Ethics Committee

Yundu Medical Ethics Center·Hearing Hall

Amid the hum of the central air conditioner, Charlotte counted the blinking frequency of the review committee members—the third old professor from the left blinked 23 times per minute, exactly the same as the academic committee member who rejected her father's project. The Hermès bag on her knees hid the key to the freezer compartment. The metal edges stung her thighs through the leather, just like the pain left by the cargo ship operation that night.

"Please explain, Ms. Lin, why did you transfer the human embryo sample privately?"

The chief committee member tapped the table with his pen, the rhythm was the same as the fetal heart monitor in the delivery room. Charlotte looked at the one-way glass, where Alexander's outline was vaguely reflected—he was sitting in a wheelchair receiving an infusion, with a PICC catheter buried in his clavicle, but he still made a shooting gesture to the surveillance camera.

"This sample is a product of illegal human experimentation." She unbuttoned the second button of her shirt, revealing the gauze under her ribs, "According to Article 29 of the "Regulations on the Management of Human Genetic Resources..."

The lawyer of Thunder Home Appliances suddenly stood up and knocked over the mineral water bottle with his cufflinks. The liquid flowed over the yellowed experimental log, and the handwriting on September 17, 2002 revealed a hidden layer after being wetted - the encrypted diary written by the father with lemon juice began to emerge:

Zhou Weimin destroyed the pregnancy monitoring record

The embryo survival rate was revised to 62%

"Objection! Evidence contamination!"

"This is the original experimental record." Charlotte pushed the ultraviolet lamp to the table, "Do you need me to explain the chemical principle of lemon juice development?"

The audience was in turmoil. Alexander suddenly coughed violently, and the blood foam he coughed up splashed on the tempered glass, which looked very much like the deformed embryo in the specimen jar in the cold storage. Charlotte's fingertips twitched unconsciously. This was the first time she felt her lower abdomen twitching after the miscarriage - in the anatomy room of the medical school, when Alexander stuffed the stolen roses into her white coat pocket.

"Please keep quiet, witness!"

Amid the scolding of the committee members, Charlotte saw the electronic screen behind the jury suddenly turn blue. As the code poured down like a waterfall, she recognized it as the final assignment she wrote for Alexander in her junior year - the virus program that invaded the medical school's grading system.

"In ten minutes, everyone present will receive the experimental data on their mobile phones." Alexander's wheelchair rolled over the silence, "including the transfer records of the Zhou family's purchase of surrogate mothers."

The alarm tore the air. Charlotte's pearl necklace suddenly broke, and the round beads rolled towards the emergency exit - on the night of her nineteenth birthday, the necklace Alexander gave her also broke on the dissection table, and the sound of the pearls rolling into the drain still echoed in her dreams.

"Catch him!"

When the security guards rushed over, Alexander tore off the infusion tube. There were dense pinholes on his pale wrist, arranged in the shape of DNA chains, and Charlotte suddenly remembered the umbilical cord slices of the embryo specimens in the cold storage.

In the chaos, his hot palms grasped her ankles. The medical tape wrapped around the USB flash drive slid into her high heels, and the surface of the chip was engraved with the coordinates of the freezer compartment.

"The password is not the date of menarche." He was dragged away with a gasp, "It's the clinic number on the day you found out you were pregnant."

The electronic screen was restored at this moment. Everyone's mobile phone vibrated at the same time. The fingerprint identification in the surrogacy contract showed the biological connection between Zhou Weimin and the CEO of Leiting Home Appliances. Charlotte looked at Alexander's back being escorted, and suddenly remembered his last words on the freighter:

"Our child should have emerald eyes."

Her mobile phone lit up with a push notification: "Morning Star Group announced that the heir was critically ill due to genetic defects." The accompanying picture was Alexander's genetic map, and the abnormal marker of chromosome 17 was exactly the same as the embryo in the cold storage.

The scattered pearls formed a strange series at her feet. Charlotte squatted down and found that three of them were engraved with tiny numbers - the geographical coordinates of the freezer. When her tears smashed the digital light and shadow, the hearing room suddenly lost power.

When the emergency lights came on, blood-stained lab coats were placed on the review seats. In the front pocket is his father's gold pen, and in the ink sac is a microfilm. After development, it is a notice of Alexander's critical illness when he was a baby:

Diagnosis: Immunodeficiency caused by failed CRISPR gene editing

Guardian's signature: Lin Jianye