From Darkness Comes - Book 2 in The Dissonance Series

The Lab

We leave the roof and ride down the elevator, passing the woman in white and the two guards. Stepping inside the second elevator, Aero holds up his hand, types in a code, and hits the button labeled "L."

I look at my brother suspiciously, wondering where he is taking me. He stands like a statue, unspeaking and unmoving until the doors slide open.

Before me lies an enormous room filled with lab tables. Several men and women in white lab coats move around, barely lifting their eyes from their microscopes to look at us. One man salutes my brother when he sees him, but the others ignore our presence, too engrossed in their work.

"Welcome to the lab: a place of learning, a place of experimentation, a place where we figure out how to survive and more importantly, thrive, on this strange new planet. This is where you will spend your days, working with a team of Mods to help find solutions to problems."

"A team of Mods?"

"Yes, Environettix needs the brightest minds working together to figure out what their scientists have failed to do."

"What have they failed to do?"

"I'll show you."

He walks me through the room, passing various experiments. I notice a section where the super fruits are being created and another with beakers bubbling with strange-looking liquids. A green goo is being picked at and analyzed. A jar filled with pebbles from the path glows like a lantern without an electrical source. Tables upon tables of odd experiments. But my eyes are drawn to one area in particular: a room in the back from which radiates a strange red glow. I look at my brother and he signals for me to continue, following behind me.

Scanning the room as I enter, the first thing I notice is that, unlike the rest of the lab, there aren't any cameras in this room. Whatever they're doing in here, they don't want others to know about it. Near the back is a long table, above which hangs a series of intense red lights. I can feel the heat radiating off the lamps as I approach. It reminds me of a heat lamp at a restaurant and I step closer to see what's cooking. I have to blink several times to know if what I'm seeing is real. On a sterile metal tray, encased in a clear box, sits a throbbing organ, a heart hooked up to tubes, connected to a machine. The organ pulses in and out. And next to it, in another case, what appears to be a set of lungs.

"Whose organs are these?" I'm afraid to know the answer. "And why were they taken?"

"They weren't taken. They were grown."

"You're growing human organs?"

"Not exactly. Tell me, what do you know about Xenotransplantation?"

"I know it's the process of using animals to grow organs for humans. So these belong to an animal? You brought livestock to this planet?" Images of a spaceship filled with cows, like a flying Noah's arc, float through my brain.

"No, that wasn't a possibility, nor did we think it was a necessity. We had no way of knowing that the oxygen levels would deplete upon our arrival."

"What does oxygen have to do with any of this."

"Humans cannot live on this planet with their current organs. But we know that modified organs, like the ones that you and I possess, can function in this climate. If we could mass produce organs that function under this planet's harsh conditions, then we could transplant them into the civilians, saving the lives of everyone in our city."

"So you're creating an organ farm for transplantation?"

"We were, yes, but we ran into some problems. In order to harvest animal organs, we needed animals, from which, to harvest the organs, but we do not have those here. One of the reasons that Environettix selected Utah for its headquarters on Earth, was because of the Great Salt Lake. For years, Environettix studied microbes from fossilized organisms found in the lake to try and find a way to recreate what had been dead for millions of years. From satellite images, we were able to determine that this planet, once contained water. It's one of many reasons why we chose it. There is a crater, not far from here, formed from an ancient lake. Our scientists were able to recover fossilized organisms and using the microbes, bring them back to life."