by Jeff Long
“You changed your hair again,” he remarked. It had been eight months.
Snakes for hair. Very Einstein. “You noticed,” she said. Don’t you remember me? she wanted to say to him. I’m your baby. But he was immune, and she knew it.
He neatly shot his sleeve to check the time. “Ten minutes,” he announced to her, then held up his hand and flashed five fingers twice. Ten. It was a signal. She looked around at the forest, and whoever he’d come in with—his driver or assistants, or maybe the director of the labs—was keeping out of sight while he had this little one-on-one with his prodigal daughter. Then she saw movement on the far side of the quarry. Dressed in camouflage, they could have been soldiers or poachers. Or field biologists.
She ripped open the newspaper wrapping a bloody piece of cod. “Catch,” she said, and lobbed it at her father. He snagged it inches from his creased slacks.
He held the raw flesh. “Okay,” he said. “Now what?”
They were more comfortable this way, him on slow burn and short of time, her glib and exercising maximum self-defense. “It’s called breakfast,” she said. “Give it a toss.”
He pitched the fish underhanded and it slapped flat on the thin ice. They waited. No Winston. “He’s probably frightened,” she said. “He’s never seen a man before.”
“He’s watching us? Through the ice?” Her father took a half step back from the edge.
“Don’t worry, he doesn’t eat people.”
“Yet,” her father stated.
“Don’t be silly. We gave grasshoppers a try,” she brightly explained. “Winston’s strictly a fish man, though.”
“You haven’t seen the pieces of animal, then?”
He wasn’t asking a question. He was springing a trap.
“What are you talking about?”
“The bones. The carcasses. The egg shells and feathers. Scattered all over the forest floor. Winston’s quite a hunter. The list of species is impressive. Comprehensive. He’s essentially sterilized the forest in a half-mile radius. Everything from mice, squirrels, and raccoons to owls and jays. Even a deer, though it’s uncertain if it was wounded during the hunting season or he actually brought it down himself.”
Miranda turned to the water, trying to hide her shock. Winston had been leaving the pond? Moving up the food chain? He could climb trees? Cross land? Kill? What made her nervous was that he had a secret life she knew nothing about. “He barely weighs forty pounds,” she said.
“There’s more field work to do,” her father went on, “but it’s clear your creation is getting bolder. He’s widening his feeding range in concentric circles. At first he was tentative and stuck close to home. But the freshest kill was found almost a mile away. If you must know, that’s what prompted our discovery of the quarry. A homeowner called the sheriff’s department. This was yesterday morning. The lady didn’t see the killing, only what was left. Her golden retriever had just whelped. Winston tore the mother to pieces and ate most of the litter.”
“I don’t believe you.” She was automatic. “There are other wild animals on the island. All kinds of predators. Foxes. Coyotes.”
“Miranda, he brought one of the puppies back to play with.” Her father pointed to a tree leaning over the quarry. Miranda flinched at the awful sight, the puppy, a rag doll in the birch. “He broke its legs and left it in the crook. We can only speculate why he went to all the extra trouble. Was it a trophy? A midnight snack?”
Still warm from her body heat, the chunk of fish steamed out on the ice. It began to melt through. Miranda finally said, “I haven’t seen any evidence of that.”
“Then maybe you weren’t supposed to.”
She frowned at him.
“He kept the corridor around your trail clean,” her father said. “It’s possible he was hiding his kills from you.”
Oddly…wrongly, but she couldn’t help herself…Miranda’s horror lifted. “Winston!” she murmured to herself. Then, to her father, she said, “Do you know what that means?”
“To tell the truth,” he replied, “I don’t know what any of this means.”
She was excited now. “Self-consciousness. Intelligence.”
“That’s enough, Miranda….”
“You have no idea. His cognitive function is…unreal.”
At that moment they saw a dark shape glancing beneath the ice. It moved with the silence of ink. His back sheared a fraction of an inch beneath the water, purple and orange, more spirit than body. Her father pointed. She nodded yes. It was him.
Abruptly the shadow cut a swift crescent beneath the surface and the slab of cod was gone. It happened so quickly. All that remained was a fish-sized hole in the ice.
Her father sounded like he was leaking air. For the moment, despite himself, he was astounded. “Will he return?”
“Yes.” Miranda knew what to look for. She saw the air bubbles in his wake, nestling like beads against glass. His coming filled her with such happiness it amazed her. It wasn’t the food that drew him up from the depths, that was plain now. He knew how to take care of his wants. Rather it was the dawn itself. Winston loved the sunlight. And her. It was that pure and simple. She wondered how the first light must look from underneath the ice. Like a ceiling of rainbows, she decided.
