#It's akin to Unborn Destiny but not quite the same

[beckytailweaver]

[FIC] Coco 1934 - Part 2

All the art and stories! Everyone is being so creative lately. I need to contribute!

Here we go again!

For the previous chapter: Part 1

To read Part 2...

Coco 1934: Part 2

When Miguel opened his eyes, he was standing in a large business office surrounded by a crowd of walking, talking skeletons.

All of them jumped.  At least half of the skeletons screamed as well.

Miguel would never admit to screaming, but he did try to run from the sudden nightmare of hollowed eyes and bony, reaching hands.  It took two of the blue-uniformed officers to snatch him up and hold on to him while they half-carried him kicking and yelling to a smaller office chamber.  They made him sit in a chair before a large desk piled with files and papers, and held him there until he quieted.

Behind the desk was a short skeleton-man with eyeglasses.  He looked like a clerk.  He and the officers questioned Miguel about how he'd gotten there—Miguel himself wasn't very clear on that—and who he was, if he had any family in the Land of the Dead.  Which was somehow where he was now.

"Mamá's parents died when she was young," he explained nervously, trying not to stare at the white, painted skull faces.  It would be rude when they weren't being very scary at all, but actually speaking reasonably.  "I don't know their names.  And I think my papá was an orphan."

He watched the Clerk and the guards exchange a look, and wondered what it meant.

"See, here's the thing, niño," the Clerk said patiently.  "You're under a curse.  Not just any curse, either—a death curse.  Which you can only get by messing with something that belongs to the wronged dead, something with the death curse attached to it."

"The last thing I touched was a guitar," Miguel confessed, hunching in the chair, "but the man it belongs to is alive!"  Maybe someone had cursed the guitar and meant it for De la Cruz, and Miguel had intervened.

"Are you sure?  Are you absolutely certain there is no one dead attached to the guitar?  Might you have touched anything else?"

Miguel rapidly shook his head.

He watched the Clerk and the guards exchange another look, before the Clerk sighed.  "The only way to get out from under a death curse is to find the wronged dead and have them undo it—get their blessing, using the magic of a cempasúchil petal—or figure out how to satisfy the terms of the curse and break it, which we have no way to know."

"So..."

"Nobody's much in the business of traditional death curses these days, niño. The last person this happened to was well before my time.  Unless the owner of the cursed guitar is dead, which you've insisted he isn't, you're stuck here in the Land of the Dead until the curse runs its course."

"What will happen then?" Miguel quavered.

The Clerk pointed at Miguel's left hand.

When Miguel found only white bone where his fingertip used to be, he fainted.

Miguel woke up with the Clerk and the officer with the thick mustache standing over him.  The Clerk was fanning him anxiously with a file folder.

"...don't know, at least he's still breathing.  Niño?  Miguel?"  The Clerk leaned closer, still fanning, peering at Miguel's blinking eyes.  "Oh, good.  You're awake.  Come on, then, up you go..."

With shaking hands, Miguel let the two skeletons help him back to his feet.  He felt woozy and his head hurt, and all he could think about was glistening white bone moving like it was alive where his finger used to be.  "What...what's happening to me...?"

"It's how most death curses go," spoke up the officer, his voice quiet and gravelly.

"That and the Land of the Dead isn't exactly a holiday destination for living things," the Clerk harrumphed, straightening his green eyeshade.  "To sum it up, young man, you have a very limited amount of time to remain alive.  Since we don't know much about the exact sort of curse you're under I can only guess how long, but at the rate you're losing flesh...perhaps sunrise?  Certainly no more than a full day."

"S-sunrise?" Miguel yelped, swaying on his feet.  The officer hastily steadied him.  "You mean...after tonight...I'll...?"

"You'll become a permanent resident here, I'm afraid."  The Clerk was businesslike, but there was pity in his eyes, a hopeless kind of pity that made Miguel's chest ache and his knees start to tremble beneath him.  "With no source here for your curse, I'm afraid that all we can do is make you comfortable until it runs its course."

"But...but my mamá, my family, they won't know what happened—!"  His vision started to blur with tears.

