CHAPTER 2: The Human Genome Project, Heterochromatin and the Food of the Gods

 

Fighting

“Is this about the fight at the gym, sir?” I asked Mr. Daimon. “I had nothing to with it. I was at the cafeteria. You ask around – I’m sure lots of people will say they saw me.”

The vice principal shook his head. “No, this isn’t about that,” he said. “I called you in for something else.” He sat down as well. “Miss Cleo, your history and homeroom teacher, tells me you are quite an intelligent, studious, and polite young man.”

I shrugged. “If she says so, sir.”

“And that you get along quite well with the other kids, not to mention being very popular among the girls.”

I shrugged again.

“And the boys, too…”

I looked at him with an eyebrow raised. “What did you mean by that?” I asked querulously.

“I’ve been told the boys also like you, too. If you know what I mean.” He made a peremptory gesture. “Don’t get me wrong – I’m not judging. So long as you’re careful and don’t hurt any of the other kids, I don’t care.”

I was starting to get irritated. “I’m not gay, sir, if that’s what you’re implying. Is it my fault your kids are all homos?”

“That’s uncalled for, Val,” he said. “I’m not saying anything about your sexual orientation, or your schoolmates’ orientation. But it remains a fact that a lot of the girls, AND the boys, are sweet on you. You can’t deny it. It’s all over the junior class.”

I looked at him, troubled. The adults see it, too, apparently – that gave me some relief. It wasn’t just in my head. “… I… I don’t know, sir… it’s not as if I’m encouraging it. At least not with the guys. And I’m not gay! I’m not into guys! I like girls. It’s not my fault that they like to come on to me! I’m not sending out any signals if you know what I mean, or I don’t think so, at least. So I don’t understand it. I don’t act weird or dress weird or do weird things… At least I don’t think I do…”

He gave me an understanding, commiserating look. “No, you don’t. I’m sorry to hear that, Val.”

“But it’s not like they fight or hurt me. What happens, mostly is they fight over me.”

He looked at me, evaluating. “Even the girls?”

“Well, the girls don’t fight – physically, at least. It’s more like they’re being snarky or bitchy and would insult each other – like that. But, yeah, they fight over me. Just not in a physical way.

“As for the guys… well, there’ve been at least a dozen times when it’s gotten to blows… I’ve even broken up a couple of those fights. I don’t understand it. Those are worse, I think – people get hurt, I mean actually, physically get hurt.”

“Were you hurt those times when you had to break up the fight?”

“Well, no. I’m stronger than I look.”

He looked at me in that way again. “Thank the gods for that.”

Questions

“I don’t understand why they have to be like that,” I said. “Why can’t people just get along?” I heard what I just said in my head. I sounded so… lame.

“I might be able to explain,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Ms Cleo said you were smart. Let’s just see how much.”

“Huh?” I repeated.

“Do you know about the Human Genome Project?”

“Yes, sir.” What a non sequitur, I thought. And I knew it - a quiz. These guys are really taking our test SAT scores super-seriously, because of the scholarships at stake, maybe.

“Tell me about the Human Genome Project.”

Tests, tests, and more tests… “Well, sir, the Human Genome Project was an international research project to map out the base pairs that make up the human DNA.”

“Why was this important?”

“One big reason for it was that this would help in finding the genetic roots of disease and then developing treatments.”

He nodded. “How about Bletchley Park and the Second World War? Do you know anything about that?”

Wow. That’s another pretty big non-sequitur. “You mean the Enigma Machine, Alan Turing, and all that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not much, Mr. Daimon. I knew that World War 2 codebreakers, based out of Bletchley Park and led by Alan Turing, broke the Germans’ secret code, which was generated using their Enigma cipher machines.”

“Good, good. How about Dr. Hephaestus and the Golden Theory?”

That was a stumper. “Ah, no, sir.”

“How about the Lelantos Corporation.”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t, sir.”

“That’s okay. I’d be surprised if you’d heard of any of them. One last thing – do you know what the ‘Kodikos Ton Theon’ is?”

I shook my head.

“Okay. Let’s shift gears. Do you know the background of our school?”

“Well, sir, I know that Delos High is run by the Delos School Foundation, and is funded by the Aristotle Endowment from Europe…”

“And?”

“… and that the endowment is dedicated to quality education for young people, and they do it through training programs subsidized by the endowment.”

“How do you know this?”

“Well, my folks got an email, inviting me to apply for a high school program – a scholarship - and all this detail was in the email…”

“Just like all our students. Tell me, what made you and your folks decide to accept the scholarship?”

