Chocolate (New Home, Part 3)

Read Part 1, Part 2

Finding capable assistants was nearly impossible these days, Michelle had been forced to realize. Too many were still concerned about ethics. How could anyone care about ethics when humanity was dying? What did the death of some useless prisoner count, when there were millions to be saved?

Dr. Michelle Wittek was sitting in front of her computer, checking the results from her latest experiment. The test subject had done surprisingly well until the last few minutes. Only then had the amount of free radicals in the blood started to badly damage cells. Especially the blood vessels looked surprisingly intact, considering the stress the body had been under.

Hypoxia caused by an increased oxygen supply had always been a problem for scuba divers. It was always either too much oxygen or too much carbon dioxide or too much nitrogen. Always too much. And the human body wasn’t able to tolerate too much of anything over a longer period of time, no matter what it was.

Contemplative, Michelle checked the inflammatory response. Still way too high. She needed to bring this one down a lot. But at least the problem with the free radicals seemed to be close to a solution.

Based on a study from some decades ago, Michelle had started using dark chocolate in an effort to control the free radicals. The effect had been surprisingly positive, so she had started to extract antioxidants from several sources and mixed them together. With each new test subject, each new experiment, the mixture brought better results. But it still wasn’t enough.

”I am so sick of all this testing”, Michelle mumbled to herself. ”People are dying out there and I just have to repeat the same experiment over and over and over again. I wish there were an easier way. I wish … “

She looked up and her eyes darted over to the small glass cube that was standing in one corner of her office. It contained a fish. But not a normal fish, no. It was a fish capable of breathing air.

”How are you doing it”, Michelle asked the fish. ”You can breathe both, air and water. You don’t care, do you? As long as everything is slightly wet, you get all the oxygen you need. Not more, not less. If there was just a possibility to give humans this ability.”

She went over to the fish and took it out on her hand. The animal tried to escape, didn’t seem very happy about being picked up.

”You don’t like to be used as a test subject either, do you”, Michelle said. ”Why would you? It’s incredibly uncomfortable. All that pain, all that suffering. And for what? Most of the time, I don’t even have any kind of results. Just dead bodies.”

Carefully, she put the fish back.

Human evolution was already too far advanced to revert to a state similar to the one this fish was in. It was highly unlikely that she’d be able to bioengineer a human that could breathe water, no matter how much she wanted it. Taking oxygen out of the ocean instead of the air, that would be just perfect.

But no, it just wasn’t possible. Moving humanity under water would never eradicate the need for fresh air. It would just keep the cleaned air from being polluted over and over again. Down there, they would just need to deal with carbon dioxide, not all those dirt particles which accumulated in airways and irritated the skin.

”We need a way to keep the air under water. And the oxygen levels can’t be too high, or it will kill us. Antioxidants can only do so much before we start poisoning ourselves with too much oxygen. But how do we get so much air under water without compressing it into an air tank? The compressed air is also bad for our lungs.”

Frustrated, Michelle sat back on her chair and stared blankly at her computer screen.

”There must be something”, she said. ”Somewhere, somebody must have asked the same question. At some point, nature must have asked this question!”

Driven by intense anger, Michelle started researching methods of underwater air storage.

And then, she found something.

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Sources:

The effect of pre-dive ingestion of dark chocolate on endothelial function after a scuba dive

Scuba diving induces nitric oxide synthesis and the expression of inflammatory and regulatory genes of the immune response in neutrophils

What Are Free Radicals?

Theme and variations: amphibious air-breathing intertidal fishes

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