With the technology currently available to Dilos and the others, they naturally could not create viruses out of thin air. But not being able to create one from nothing did not mean they could not create viruses at all.
They only needed to take a small segment from the genes of any virus or organism and rearrange the four bases within it to create a new virus.
Naturally, the virus-creation process had to be conducted under strict containment measures. Dilos had no desire to trigger a nationwide—or even global—biological crisis through carelessness. If it truly came to that, humanity might die out before the aliens even arrived.
For the three weeks after the new drug was completed, Dilos and Dr. Connors remained buried in a newly built high-containment laboratory, creating suitable viruses.
Although virus creation, like cross-gene transplantation, was a method used to produce biological weapons, the former was far more dangerous than the latter.
If the two fields had not shared certain technical foundations, and if the two of them had not already accumulated considerable knowledge, experience, and techniques through cross-gene transplantation, these two leading figures in biology truly would not have dared to meddle recklessly in the field of virus creation.
Even so, the two had encountered plenty of hair-raising dangers during their experiments—such as the latest, 781,257,481st experiment...
Just as Dilos and Dr. Connors arranged the four bases in a tiny gene fragment into a new sequence and implanted it into a white mouse no larger than half a palm—
The next second, irregular black tumors of all sizes appeared across the white mouse's body at a visible rate. Within one minute, they continuously split and expanded, easily bursting through the small containment chamber and swelling into a bizarre black "flesh ball" roughly the size of an