The Window

Leah

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. The view from this particular window was the best that their house could offer. And her dad never refused her when she, with a sweet smile, asked him:

“Daddy, may I support you in your seclusion in the office room?”

“Of course, my sweetheart.”

Daddy was always sad, but also so very gentle and caring. She would mount on a chair, bring the binoculars up to her eyes, and freeze with solemn air in a posture of young buoyancy and gaiety for minutes, sometimes hours. Indeed, the view from the window was amazing. The green ocean of grass, from time to time agitated by occasional puffs of wind, smoothly flowed into foaming sea waves, deep blue colors of which took her breath away. Such a sterile, yet charming view! Leah’s favorite pastime was watching the seagulls, as they would elegantly dive into the sparkling waves and then, with the same grace, resurface, victoriously clutching their still resisting and wriggling breakfast in the beaks.

Her dad would sit at his desk, immersed into loads of monitors and screens, frowning, breathing heavily, and every now and then throwing loving and woeful glances at his child. And she would giggle, or express her surprise by merrily clapping her hands when a rare ship passed by somewhere on the horizon.

Other windows were less interesting. Maybe, it was just because her dad would rarely stay with her when she climbed those other windows to peek outside. His office was his favorite place, there he could stay for hours, taking breaks only to cook some food for them, or to have a nap. He never slept more than six hours a day, Leah conducted research on this account. He would always go to their bedroom at 10 in the evening, put her to bed, and for the next hour or so she enjoyed listening to the books he read to her.

“Good night!”

“Good night!”

Then he switched off the lights, lay down on the sofa, and in a few minutes she could hear his deep and even breathing. At 5 in the morning, he would always get up, very quietly, so that not to disturb her, and walk out of the room. But almost every time she would wake up, and sneakily screwing up her eyes, so that he didn’t notice, watch him closing the door behind him. So funny and naive, her dad is!

For her age of eight, she was very grown up and knew how to do a lot of things. She could make an omelet, and do laundry; she enjoyed reading Dumas and used to recite the whole scenes for her dad, who sometimes, but not often, played along, and then they could for the whole day imitate being musketeers, or royal courtiers, or insidious politicians.

“Je vous défie en duel, monsieur!”

“ Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait, petite mademoiselle?”

Once, her dad got very sick. And she took care of him, cooked cereals for him, and constantly reminded him to take his medicines.

There were only two of them in the whole world. Protected from the outside by the walls of this house and a very elaborate machinery of tubes and pipes, and other things she didn’t know the names of, that decontaminated and sterilized the air coming in from beyond these walls. Leah found it very confusing that the picturesque, and such lively sceneries that she could observe from the window, were indeed dangerous and detrimental for human beings as soon as they cross the line between beholding its beauty through a window pane and taking a breath of it. Not long before she was born, the world had given in to the merciless grip of a severe virus pandemic; the science, the greatest minds behind it appeared to be helpless to find a cure against it, and the only way to save the humanity from total extinction was complete isolation. Different human life rescue projects were devised and implemented: hiding into bunkers deep underground, escaping the poisonous atmosphere by launching spacecrafts inhabited by perpetual passengers into orbit. Her father constructed and built this house at the seaside, protected from the deadly atmosphere by a sophisticated air purification system. A few months ago she finished a book called “Air Merchant.” Only imagine, sucking all the air from Earth, converting it into liquid stockpiles, with the purpose of selling it! Such a vicious and horrifying entrepreneurship! Though, of course, even with her childish mind, she understood that this is pure fiction. But what also came to her mind was that if this sort of machine that’s capable of sucking all the air could indeed be built, maybe this could save the planet now. Just to suck all the air through this machine, filter it, and eliminate the contamination. And Leah was suspecting that maybe daddy is working on this sort of machine now, giving his all to save the world.

Although locked in their house, she didn’t feel lonely all these years. She had her daddy, her books, and, actually, also the whole universe, which she could explore, where she made friends, discovered beautiful sunsets on the planets that had two suns, bathed in the lilac and silvery oceans, and even traveled in time… Her daddy was a genius, he built for her this VR universe, all she had to do was put on the special costume, sit in the chair, and press the launch button.