“Well, it’s free and it subsidizes everything. My folks won’t need to pay for anything, and if I make the grade, I get to go to any college of my choice anywhere in the country for free.”

“I would have assumed your folks would be very suspicious of such an email, unsolicited and out of the blue…”

“You’re telling me! But Dad and I – we did our best to confirm if this was legit or if it was a scam. Needless to say, it wasn’t a scam. The Board of Education confirmed it, actually, and we checked out the school itself. And I was seriously thinking of quitting my old school anyway, so this might just be it.”

“Quitting your old school?”

“Well, let me just say my teachers said I was a very disruptive influence, and I didn’t want to be the cause of anything like that… I wasn’t that happy there, sir, and my grades were starting to get affected…”

“I see…”

I was starting to get exasperated. “Mr. Daimon, what’s this all about?”

“Well, let me tell you.”

Explanations

Apparently, according to Mr. Daimon, The Delos School Foundation of Chicago was, indeed, run by the Aristotle Endowment based in Athens, Greece. Delos was one of ten around the globe run by the Endowment, which included secondary schools / high schools in Saint John (in New Brunswick, Canada), London, Athens, Viterbo (that’s an Italian city near Rome), Cape Town, Kyoto, Seoul, Amsterdam, and Melbourne (the Melbourne one was the smallest school among the ten).

These ten high schools had good reputations and their graduates had good academic records, but they deliberately did their best to keep under the public's radar. How the Endowment’s schools selected their students was a mystery, and it seemed to really be random, but part of the vetting process for candidates included a medical examination – not exactly normal but not unheard of, especially after the global COVID pandemic. However, that medical exam wasn’t just pro forma – Mr. Daimon said it was actually the main part of the vetting process. Because the DNA profiles of the candidates were the CENTRAL reason for their selection.

Back during World War II, the various eugenics programs of the Nazis revealed that there were certain characteristics among the people in Europe that the Nazis found desirable. After the war, these programs were distilled and refined by certain people among the Allies, this time including all the people that the Nazis didn’t use in their programs due to their off-kilter world views, and they came to the same conclusions – that much of the global population had these “special qualities” that aren’t known by mainstream science. The ethics of the Nazi programs were… questionable, but the movers of the new program had other more altruistic goals – this new program wasn’t about eliminating certain races now or such, or of creating a master race, but was about discovering cures to certain things that ailed the human race – cancer, for example, and various diseases and conditions. With the discovery the base sequence of nucleic acids, and the mechanisms of DNA, the new program went into full speed, and in as little as six months, they started zooming in on the undeniable fact that the roots of many of humanity’s problems were genetic in nature and that these might be built-in to the natural human condition.

Mr. Daimon then abruptly changed topics.

In the fifties, after the new program had been underway for a few years, priests and monks in the New Saint Dionysios Monastery in Greece took from the original Saint Dionysios Monastery (which the new one replaced) several artifacts and relics, for preservation and display. Among the most ancient of these relics, there was something called the “Kodikos Ton Theon,” or the God Codecs or, literally translated, the “Code of the Gods.” It was made up of several flat tablets of granite - actually, forty in all - that bore letters and symbols from the Fayum Alphabet, an ancient writing system that even predated ancient Greek writings. But as much as they tried, the scientists, linguists, philologists, and archeologists who took interest couldn’t make head or tail of it. This puzzled Val, though, as it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Delos High, but Mr. Daimon continued.

Later on, in the late eighties, a Greek scientist working at the American NIH named Dr. Hephaestus became part of what eventually became the Human Genome Project, and he had heard of the Kodikos. Needless to say, he was Greek, with a name that harkened back to ancient Greek mythology. Perhaps because of this, he had taken a keen interest in ancient Greece and ancient Greek mythology. So, naturally, he was interested in the Kodikos.

After an in-depth though amateurish analysis of pictures of the Kodikos (he didn’t have access to the actual stone tablets), he made an intuitive leap – that the Kodikos were actually a DNA map – ten DNA maps etched in code onto forty stone tablets the size of Apple iPads. It wasn’t surprising that he broke the code – he was a geneticist, after all, and was working with the HGP, so the pairs of symbols seemed a natural conclusion. At least to him – not necessarily to others.

