The spotlights made it difficult to see everyone, scattered as they were across such a wide room. “Good morning,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen of the … United Nations—or the General Assembly? Is that how I address you?” He heard a murmur from the Estonian section, and wondered what they were saying about him, and in that moment he felt something inside of him snap. He was sick of being scared, sick of being dragged around, sick of being mocked by the people who’d brought him here to help. Twelve hours ago he’d been dying by inches in a prison camp, and now he was standing at the podium of the United Nations. His stock, as Cynthia had put it, was on the rise. If he had power now, even for a minute, he was going to use it.
Lyle looked back up at the auditorium, peering into the unlit depths. “I’m sorry, can everybody come up here to the front? All close in where I can see you? I feel like I’m talking to an empty hall.”
“You are talking to an empty hall,” said Estonia.
“You, too,” said Lyle, pointing back at the Estonia delegate. “Everybody, right up front. Get friendly. If this is the last group of sane … anyone in the world, let’s at least act like it.”
“That’s not the way we do things,” said Japan. “There are rules of order we can’t expect you to understand—”
“I don’t want to understand them,” said Lyle. “You’ve been following your rules throughout this whole process and look where it’s got you.” He gestured at the vast, empty room. “I think your rules are stupid.” He stole a glance at Cynthia and saw her red-faced and fuming, but still keeping silent. You don’t have the power here, he thought at her. If not even your secretary’s afraid of you, I won’t be, either.
The delegates still hadn’t moved, and Lyle spoke again. “Come on, guys, you can do it. Right up here. Bring your little nametag plaques if you feel weird without them.” The Mexican delegate stood up and came forward, grinning wickedly at Lyle’s breach of form. “Good,” said Lyle, “there’s one. Mexico wins the prize; somebody get him a candy bar. Who’s next? Here, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to unplug the microphone and just start talking about ReBirth. Mexico’s the only one who’s going to hear any of it.” He unplugged the mic and more people came forward. Soon most of the remaining assembly members were clustered in the first few rows, twenty delegates and nearly twice that many staff members. Cynthia, Lyle noticed, was no longer fuming, and wore her standard face of arch calculation. He’d impressed her. Lyle looked away from her and scanned the group with a surge of his earlier fear.
“Wow,” said Lyle. “All in one place there’s kind of a lot of you.”
“We’ve moved our seats,” said Bangladesh. “Now stop wasting our time and talk.”
“Right,” said Lyle. “What do you want to know?”
Kenya raised his eyebrows. “You don’t have a presentation?”
“This time yesterday I was trading cigarettes for prison food,” said Lyle. “I know more about ReBirth than apparently anyone else in the world, but no, I don’t have a presentation. Ask me questions.”
“Why did you create it?” asked Germany.
“By accident,” said Lyle. Some of the delegates seemed shocked, but Lyle was past caring. “A lot of preliminary studies have been done using gene therapy to heal burns, and I was trying to use the same technology in an antiaging cream. It was a wrinkle remover.”
Kenya scowled. “You destroyed the world with a wrinkle remover?”
“Not personally, no.”
“But how does it work?” asked Tanzania. “How did it turn from a wrinkle remover to … whatever it is now?”
“It was the retrovirus,” said Lyle, and shot a quick glance at Cynthia. “That’s what I thought at first, and I was right, but it took me months to figure out exactly what was going on. See, the technology uses a plasmid to express a heat-shock protein—” He stopped with a sudden frown. “How many of you are scientists?” The delegate from Libya raised his hand, but he was the only one. “Okay,” said Lyle. “Let me see if I can translate this into normal human-ese. You all know what DNA is?” They all nodded their heads. “Do you know how DNA works?” This question met with far less confidence, and Lyle glanced around for something he could use to explain it. He spotted one of the Filipina staff members wearing a zippered sweater, and smiled at her kindly. “Excuse me, ma’am, can I borrow your sweater? Thank you. I’ll give it right back.” He walked back to the center of the group, standing in front of the podium, and zipped the sweater closed.
“A strand of DNA is like a zipper,” he said, “and all of the little teeth inside of it, all the little metal nubbins, are the blueprints it uses to build more cells. Imagine that each little nubbin is a different command: this one tells your body to make skin, this one tells it what color of skin to make, this one tells it what kind of skin to make, and so on. That’s grossly oversimplified, but you get what I mean. Now, in its normal state a strand of DNA is all zipped closed, like this sweater, so when your body wants to read those blueprints and get its new instructions, it has to zip it open.” He zipped the sweater halfway open. “When it’s open like this, another very similar strand called RNA comes in, kind of zips itself onto a little piece of the DNA, and copies it; then it can take what it’s learned and go tell the cells what to do. It’s a very stable process because the DNA and RNA both use a careful proofreading process to make sure the instructions don’t get screwed up partway through. The lotion I created uses a little chunk of self-contained DNA called a plasmid, which has just enough instructions to say ‘Hey, skin cells, produce more collagen.’ Your RNA would read it, think it was the real deal, and produce more collagen. That’s how it fought burns, and that’s how it removed wrinkles.
“Now: that entire plasmid process is overseen by a retrovirus to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. A retrovirus is kind of like RNA, but it works backward—instead of zipping up, it zips down. That’s important for later, so remember it. When it’s working correctly the retrovirus chaperones the whole transfer of information and makes sure the plasmid doesn’t do anything stupid like injure the cells, or start replicating new garbage cells without stopping, which is another way of saying ‘cancer.’ The retrovirus should be our best friend in this scenario, but that’s the great irony of it. Because it zips backward instead of forward, it bypasses all the proofreading that RNA normally goes through. This makes it extremely vulnerable to mutation, and that’s exactly what happened to ReBirth.”
