Chapter 14: Say Never Die

By dinner time Claude had sent Cyan the login, and it was mission accomplished: Cyan would be installing her space-age virus and stopping the transmission that might have been guiding the bad guys to Earth. The meal was a celebration.

Later on though, lying cuddling on the bed with Mia, Grace found herself replaying the meal, and wondering if Claude had been quite as joyful as the rest of them.

“Do you think it’s really the end?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Probably, why not?” Mia was casually stroking Grace’s ear.

“It seems a bit easy, and I was getting the feeling Claude isn’t really sure.”

“Well that’s all we could do, and we did it.” Mia was getting up. “Thanks to you being awesome. I’m going to see the boys, you want to come?” she grinned, teasing but meaning it.

“I think I’ll go and ask Claude.” Grace wasn’t ready to get fucked, just yet. She didn’t really want Mia to go and get fucked either, but she had to be reasonable. And realistic.

“You can just watch. See how great it is.”

“No thanks,” she had to smile back. Mia was testing her, a bit, but that was actually okay, in a way.

“Join us in the gym, after?”

“Okay.”

She phoned, Claude sounded pleased to hear from her, and she went along to have a coffee. She sat in the stylish armchair at right-angles to him, on the end of the weirdly shaped glass-topped coffee table, while he smiled at her in his warm way.

“So we’ve been thinking,” she started, after the opening pleasantries and a sip of coffee, “about switching off ageing, and what that might mean? Cos it seems to us the Striteracians will be able to tell us how to do it too. I mean we do genetic engineering don’t we, so once they explain our scientists will be able to catch up?

“We think you’re right that it’s an issue, your mother and me.” Claude was taking her seriously. “It’s done with a virus, in fact, to seed cells with the modified DNA. Not a computer virus but a live synthetic virus, as a vector, or carrier. You don’t have to change that many cells, actually. So we’ve been talking about it. What do you think?”

“Well I don’t want to die and nor does Mia, or probably hardly anyone at all,” Grace was relieved her mum had been thinking about it too. “And we don’t want people we love to die, when we could save them. But if we used it and it got out, we’re afraid everyone will fight over it, and the religions won’t like it, and also people won’t stop having babies so overpopulation will get even worse.”

Clause just nodded, smiling at her.

“And if word gets out anyway,” she continued, “that we can do it, then we might be in danger, and the aliens too, on top of for being aliens, because whoever finds out will want to have it to themselves. It’d be worth billions obviously, and also governments might want to stop it. It’d be the same reasons Rose and Emerald and Cyan had to escape their planet.

“I suppose ... you’d have to say - I mean have a law - that people can only have the treatment if they don’t have babies. But how would you enforce that? People might riot or attack. And you’d get some people killing their children so they could live forever.”