"I'm very sorry, niño," said the Clerk, more briskly than he wanted to hear.  "You can wait here at the Department.  When the time comes, since you have no family here, one of the officers will walk you down to the San Gerónimo Children's Home.  A counselor will assist you with filling out the requisite forms before you leave, so that you can be notified if and when any family members arrive in the future—"

"An orphanage?" he yelped, drawing away from them.  "You're sending me to an orphanage...f-for dead kids?  I have a family, I'm not dead!"

"I'm afraid it's only a matter of time," the Clerk sighed.  "And since you are underage and with no known deceased family, you have no residence or legal guardians here.  When an adult from your family arrives, you can—"

"I want to go home!" Miguel declared, but when he tried to back away further, the officer set a very firm hand on his shoulder, preventing him from moving.

"There's nothing we can do, son," the officer said in a gruffly gentle way.  "We don't know of any way to bring you back into the Land of the Living."

"You don't, but maybe someone else does!" Miguel insisted, trying to free himself from the bony hands.  "Let me go!"

"It's not safe for a living person to go gallivanting about the Land of the Dead," the Clerk said, adjusting his glasses.  "There are still bad sorts here that might try to use you for some unsavory purpose while you are still alive, likely to try to contact the living world, and...it doesn't bear thinking about, especially for a child.  It's best if you just wait here quietly until tomorrow.  I'm sorry, Miguel, but that's the best we can do.  Jorge, if you would take him to one of the family rooms, maybe get him some water...?"

Looking stern and sad, the officer pulled him to the door.  Miguel fought him along the way, unable to hold back his tears.  "Let me go!  I'm not dead!  I want to go home!  Let go!"

Just outside the Clerk's office, they almost ran into another uniformed officer and a lanky skeleton in a purple jacket he was frog-marching through the front office room.  "—could have been clocking out to visit my living family already," this new officer was grumbling at his captive, "but I have to haul your obnoxious arse to lockup again—every goddamn year—"

"Carlos! There is a child present!" the lanky skeleton protested, before he took a closer look at Miguel and gasped.  "Ay!  He's alive—!"

"And he's none of your business, Héctor," the mustached officer stated, keeping his grip and pushing Miguel along before him as if to shield him from the other detainee's view.  "Looks like you're in enough trouble as it is."

As they all trudged along almost in parallel for a few moments, Miguel's tear-streaked face turned up to glance at the tall lanky skeleton staring wide-eyed back at him.  In that instant, something passed between them—an echo of determination, a shared desperation, a wily spark of inspiration.

"No! I wanna go home!"  Still struggling against the mustachioed officer's grip, Miguel threw himself with a wail to the floor at the lanky skeleton's feet, almost dragging the startled Jorge down with him.

The lanky skeleton—Héctor?—took a step to the side and tripped over Miguel in such a dramatic sprawl that the two officers collided with each other and stumbled as well. Suddenly everything was a mess of clattering bones and flailing limbs and everyone else in the office was staring in incredulous dismay.

As limber as if he'd practiced for a circus tumble, Héctor rolled out of the mayhem and bounced to his feet with Miguel clutched under one arm.  "Let's go, chamaco!"

The mustached officer made a grab for them from the floor, but like a thief with a freshly stolen jewelry box, Héctor slipped away from the reaching hands and lit out for the front doors.  Miguel was jarred against rigid bone but didn't complain, hanging on to the skeleton's threadbare jacket for dear life.

There was yelling from behind, and another officer tried to bodily block them from the doors, but Miguel's long-legged ride spun nimbly around the tackle, cleared the queue control rail in one leap, and slammed into the office doors hard enough to rattle teeth.  He scrabbled at the handle for a heart-pounding instant, and Miguel felt a hard bony hand grasping at his ankle before they all but fell through the opening.

Miguel kicked out blindly, knocking the reaching hands away, and the skeleton carrying him bolted out of the office like a spooked deer.  Moments later, they were weaving without slowing through thick crowds in what seemed almost like a train station, leaving the frantic officers and angry shouts far behind.

tbc...

Notes: There may or may not be an actual face scanner in 1934! It’s likely a new-ish invention. The marigold bridge magic still works to prevent unauthorized passage, though. The office skeletons aren’t uncaring of Miguel’s situation but they honestly have no idea what to do for him. This sort of thing doesn’t just happen any more, since the world has moved away from belief and magic of decades and centuries past. Even if they could walk Miguel across a marigold bridge, they have no idea how to flip him back into the living world from where they are. Nobody knows how to help, unless they’ve got maybe an Aztec shaman stashed away somewhere or something like that...? Yes, this Héctor is in much better shape than the one in the canon movie. It’s only been a decade or so since he died, so he has multiple living people who remember him. He might be penniless and a bit threadbare, but he’s still fit, unfaded, and even somewhat optimistic. There might be a familiar face or two in the office...

