Cain by James Byron Huggins Read Free Book Online

he whispered. "I need my pretties."
    ***
    "This doesn't make sense," Soloman said, tossing the file onto the table. His eyes were flat. "You people were keeping oxygenated blood circulating in what, in essence, was a dead man."
    "I'm not sure that I follow you, Colonel."
    "Call me Soloman."
    "Thank you. Call me Maggie."
    "My point," Soloman continued, "is that Cain—or whatever made Cain what he was—was no longer in that body."
    "But his brain wasn't damaged."
    "No, his brain wasn't damaged – not the neurons. But a man is more than the base electrical synapse of ten billion neurons." Soloman paused, frowning. "Tell me something," he continued, "where does thought come from?"
    From her face, he knew she had no answer. "I know where you're going with this," she answered. "But I don't think a philosophical direction is going to help us."
    "Let me decide that."
    Hesitation.
    "All right," she said, finally. "Nobody's able to localize the portion of the brain that originates thought. All we know is that 'thought' is inserted into the electrochemical flow of ions at some point in the axon. That's a long nerve tendril leading out of a neuron that communicates to other neurons. Are you theorizing that Cain's mind is gone?"
    "I don't know what I'm saying. But something doesn't add up. Because you can't bring anyone back to life. It's impossible."
    "But we did it, Colonel."
    "You don't know what you did, Maggie." He didn't make his tone friendly. "All you know is that you took a dead man and made him into some kind of Frankenstein. But now it's loose and those morons that you work for expect Ben and me to stop it." He shook his head. "Why won't this HyMar virus kill him?" he continued. "Is Cain immune to the virus like he's immune to everything else?"
    She was affected by his criticism but recovered quickly. "Cain is only immune to the mutated HyMar virus that we used to alter his genetic code. He's not immune to the original Marburg. The term for it is Viral-Engineering Manipulation."
    "Sounds very benign." Soloman stared at her.
    She blinked. "The ... the main DNA segment of the Marburg virus—the single most deadly virus on the planet—is about two thousand base pairs long. The rest of the strand is devoted to replication, direction, anaphase, whatever. But the main two-thousand-base-pair strand defines the characteristics of the virus. For instance, what the virus is going to do to the cells of its host. What it will give the cells. Now, in the telephase stage of mitosis there is a point called specialization. That's where a cell says to itself, 'I'm going to be a muscle cell.' Or, 'I'm going to be a white blood cell to promote healing.' And because the mutated Marburg, or HyMar, has human DNA buffers in it, the main strand has been redesigned and re -segmented into the virus to promote healing instead of cell destruction. That's why Cain heals up almost instantly from any wound. HyMar is constantly promoting him to a state of hyper-mitosis."
    "That accounts for his healing factor," Soloman said. "What accounts for his strength? I've read this man's 201. Cain was strong before he died, but he wasn't this strong. Nobody is this strong !"
    "Cain's strength was developed through the use of the Sulijuki Forest virus. It's taken from the western forests of Uganda." Her mouth tightened as she collected her thoughts. "To truly grasp this phenomenon, you have to understand that Cain was a freak of nature even before we altered his chromosomes."
    "Why?"
    "It's not in his file, but he had an exceedingly rare XYY coding."
    "What's that?"
    "That's what's known in science as the 'superman' trait," she said. "It's almost impossible for a male to possess two of the same chromosomes, but Cain did. That's why he was so strong in life, and the main reason he was selected for this experiment. But with the Sulijuki Forest virus we managed to denature a part of the second Y chromosome and bond it strand-sight onto chromosome 14, which hyper