed, Ping and Albert followed Dr. Hussein through security into the large room where the Royal Mummies were kept in biologically sterile titanium containers. Under strict temperature, humidity, and atmospheric control, they were protected from further deterioration. The kings were only removed for study or to create holographic displays for the museum.

Hussein called out a command in Arabic and a container slid smoothly out from the wall. It reminded Albert of a morgue. The container, supported only at the wall seemed to be floating as it opened. They looked down on a pile of skin and bones loosely covered by disintegrating linen. “What part do you want?” Laser cutter in hand, Fawzia was asking them like they were ordering chicken.

“I don’t know. I suppose we should get both skin and bone in case one or the other helps us with the fragmentation problem.” Albert, a man who had dissected countless animals, was now a bit unsure about gathering human flesh. He looked at Ping. She just shrugged.

“Okay, I’ll take a little bit here and a little bit over here.” Almost as he was saying it, the laser cut a sizable piece of flesh and bone from the pile, and then, another, from another location. A pungent smell rose as the laser burned through. The samples were placed into the compartments in the case. In less than a week, case in hand, Albert handed it to Rao Khundi as they exited the elevator at Dulles.

Rao was beaming. Albert noticed it but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until they were in the van, headed back to the Research Site, that he finally told them.

“You know that blood from Dominic you brought us? Well we screened its DNA to be sure, and …, it’s perfect!”

“I know it’s perfect. You told me that after you got all the fragments of DNA to join together, you checked it on the Athlon array, and fixed any defective genes. Right?” Albert didn’t understand why Dom was so special.

“Well, you know that lifespan gene we’ve been looking at for many years? The correction process seems to have altered it. Now the gene allows for normal maturation, but instead of a gradual decline when all cells shut down in about 125 years, simulations show that Dominic’s cells will continue to be replaced indefinitely without decline. In other words, he’s immortal! We haven’t fully checked Wooly out yet, but he may be too.”

Albert was floored. He had often contemplated immortality since medicine had come up with remedies for almost any malady or injury. When spinal cord neurons were regrown, he began to think that anything was possible. But humans had a finite lifespan built into our genes. He never thought that he’d see the day that gap was breached. He wondered what the consequences would be? He might find out. His son was the first.

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