Originally, he thought that it used a kind of code. After talking with some people who worked in Bletchley Park during World War II, he was told that it wasn’t some secret code – it was just written using an ancient language. The folks he talked to were pretty old by then, so he doubted their opinions. But he checked it out, and they were right. He then made a translated version of these DNA maps and published a paper on it. They weren’t complete DNA maps, but

But weeks after the publication of his paper, Dr. Hephaestus quietly went missing, and his article mysteriously disappeared from the records of the few scientific journals that deigned to publish his obscure paper. Likewise, most references to the Kodikos disappeared from public sources. Sure, some people would have copies of the actual paper as well as material about the Kodikos tablets, but no one really paid attention to the article and it was soon forgotten, while the tablets were at best a vaguely interesting artifact. If one went to the publications’ offices, they wouldn’t remember having published it nor even have records about it. It was an obscure scientific paper, after all.

Months later, the doctor’s car was found at the bottom of a ravine in California. Though no remains were found, the authorities concluded that the doctor had died from this terrible car accident.

A year after that, the Aristotle Endowment was founded.

- - - - - - - -

Mr. Daimon revealed that the whole point of the Aristotle Endowment was to find individuals that had DNA maps similar to the partial maps Dr. Hephaestus “discovered,” and to observe and test these individuals in a fully controlled environment - without letting them know they were being observed and tested. They weren’t expecting exact matches, of course – finding very similar maps was very unlikely – but what they were interested in were just the heterochromatin portions of their DNA code. Heterochromatin was very gene-poor and were still being studied, but it’s known that one of its primary functions was their ability to silence euchromatic gene expression. As such, it had the ability to control the expression of DNA code, which touches on epigenetics.

Large parts of the heterochromatin portions of the ten partial DNA maps in the Kodikos were practically the same among all ten, and it was these that the Endowment concentrated on: so those parts of the DNA maps of all of the recruited Delos’ students were very similar to these portions in the Kodikos maps – close but not exactly the same, since a 100% map wouldn’t be statistically possible. Furthermore, it was difficult to match since the portion of the code that matches varies in their location in the chain.

However, Mr. Daimon said that instead of the heterochromatin portions of my code just being similar, it was an exact match to those from one of the Kodikos maps (specifically, the second map of the ten). I was the first one that they found that had a section of their DNA match exactly one of the Kodikos codes. Up till then, they were just happy to get similar codes. My exact match was almost an impossibility. The significance of this made me very important to them.

They originally thought I only had a match for the common components of the ten maps, so I was offered a spot in Delos. But as they ran a full evaluation, and my DNA was evaluated against each of the ten Kodikos maps, I had various percent matches with each, varying between fifty and sixty-five (with a couple that even had an eighty-five percent match). But on the very last map they tested for, I had a full match.

Aside from the Kodikos, there were also several green metal plates among the relics inside the Saint Dionysios Monastery which the monks of the new monastery couldn’t recover – apparently, someone else beat them to it - these plates were actually found long before World War 2. There were ancient-Greek age bronze plates on which ancient Greek writing was etched, which was like a story written in epic poem form (which was supposedly the style preferred by the ancients). And these “poems” talked about how the ancient deities of Greek legend sought to preserve their godly lineage from the ravages of time, and from mongrelization with mortal man.

The tale etched into these plates (those who found them called them the “Golden Theory”) wasn’t a story that was part of the pantheon of stories known from Greek mythology. Mr. Daimon said that it was a story about the god Hephaestus – the mythical god of fire and the forge, and his wife Aphrodite – the most beautiful among all the gods. The story was about the coming of the end of the Gods, where, because of the vicissitudes of time, the gods would “go away” (that was all that was said about it – they used the Greek word, “fyge”), so the two created or invented an elixir or something like that, which the people at the Endowment said was most probably the legendary “food of the gods,” that, in the fullness of time, mortal men that are blessed with godlike attributes can become the resurrection of the race of gods when they “imbibe” of the elixir, and the race of Olympus will again walk the Earth.

It was the interpretation of the people from the Endowment that the godlike “attributes” referred to were their ancestry – if mortals who had Olympians among their ancestry were given that elixir, whatever that was, their recessive Olympian genetics would express themselves, and they would transform into gods. As to how to find these mortals, the plates referred to the Kodikos, but then the Kodikos were only found years later…

- - - - - - - -

I listened to Mr. Daimon. He had talked for what felt like hours! Sure enough, when I looked at my watch, classes had been long over already.

“Sir?” I said. I was about to tell him about the time. Mr. Daimon noticed me looking at my watch, so he lifted a peremptory hand.