Ethan

The screen of the monitor glowed in a cold blue tint, illuminating his pale and tired face. Again! Again the results were underwhelming. It’s been eight years, and all the experiments predicted a negative outcome. A normal human would give up, and accept the inevitable: there’s no way to fix this. But he is far from normal, he’s mad, obsessed with the idea that this cannot be true, that the solution must be hiding somewhere in these terabytes of data. Ethan came to terms with his madness, he cut a deal with it. It was his madness, his obsession, that gave him the strength to get up in the mornings, breathe, and take care of Leah. He will find a solution and liberate his daughter from her imprisonment. And then the madness, the darkness may consume him, destroy his mind, he doesn’t care as long as Leah will be safe and free.

But along with craving for finding a solution, he was so very afraid. The shroud of lies he wove was so unutterably terrible; the way he’s been deceiving his own daughter for so many years kept him from falling asleep at night. But how he could confess to her that it’s not the world that is condemned to perpetual isolation, but her, his only consolation and joy, his flesh and blood. Therefore, he had to create this story, to distort the real state of things by convincing Leah that it’s the only acceptable and possible way of leading life now – in four walls, away from communities of people, hidden from the breath of wind, unable to contemplate the beauty of real, not recreated by VR, nature.

Eight years ago, with the birth of Leah, he lost his wife. But this was only the beginning of his misery. At first, doctors didn’t notice anything, all newborn screenings were made according to protocols. Except for the low weight of a premature baby, the child looked to be healthy. The mother perished, but gave life to a child that would continue her bloodline; Ethan was grief-stricken by his wife’s decease, but also he was grateful to God, if there is one, that his and Sandra’s child made it out alive and healthy. They will manage!

And then in a few months, Leah got sick with a terrible fever. It happened so suddenly and abruptly; her body was literally burning, she could merely breathe. The poor child was so exhausted by the illness she didn’t even cry. Ethan immediately sought help from doctors. She was getting worse and worse, the next day after hospitalization she developed respiratory distress and had to be connected to a mechanical ventilation system. The doctors diagnosed Pneumocystis pneumonia. This signaled to check her immune system response, and there appeared to be almost none. Some more advanced screens were made then, and the results were absolutely shocking: it turned out that the baby girl had X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Doctors were perplexed. The genetic disorder that normally can be found only in male patients. How could it be possible? It’s true that newborn screenings can sometimes give a misfire. That’s why it could happen that the condition had not been identified in the first place. But how could it have happened that both of her X chromosomes had had the malignant defect?

Ethan and Sandra knew that she was a carrier of this genetic condition, yet they wanted to conceive a child. A 75% chance of having a healthy child gave them the hope that they’ll succeed. When Sandra got pregnant, their happiness was clouded by trepidation: will their baby be born healthy? At the twelfth week of pregnancy, they carried out a chorionic villus sampling. The results brought them relief and feeling of joy of soon-to-be parents: the genetic tests showed no abnormities, and it was a girl!

And now it turned out that the genome of this wretched teeny child tricked everyone, including nature itself! Ethan lost his sense of reality, for the next few days, weeks, he wandered on the edge of this world and daymares, appalling in their vividness and hopelessness. SCID is not a deadly disease, one can fight it. But yet, how could this even have happened?!

Trying now to reconstruct what was happening after the horrific revelation was made, Ethan could collect only fragments of misty images. Leah stayed in the hospital for months. Her body rejected bone marrow transplants, the gene therapy was inefficient either, most antibiotics gave a strong allergic reaction. The doctors kept torturing the child, at some point she became more than just a patient, she was a scientific challenge, an enigma. Meanwhile, Ethan kept continually traversing the borders of sanity. But eventually, he by some miracle managed to take back control of his ability to think and take action. He arranged the construction of this fully isolated house, a sophisticated facility that would be able to protect his daughter, her incubator and prison, that will keep her alive, healthy and away from the predatory eyes of the scientific community. They isolated themselves in this house by the sea. Ethan cut off all connections with the outer world. He only kept keeping track of advances in cell biology, medicine, and related areas.

And indeed, Leah was growing up a healthy and smart girl. The need for sunlight, outdoor recreational activities, socializing with peers, and other things necessary for the normal development of a child, were replaced with advanced technologies that could emulate all the required things. Ethan came up with this post-apocalypses story, he felt terribly bad for this, but he couldn’t tell her the truth, he just couldn’t.