Thoughts welcome!

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 274

GEN-ETHIC ANXIETY AND SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE GENOME PROJECT

The Genome Project was started at a research institute known as HUGO, which is short for the Human Genome Project, in Montreux, Switzerland on October 1, 1990. This important project, with consequences that are not yet understood, was beyond human imagination at the time it was established, and is expected to provide answers to many questions in our minds.

With the full extent of its use not being understood at the time of its establishment, the project emerged mainly with the pharmaceutical mission to predict, detect, treat, and cure diseases that were caused by genetic anomalies by identifying the genetic information in the human organism.

The desire for such a project was something akin to, or even beyond, the desire to climb Mount Everest, for it aimed to find out something that was unknown at the time. In such fields of biology as cell biology, immunology, and neurology the specialists need genetic information from human organism. The genetic information that an individual organism inherits from its parents can open a door to answer the questions of how an individual develops, how long an individual will live, or how the various species on Earth have lived over many generations.

New developments followed one upon another with the emergence of the Human Genome Project. When the famous Scottish sheep, Dolly, was cloned in 1997, it still seemed to be theoretically impossible to clone a human being. American scientists cloned an ape named Tetra which shared 98 per cent of the same genetic information as human beings. Soon after this, the scientists began to suggest that that all that remained to be cloned was humans.

Dr. Richard Nicholson, the editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, noted that there is no danger in cloning humans, as long as the techniques of doing so are kept under control. If a dictator, however, were to get hold of this information, they would be able to produce an army of genotypically identical soldiers.

The most exciting scientific study of recent years of the Genome Project is that it is trying to develop a complete gene map of an individual organism. According to scientists, a human body has between thirty thousand and fifty thousand genes. All genetic features identifying an individual are found in the gene sequences of the DNA molecules. Eye color, character traits, IQ, and all the illnesses a person may possibly develop are all hidden in the genes. The genome carries all the hereditary features that determine all of life's diversity, determining whether an organism is human or another species, or ape; all living things have their own genomes. The human genome, which is the full complement of genetic material, and which resembles large tablets recording the history of ancient civilizations, is distributed among 23 sets of chromosomes. It is comprised of approximately three billion letters and is the biological record of our destiny.

ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND SOCIAL ISSUES

In H. G. Wells’ classic novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Dr. Moreau conducts hybrid experiments on animals that result in twisted masses of flesh, half-man, half-animal. When the European Patent Office allowed the Australian company Amrad to obtain new embryos by combining human and animal cells, this led to a revival of genetic fears, more than a hundred years after the story of Dr Moreau was published. Not surprisingly, this event alarmed several civilian organizations, including Greenpeace. In a press statement made in Hamburg, Greenpeace drew attention to the fact that we might face “dangerous creatures” in the future that would be created from such techniques. Probably one of the most disturbing facts was that the patent did not disclose how these creatures were to be used. Greenpeace voiced opposition to this for the following reason: “A patent grants its owner the exclusive control over his/her invention. Therefore, patents on life fundamentally change our perception and understanding of living nature and our relationship towards it. Living organisms, which have been ‘created’ by industry and which can be patented cannot have a value of their own, since they are only considered an invention of human beings. Thus they can be exploited without any ethical concerns.”

According to the patent, the embryonic stem cells derived from humans, mice, birds, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, or fish could be used. The patent covers a “method of producing a non-human chimeric animal” by mixing human and animal embryonic cells: human stem cells are integrated into animal embryos. As a result, the created chimeras are non-human, but they may contain human organs, body parts, nerve cells, and even human genetic codes.

Experts state that the system of producing chimeras is completely different from that of cloning and they drew attention to the risks involved. For example, a virus like the one that caused mad-cow disease could easily pass from one species to another.