At the same time, she felt betrayed by his kills. That wasn’t exactly true. It wasn’t his hunting that disappointed her, but his maturing. She had brought him into being, and now he had grown beyond her understanding. He was no longer dependent.
“Where is he?” said her father.
Winston breached. He speared up from the ice through an explosion of shards, and seemed to hang in midair. His stomach was the color of ripe citrus fruit. Then he twisted and punched back through the glass. There was a loud icebreaker crack. He was gone again.
“My god,” her father whispered.
Way to go, Winston, thought Miranda. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she said.
He was shocked. “That face.” He had seen it.
“He’s very expressive.” Highlight the positive, she thought. Gain time. Let them get used to each other. “He smiles. Frowns. Shows fear. Sorrow.”
Miranda untied a second bundle. It held a lobster, his favorite. “Winston,” she called, and threw it high in the air.
The monster arced upward to catch it, shattering the thin ice. Once more he was caught in the sunlight, his slick skin gleaming, webbed feet pushing at the water, arms outspread. His natural grace only heightened the grotesque. With the head and face of an ape, absolutely hairless, he was a blend of beings, neither one thing nor another entirely. He caught the lobster in hands with short knuckles and waxy nails, the tips crimson, his palms white. She’d held those fingers. They had whorls. Winston had fingerprints. And bright jade-green eyes.
At the tip of his apogee, Winston looked across at them. His ears, small nubbins with holes, rotated toward them. He was sizing up the stranger. An expression of…delight…formed on his face. Then he plunged back through the ice.
“You really did it, didn’t you?” her father muttered. He was trembling. He had seen the eyes. They were Miranda’s eyes. In turn, Miranda’s were the green, green eyes of a woman neither of them ever spoke about. “You dared.”
“There’s more,” Miranda calmly replied. She knew her world was about to change. From here on, it was simply a matter of degree. Her fatalism felt ancient. The only unknown was what her father planned for Winston.
“I’ve seen enough.”
“No,” she said, “you haven’t. For once let me have your open mind.”
He waved that away. “You’re being transferred. You’ve turned into a cowboy, a cowgirl, whatever. A loose cannon. Someone should have been watching over you more closely. Guiding you. Imparting respect for the system. I’ve spoken with an old friend.”
They were always old friends, her guardians and regents and keepers. “Who this time?” she asked.
“Elise Golding.”
“Elise?” breath
ed Miranda.
It was Elise, at the funeral, who had gotten down on her knees behind a bewildered little girl and helped press her palms together and whispered a prayer in her ear for her to whisper. While Paul Abbot wept, it was Elise who had helped Miranda send her mother to the angels in Heaven.
“She’ll take you on the condition that you promise….”
Miranda didn’t hear the rest. Any conditions were her father’s bully threats. Elise would take her without condition, and she knew it. A warmth ran through her.
“You leave today. This morning,” her father finished. “You’ve caused havoc at Jax, but the director has agreed to clean up your mess. The sheriff has been taken care of. This whole thing never happened.”
“This morning?”
“Your bags are packed.”
“You can’t do this.”
“You’re going to Los Alamos. The University of California oversees operations there. Elise has found a spot for you. They say you have golden fingers.”
“But Winston….” she began.
“I can only save you,” he said.
“I can’t just abandon him. He needs me.”
“It will be safer for you there, Miranda.”
“He would never hurt me.”
“It’s not your creature that I’m worried about.”
She hesitated. His voice had retreated into his bureaucratic shadows. Again she heard it, his fear. Profound fear.
“You’ve heard about these micro-outbreaks in Europe?” he asked. “A mystery virus.”
“And in South Africa,” she said. “But that was weeks ago. And they were confined to two or three labs. It’s over.” With a shrug, she quipped, “Ebola happens.”
“It wasn’t Ebola,” he said.
Each of the outbreaks had involved reputable labs specializing in DNA typing, not disease research. None used more than rudimentary bio-safety measures. The real mystery was why any of them had been handling a virus in the first place. There was quiet talk that ecoterrorists might have mailed the deadly samples, or a Unabomber with his own private stash of contagion. In the scientific community it had become common wisdom that the outbreaks had been hemorrhagic fever of some type, probably Ebola. Transmission was by contact, she’d heard. But it might also be aerosol. The authorities had gone into standard defensive posture, neither confirming nor denying the accidents. They had let the tabloids exaggerate it to flesh-eating absurdity. The public quickly quit believing it was anything more than entertainment. Miranda had quit paying attention.
“They did contain it, though,” she said.