For all these years he kept working on understanding how Leah could inherit the disease, and how to cure his daughter. It took him five years to make software that was able to simulate the processes taking place in human cells: gene expression regulation, cell proliferation, etc., etc. He reconstructed the behavior of the whole blood circulatory system, the lymphoid tissue, and even some organs. He tested his model on several known clinical cases. The outcomes of the simulated treatments showed great agreement with the real clinical treatment results. And then he entered all available genetic data of Leah into his program. And each time he ran the program, the results were inconsolable. All the modifications and improvements he made to the program were fruitless. But he won’t give up!

The other task Ethan kept giving all his strengths to was paying enough attention to his daughter, being a good and caring father. He was also substituting for her mum, friends, and teachers. Although deeply concerned about her future, and how to treat the impossible disease, he could enjoy the wearisome but rewarding obligations of parenthood. Her growing up was bringing him the joy of a father, but also was scaring him. He was afraid that she would start distancing herself from him, and that she would suspect him of hiding something from her and not being honest. Now she is still a small and naive child, resilient and gullible, perceiving her imprisonment as a game, her daddy as a hero; but what if this state of things will change? And they will change, they normally do, all parents know that.

Change

The sweat trickled down her chin, but her breath was even and steady. Leah increased the speed of a running belt of a treadmill. She did running every day except for weekends, giving her body time to be able to recover from the exertion. Sometimes dad joined her, but not regularly. His puffing and anguished look always was making her want to burst into laughter, but she restrained herself to avoid losing control of her breathing rhythm, and also she didn’t want to offend and discourage him.

Their relationships were good, but sometimes she could notice herself shying away from him. She also started to note his somewhat strange behavior: he didn’t want to talk much about what he was constantly doing in his office with all those screens, blinking LEDs, and concerned and almost desperate look on his face, as if he was hiding something from her. She understood that he was doing some medical simulation experiments and that this is related to the situation with the outside world. But why did all this make him so desperate, as if it’s his guilt and responsibility? Also, he always evaded answering her why they completely lost contact with other survivors. She suspected the worst scenario to have taken place; but then what is the point of them staying alive and him pushing himself so hard to find a solution to the problem?

Leah started to spend more and more time in the VR. She built towns, raced cars, danced at virtual concerts. Even when she wanted to simply sit with a book, she would connect to a VR machine and go to a virtual library. She discovered this feature quite a while ago, but at first, she still preferred a real physical fragrant book over its virtual doppelganger. But recently, after the last update her dad made, she got really fascinated by this technological wonder. The experience was absolutely the same as if she was holding in her hands a real book, she could feel the weight of the book, see the tiniest details of the texture of the yellowish paper. She even could lick her finger before turning a page. The only thing that wasn’t available to her senses was the smell of the books. She talked about this with dad, and he told her that he had been thinking for a while about how to introduce olfactory perception to virtual reality.

“Well, I could read you a whole lecture about this. The idea has been stirring my imagination for a couple of years already. Well, one decision could be to build an apparatus, an odor machine if you like, which would accommodate a variety of flasks containing volatiles responsible for this or that particular odor and regulated by a complex machinery of valves and channels which would release, mix and recreate the smell in a small chamber where the VR participant should have been sitted. Technically, this system is not complex, but it’s pretty tedious and is limited to a finite number of smells. Much more interesting but also challenging is to achieve olfactory perception via directly sending the right signals to the brain that would cause the sensation of the odor in the absence of its source. But here I bump at the lack of knowledge I have in the field of neuroscience.”

Leah loved when dad explained things to her and talked to her as if she was grown up and mature. Of course, she could not always understand his lessons and explanations, but still, these moments brought immeasurable joy to her, these were also the moments when the slight tension between them that had appeared recently vanished. They were equal, and her dad held no secrets from her.

Leah still liked to sit in dad’s office and stare out of the window. The picture outside didn’t change much, it was stable in its tranquility and consistency. The green grass was periodically hidden under snow, the sun raised and set every day, the ebbs and flows of the sea never failed at their duty. Months were passing.