THE MEDIA JOINS THE ISSUE

Thanks to the great interest people have shown in the future of genetic studies, we frequently come across news reports that deal with the topic. However, we would like to note that titles like “the homosexuality gene has been found” or “genetic solution to talkativeness discovered” infuriate genetic scientists. Dr Arnold Munnich says that media aims to raise interest by misinforming the public with subjects like “obesity gene” or “laziness gene”; they merely oversimplify the issue. Dr Munnich emphasizes that a gene means nothing by itself.

THE DANGER OF ABUSE

The researches who have worked toward improving gene technology have performed some good for humanity; this is without a doubt. However, there is the risk of abuse. The discoveries in this field may be worth a great deal financially; when we add the rivalry between companies and countries, it seems highly likely that legal bans and ethical rules will be ignored. Some people even object to all kinds of genetic research, not only their abuse. They say that the abuse of seemingly useful genetic technology practices in the future is possible, as has happened in other fields of technology; nuclear researches and laser technology also used to be innocent studies at the very beginning. But we cannot object to the use of electricity just because it is also used for executing people with electric chairs.

Governments and international organizations are quite sensitive to ensure that gene technology will only be used for the good of humanity. There are several international organizations interested in the ethical dimension of the issue. There are certain rules and regulations that establish the fundamental principles that will prevent the abuse of genetic studies, and protect the biodiversity and ecological balance. It is forbidden to carry out research on human cloning and altering human embryos. In the past, dictators like Adolf Hitler attempted to abuse gene technology in this respect. The ruthless Dr Joseph Mengele tried to clone his Fuhrer from the epitel cells he took from him.

WILL CONFIDENTIALITY BE RESPECTED?

Another concern brought about by new diagnosis methods and tests is that the principle of patient confidentiality, which has existed for centuries like a secret agreement between doctors and their patients, has begun to be debated, even violated. We usually talk about such “confidentiality” when the information is likely to be harmful for the patient if publicized. From this perspective, the results obtained by genetic tests can be evaluated as such. It is one of the duties of doctors to maintain patient confidentiality. On the other hand, if the relevant data is also likely to harm society, the hospital staff, and those around the patient, then the doctor can face a dilemma.

Some of the possible problems that may be faced due to the mapping of human genome will be that employers could be provided with forehand knowledge about the potential genetic diseases of applicants; they may know whether the person to be employed will be a future financial burden to the company if they carry such genetic risks as cancer or Parkinson’s. In this way new standards of employment will be developed. Even though systematical public surveys do not indicate any significant dangers at hand, it would be nearly impossible to stop rumors. Several people may be denied insurance if they have the genes for a fatal disease. Another may be dismissed from their job for the same reason. In the USA, it is illegal in 39 states to issue insurance policies according to genetic test results, and it is also illegal in 15 states to expel employees according to these. However, employers and insurance agents take advantage of the gaps in relevant laws and they secretly make use of genetic tests. According to research carried out in 1999, 30% of medium-sized or small businesses use such tests to promote and dismiss their employees.

Psychologically, it does not seem likely that people would consent to their status being determined by genetic tests. Would you really like to face your genetic disadvantages? A survey made with cooperation of Time magazine and CNN revealed that half of the participants did not want to know.

THE FATE OF AN UNBORN BABY

Deciphering the book of life unfortunately brings along ethical problems. The discovery of our genetic codes can also lead to other humans controlling the future of the human race. The critical question is “Can scientists produce human beings with the desired physical and mental qualities?” If so, genomic science may enable biologists to prepare a list of spare parts, parents may “order” a baby, and as altering our children or ourselves gets easier, we may be less tolerant against those who have not been altered. Lori Andrews of Kent University wonders if we were to be informed of mental defects, obesity, shortness or other undesired characteristics beforehand, whether the parents of those babies would still allow them to be born into a society that scorns such qualities. Even now, it is not uncommon to see some doctors and nurses criticize the parents of babies who are born with pre-detectable defects. If we assume that all parents have “ordered” babies, God knows what kind of a world we will have.

WHAT SHOULD THE AIM OF SUCH PRACTICES BE?

Genetic studies should aim to prevent or treat illnesses, not to “enhance” genes. The opportunities offered by genetics should not be a mass elimination medium used by employers or a mechanism of spotting potential criminals in the hands of oppressive regimes. The Almighty One Who has been running the order of our universe so perfectly has granted us some keys to its mysteries. Why should we not do our best and use them for the good of humanity?