Except, he remembered, that Erin Mathieson had not yet lost any baby teeth.
As Cameron worked, he began to recall what he had learned about the genetic experiments carried out upon the "superbeings" throughout the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries of Earth's history.
In those days, scientists had been experimenting with artificial selection, choosing offspring traits and altering the gene alleles to eliminate genetic diseases and weaknesses. Preserving the umbilical cord stem cells when the children were born, the scientists were able to grow new cellular materials in the event that the superbeings' organs failed or if they fell prey to disease.
However, some had not been content with the limitations of ethical science, and an illegal trade of body parts, brain tissues and enzymes, and foetal placentas had developed in the West.
“I just can’t remember,” Cameron shook his head, wondering if anyone knew when the international law had been passed preventing the importation of human body parts. Some literature from the day still survived on record depicting horrific stories of vagabond children being lured and butchered by human body part traders.
For ethical reasons, genetic alteration had been banned for hundreds of years, but now the council tried to push new experiments to create super-warrior children. Cameron himself was opposed to the idea, but he realized that the matter was out of his hands. His own knowledge of the secret experiments being conducted in New Quebec City had been one of the factors that led to his premature retirement.
“They are still trying to create a superwarrior, as they did in the ancient days.” Only a rudimentary knowledge remained of those ancient days on Earth, but Cameron knew about the history of this subject.
Still, Cameron knew the council's experiments could not explain this case of genetic manipulation. As much as he would have liked to believe it, Cameron was under no illusions that the council had used Erin as a genetic experiment. He knew the limits of human knowledge in the field of gene alteration. But he did not entirely dismiss the idea that gene alteration was at work.
“How strange that we found Erin that day when the first alien ship arrived…” There had been no signs of life within it then or since, no reason for the ship to have landed on Earth. In contrast, the aliens at Charon had let the Earth know their intentions from the moment their presence was confirmed.
But on that first day, before the escalation of this new war, they had found Erin sitting quietly at the edge of the tree line, not two hundred meters from the end of the alien spacecraft. The child had spoken no language, but even at that first meeting later in his lab he had noticed her intelligence, how quickly she learned, and how carefully she observed her surroundings.
Then, he had thought her garment to be proof that she had come from the hermit colonies living in the wilds. How she had come to be wearing it, especially in light of this new evidence, remained one of the many mysteries he could not solve.
Yet, it was by no means a stochastic accident that she had been found that day, that much he understood. Erin simply could not be a child of the Earth. He accepted the realization with far less shock than he thought he would, as if he had long suspected something unusual about her, as if something had kept him from recognizing what that was.
Now that blindness had departed, and the truth was plain to see, staring him in the face; he could not imagine how he had overlooked it before.
Erin had arrived that day when the UESRC's fate changed forever, the day her spaceship had been buried beneath the Acadia cliff side and the fragments of the ancient waterfall. And, from the evidence he gathered today, clearly someone or some thing had tried to disguise her origins and had succeeded, at least superficially, in altering her pigmentation and body chemistry to present her as an Earthling.
But to what purpose? Cameron wondered. Erin herself didn't appear to remember her own origin. He couldn't believe that she was any kind of hostile threat, but perhaps his affection for the girl clouded his judgment, he thought. He couldn't deny his gut instinct—Erin appeared harmless, but she had been sent to the Earth for a reason, and that reason could be connected with the mysterious arrival of the second alien vessel.
Who are her people, and what do they want here?!
Perhaps, he thought, the other aliens had no connection with Erin's people at all—they had arrived in a ship by all reports nothing like the first.
Perhaps Erin's kind, too, had been attacked by the hostile creatures and chased to the Earth. There was no way of knowing.
Another conclusion which puzzled and elated Cameron was the mere fact that, although Erin's genetic sequences and biological composition proved her to be of alien origin, she was nevertheless a type of humanoid and remarkably similar genetically and physically to a human being.
Truly remarkable! If only he knew how it was all possible!
“I wonder if Erin's genetic code and DNA was artificially altered by her own people, not just to dissemble her appearance but perhaps to adapt her body for unknown survival conditions?” After all, her skeletal system, though nearly identical, showed slight fluctuations from the human standard in the eye sockets, hands and feet, jaw, and skull, though the differences might not have been noticed unless someone directly looked for them. Maybe somehow an observer could not detect the anomalies, unless Erin wanted them to be discovered. After all, Cameron thought, this was only the first time he had been able to unveil the mirage surrounding her. As though it was another kind of natural mind control.
“She is so amazing!” He laughed again. She had natural mind control abilities!
The initial discovery led to further enlightenment about the aliens aboard that first spaceship, such as Cameron had long prayed for; Erin's structure told him that the gravity of her home world, though close to the Earth's, must have been slightly less. Her chest capacity, likewise similar, was slightly larger to accommodate a lower atmospheric pressure.