He lifted his phone’s receiver and called the school principal. “Geoff,” he said, “I’m with Val right now. No, we’re not done yet. Call his folks and tell them he’ll be in school for a while more. Tell them anything you want – let’s just not get him in trouble at home. Okay? … Great. Oh, that’s right. Yes, thanks for reminding me. Tell them we’ll eat here in my office and bring it here. Thirty minutes, maybe. Do it now.”

He hung up and looked at me. “You’re all set at home. Your folks won’t need to worry. Also, in case I take too much time to finish up, I just sent out for some food.”

I looked at him goggle-eyed. No one talks to our principal that way! Especially the vice principal!

“So. Any questions?”

I shook my head and, in my mind, I returned to the incredible story he told me. So, if what he said was true, then I’m going to be a god? And all I need is some injection of this “food of the gods?” Or was it actual food? Do I just drink it or something? But then how can these people believe this crazy story!

“You sincerely believe this crap?” I asked.

Mr. Daimon laughed uproariously, and it took him some time to recover. “Ah, Val!” he said but had to stop and try to get a hold of himself.

“Ah, Val…” he said again and wiped his eyes.

I folded my arms and waited.

“I understand,” he said. “Can’t blame you for questioning my story, but, yes, it’s all true.”

He looked into my face. “But you don’t believe it,” he said. “Like I said, can’t blame you.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a big, old-style thumb drive which was the length and width of a stick of chewing gum. He walked to the TV mounted against one wall of his office, plugged the stick into the side of the TV, went back to his chair, and got out a remote control from his desk.

He switched the TV on, and as video and pictures were flashed onto the screen, Mr. Daimon explained.

“Here you see the original Kodikos. It’s kept in the main office of the Endowment in Athens.” On the screen were displayed forty stone tablets, each the size of the original Apple iPad. On the face of each were rows of paired symbols or letters. At the bottom center of each plate was a small phrase. I couldn’t read them, of course.

“We have grouped the tablets into ten sets of three to five tablets each,” he said, “and the reason we were able to group them was because each tablet had a name at the bottom. And you’d be surprised at the names.”

I looked at him, my interest piqued. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. This first set of four tablets, for example, bears the name ‘Hephaistos.’” He pointed at the symbols on the lower middle part of the stone.

“Wow…”

“The second set, the one with the largest number of tablets – seven – has the name ‘Aphrodite.’”

“You’re kidding…”

“The next two tablets have the name Hermes, the next three Poseidon, and then the other groups have the names Zeus, Eros, Koios, Mnemosyne, Ares, and the last is Metis.” As he rattled off the names, he kept on flashing pictures of the tablets.

“Zeus. Really? Oh my god.”

“Yeah.” Mr. Daimon smiled at my reaction.

“Why these particular names?”

Mr. Daimon shrugged. “Maybe these were the only ones that Hephaestus could find at the time and sample. I mean, he included himself and Aphrodite – he was probably hard up for samples. Or maybe there were a lot more tablets but we just couldn’t find them.”

I looked at him. “You’re really believing all this, huh?”

“Yes.”

“And you really think there were gods way back when?”

“Well, what I think was that, during ancient times, there were human-like creatures, or perhaps another species of humans, that had certain physical characteristics and abilities that made ancient people think of them as, quote, gods.”

I nodded at that – that sounded quite reasonable. But when he said “ancient,” I had an idea.

“Did you carbon-date these things or something?”

He nodded. “Our best numbers say the tablets are between at least ten thousand years old, and, at most, twenty thousand – both the metal plates and the Kodikos.”

“Wow…”

“Indeed,” he said. “Up to now, I’m still speechless about it.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Well, we’ve been at it since the late forties, but it only started to really gain headway during the eighties when genetic and DNA technology were advanced enough that it made things like the Human Genome Project possible. Back then, from the forties to the seventies, the operation was just trying to identify gross genetic characteristics of people. By then the Golden Theory plates were discovered and translated. The ‘attributes’ that the plates alluded to where what we were most interested in. It referred to the Kodikos, but they were still to be discovered.”

“Wait…” I said, suddenly realizing something. “The NIH scientist that discovered and translated the Kodikos tablets… his name was ‘Hephaestus…’”

Mr. Daimon nodded. “Yes, I was waiting for that. That was just a happenstance – a coincidence. The one who discovered the Kodikos tablets wasn’t the god that made them – he was just a regular human.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. To me, that sounded a bit suspicious, but I let it go for now.

