“Please don’t kill the messenger,” I heard him mutter. And then he looked directly at a number of us and in a much stronger voice said, “As you probably suspect Dr. Schein they used a retrovirus because they wanted to affect your DNA. To this point the Noridians had been careful not to bombard your planet with asteroids or do anything else that could leave a long term signature pointing to their interference. Even the evidence of multiple nuclear blasts disappears over time, but a virus can mutate and potentially become deadly for all primates. The last thing the Noridians needed was a time bomb of engineered viral destruction waiting to attack the next dynasty that happened along.
“So instead they chose to be much more subtle. Your planet already had a history of evolutionary divergence and the Noridians were quite skilled in genetic manipulation. They simply altered the eukaryotic DNA replication enzymes so that Earth life could no longer replicate the sequences present at the ends of the chromosomes. To offset this, they added telomeres to the ends of those same chromosomal strands as well as an enzyme called telomerase. So now when your cells replicate, the DNA information lost at the end of the strands are only telomeres and you have telomerase to replace it in critical cells.”
“Oh my God,” said Julie.
I quickly looked around for Toni because this was her specialty and I wanted to get a read on her reaction but when my eyes found her I realized that she was staring at the ground.
“What does that mean, in English?” I heard Major Reagan say rather sternly.
“It means Major that the telomere/telomerase addition was only a Band-Aid, and by definition Band-Aids are meant to be temporary. In plain English, it means that the Noridians artificially and significantly shortened the lifespan of every single life-form on planet Earth—including Homo sapiens.”
Chapter 27
Major Mathew Reagan, US Army
It just keeps getting better.
If what Silva was saying is correct the Noridians attempted genocide and that means war under any definition but why had their strategy changed? What were they up to now?
Also, why hadn’t their plan to shorten our lifespan worked? I didn’t understand half of what was being discussed but I was pretty sure that this genetic thing was supposed to have wiped us out. We were still here and how much older were we supposed to be anyway?
The Coridians seemed to be on our side; why? What did they want from us? And even though it seemed almost trivial compared to everything else I wanted to know how Captain Silva had infiltrated the Earth Team, let alone the US Army.
I had always prided myself on being able to handle stress. I had both led and lost men in battle. Those responsibilities will be with me forever but I will not shirk from my duty; I hold no doubts that I would do it again with the strong moral conviction that I was upholding my sworn oath to the Constitution of the United States.
The military puts you through a crucible; if you can’t handle the pressure they cull you from command quickly. Learning how to handle that pressure had years ago cost me my wife; one of the bigger errors in my life that I had learned to take responsibility for. Fortunately, the military is also very good at eventually teaching you how to handle that pressure by giving you rigorous training in almost every possible scenario; almost every scenario. There was no way to have anticipated or trained for what we were experiencing now.
I think every head of household knows the weight of being responsible for others. My father was a small business owner and the whole family looked up to him. Cousins and in-laws would come to him to make everything right; to advise them and save them from folly.
I remember a period of a few years when my father lost his business. He started and failed several times before he got another one up and running but he was still there for everyone through the process. It wasn’t until years later that I understood he had almost lost everything and what it had cost him personally. Looking back I realize that this was when his hair went grey and his health first started suffering, but he did his duty.
In the end I think that’s the choice all of us make; we can do what we know is right, or not. I had a responsibility to my team, to my country, and to my planet. It would be easy to ‘tuck tail’ and run home to Earth; there would be no shortage of politicians willing to take command and make all the decisions, but I was on the front line and people were depending on me. It really was that simple.
There was a lot more we needed to know; whether we were going to like hearing it or not.
Echoing my thoughts perfectly Iron Jaw spoke up, “Well something obviously went wrong; we’re still here. How much shorter were our lives supposed to be?”
Letting out a deep breath Captain Silva said, “The retrovirus worked as designed. We believe it probably took several generations for all organisms to adapt but Earth DNA has been changed and the RNA from the retrovirus is no longer present as a ‘smoking gun’.
“The Noridians thought that if Homo sapiens lived short lives they wouldn’t have time to be creative and advance technologically. You need to understand that galaxy-wide, things move very slowly; civilizations develop slowly. If you drastically cut everyone’s lifespan then you theoretically cut everyone’s ability to progress. The Noridians fully expected mankind to stagnate and die off.”
“But that didn’t happen,” I said.
“No sir,” replied Silva. “Instead, you Earthers have become more dynamic, almost frantic in your rush to achieve things during your lifespan. It is totally the opposite of what anyone would have expected and that is why we became so fascinated with you when we came here almost three hundred years ago.”
“The Law of Unintended Consequences,” I heard Dr. Spencer mutter.
“Captain,” I said. “Are you telling us that we’re the only people in the galaxy that don’t live as long as Coridians or Noridians?”
“Yes sir; that is what I’m saying.”
“Captain, just how long do you live?”
“Theoretically we’re not really sure. People die, quite often in fact, just not from what you call ‘old age’. Typically a person in this galaxy can expect to live for thousands of years.”
Someone whispered, “How old are you?”
“In Earth years I am one-thousand two hundred seventy-nine years of age,” He responded. “Pretty young.”
We eventually took another break, and while Captain Silva was giving a small team I had assembled a tour of the belowdecks portion of the ship that we’d never seen Iron Jaw, Julie, Dr. Spencer, Dr. Decker, and Dr. Spelini were gathered in my quarters.
I started with my usual ritual, “Comments?”
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Dr. Decker immediately said. “But I’m pissed off. Apparently humanity has been manipulated and screwed with over and over by these Noridians and they’re trying to do it again.”
“Just to be clear,” I said. “Exactly what is it that we feel the Noridians are currently trying to pull over on us?”
I felt pretty clear on that issue myself but I wanted to not only make sure we were on the same page, I knew that if we didn’t perfectly pin down the Noridian motives we didn’t have any hope of understanding the Coridian motives.
“They want to own us,” Dr. Spencer said.
“It’s just ownership on a different level than what we’re used to thinking of. Maybe a better way of saying it is that they want to own our intellectual rights. If we’re under the Noridian flag then every invention, every innovation, every idea we have they will get credit for.”
“But what ideas are we realistically going to have that can benefit a society that is hundreds of thousands of years old?” said Julie.