Chapter 276: FRB (4)

“They’re taking the hit from everywhere,” said James Holdren.

James Holdren and Director Harris were discussing their strategy in President Campbell’s Oval Office.

“We didn’t see that coming,” Campbell said, chuckling as he watched Song Ji-Hyun and Yassir’s announcement on a monitor. “This makes things a little easier. The Nicaraguan government’s attack started a fire, and these two are pouring oil on it. Now, we just have to pressure Heagan’s cabinet members one by one.”

“And Lofair,” Holdren added.

“I’m a little worried about the CIA, though...” Campbell said, glancing at Harris.

“It’s alright. People will now realize that the power of financial authority has even reached the agencies directly under the President,” Harris said.

“You might be attacked,” Campbell said.

“It’s fine. It’s my fault. I was also going to kill Isaiah Franklin after getting some information from her. I didn’t realize you would fight Lofair, sir.”

Campbell nodded, looking apologetic.

“Harris. How is Isaiah Franklin doing?”

“She’s out of the woods, but she’s in no condition to testify,” Harris replied.

“And she’s not cured yet, as Doctor Song and Yassir say, so we don’t know when she’s going to die?”

“Yes.”

“If Isaiah Franklin dies, it might change the dynamic of this fight,” Campbell said.

“Should we bring Doctor Ryu to the United States?” Harris asked.

*

“I’m going to go back to the U.S. for a bit, and then I might have to go to the Netherlands,” Young-Joon said.

“The Netherlands?”

Doctor Koo Yeon-Sung, the deputy director of the Next Generation Hospital, seemed a little taken aback by the unusual location.

“That’s where the International Court of Justice is, so I will probably go there to testify for the Nicaraguan government,” Young-Joon said.

“I see.”

Koo Yeon-Sung nodded.

“You are always such a busy man.”

“Well, everyone at our company and the Next Generation Hospital is busy, since we’re pioneering the future of medicine.”

“Would you like to see some patients before you leave?” Koo Yeon-Sung asked.

“Patients?”

“There are some cured patients, some still undergoing treatment, some waiting... But they all want to see you, Mr. Ryu.”

“...”

“You’ve been doing research all this time, and you haven’t met with patients, have you? This whole visiting hospital setup with six hundred doctors and an entire country is pretty novel. Wouldn’t you like to take a look at it as the director?”

“Well, I am curious, but...”

Young-Joon smiled a little embarrassedly and declined.

“It’s alright. I didn’t really do anything here. The Next Generation Hospital doctors were the ones who examined patients, and the A-GenBio scientists were the ones who designed the stem cells and Cas9.”

Koo Yeon-Sung smiled. Young-Joon really was a humble person, as well as a principled man.

“It’s doctors who see patients, not businessmen or scientists like me,” Young-Joon said.

“Alright. When are you leaving for the U.S.?”

“If everything goes well, probably the day after tomorrow.”

Young-Joon returned to his lab. He organized all the data of the TALEN manipulation and put it in his bag.

‘I trust my doctors and staff, but I’m just saying this out of unnecessary worry,’

Young-Joon said to Rosaline.

‘Can you scan the patients in this ward using Simulation Mode?’

—You want to see their prognosis?

‘Since I’ll be gone a while.’

Rosaline popped out of Young-Joon’s body and climbed up onto the lab bench. She crouched and closed her eyes, and her red hair floated up.

[Simulation Mode Activated.]

There were around two hundred thousand people here, including the patients, volunteers, and the people who were enjoying the festival. Of those, twenty-three thousand two hundred ninety-one of them were currently patients. Fourteen thousand five hundred fifty-nine of them were treated; most of them were hospitalized with a prescription for medication, while others were treated with A-GenBio’s personalized therapies from various pipelines in order of urgency.

Eight hundred forty-two patients with chronic neurological conditions received stem cell therapy. These patients suffered from glaucoma, carpal tunnel syndrome, Guillain-Barré syndrome, diabetic neuropathy, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, spinal cord paralysis, and more. Some were cured, and most were fascinated by their progress.

Artificial organs—hearts, lungs, pancreata, livers, and kidneys—were designed and transplanted into two hundred eleven patients.

Some of them had genetic conditions: for example, some of them suffered from congenital cirrhosis because they were born through genetic engineering at Groom Lake. To create an artificial liver, the patient’s own cells had to be de-differentiated and then differentiated into hepatocytes, which wasn’t easy because all of the patient’s cells already had the problematic mutation.

In this situation, they had to take the patient’s tissue, de-differentiate the cells into stem cells, correct the mutation using Cas9, genetically test whether the corrections were made, and then induce differentiation into liver tissue. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but now A-GenBio and the doctors at the Next Generation Hospital were able to do it quite easily. This was the concentration of cutting-edge technology.

—There’s the polyomavirus.

Rosaline observed through Simulation Mode.

“What?”

Young-Joon’s eyes widened.n

—A significant portion of the patients here are infected with the polyomavirus.

“...”

—Come to think of it, Yassir probably had a lot of time before he made that announcement, so he could have released it here beforehand since we were both too busy working on DNA research to pay attention to that.

“It’s where most of the artificial organ transplants, stem cell therapy, and gene editing work are done, so if the virus was released here, it would easily penetrate deeply instead of staying near the respiratory tract. Did he come in disguised as a volunteer or a tourist and release the virus?” Young-Joon asked.

—I think so. And it’s mostly a virus that carries morality genes. It’s similar to the one that infected Lagba.

“Is it likely to cause any safety issues?”

