For two days Jan watched fascinated as she watched the images and listened to the different voices from the past. At first it was hard to follow what was going on—many of the words were meaningless to her—but eventually she began to comprehend the overall picture. It seemed to fit with what Milo had told her, and the little she had learned from Ceri.
Long before the Gene Wars the world had been faced with two serious threats; the first had come from nuclear weapons, which had originally been controlled by the two big empires of the latter half of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. When, at the end of that century, these weapons had spread to many other countries these two empires got very nervous. Then came the ‘Little Armageddon’ war in the Middle East, where nuclear weapons were used for the first time since the Second World War. This settled the minds of the rulers of the two empires and led to the formation of the Soviet-American Alliance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Alliance’s first act was to declare all nuclear weapons banned. There was much opposition to this ultimatum, not only from countries who’d possessed their own nuclear arsenals for a long time, such as a country called France, but also from the Federation of Islamic States who had been the victors in the ‘Little Armageddon’ war.
The Alliance reacted ruthlessly to this opposition. Using a few of their own nuclear weapons with what the commentator called ‘surgical precision’, in harness with their ‘orbiting beam weapons’, they ‘cauterized the problem areas’. When the dust cleared the Islamic Federation was once again a collection of individual countries and France had been reduced to a purely agricultural economy. The other nations saw the point of the Alliance’s argument and handed over their nuclear weapons. When the Alliance was satisfied that no other such weapons existed, nor the means to manufacture them in future, it destroyed its own nuclear arsenal and remaining nuclear reactors. The nuclear age was over.
The other great threat had appeared in the early nineteen-eighties, though it had probably been around unnoticed for a long time before that. It was a plague caused by a type of virus that normally only affected animals—a ‘lentivirus’. The theory was that the virus had jumped the ‘species barrier’ from a species of African monkeys to humans.
Whatever the origin of the virus it spread rapidly and by the end of the twentieth century had infected one in every ten people on the planet. It was literally decimating the world’s population. And being a lentivirus it possessed genetic characteristics that made it very difficult to combat. The genegineers—called ‘microbiologists’, Jan noted, in these early reports—tried for years to create a safe vaccine but without success.
A parallel line of attack on the virus had been going on for some time by other genegineers. They had been trying to build their own virus—a synthetic ‘hunter-killer’ virus using altered genetic material from the plague virus itself. A virus is a genetic parasite—it invades a cell and hi-jacks the cell’s own DNA in order to replicate itself. The hunter-killer virus would, in theory, not only seek out and destroy the plague virus within an infected system but also penetrate infected cells and insert modified DNA into the cells’ nuclei that would neutralize the DNA created by the invading plague virus, thus preventing further replication. That was the theory, but to turn it into working reality involved major breakthroughs in the mapping and manipulation of human DNA. The enormity of their task was succinctly summed up by one startling image—that if you were to lay all the DNA in a single human being end to end the chain would reach the moon and back 8,000 times.
Finally, however, they did succeed—their synthetic virus acted as both a cure and a super-vaccine and the plague was quickly eradicated.
But the major breakthroughs that had been achieved in human genetic engineering on the way to creating the synthetic virus had other important repercussions for the whole human race: in the same way that the virus had been used to cure infected cells it was now possible to make all manner of modifications to human DNA. It could be altered to improve the immune system, to eradicate diseases like cancer, to increase the human life span … all the modifications that were eventually incorporated into the Standard Prime.
At the same time genetic engineering in other areas had also made tremendous progress—new strains of cereal had been created that were disease resistant and could grow in arid conditions; the ‘bio-chip’ had replaced the silicon chip, resulting in much more efficient computer systems; new forms of bacteria had been created to perform a whole variety of industrial functions, from producing cheap fuels to making things like imitation wood pulp that could be turned into paper; there were the biological fuel cells and synthetic chlorophyll that turned the sun’s rays into electricity. …
The list of wonders seemed endless. It seemed as if all the traditional scourges of humanity would be eradicated forever. The genegineers had brought the world to the verge of a true Golden Age.
But it was not to be.
According to the long-dead voices that accompanied the images on the floating screen it was the creation of the Standard Prime genetically-altered human being that led indirectly to the Gene Wars. Up until then, and for some time after that, the United Nations possessed real power, as it was backed by the Soviet-American Alliance. It had enough power to enforce its rulings on those areas of micro-biological research and genetic manipulation that were forbidden but, as Milo had told her, the coming of the Standard Prime caused the break-up of the bigger nations into independent states. The disintegration of both America and Russia into smaller states meant, of course, the end of the Alliance and, in turn, the end of the power that had been wielded by the United Nations.
In the chaos that followed it was the multi-national corporations, most of which relied on genetic engineering patents for their wealth, who emerged as the true holders of power. And with the United Nations effectively finished as a law enforcing agency it meant all the restraints on genetic engineering were gone. The corporations could now do whatever they wanted.
Even before then there had been rumours of the rich and powerful experimenting in forbidden areas. There were tales of incredible creations hidden behind locked doors; of billionaires stocking their private islands and estates with all manner of exotic creatures—sexual fantasies made flesh by the genegineers; and there were stories that certain heads of states and corporations were building up secret armies composed of terrible beings who were nothing but living weapons.
All these rumours turned out to be true.
With the United Nations and the Alliance gone the corporations began to war amongst themselves. The independent states were dragged into the conflict, having to pledge allegiance to one corporation or the other. The Gene Wars had begun.
After a decade of fighting using their genetically engineered armies, the Wars entered a new and more deadly stage when one of the corporations initiated germ warfare—something that all the corporations had originally sworn not to do. It was the beginning of the end.
The first targets were agricultural ones—cereal crops and the like. Then came fungi engineered to eat vital parts of electronic systems, as well as practically everything else. Finally the inevitable happened—the unleashing of the designer plagues specifically engineered to kill people.