But since Erin had grown up for the last few years on Earth, Cameron wondered how her initial physiognomy had been altered by Earth processes. Pulling out a chart he had saved from her first analysis, he compared it to the most recent x-ray image.
In the last three years, Erin's internal structure had altered itself. Where once her internal organs had closely followed the human pattern except for the lack of an appendix, they now had rearranged, pulling slightly away from the exterior and up into the abdominal cavity. Humanity's design had been a leftover remnant from the days when man's ancestors walked on four legs; eons of evolution hadn't yet changed the basic structure.
However, in three years, Erin's internal structure had repositioned itself to better suit an upright posture, to better cushion and protect her internal organs. It was as though her own ancestors had been always bipeds, or that they had been so many more years than humankind.
Testing her bone and muscle density and metabolic rate, Cameron attempted to pinpoint an accurate temperature for her home world, a reasonable sleep cycle half to a third of the length of the planet's rotational orbit, and the distance of the planet to its star. The structure and size of Erin's eyes, just slightly smaller and more elongated than his, indicated that the brightness of her home planet's star exceeded that of the sun, and he plugged his own estimate into the equation.
To his disappointment, however, his results in the equations varied from each region of her physical and chemical structure.
Erin's people could have lived within the range of 30 to 76 degrees Celsius, or from 3 to -77 degrees Celsius. Neither result seemed feasible, he realized in disappointment. Moreover, her sleep cycle showed to be an average of eight hours in duration, but she had been subject to Earthly conditions since childhood, which had doubtless affected his findings.
As a result, and to Cameron’s extreme vexation, he was unable to determine the distance of the star to her home planet. But one thing was clear: the star that had supported life on her
world was far brighter and hotter than their own. It could not be a type O or type B star, blue or blue-white. They were far too radioactive and short-lived to engender a living biosystem.
It had to have been a type A or F star, he thought, a white or yellow-white star hotter than the sun but old enough to have created a living planetary system.
Cameron shook his head, unsure again of his own calculations. Too many contradicting enzymes could be found in Erin's blood and tissues to accurately depict her origin, and his equations assumed comparability with human measurements and expectations. Perhaps Erin's alien system followed guidelines unknown and unimagined on Earth.
In any case, more questions had been raised than the information could present answers for. But for the time being, Cameron believed he had traced the cause of her irregular illnesses to the mystery of her circulatory system, and his hunch pointed the finger of blame at those odd "cancerous" and tri-nuclear cells. With that information, he hoped to establish a good diagnosis for her future.
And provide him an excuse to make further studies.
“But is it really cancer that she has?” He wondered.
At first, Cameron formed a hypothesis that the tri-nuclear cells turned ordinary cells into cancerous ones, but when he observed the cell nuclei of her "normal" cells, he had discovered those strange "buds" along the edge of the nuclear envelope. Perhaps as Erin grew, all of her cells developed into fully tri-nuclear cells, and the "cancerous" cells were only an intermediate stage of development.
As to the significance of this information, if it were the cause of her altered physical structure, Cameron could not even guess, at least not with the limited amount of time he had to observe Erin before her parents returned.
With less than an hour remaining, Cameron hadn't even progressed yet to study Erin's brainwave patterns, brain structure, or nervous system, which might have afforded some clues as to what traits her genes coded. He began to wonder what psychic abilities Erin possessed that only she knew about, and how these abilities might progress in time.
As he gazed at the girl softly breathing on the lab table, his heart was moved to pity. She must have felt different, isolated from others. But would it be any better if she knew her true origins? Or might she become a public curiosity, a pawn of the government? Would she lose the only family she had ever known? Eventually, Cameron realized, someone was going to find out who she was, especially if she were taken in for more extensive medical treatment.
“I fear the worst—as usual,” thought Cameron.
Already Major Mathieson had indicated that Dr. Cepheras—whom Cameron admired personally, but mistrusted in all things work-related—and his team of unfeeling robots had shown an interest in obtaining genetic samples from Erin's lymphocytes. He reminded himself that he needed to deal with them, have the UESF confiscate their samples and send them to him. It was already bad enough that the UESF was paying geneticists to look for strains of "superbeings" to use as donors for test tube children.
What if they tried to use Erin’s blood to create an Earth superbeing? The thought made Cameron shudder.
All of a sudden he realized it didn't matter to him why Erin had been sent to the Earth. Cameron knew in his heart that it was best to keep her identity secret, and not just for her sake. What good would it do to hand her over to be dissected by Cepheras' gang? He could predict their course of action. They would blame her for the war—or assume that she was a part of the threat and punish her for the crimes of the Charon aliens. Or destroy her.
But Erin was at least a humanoid, and the aliens at Charon had never been seen before. No one knew a thing about their body chemistry. His own analysis of the metal and crystal fragments taken after the destruction of Statue City suggested that they had been formed on a planet of slightly lesser gravity and greater average temperature than that of Earth. The evidence favored a different point of origin for the Charon aliens.
And knowing what they were capable of convinced him that Erin might already be the war's greatest surviving victim.