—It’s not a virus that normally causes disease. Lagba was a very, very unusual case.

“Yeah...”

—Speaking of which, I didn’t know Yassir and Doctor Song would do that.

Rosaline seemed surprised.

“Yassir probably did it to save Doctor Ref, but I was really surprised by Doctor Song. I thought she went home.”

Young-Joon flinched.

“Wait. It’s been weeks since I came to Nicaragua. If she hasn’t gone back to Korea, what has she been doing?”

*

After she and Yassir made a major statement to the media, Song Ji-Hyun went to a small diner in suburban Washington by herself. She sat for a while until it was time.

A fat woman walked into the restaurant and sat down across from Song Ji-Hyun. Her hat was pressed down, and she was wearing a mask and glasses.

“Thank you for coming forward, Doctor Elsie,” Song Ji-Hyun said.

“I told you I wasn’t going to do it, but things got interesting,” said Elsie after ordering an apple pie and a Coke.

“Doctor Elsie, are you going to come to the Netherlands with me and testify?”

“I suppose so. The Lofair family’s fortune began in the Bank of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and maybe it’ll end there, too.”

“You don’t do drugs anymore?” Song Ji-Hyun asked.

“I quit.”

“You can just quit like that?”

“It’s not like I liked it in the first place.”

Song Ji-Hyun began to reminisce about the first time she met Elsie. The unusual meeting between the two scientists was a few weeks back.

*

After seeing off Young-Joon at the airport for his flight to Nicaragua, Song Ji-Hyun listened to Yassir’s eloquent persuasion. She was going to refuse, as Yassir seemed shady, and she didn’t want to work with him.

Then, Yassir changed his tactics and gave her Elsie’s home address in America.

“This is Isaiah Franklin’s biological mother and a former employee of A-GenBio’s Life Creation Department. She’s the one who recently met with Doctor Ryu in secret, and that’s probably where Doctor Ryu heard about it and became interested in the scandal.”

Song Ji-Hyun became very curious about Elsie. She felt a little uneasy after sending Young-Joon to Nicaragua alone, but it felt like meeting with Elsie would give her a clearer idea of what she needed to do.

She went to the address Yassir had given her and opened the door, but what she saw inside shocked her. The house was almost like a garbage dump. Drugs and alcohol filled the room, and Elsie had gained a lot of weight and looked very haggard due to malnutrition and addiction.

“Doctor Song?”

Elsie recognized Song Ji-Hyun’s face and made a strange expression. It looked like a lot of things were on her mind.

“Are you here because of Rosaline? Or Doctor Ref?”

“... I want to help Doctor Ryu. Yassir told me to come here, and he said you would tell me about Isaiah Franklin.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you about my daughter and Lofair. Come in.”

Elsie cleaned her messy house a little and told Song Ji-Hyun about Groom Lake Air Force Base. Elsie knew everything.

After hearing the story, Song Ji-Hyun had one question. Elsie Franklin was the biggest witness of the Groom Lake Air Force Base, the person who knew everything that happened, and the one who kept Isaiah Franklin alive. How was she, the only scientist who ever confronted Lofair, still alive? Why didn’t Lofair kill her?

Elsie’s answers were more confusing and shocking than her family situation.

“Isaiah had been hanging out with Palestinian rebels since he was thirteen. She’s won big prizes at international conferences and stuff, and she was offered a scholarship at a university in Europe, but she declined it and joined the rebels,” Elsie said.

“Maybe that was for the best because who knows when she would have been killed if she stayed on the bright side. It’s better if she’s a Palestinian rebel who’s at complete odds with the international community.”

“So you sent Isaiah there, and you went back to the U.S.?” Song Ji-Hyun asked.

“Yes. I got a teaching job at New York University. I started doing research again, publishing papers and all that. I went back into academia,” Elsie said. “At that point, I was thinking that Lofair could send someone to kill me at any moment. And I didn’t care because I was tired of everything. But it was a drug dealer who came to me.”

“A drug dealer?”

“You think I became like this because of a failed career?”

Elsie burst out laughing and pointed to the drugs and alcohol bottles rolling around the room.

“Isaiah Franklin became Doctor Ref and joined the rebels, and if she was to attack someone, it would most likely be Lofair,” Elsie said. “Lofair needed a hostage to stop Isaiah.”

“Then...”

“He needed me to threaten Isaiah without provoking her, but he wasn’t comfortable with letting me stay in academia since he would be in trouble if I built up a reputation and exposed him.”

The gang that the drug dealer brought grabbed Elsie, who resisted, and forcibly injected her arm with drugs. They tied her up and then injected her at regular intervals for weeks, leaving her addicted.

“I was fired from the university, of course, and the funny thing is, the dealer paid me when I did the drugs they gave me. That was when I realized that I can’t go back to academia now, and I started doing drugs partly because I wanted to and partly because they made me,” Elsie said. “At this point, no one would listen to me even if I talked about Groom Lake because it would just be junkie bullshit.”

*

Crunch.

Elsie took a bite of her apple pie. That sound brought Song Ji-Hyun back from reminiscence.

“Doctor Song,” Elsie said.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t ask you before because I was out of it, but how much do you know about Rosaline?”

“Rosaline?”

“You know, did Doctor Ryu...”

“Oh! Doctor Ryu’s niece?” Song Ji-Hyun said with a bright smile.

“Niece?”

“Aren’t you talking about Doctor Ryu’s niece who lives in the U.S.? She’s about this tall, smart, pretty, and she has red hair.”

“... What?”

Elsie looked extremely confused.