At some point, Leah noticed that dad started to avoid her. They still had dinners together, he kept coming to her room every evening to wish a good night, but his eyes were evading looking at her, he delved into himself deeper than usual, looking desperate and guilty of something he didn’t dare to tell her. Was it that strange incident that caused this sharp change in his behavior? She got really worried, but couldn’t do anything. Eventually what she did was copy his behavior. She resented him, and felt so lonely, alone on the whole planet. Why did her mum have to die?! She wouldn’t have let their family fall apart. Leah knew that her mum was strong, probably much stronger than her dad.

Truth

That’s not right. He is losing his daughter, he feels the growing distance between them, and it’s him to blame for what’s happening. Leah appeared to be much stronger, much wiser. Just like her mother. Ethan, on the other hand, was oppressed by a load of his lies, he was losing his grip on controlling his constantly growing depression. He had some success in his research, but it devastated him even more.

The discovery he had recently made was if not impossible then so very unlikely to happen. The chances of this really happening were one in billions. The population on Earth is smaller than these odds. Yet it occurred; as if somebody set it up. The last tests that Ethan ran showed that at some point during the early stage of zygote development, the DNA transposition event took place and damaged the healthy X chromosome. Moreover, the gene that was disrupted hadn’t been previously identified to be related to immune system regulation, and even more, it even hadn’t been annotated. That’s why neither doctors nor he could identify the cause of the disorder for so long. But even these findings, if they were true, didn’t explain why Leah’s body so fiercely rejected all the treatments that she was subjected to in her infancy. Something was wrong here, something didn’t feel right, and gave Ethan the feeling that he was being continually fooled by somebody or something.

The advent of hardware and software that made it possible to simulate and predict the processes happening in living organisms at the level of organs and cells, and even on a molecular level, pushed science and medicine far ahead. Ethan was one of the developers of this sophisticated system. The project had been started not long before Leah was born and Sandra died. After Ethan isolated himself and Leah from the outer world, the only contacts he didn’t cut off were a couple of his colleagues. It was extremely difficult to keep this connection in secret from Leah. They supplied him with experimental data. He was processing these data, finding interconnections, and translating them into machine code. Eight years ago, they released the demo version of the program and started to test and train it on real clinical cases. The results were astoundingly good. But when he turned to try to understand Leah’s disease, the progress, until recently, kept flogging a dead horse. At one point, he also lost connection with his colleagues, they stopped responding to his inquiries.

Ethan’s recent findings, instead of giving some hope to him, made him more and more suspicious, he started to recollect some vague memories that his mind had long been suppressing. The fact that he remembered so little about the time when Leah was born, and how they moved to this prison-house, always worried him, but he tried not to think about it, as it didn’t help at all, and only exacerbated his depressed moods. But now he started to dig deeper into his consciousness. Something was wrong with this entire situation.

Finally, he decided on taking this step despite his unwillingness to do so. He told Leah that he was doing this just as a preventive measure to be sure that their health by now is not in danger, as he started to get worried about the robustness and efficiency of the air decontamination system. God, he nearly fainted when he drew her blood. To have fear of blood at his age and with a cool head of his! Leah looked at him very closely but didn’t say anything.

Then, he ran the whole genome sequencing of her blood sample.

But when he obtained the results of sequencing and compared them with the sequence he had been working with for all these years, never doubting that it was his daughter’s genome, because how could it be otherwise, he did blank out. When he regained consciousness, he found himself trembling in fever, his palms were scratched to blood, nails broken. This is wild! Or did he go completely crazy? Leah, his poor child, the only reason that gave him purpose to live, she wasn’t his daughter! And she wasn’t ill. Her genome didn’t contain any mutations dangerous to her health. He ruined a child’s life! He locked up a poor girl, whom he didn’t even know, raving that he was her father and that she is seriously, deadly ill! It didn’t make any sense, but at the same time, there was no one to blame for this. All the responsibility, all the guilt is on him even if he doesn’t know how any of this could have happened. What is he going to do?