Mr. Daimon continued. He flashed some more pictures and videos, and I saw the so-called “Golden Theory.” The first pictures were bright green with patina, but after the bronze artifacts had been cleaned, they turned out to be gold or rather, more reddish copper than real gold since they were bronze.

There were also other pictures, like the pictures of the monastery and other things, and as I took it all in, I started to believe.

“If you really started to make progress around the late eighties,” I said, “then you had more than fifty years. Have you discovered… your latter-day gods?”

“Well, we aren’t hopeful that we will anytime soon. All we can do is identify kids with DNA similar to the ten DNA maps in the Kodikos. And as we accumulated more and more of these kids, we noticed that these kids, pardon the term, were ‘better’ than the rest of the population – typically stronger, better reflexes, sharper senses, and so forth. Not like Marvel superheroes, of course – just generally all-around better than average than most regular folks. They also seem to have natural protections against cancer and most viral and bacteriological diseases, and they don’t seem to have genetic problems. There seemed to be a correlation with this and how similar their DNA codes were to the Kodikos Ten. We won’t know with full certainty, of course, until we accumulate more data, but I think that’s academic by now. What’s important is that we’re well on our way to our goal of improving the human condition.

”Anyway, we rate all of our students and graduates. Those that we’ve offered scholarships to had to have scores of at least fifty or more, meaning a fifty percent or more match to the Kodikos Ten, and then throughout their stay in our schools, we’d observe and test them. And right now, our work is starting to pay dividends: we’ve started to help companies that are doing gene therapy programs and gene therapy cures, sharing with them what we knew, without, of course, sharing the fundamental foundations of the Endowment, and the information available to it.”

What’s the highest score that you’ve ever gotten?”

“We have about a couple of thousand our graduates who scored sixty-five or higher - a couple of them even scored around eighty-five.”

“Is that good?”

“We don’t know, precisely. And don’t ask who these people are – I won’t tell.” He grinned.

“Why the hell not?”

He smiled again and shrugged. “Reasons,” he said.

“Anyway,” he continued, “that’s all we’ve been able to do. Right now, what we’re concentrating on is an easier way to find more of these kinds of kids. Imagine if we could just do a simple test and quickly identify such individuals, and then rate them on how close their heterochromatin chains were to the Kodikos Ten.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

“One would think,” he said. “But even though we have the ten DNA maps from the Kodikos, how do you locate matches, especially since the position in the code changes from person to person, and then incorporate that data into a small, easy-to-use portable detection device? And then how can we make wide use of such devices and legitimately test people?”

I thought it through. Yes, that could be a problem.

“Also,” he continued, “how do we catch these individuals between the ages of fourteen to eighteen?”

Huh? “Why?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the age when the Ambrosia – that’s what the so-called ‘food of the gods’ is called - would work on them and allow their recessive Olympus DNA code to be expressed so that their transformation into their better selves would be initiated.”

In my imagination, I had, in my mind, something like how the Hulk or Spider-Man transformed. “Can you describe how such a transformation would happen?” I asked.

“Nothing spectacular, really. Slowly, over time – typically a period of about nine months, they’d notice general improvements in their abilities and such, and then they’d stabilize.”

That was disappointing. “How about their looks and features? Things like that?”

Mr. Daimon shrugged. “Again, nothing spectacular – they’d largely still look like themselves, except they’d be a bit taller, slightly better-looking, healthier-looking, that kind of thing. Just that. But nothing spectacular., like I said.”

Again, that sounded disappointing. She imagined transforming from being normal to a Marvel-type superhero. But that was too good to be true. The real thing was extremely boring in comparison.

“And, according to you, I’m going to be like that?” I asked

“Well… no…”

“But you said…”

“You’re different. As I said, all of our students and graduates score around fifty. Some up to sixty-five, with a couple reaching eighty-five or so, whereas you…”

I started to worry. “What about me?”

“You scored one hundred…”

That made me think, and what I imagined made me both excited and worried.

“What does that mean?”

“We don’t know, yet. But word has come down from Athens. I am supposed to brief you about things, which I’ve done, and then to ask your permission if you would like to… proceed.”

“Why?”

“We don’t, normally, because nothing bad happens. But we don’t’ know what’ll happen to you. Whatever we are, we try to be as ethical as we can possibly be, and still continue with our work.”

“Will it be bad? Will I become… like a monster or something.” I had a sudden fear of becoming like Medusa.

Mr. Daimon probably guessed what I was thinking, and chuckled. “No. Probably not.”

“Then why all this?”

