The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [125]
“The long and the short of it is that the process of mosaic reconstruction stopped the aging process in its tracks. The transgenic mice were rejuvenating themselves. Initially, of course, that did my specimens more harm than good because the newborns, which remained newborns by virtue of their new power of self-renewal, couldn’t survive the interruption of their developmental processes. They died of superabundant youth. Once I’d figured out what was going on, though, I soon found out that the retrovirus could also be used to infect adults. Although the effects were variable, some of the inoculated adults were stabilized by the transformation. Their life spans were dramatically extended—and I’m not talking thirty or forty percent. In time, I found that a substantial minority were living ten or twenty times as long as their parents. A few lived a hundred times as long—and the current record holders were still extending the multiplier two days ago. Were the angels of wrath telling the truth when they said they’d torched Mouseworld?”
“Yes, they were,” Lisa confirmed.
Morgan Miller sighed again, but this time there was an element of theatre in the sigh. “It was a long time, of course, before I was convinced that even a few of the mice were authentically emortal, but the cream of the crop has stayed stable, fit, and healthy for forty years. A few were sterile, but not all. The real champions didn’t cannibalize all the fused oocytes; every now and again they gave birth to litters of daughters. Most of the offspring failed to develop, like the newborns I’d transformed myself, but a few grew to maturity before stabilizing. The selective regime progressed by degrees to the inevitable terminus: a population of emortal female mice whose daughters were likewise emortal. It took time, but when the potential’s there and the regime is stern, natural selection is no slouch.
“Long before I was convinced they were authentically emortal, I’d begun introducing the mice to the cities, for exactly the same reason that Chan wanted to introduce his augmented specimens: to see how they’d fare in a stressful and competitive situation. Mine did a little better than his—obviously, or Stella would never have found the transformed mice—but not that much better, and not for a long time. When you came along in 2002,1 only had half a dozen potentially emortal mice, and nineteen of the twenty offspring they had so far produced had died paradoxical deaths of superabundant youth. By the time I moved on to experiment with other species in ’09 or thereabouts, I had a hundred adult mice and the survival rate among the new litters was up to one in three. Even then, you see, I couldn’t be sure they’d live significantly longer than normal. If I had been, I might have told you … maybe.
“It was all so gradual, so uncertain, so surprising. You should be able to imagine how tentative my conclusions were when I first knew you, how much more needed to be done before I could be confident. Stella came in on the hind end of things, when everything was set and fixed, and she never tried to imagine how it must have been in the long and confusing beginning. All she saw, when she tumbled to what was going on in London and Rome, was a secret that I had kept for forty years. And all she cared about was the obvious—she and her friends didn’t pause long