VIABLE by R. A. Hakok

ambulance. Benzodiazepine was a common sedative, with longer lasting effect. Like methohexital, both drugs were readily available. As a third bullet point she wrote:
    Patient further sedated once in van (?? )
    She was sure that the sheriff had mentioned a list that he had made of the drugs found in the back of the van, but it wasn’t in the file he had given her. She added a note in the margin beside her third point:
    Check with sheriff if ketamine/benzodiazepine found .
    Then there was the gunshot wound. She flicked back to Sue Ellis’s handwritten notes on the copy of his medical chart. The surgeon at Mount Grant had thought that he had been shot less than an hour before arriving at the OR. The drive from Salt Wells would have taken longer than that, which indicated that Gant had indeed been shot after he had got into the van. And the forensics report seemed to support the theory that he had been shot while he was strapped to the gurney. They had no way of knowing for sure whether this was before or after he had been sedated but she was prepared to bet that it was afterwards. If they had given him methohexital to get him into the van they would have needed to administer the second longer-lasting sedative fairly shortly thereafter.
    The remainder of Gant’s history was well documented. He had been admitted to Mount Grant just after four p.m., the blood work completed quickly. Too quickly as it turned out, but she couldn’t blame Sue Ellis for that. There wouldn’t have been time to type and cross his blood and the hh phenotype was so rare that the possibility of it being an issue would have been discounted even if anyone at the hospital had thought to consider it. Then the transfusion – 4 units of O negative - followed almost immediately by the first indications of an acute hemolytic response: the increase in heart rate, the rapid, weak pulse, the drop in blood pressure, the uncontrollable bleeding from the wound site. The other symptoms - fever, chills, facial flushing, severe lumbar pain - would most likely have been masked by the fact that he had been anaesthetized. She saw from his records that Gant had been placed on an epinephrine drip to counteract the hypotension. She simply scribbled a new note under the last:
    Adrenaline administered.
    Satisfied that she had considered the external factors available from the evidence she turned to the blood tests both she and the technician at Mount Grant had run. If they were to be believed the results were simply amazing. The number of hematopoietic stem cells in the first sample was incredible, but it was the results of the second test that really interested her.
    Embryonic stem cells had started to appear in Gant’s blood.
    What were they doing there? Was it possible that his body had the ability to produce totipotent stem cells – an almost infinitely flexible type of cell – at will in order to repair damage to his body? And if so how was he doing it? Were these entirely new cells that his body was producing or were his existing cells de-differentiating, regressing to an earlier more plastic form? She warned herself again against getting carried away. She would of course need to verify every aspect of the process by which the samples had been obtained. Ideally she would take her own samples from Gant, assuming they were able to find him.
    It suddenly occurred to her that she still didn’t know what the man looked like. There had been no photos in his file from Mount Grant but the sheriff had also left her with a copy of his medical records from Fallon. There might be something there. She opened the folder. On the second page was a photograph of Master Chief Carl Gant.
    She felt her heart skip a beat.
    The picture had been photocopied but there was no mistaking the face. It was the man who had approached her a couple of months before, just after term had started. He had seemed vaguely familiar at the time, as though she had seen him somewhere before. She had assumed