Mr. Daimon cleared his throat. “Well, like I said, ‘probably not.’ We aren’t a hundred percent sure what will happen. Our experience with Erin… anyway, we need to let you know that we don’t know what’ll happen, and you therefore have to make the decision - not us.”

“Who’s Erin?”

“Erin Smith – she was from the Melbourne school several years ago.”

“What happened to her? Did she become a monster?”

“No, no! Nothing like that. … But it has become policy to ask first now, especially for those with higher-than-normal scores. And those with a less than ideal match to their Kodikos map.”

“Why are you telling me all this only now?”

“Well, it was only last week that we confirmed your 100 score…”

It made me think. What to do? It was an incredible temptation – to be changed into… an avatar of a Greek god. But there might be problems. But they didn’t seem to be too worried. I wondered what happened to this Erin. They showed me a picture of her: she was very pretty. She reminded me of Charlize Theron, but in the movie Atomic Blonde, or in that old movie Aeon Flux. She was pretty, but she looked tough at the same time. Sort of like a cross between a young Margot Robie and David Bowie.

In the end, though, temptation won. I looked at Mr. Daimon and nodded. Ma would have probably asked for time to think about it, but Dad always said I made too many rash decisions. However, I’ve always argued that most of my decisions turned out right in the end. I hoped that this decision would turn out right, too.

Mr. Daimon smiled. “Excellent!” he said, and beamed at me, totally delighted. He picked up his desk phone’s handset “It’s quite late already,” he said to me. “I’m sure you must be hungry by now.” He punched a number. “Yes, please bring in the food,” he said into his handset. “Yes. Of course the Cokes, too.”

After a few moments, one of the cafeteria people came in bringing a tray. On it were a couple of Big Macs, large Cokes, and fries.

“Sorry, Val,” He apologized. “The cafeteria’s closed already. I’m afraid dinner’s going to be fast food take-out.”

I shrugged. “I don’t mind,” I said and reached for one of the burgers and the soda. The burger wasn’t too warm, though, as were the fries – not exactly fresh. But the Coke was cold and chock full of ice – just the way I liked it.

As we ate, I quizzed him some more. And he told me some more about the transformations that the kids have gone through. Apparently, general physical improvements were about it: nothing major, as he said.

I asked him how many graduates have there already been, and if all of them had taken the… “food of the gods.” He did some computations – with a graduating class of fifty per school per year, and they’ve been operating for more than thirty years already… “We have a little under eighty thousand graduates by now,” he said. “Eighty thousand five hundred by next graduation, with only less than a thousand having missed transforming.”

Oh, my god, I thought – eighty thousand…

“And none of them know?”

“You’re the only one who does. Plus, the teachers, and school and endowment staff, of course.”

“What happens to them after? Do you, like breed them? Make them have babies together?”

“Of course not!” he said indignantly. “We’re also not out to create a race of gods! We’re not nazis!”

“So then what happens?”

“They’re free to live their lives, free of any interference from us.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is to understand all this, and maybe find a mechanism that will allow all humans to benefit from it, regardless of their ancestry. We’ve tried a few times – there were a few programs that we tried: we had a lab in Sweden plus one in the midwest, but we shut down the Sweden lab because we were getting very minimal results. The point is, we need to understand this better before we try another one.”

“Wow.”

Mr. Daimon shrugged.

He then talked about the other nine schools, and, from his descriptions, they sounded just like Delos. I asked what would happen to me after graduation.

“Well, graduates are given a 100% scholarship to any college of their choosing, but more than ninety percent of our graduates don’t opt for the scholarships and just ask for the fifteen thousand-dollar academic grant instead - you see, those who don’t opt for a scholarship would be given a one-time so-called ‘academic grant’ – a lump sum of fifteen thousand. For those that take the scholarships, they’d be under tabs for the duration of their college life, or at least four years if they opted for the grant, to allow us to watch out for… ‘unusual things.’ After that, they’re free to do do anything they want, free of any surveillance or interference from us.”

“But why? I can imagine it would be incredibly expensive.”

“Yes, but imagine there’d be thousands of enhanced humans out in the world, and they’d be having kids and families, and their families will have families. Maybe in the near future, cancer and COVID and heart disease and diabetes and multiple sclerosis and alzheimers and thousands of other diseases will be things of the past… Just imagine.”

I looked at him in silence. His dream was wonderful, indeed…

I cleared my throat. “For myself, though, I think I’d probably opt for the scholarship…”

He looked at me. And after a beat, we both laughed.

 

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