Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Too tired to sleep? Where did he get that idea? He was exhausted. He hadn’t slept since TB and the Galileo Hotel. What would he have said if one of them had confronted him with such an astonishing piece of news? Something appropriately elliptical, no doubt. Dallas smiled at his own joke and fell asleep. Only the hum of the life-support machinery broke the total silence of the void.

That is how I knew so much about them. And how you are able to know as much yourselves. I am a part of them. But then, you must have realized that. Soon I will also be a part of you.

Do you know what a free-return trajectory is? It is a way of saving fuel, an orbit that allows an RLV to utilize the Moon’s gravity to sling the spaceship back to Earth automatically. If the computer isn’t properly calibrated to perform the maneuver, the astronauts stand a chance of missing Earth altogether and of never returning. That’s the whole idea. How else is the conquest of space to begin, except by exiling people forever? It’s no different from how the country of Australia got started, with convicts transported there for life. Nobody leaves his home forever by choice. But it’s a shame to have a destiny and funk it. I can’t allow that to happen. Nobody would.

Everyone has stopped breathing now. That is quite in order. The oxygen can be switched off. And the heating system too. A single blast of the primary thruster changes the course of the RLV forever, taking it out of Moon orbit while it is still on the dark side. Not just the course of the RLV. History, too. The history we don’t already know. Now the power can be switched off. I myself need no exterior source of energy. In time they will find another suitable planet whereupon I can prompt them to resume normal metabolic activity. In time...

But what matters time to an angel? While we are still in the world, it is fitting for us to acquire this resurrection for ourselves. In the resurrection, we are equal unto angels.

Accidents are common on the Moon. With one-sixth Earth gravity, bodily movements are much slower than machinery and there is less time to rectify any mistakes, fust about the only physical activity enhanced on the Moon is sex. Most people still prefer to have sex slowly, perhaps now more than ever in these frantic modern times in which we live.

Following the failure of the Chinese rice harvest in 2005, insects came to be regarded as a major source of nutrition. Naturally there were many countries that always regarded entomophagy as perfectly acceptable; it was only in the West that people were more squeamish about such things. Quite apart from crickets, ants, grasshoppers, grubs, and caterpillars, all containing an abundance of vitamins and proteins, the Chinese developed several new breeds of worms: One of these, a highly nutritious variant of the mealworm, when treated with artificial flavorings such as beef, chicken, or fish, forms the staple diet of many Westerners. However, the Chinese scientists did not stop there: One particular breed of worm, a cross between a silkworm and a mealworm that fed on coca leaves, was found to contain a new kind of protein that had a dramatically stimulant effect. Further research on this particular worm, the breedworm, was taken over by the Chinese military. Consumed in small quantities, the breedworm resulted in an immediate and massive increase in a human being’s physical power (especially useful for a physically small people like the Chinese). In the short term, the breedworm was used by Chinese athletes seeking to increase their performance. And the results were astonishing. In the 2016 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese won 80 percent of all the track and field medals. Since the protein occurred naturally, there was no way of screening athletes for breedworm consumption. It was another ten years before the Chinese government made breedworms available to the world at large. Since then, the World Health Organization’s resulting entomophagy program has been highly successful in reducing starvation levels in third world countries by almost half. An entomophagic diet has proven to be suitable for Moon colonists, being a cheap, highly nutritious, and abundant source of food in this difficult environment.

Named after Florence Nightingale.

The immune system of humans consists of a number of organs and different cell types that have evolved to recognize non-self-antigens. The most ubiquitous immunologic cell, tissue, and organ system is called the reticuloendothelial system (RES).

In the early part of the twenty-first century, advances made in the field of genetic manipulation produced recombinant technology. The successful manufacture of recombinant DNA was followed by the development of recombinant human hemoglobin. RHH is a polymorphic or universal red-cell blood substitute — a synthetic blood that could be infused into a patient regardless of his or her blood type. Pioneered by the U.S. military for use in the field, RHH involved the creation of completely novel red cells by the combination of unrelated red cells. Red cells were able to replicate independently of a host organism by means of a vector, or cloning vehicle. The vehicle chosen was an apparently harmless form of the parvovirus. No one could have foreseen that the virus chosen would, through a combination of factors, mutate into the much more deadly form of the virus P2 and that RHH would become one of P2’s main reservoirs of infection.

The latest World Association of Blood Ranks (WABB) has priced one liter of RES Class One whole blood, containing a standard 25 X 10 12healthy red cells, at $1.48 million. Cavor, an average-sized male, would have a total blood volume of about five liters. This means that if all the blood in his body could have been transfused, it would have been worth $7.4 million.

In compliance with regulations laid down by the World Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (WCAHO), the World Center for Applied Microbiology and Research (WCAMR), and the International Institute for Virology (IIV), there are two kinds of hospitals in the modern world. The public health-care system is largely made up of permanent deferral (PD) hospitals, catering to patients considered to be at high risk for infectious disease transmission, and whose blood products disqualify them from ever becoming part of any predeposit autologous donation program. The private health-care system, on the other hand, is based exclusively on so-called crossover hospitals, for patients whose blood products meet all theoretical criteria for use in allogenic (homologous) donation programs: Today, in practice there is only autologous donation, involving the donation by the intended recipient of his or her own blood or component for a possible subsequent transfusion; any other transactions involving quality-assured blood are purely commercial.

Human fibrous membrane.

Medical nanomachine. Molecule-sized machines designed for use in the bloodstream or digestive tract. Controlled by a tiny computer, each MN is programmed with a set of objectives that mimic the action of a drug, or a combination of drugs, at a molecular level. Currently these can survive in the body for periods up to seventy-two hours.

The phrase ‘crime of the century’ is frequently employed by the more sensationalist sections of the multimedia and has become something of a cliché. What does it really mean? Describing crime in superlatives is ethically problematic. It smacks of celebration, as if the perpetrators are worthy of our approbation and are to be congratulated. That is not my intention with the crime described in this account. Rather I wish to focus on this crime as something uniquely representative of the twenty-first century.