Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Leaving Hel behind was the hardest decision Alexander ever had to make, but he knew that she was right, the embryos had absolute priority. Hel could be saved later.
If there was a later, of course. But Alexander didn’t want to think about the possibility that there wouldn’t be.
His escape had been surprisingly easy, the night shift guards didn’t react fast enough to seal off the building and Alexander could slip by them unnoticed. As soon as he was out of the hospital, he ran to one of the safehouses that Hel didn’t know about.
And then, he sat there, not knowing how to proceed. The people who were supposed to distribute the embryos to the new families were waiting, but there was always the risk that Hel would tell her jailers about the plan. Not voluntarily of course, but you never knew how much torture a person could take.
Keeping the embryos was out of the question, if they weren’t implanted soon, a pregnancy might not be possible anymore and ten thousand children would be lost.
Alexander stared at the briefcase for what felt like several hours. Finally, he reached a decision.
Aborting primaries was absolutely forbidden by law, even if the pregnant woman wasn’t really the mother. So the only hope he had now was to quickly impregnate all the women who had volunteered for it. He needed to act fast.
With frenetic movements, he started dialing one number after another to inform the middlemen who would then call the deliverymen.
It didn’t take more than half an hour until the first people started pouring into the house. They all had briefcases similar to the one Alexander had used, just a bit smaller. And all of them wore masks as a precaution.
When all embryos had been given away, Alexander sat alone in the empty, silent house.
What now?
It would take some time to see the results of this project. Hel was gone. Possibly dead, likely to be questioned. He needed to move all members of the resistance she had been in contact with, declare all houses she had seen as unsafe. But more importantly, he had to get her back.
Alexander knew, that he couldn’t discuss this with the other members. Saving someone who had been captured was out of the question, way too dangerous! But they didn’t know that Hel was special. Hel herself didn’t even know.
Before a new member could join the resistance, they needed to submit themselves to a complete sequencing of their genome, to prove their secondary or tertiary status. It was the safest way to keep primary spies out of the resistance.
Completely sequencing a human’s genome wasn’t complicated or expensive anymore. Even 50 years ago, the price had dropped from several hundred million to only $1000. Nowadays, it was a procedure that every child had to go through at birth so that the government could label them accordingly.
When Alexander had checked Hel’s DNA, he had found something interesting: A genetic marker that implied that she was a primary. But only on one of her chromosomes. Usually, the marker would be found on both chromosomes of a pair, but Hel only had one.
That meant that one of her parents was a primary. There was no other way, the genetic sequence was too long to happen randomly.
But Hel didn’t know this, it seemed. Alexander had asked her about her parents and she told him that both were secondaries. Was she adopted? Did her mother cheat? Did one of her parents die? He didn’t know. But Hel was the perfect future leader of the resistance.
The outrage it would cause! A child of a secondary and a primary, fighting for an equal society. He had wanted to tell her about his discovery as soon as this last mission was finished.
But now it seemed that this had to wait. First, he needed to free Hel and bring her back.
The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome
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