Washington DC, 22nd February 1991
At the senatorś house it was morning. By eight a.m. they had all come downstairs for breakfast. George was the last to descend, bringing two CDs with him. He had spent the night recording and encrypting the CDs with old family files, and details of the family tree, proof of everything he had told his son and granddaughter.
‘Thomas and Sarah, these CDs are for you. They are encrypted with a 2048-bit key, impossible to break without the password.
The password is at the back of the family portrait i gave you last Christmas.’
The senator had given each of them an oil painting of the whole family in a group. it had been painted from a photo which had been taken the previous Christmas, when practically the whole Griffin clan was present. That was the only time it was possible to get everybody together.
‘You´ll find a lot of answers in this CD,’ George went on.
‘Thomas, take this parcel, I´ve put the cylinder in it. Please, take good care of it.’
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‘Don´t worry, Dad.’
The Griffins finished breakfast and said their goodbyes. Thomas and sarah took the highway back to New York. As they drove they talked over what had happened, about all the revelations George had made. Both of them were intrigued and pleased to have a part to play in events of such importance.
‘Daddy, I couldn´t sleep last night, thinking about all that grandpa said, and I came to a decision: I want you to make this clone and I want to give birth to it,’ said Sarah with absolute certainty.
‘But daughter, itś very dangerous. If something went wrong I´d never forgive myself,’ answered Thomas in a worried voice, stroking his daughterś hair.
‘Daddy, I trust you and, if the worst came to the worst, what could go wrong? You do inseminations every day at your clinic.’
Thomas was a scientist and university lecturer, as well as a consultant to businesses. And he ran a fertilization clinic where he treated women who couldn´t conceive, and carried out artificial insemination procedures.
‘Cloning is a lot more complex. I will have to take an egg of yours, or another egg, and strip the genetic material from it; then I will take a cell from the donor (which will be cloned) and join it to the egg by a process of electro fusion. in this way the embryo will be formed. However the egg may reject the donorś genetic material and, even if there is no rejection, the child that is born will have nothing of yours, he won’t really be your son, you will merely be providing the womb. And the child could be born dead or deformed.
Are you prepared to take such risks?’
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‘Daddy, he’ll be my son. Bringing up a child is to be its mother just as much as giving birth to it is.’
Thomas knew he wasn’t going to be able to get this idea out of his daughter’s head; after all, she always got what she wanted. Since she was a little girl she had been very spoilt by her mother and especially by her grandparents.
‘i’ll analyze this blood. if everythingś alright with it i’ll think about what you’ve said.’
Thomas left sarah at work and went straight to the laboratory at his clinic, which was nearby. When he got there he hurried into the building, anxious to get the analysis done, and he barely greeted the staff and patients. he locked himself in the laboratory and gave instructions not to be disturbed. he put on his white coat and his mask, and took the cylinder out of the parcel his father had made.
He looked around to make sure nobody was in the lab, and then he put his finger over the crack at the top of the cylinder, which immediately lit up. With one hand holding the base, and the other the top of the object, he twisted them in opposite directions and with a little click the cylinder opened. Very carefully he tried to pour a drop of blood on to a slide, but the blood would not pour.
In fact it wasn’t possible to see the blood inside the cylinder, as the duct inside it was very narrow.
he carefully inserted some cotton wool on a very thin stick into the recipient, and when he withdrew it the tip was dark red, confirming that there really was blood inside. He wiped the cotton wool on the slide – the blood was thick and dark but, amazingly, it had been conserved in that cylinder for nearly two thousand years.
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that there was no longer any blood in the tube, since after so many centuries it could have dried out, and in this case it wouldn’t be possible to collect genetic material.
Thomas collected a little more blood. he decided he would use an electronic microscope powerful enough to see even the DNA chain. The analysis would take a little longer, but the precision would be much greater. The microscope had been donated by a billionaire friend of his father’s and cost something in the region of five million dollars, an unimaginably vast sum for Thomas and his humble clinic. After many minutes of waiting, the result of the analysis of the blood started to show up on the computer screen.
While this was happening Thomas had gone out of the laboratory to get a cup of coffee. With one eye on his coffee and the other on the computer screen, which he could see from a distance through the glass, he could see that something was appearing on the screen.
He swallowed his coffee in a single gulp, burning his throat as it went down, and ran back to the computer. His main objective was to compare the DNA of the blood with his own. He could see on the screen the structure of the cells, the chromosomes and, in small print, he could read the words:
DNA sequencing complete
Pairs of chromosomes = 24
Thomas was thunderstruck. his mouth grew dry. he couldn´t believe his eyes.
‘Impossible! The machine must be broken or badly adjusted!’
Naturally Thomas knew that monkeys have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. humans have 23 pairs. he decided to re-do the test, this time making a comparison with his own blood. He took a 80
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hypodermic needle and drew a little blood from his own arm, then placed it under the microscope and waited for the result. eventually the result appeared:
sequence 1 - 24 pairs of chromosomes
sequence 2 - 23 pairs of chromosomes
DNA compatibility = 89.786%
Thomas refused to believe it and entered the result in a database which contained all the known species of animal, to find out what species the blood belonged to. But the result was negative: after hours searching the database the computer could find no species to which that DNA belonged. Everything began to become clear in Thomas’ mind. The blood didn´t belong to any race existing on this planet. The chimpanzee, with twenty-four pairs of chromosomes, exhibits approximately 97% of compatibility with human DNA.
The genetic material he was testing wasn´t human, and it couldn´t be from this planet. In fact the blood was really Jesus’, and by all appearances Jesus really existed. That story his father had told was beginning to make sense. But something began to intrigue Thomas: how did Jesus successfully procreate with a human woman? Was Mary Magdalene human or a hybrid - half human and half alien?
Various suppositions and theories began to crowd into Thomas’
head. he started to weep with the strong emotions he was feeling.
He was the first scientist in the world to have the chance to analyze the DNA of the greatest and most famous of all beings, Jesus Christ; and to cap it all he was a member of his family! Thomas was beside himself, he couldn´t keep this information to himself, he felt he must share it with someone. he was euphoric; but he realized that the information was too dangerous, nobody must know.
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Now everything made sense, the stories about Jesus, the way Mary became pregnant while still a virgin - of course it must have been by artificial insemination: hence the legend of the Virgin Mary. Jesus’ powers were explained. It was clear that he belonged to a race which was mentally very advanced, with total control over his own mind and, thereby, able to perform the “miracles” which everyone talks about.
Without a second thought, Thomas took the samples out of the microscope, recorded on a diskette the results of the blood tests and instructed the computer to delete the research he had done, as someone could come across it. He hurried to the phone, picked up and dialed the number of his father’s house.
‘Hi, at the moment we can´t come to the phone. Please leave a message and we´ll get back to you soon. Thanks,’ said his father’s voice recorded on the answering machine.
‘Dad, you´ve no idea what I´ve found out! I analyzed the blood in the cylinder and i found something sensational. it doesn´t belong to any species known on this planet. As a matter of fact the DNA of this blood has 48 chromosomes, while human blood has 46. Isn´t it fantastic? By the way, I´ve decided to try and create the clone. Call me as soon as you get this message. Bye.’
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