The following weeks were worse than a nightmare. He tried to do his best at staying a caring father, but he could feel how he was failing at this, he realized that Leah noticed a sudden change in his behavior, that she is scared of what’s going on. He himself was terrified. His brain desperately worked trying to find a solution. What should he do? How to reveal the truth to Leah? But he himself doesn’t know the truth. What is real in this world? Nothing seemed real anymore. Even his love for Leah now was discredited and denigrated.

Nothing matters anymore. He lost his wife. His last thirteen years were a fake. He didn’t have any reason to live after all. He had nothing to say to Leah, no words of explanation and consolation. He tried so hard for no reason, delusional in his pursuits. And the poor girl suffered for nothing! She could’ve had a happy childhood, with a loving family and many friends. Instead, she was forced into this hoax. Who did this to them? But he doesn’t care anymore, he has no more strength left to fight and to confront his longstanding desire to die.

The window

Leah was always a light sleeper. This time she also heard how her dad got up, earlier than usual, and then, through a wall, she could hear all his preparations. But she was very scared to move, to call him, to shout into the darkness for him to stop. She was terrified, unable to move, merely able to breathe. She didn’t know how long it lasted, but when she regained her ability to move her lips, she shouted “Daddy!”, jumped from her bed, and rushed into his office. But it was too late.

What was happening next was shrouded in haze, in tears, in insanity. She became hysterical and kept stuttering something, there was no more reality, all this was fake, virtual reality, whatever else, but it could not be true! She caught a glimpse of the window. The sun was rising serenely, the scattered light tinted the sky bloody red. Leah with all her might headbutted the pane. The glass cracked, the picture in the window went out. Where a few moments ago there were the seaside and the sunrise, now only rainbow streaks were left.

Revelation

“Doctor Helmholtz, was it really necessary to subject them to all these suffering and lies? Our society is so proud of being humane, joyful in achieving new horizons of welfare, physical as well as moral and spiritual if you let me say so; but now that this horrendous truth about Professor Ethan Hubbard’s life and death got uncovered, our people for a while got really agitated, even outraged – despite the fact that after the case was leaked to the masses, the government officially declared that these actions were legalized and morally justified, as they were aimed at the improvement of the overall healthcare system worldwide. But you personally, not as a director of the project, but as a human being, don’t you feel any remorse?”

“Remorse is a too strong of a word, miss. I do feel responsible. But as today we behold the fruitful results of this, I agree, somewhat cruel enterprise, and what’s much more important, as we successfully implement them in scientific and medical research, I can say with confidence that it was not in vain. I think that Professor Hubbard would agree with me.”

“But –“

“It could have happened differently though, not so tragic. An unfortunate set of circumstances, bad luck, call it whatever you like. Ethan was a genius. We started this project together around fifteen years ago. But then in one day he lost his wife and his newborn child. He fell into a deep depression, lost any interest in the project, lost any interest in life.”

Doctor Helmholtz swallowed and continued.

“But we couldn’t sit and watch as he was slowly killing himself, killing our hope to succeed with this extremely important for the scientific community as well as for ordinary people project. You must understand that Ethan was a true genius, alongside Newton or Einstein. Such people are born once in several centuries. Fifteen years ago, the state of natural science and medicine was on the verge of crisis, limited by ethical values that the society constantly reminded the scientific community about; science was close to making a large breakthrough but was frozen, scared of playing God. Even if the results of these endeavors could save thousands and millions of human lives. Science is never about being certain of the outcome, of the success of the research. Risks too high, questions of ethics, and humans’ gentle nature prevented science from crossing the line. Then Ethan came up with this idea, and his preliminary investigations showed that it’s indeed possible to recreate in silico the behavior of the whole cellular machinery on a molecular level. In fact, the idea was far from being novel and original. But only he was getting closer and closer to solving it. No need for real unethical experiments. From a long-standing perspective, you would be able to simulate the development of whole organisms, able to control and dissect their phenotypical and genotypical traits. That was our ultimate goal! That’s what nudged me to do what I did. We subjected Ethan to intensive psychological manipulation, or brainwashing if you please, and locked him up in a specialized facility, provided him with a purpose to live, all necessary tools for his work, and things for basic needs sustenance. But also we saved him from killing himself.”

“And what about the girl?

“She was an orphan. So, she obtained a loving father and a relatively happy childhood. And now her name is written down in history for ages. We are standing at the foot of a new era!”