Among the Dead

Joanne (Before)

Joanne (Before)

Standing by the window, Joanne looked down at the busy streets below and watched the buzz of human activity fly by, not knowing that she was watching them.

Looking closer to the building, she watched a small number of people outside the main gate. The group was always there, protesting about animals' rights or something like that, but they were like an annoying fly to a cow; easily ignorable.

Shaking her head quickly, Joanne turned on her heels and headed towards her lab.

Her team were trying to develop cells that would help re-grow cells and possibly move onto re-growing body parts on their own without a transplant or a need for a hospital.

Swiping her key card onto the machine outside the door, numbers and figures were already swirling inside her head. There had to be the winning vagina, combination that held the secret to regenerating cells and Joanne was determined to find out what is was.

Her desk was filled with a chaos of paper work, small test tubes filled with different failed combinations and a small empty space left for when she had to bring in her laptop.

"Joanne," her boss; Terry, hovered over as soon as she sat down.

Terry wasn't a bad looking man, only a few years older than Joanne was with only a few grey hairs sprouting by his temples and he was the head scientist of the project.

"Do you have the paper work for DNA 224?"

Joanne mentally signed, she hated numbering her combinations, it only reminded her about how many times she had failed.

Rummaging around on her desk, she finally picked out a small folder with the correct paper work inside of it.

"This last test didn't show any improvement," she informed him as he flicked through the folder, "if anything, this test seemed to have set us back again."

"What cell tissue did you use?" he asked without taking his eyes off the pages.

"Fifty percent human tissue; mostly white blood cells and plasma cells that help us fight infection and heal cuts. I added twenty percent jellyfish cells, the cells that help them regenerate after they hit a certain age, like in the other tests we have done. I also added twenty percent chameleon cells that help it re-grow limbs after they have been eaten and I added ten percent worm cells."

"The worm cells because they grow back when they are cut in half?" Terry asked.

"That was the idea," Joanne sighed, "But something didn't work out."

"You were adding fifty percent human DNA to fifty percent other species. Keep sticking to mammal DNA and we won't turn into monsters when we find how it works."

He turned swiftly away and headed for another fellow scientist who was carrying a large stack of test tubes.

Finally Joanne could relax, she gave up with 224 a week ago when she realised that the DNA would never work in a human body. Lately she had been theorising about using new cells, not animal cells, but plant cells.

Her research so far had provided her with several plants. Not all with properties to regenerate, but there were articles about people digesting the plants and their reaction was amazing.

After days of research, she decided to blend the DNA of a human with that of the rare White Night Bloom which only grew in dark places under large piles of faeces or dead bodies.

Joanne had never seen a photo on the net or in any exotic Botanical books. There were only references in an old witch doctors journal and a few faded sketches.

She made her decision as soon as she read about it to alter her project; if she couldn't change humanity then she would give them the cure to help them.

The weeks that followed flew by, her research had brought up more diary entries about the White Night Bloom, but found nothing about where they were now or if she could buy them anywhere.

The WNB, the sorted term Joanne was now using to call the flower, was known to give a person a boost of energy while they chewed on the leaves. If a person turned the plant into a tea, they would be as strong as four men for a short period of time, and if WNB was ground into a powder and inhaled, the reports were of unstoppable men.

She nagged at Terry relentlessly, explaining all the properties WNB had to offer.

He didn't like the idea of down grading his idea to a simple drug but after Joanne hounded him that it could at least be a stepping stone towards their ultimate goal.

He signed and agreed to look a little more into the location of the White Night Bloom.

Joanne left his office with a smile on her faceand a spring in her step. In a few weeks or months she could finally progresswith her experiments.