#haha hell if i know how gene splicing works but between what i remember from school and wikipedia i think i did oooooohkaaaay

[did-you-reboot]

Unlocked

Saw this on /r/WritingPrompts and wanted to have a go: As the world's leading expert in Genetic Microbiology you discover that the ancient viral code in human DNA are there as limiters to human capabilities. You begin to activate these viruses to improve the human race but soon realize why they were there in the first place.

Twenty years.

Twenty years ago, my team and I found ourselves on the cusp of a breakthrough, of a new understanding of the human genome. By that point, we’d already spent several years refining techniques to sequence, catalog, and compare the genetic material of humans using the university’s then-new quantum computers. We agonized over having to share them with other research teams, and each failure meant waiting weeks for another turn.

It was nearly 2 AM on the last day of our allotted computer time that I got a call from one of the grad students in the team, screaming into the phone that one of my teammates had found something and that I should get to the lab immediately. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up; whatever it was they found, it was important, and I think deep in my gut I knew that we were going to find something groundbreaking.

I arrived at the lab unkempt and disheveled in my haste, and I hadn't the chance to put my bag down before Olson, the grad student, found me and herded me to Valdez’s station, where he was waiting, legs crossed, arms crossed, and foot wiggling anxiously.

He turned his monitor to me and got out of the chair without so much as a greeting. “Look at this,” was all he said. Olson hovered anxiously behind us, wringing her hands.

The tension was palpable as they waited for me to make sense of the data. My palms began sweating as I scrolled through marked-up images and highlighted numbers.

“Kang was right — we were right,” was all I could say.

Kang had theorized that the segmental duplications in the human genome were evidence of an ancient retrovirus. She'd founded my team several years ago and had laid the foundations of the work that had finally come to fruition at this moment. Two years ago she lost a battle with illness, and in this moment my heart ached because she deserved to see the numbers and the images and everything that had proved her right.

We spent another year painstakingly gathering more data to make sure the results weren't a fluke. We spent the time asking ourselves how this virus could be — in the time between the quantum computer runs, we wondered how this virus could have evolved, and why it did. None of the theories seemed to fit, and eventually I wondered: what if it had been purposefully created?

The more I thought about this, the more it felt right. But feelings, especially one as tenuous as this, did not make for good science. Still, I found myself fixated on the idea, which eventually drove a frustrated Valdez — and several other colleagues — from the team. Eventually it was only me and Olson left, and we left the university to continue our research with a team at Cassan Genetics, a genetic engineering firm that had shown interest in our findings.

Ten years ago, we began trials to remove the viral DNA from human cells. We selected a series of sites that we were convinced would allow brain cells to regenerate. In vitro trials went well, and three years later we moved on to human clinical trials with patients who had suffered severe brain trauma. My fixation all but disappeared — we were doing exciting work, and I threw myself into it with a passion.

The recovery with our treatment was remarkable and unprecedented. For obvious reasons, our firm wanted us to focus on refining the treatment. So we did. The trials were going incredibly well — too well, in fact, and it was five years ago that the first sign of significant side effects emerged. Patients who had received the widest spectrum of treatment were reporting hallucinations, vertigo, and showed symptoms of sensory overload. Soon after, some began reporting intense feelings of dread.

What was curious, however, were their hallucinations. All described glimpses of a void with ominous and out-of-focus glowing shapes. Most experienced some level of vertigo, with some saying that they felt like they were balancing on the edge of a cliff.

Nothing made sense; though physically the patients were fine, they were in incredible distress. Soon I wondered what would happen if we spliced the viral DNA back in, starting at the most recent sites of removal. And slowly, their symptoms diminished. We did more trials, gathered more data, to make sense of what was happening. Eventually we found that it didn’t matter what order we removed or reinserted the viral DNA: it was the number, not the order, of removals that were most likely to cause these symptoms.

Cassan was content to leave it at that — it was clear that the treatment worked wonders and they were chomping at the bit to announce a real medical miracle (their words). My team, however, was not. While we appeased Cassan by narrowing down the safe zones of treatment and refining the payload delivery systems, we squeezed in time to continue investigating the oddities surrounding the side effects and, more importantly, the oddly specific symptoms that the patients all shared. My suspicions regarding the origin of the retrovirus returned, clawing its way out of the back of my mind where I’d buried it years ago.

“I want to see what those patients saw,” I said one evening last year. Olson was just getting up to leave for the night, and she looked to me in a mixture of knowing and resignation.

“I know you do.” She wringed her hands — a habit she’s had since her grad school days. “They won’t like it.”

“I know they won’t.”

“You’re going to do it anyway,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.”

There was a real risk of, to put it bluntly, royally fucking myself up by giving myself so much of the viral removal treatment. It was beyond foolish to do this to myself, and I half expected to be the subject of a news article detailing a delusional researcher’s descent into insanity. But I needed to; something in those patients’ words had lit a sort of fire in me. Olson and Hsu, the only other person on the team who I knew understood my irrational objective and who too wanted to know just what those patients were seeing, agreed to begin the reversal should I begin to lose myself.