But having little evidence to back up his sentiments, he would do his best to protect her. If he had his way, he would see to it that no one ever found out that she was anyone other than Erin Mathieson.
“I won’t let them do a damn thing to her,” he thought to himself.
* * * * *
When Richard Mathieson and Sasha Blair returned to Cameron's quarters that evening, they found Erin playing a game of hide-and-seek with the doctor. As the couple entered, Erin emerged from behind the forest green sofa and rushed into her parents' arms.
"How did the tests go, Doctor?" Sasha enquired calmly, smoothing Erin's hair back behind her ears. She thought Cameron took his time in answering, and noted his preoccupation with watching the interaction between mother and daughter.
"Ah yes, well... First," Cameron paused, indicating with a gesture that they should come sit beside him as he gave them his prognosis, "I don't believe that her condition is terminal."
Richard and Sasha both let out an audible breath and brightened in spirits.
"Well what is the cause—"
"Why is she—"
"Please, give me a moment." Cameron put up a hand in protest to silence them. "Your civilian doctor wasn't entirely accurate in his assessments. Trust me when I say that Erin's condition will improve, though she will from time to time suffer an occasional relapse. These will probably cause her a great deal of pain, but I want to assure you that they are nothing serious. I'm afraid she has a permanent but viable, rare cardiovascular condition and something similar to cancer.
"Now, I recommend you not bring Erin to any more civilian doctors. If she's in great pain and it's necessary for her to see a physician for any reason, I suggest you bring her here for treatment at any time—"
"Oh but we couldn’t impose upon you—" Sasha began to object.
"Sasha, the reason I'm suggesting that Erin remain under my care alone is because her condition is so rare. Those who are unable to treat her unique needs properly may end up doing her more harm than good." Cameron's gaze drifted to the little girl sleeping on her mother's lap.
More harm than you know, he reflected.
"Oh well in that case, Doctor, we’d appreciate your involvement.” Sasha agreed gratefully. “It did seem to me that Bredesen wasn't getting any real results."
"All he was interested in was studying Erin like a lab rat." Richard added derisively, his forehead furrowing as he recalled the memory of their last visit. "He didn't care about Erin at all—he wanted a case study to establish her disease."
"I see." Cameron paused thoughtfully. "Well, if you can bring Erin in to me twice a year for checkups for the next ten years, I can give her all the medication she needs and administer her annual in depth-physical for her files—without forcing her to give any blood samples. I believe that, more than anything, is causing her condition to degenerate. The blood tests might be weakening her." And I have no intention of letting them fall into the wrong hands.
“I am going to do something unprecedented, and restrict access to her medical file and case. She will not be allowed to be treated by any medical doctors if I do this, and will have to be brought to me personally for all medical treatment,” Cameron insisted. “It’s a rare thing to do, but I feel that it is necessary.”
"What if she's in training and needs medical attention, doctor? Can't the military specialists give her treatment?" Sasha, Cameron noticed, had already begun to consider Erin's future, despite what Bredesen and the others had told her about Erin's slim chances.
"Not without your consent on the medical forms," Cameron sighed. "I'm going to make up a case file to be put in her records with my suggested treatment, but I urge you not to sign the forms allowing blood or tissue tests. If she receives treatment above what I have prescribed, there may be drug interactions, and the effects could be cata
strophic."
"We'll do as you say, for Erin's sake, Doctor." Richard managed, then licked his lips. "We can't thank you enough for your kindness."
"That's enough of that, now," Cameron said, dismissing their gratitude affectionately. "Just take good care of my little friend there and we'll call it even."
Chapter Fifteen
“Home at last,” Knightwood said thankfully. Now back at the UESRC, Knightwood was glad to have the chance to rest in her office after four days of meetings at the Aries Council Headquarters in Central City.
“What a mess it is in here,” she thought out loud, noticing the disorder she had created just as she left the last time.
Only ten short days ago, two days after the Stargazer left on its maiden flight to Charon, Knightwood had received a code one emergency order to launch the untested defense missiles into space, on a vector that opened only a brief twenty minutes after the orders arrived. The defense missiles had proven to be a successful investment, managing to destroy the three alien ship carriers coming from Pluto that had bypassed the Stargazer and reached the moon's orbit.
Caught off guard by the Earth's change of tactics, they had been too close to the Earth, slowing for entry into the atmosphere when the missiles hit. Reports confirmed that the remnants of the vessels had been caught in an orbit around the planet, and some of the UESRC and Ural base scientists sent out a shuttle to collect the fragments for study.
The success of the defense missiles had contributed to the boost in morale that had been building the past few months with the construction and launch of the Stargazer and the radar invisible nuclear missiles she carried with her.
Although the fragments had been analyzed with a tedious and painstaking collaborative effort among the scientists from all over the world, they had yielded little information about the alien's origins or biochemistry, and in fact, nothing more than had already been known. Still, for the general population, this disappointment did nothing to hinder the celebrations taking place.