Libya spoke up. “It can’t just mutate to start cloning people.”
“No it can’t,” said Lyle. “That’s what confused us for so long. What it can do, and what it did do, is mutate in such a way that it started working in the wrong direction. Instead of writing the plasmid instructions onto the human host, it started writing the human host onto the plasmid. Worse than that, it was somehow compressing the human instructions in such a way that they could be stored, in full, on a plasmid.”
“That’s two very specific mutations in a single retrovirus,” said Libya. “The odds of that are … I can’t even calculate them. They’re astronomical.”
“They are,” said Lyle, “but it only took the one. One mutant retrovirus copying DNA wouldn’t have done anything, we wouldn’t even have noticed it was there, but one mutant retrovirus aggressively rewriting every other genetic communicator it came into contact with created a cascade effect that altered the entire batch of lotion, and that batch altered every other batch it touched. Think of it like a zombie apocalypse on a molecular scale: the first retrovirus found another and said ‘you should be doing this instead,’ and then those two found two more, and then those four found four more, and every time we mixed a new batch we added more retroviruses and they got rewritten, too. That’s why no one has been able to reproduce the lotion outside of our original factory, because they were starting with fresh ingredients instead of the mutation. In our factory we started each new batch with a sample of the old, mostly as a shortcut to match the texture and consistency, so it had a chance to infect all the new lotion.”
“So if we had a sample of blank ReBirth,” said France, “we could make new lotion.”
“You could,” said Lyle. He paused, watching the delegates, surprised when they didn’t leap out of their chairs. “What, isn’t this the part where you all race back home and build up your stockpiles and glare at each other from bunkers?”
“The twenty nations still active in this assembly are beyond that,” said Zambia. “We recognize that the world has hit a tipping point, and working together is the only way we can expect to accomplish anything.”
“Which is not to say,” said Israel, “that we won’t be making new lotion. We’ll just be making it together.”
“What possible use could you have for new lotion?” asked Lyle. “I know none of you have left the building in a while, but have you at least looked out the windows? The world is ending out there—Manhattan is practically a shantytown, and the rest of the world is arguably worse. Do you know how I finally cracked the code on this retrovirus thing? I found a ReBirth user with Down syndrome—a dose of ReBirth rewrote his genes wrong, giving him one more chromosome than he was supposed to have.” He held up the sweater. “Imagine that the DNA is unzipped, and a retrovirus is zipped onto it happily rebuilding the whole thing, and while that’s happening another retrovirus shows up and starts rebuilding them both. That’s how that happened, and that’s how aggressive this retrovirus is. Virtually all of the DNA transcription in the entire body of an infected person is being performed by ReBirth instead of by the natural processes, and that means the proofreading system is gone. Our biological process is completely unregulated. The occurrences of Down syndrome and Turner syndrome and Klinefelter syndrome are up worldwide; the cancer rate is through the roof; I talked to a doctor a month ago who said he had two new cases of Wolf-Hirschhorn microcephaly spontaneously generating in adults. Name a chromosomal disorder and I’ll bet you a hundred bucks someone within a mile of this building has it.”
“But we have to face the realities of the situation,” said China, and Lyle cut him off before he could go any further.
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” said Lyle. “You have to face reality. This meeting can’t be about consolidating power or whatever you’re trying to do here.”
“We have to face the realities of the situation,” China repeated calmly. “The world isn’t just ending; in many places it has already ended. The cascading effect you saw in the retroviruses has been repeated in human society, and the effects of ReBirth are being seen in new places every day. The hundred and seventy-three nations not represented in today’s meeting have given themselves up to an arms race more frantic than the Cold War, and for which not even the strongest of us are prepared. I received word only two hours ago that Russia has declared war on my country, striking across the border to seize our mines and oil basins. It is only a matter of time before they do the same in Alaska and Canada. Any sense of global stability we once had is crumbling faster than we can even catalog it. Do you think we are here because we have something to contribute? That we have some kind of miraculous solution to put our planet back in order? We are here because we have nowhere else to go, and no hope that anything else will make a difference.”
There was a moment of shocked silence, broken only by a soft voice in the back: “Samoa agrees, but does so in a slightly more upbeat manner.”
“So why are we even here?” asked Lyle. “If nothing matters, and we can’t help anything, why have a meeting? Why bring me in to explain all this? Do you think there’s a ‘cure’ for ReBirth? There’s not. That’s not how it works—nothing can reverse it but more ReBirth, and I’ve already explained what a bad idea that would be. What’s left? What are you going to do? Why do you want ReBirth?”
“We could hit Russia with it,” said Nepal. “When they’re done with China they’ll get around to my country sooner or later.”
“If we ReBirth Russia they’ll ReBirth us back,” said Mexico. “Some of us were paying attention during the Cold War.”
“As the only nation ever actually attacked with nuclear weapons,” said Japan, “I want to remind everyone how poorly that strategy works.”
“But stockpiling ReBirth has a regenerative effect, as well,” said Zambia. “If an aggressor attacks with ReBirth, we can use our own and heal our populace before anything bad happens. Nuclear weapons never had that capability.”
“That won’t work in practice,” said Germany. “A strike that hits as quickly as São Tomé’s did wouldn’t leave any time or infrastructure to deploy the lotion defensively. And don’t forget what prompted the São Tomé attack in the first place: they had a bunch of ReBirth, and an enemy nation wanted it. Hell, a friendly nation wanted it, and became an enemy overnight. No offense, Chad.”
“Shut up.”
