Joseph Orlando

Chapter 57 - How antibodies tell tales - p.1

Added 2024-12-10 13:00:10 +0000 UTC

Somebody asked me how I thought this up. The answer is a little silly. I have never watched the TV show "House", but I saw a few minutes of an episode one day where Dr. House used his amnesiac patient's antibodies to learn about them. Somehow I remembered that little snippet of the house I watched years and years ago when writing chapter 57 and did some more research and it got used this chapter. Like I said, silly.

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Dead men did tell tales. Humanity had known that for thousands of years. For the humanoid races, imagine your immune system was a military and every time it encountered a new attack, a virus for example, it built a defense customized for that particular attack. That defense is called antibodies. These protective proteins can tell a story about what that person’s immune system had encountered, if you knew how to listen.

Of course, in an era of interstellar travel and widespread common vaccinations, some antibodies were ubiquitous, but in that mess of information my doctors had found a few needles in the proverbial haystack, antibodies found only in certain sectors, for rare viruses few were ever vaccinated for unless you had a real need for them. The medical database of the Interspecies Medical Exchange, which was still alive and kicking in the 24th century, had been instrumental in interpreting that data. Coupled with the analysis of the hull fragments we’d recovered from the scout ship, which had been exposed to some unique radiations and stellar conditions, we’d further narrowed down the list to something actually useable.