The plan was to spend a year bringing myself up to the levels that caused the most severe symptoms in our trials patients. For the first few months, I noticed nothing out of the ordinary and I worried that the experiment was a bust. But soon I had what I could only explain as the tingles, waves of small sensations as though someone was lightly brushing their fingers across my skin.

Then the hallucinations came. There were flashes of darkness — the void with glowing shapes that seemed to be rushing past. The tingles became worse, and shortly after the hallucinations began, the vertigo came with it. But it was unlike any vertigo I had experienced. It wasn’t so much a feeling of being off-balance as it was my brain being concerned that I was about to fall from a great height.

Three months ago, there was real concern for my health, and Hsu tried to call it off and start the reversal treatment. By now we had already far surpassed the levels of treatment that we had tested on humans, so it was understandable that Hsu and Olson were becoming extremely uneasy from the descriptions of my symptoms. But the hallucinations were becoming more frequent, the glowing shapes becoming clearer and clearer, so I asked — begged — for Hsu and Olson to give me a little while longer.

I sat in the lab room today, waiting for my colleagues to arrive with the latest treatment. I glanced around the empty room, searching for the flashes of void that seemed to appear if I looked in just the right spots. The feeling of imminent falling was nearly constant these days, and a vague feeling of dread was always churning in the pit of my stomach. But these were as nothing; I felt that we were close to making sense of all this, and that was more than enough for me to push through.

Olson arrived with the treatment, Hsu on her heels with a tablet in hand. “Are you ready?” she asked as she set the tray down and took a seat in the stool next to me.

“Yeah.”

She administered the injection wordlessly. None of us moved to get up — it was now routine for them to monitor me for the next hour while the effects of the treatment slowly took root. I listened as Olson and Hsu discussed a food festival in the city, the dread in my stomach growing with each passing minute.

I soon felt as though my vision was closing in and going dark and I felt a small panic that I was about to go blind. The distress must have been obvious on my face, because I heard the faraway voices of Olson and Hsu asking me how I was feeling.

Minutes passed. Or was it seconds? The feeling of falling was growing worse and I shut my eyes in an attempt to stop it. I felt Hsu’s hand on my shoulder, and this was reassuring enough that I opened my eyes again.

I saw the void rushing past in all directions.

My mind felt odd, and I haven’t the vocabulary to describe how the tracts of thought were crisscrossing in my brain at strange angles. I looked up — or was it up anymore? — and my mouth fell open.

Glowing words hung suspended in the void above — above?

TIMELINE GL-57-A: LOST

These words, and more like it, were arranged in neat rows — rows? Cubes? — delimited by faint, glowing lines of light. They were far in the distance but also somehow simultaneously so close that I felt oppressed by their presence and their words. As I looked around me, I felt chills go down my spine.

TIMELINE GL89-57-B: LOST

TIMELINE EQ91-32-N: LOST

TIMELINE KL91-45-T: LOST

Under each of these glowing, floating signs were enormous squares — cubes? — of a nothingness that tweaked at my mind. I felt an instinctive fear at this nothingness: a bad gut feeling, a reflexive terror. Countless more glowing labels of lost timelines and their accompanying nothingness slowly — quickly? — moved past me. Were the terrifying squares of nothingness the only indicator now of a timeline that were, as the signs now showed, somehow lost?

I looked in the direction that I was traveling and found myself sitting before a panel of computers. But these were none that I’d ever seen: they were slim and indescribably sci-fi, and displayed incomprehensible graphs and numbers whose significance wasn’t immediately obvious. I looked up at the glowing sign that I and this panel of computers were moving toward and let out a small noise of surprise.

TIMELINE SV-99-A: STABLE

Stable?

I looked back down at the panel of computers in search of answers. I still hadn’t a clue what the numbers or graphs meant, but after a few moments of examining the screens, there was a soft hum and a sheet of plastic shot out of a slot on the side of one of screens. It floated in place where it had come out, and I knew that it was meant for me so I reached out to take it.

“Jesus Christ, where the fuck is her arm?!” came Hsu’s voice. I glanced back (??) and saw them panicking in the lab room, undecided if they should grab me or not.

I snatched the sheet of plastic before they could wrench my arm back (“Where the hell did that come from?” Hsu exclaimed). The plastic was about the size of a large tablet and about as thick as a credit card. On it was some sort of message in fine print, in several languages I recognized and a few that I’d never seen before.

Whenever you have come from: turn back and undo what you have done to yourself. Humanity and the local galactic cluster have been locked to the (-0.9667, 2.0103, -7.7016, - 1.0100) vector in SV-99-A to ensure survival of the human race. It is extremely dangerous to venture outside the confines of SV-99-A.

DO NOT ATTEMPT.

SV-99-A is the only stable timeline we were able to recover following the collapse of spacetime in the conflict with the Ulteaus. In the SV-99-A timescale, it took on the order of 9 billion years to lock the cluster safely. This timeline is all we could salvage.

We crippled you — us — to keep you safe in SV-99-A. We are long gone, but if you are reading this, then we have succeeded. Stay safe in SV-99-A. There is nothing else outside. We cannot survive in unstable spacetime.

There is nothing else out there.

DO NOT ATTEMPT.