“Slammed the door shut on it,” her father said firmly. “But it was a close call.”
She felt an edge of fear, less for the “close call,” than his adamant closure. “What was it?”
“We don’t have a fix on it yet. It attacks the skin. Then it goes straight for the brain.”
She thought about that for a moment. Skin, then brain, what was the connection there? The symptoms started with the most external organ, and then jumped to the most internal organ.
“Of course,” she realized. “They originate from the same tissue.” She wanted to dispense with his riddle, demonstrate her virtuosity. Cowboy! He was watching her.
“In early development, the outer layer of the fetal ball envaginates,” she recited. “The outside becomes the inside. The ectoderm creates a tube, an empty space, that becomes the spinal cord and brain. At the cell level, skin and the nervous system are the same thing. That’s why melanoma is so deadly. It shows up on the skin, then goes straight for the nerve cells.”
He was impressed, she could tell. But impressed enough? Would he grant her probation, let her follow through with her slippery creation? “That’s probably what’s at work with this new disease,” he said.
“Skin,” she went on. “Touch. Contact. Is that how it spreads?” What about aerosol transmission? Was it blood-or water-borne? How long can it survive outside its host? Where does it come from? Have you mapped its proteins?” The questions bubbled out.
“We haven’t figured out its natural reservoir,” her father said. “No one has seen it. We have no idea if it’s even a virus. We don’t know.”
Not for lack of trying, Miranda guessed. The international effort must have been fantastic—and fruitless—to earn his anxiety. “What else could it be?” she asked. Bacteria and rickettsias were too large to miss. Given the state of modern immunology, they would be like elephants wandering through Lincoln Tunnel. A prion, then? They were the next new thing in alien contagions.
He shut down the line of inquiry. Back to Chairman of the Boxes. Boxes within boxes within boxes. “For now,” he said, “I don’t want you working with animals.”
“I hear your concern about this outbreak,” she said. “But Winston is separate. He’s not a problem.”
“He may be separate, but he is similar,” her father said. “Like viruses, he constitutes a kingdom unknown. We don’t know what he is, therefore he is a danger. I won’t argue.”
“There’s something more you need to know,” she blurted out. “About Winston. It’s important.”
His eyes darted from her to the pond. Shards of broken ice bobbed on the dark water.
How to sum it all up? “I boosted his growth,” she said. “In the womb. Winston was born the way you just saw him. Same height. Same weight. He was born fully formed.”
Ever the reductionist, her father broke the notion into manageable parts. “You grew him to full maturity? Inside a Plexiglas box? Impossible,” he said.
She skipped on. “I accelerated his development. The trigger was there. I just had to switch it on. That wasn’t the hard part.”
“What was the hard part then?”
“Switching the trigger off. Otherwise he would have died of old age a month ago. I had to find a way to stop it at the genetic level.”
“Miranda,” her father slowly entoned. “You had to find a way to stop what?”
“Aging. Death.”
“What?”
“I found the brake. I built it in.”
Her father was staring at her. “That can’t be.”
“Why not?” she said. “Because it’s me that found it?”
“Because, Miranda,” he said, “it’s not chronological with the research being done. It comes out of nowhere. And yes, because it’s you, an unpublished, unfunded sixteen-year-old girl working in secret by herself. With no assistance, with a few stolen instruments, out of the scientific community’s view, with no guidelines, no oversight.”
She interrupted. “Dad. Seventeen. For the record. Two weeks ago.”
His mouth opened and closed. Usually one of his secretaries faked it for him, some roses and a check. She watched his chagrin, a matter of jaw muscles. “If what you say is true,” he said, returning to Winston’s genesis, “you’ve jumped across the entire process.”
She had jumped their chronology. So what? “There’s nothing mystical about it,” she hurried on. Her ten minutes were nearly up. “It’s as natural as nature. Everyone’s so busy with gene mapping and cloning mice, they haven’t bothered going out into the world to test-drive the code. I did. That’s how I made the real discovery.”
She had his complete attention now. “You have to see this for yourself,” she said. “We have to go closer.” She hopped down to the next ledge.
“Get out of there, Miranda. It’s dangerous.”
“Just a little closer. So he can get a better look at you. Then you’ll see.”
“You don’t know what it’s capable of.”
“But I do,” she insisted. “He’s like a miracle. You know the law of unintended consequences. Results you didn’t build for.”
Something—her conviction, his curiosity—bridged their gap. He took off his trenchcoat, and lowered himself to her ledge. Miranda hopped one lower, and he followed. She didn’t take him all the way to the water. He was close enough.
Miranda unwrapped the final bundle, a
nother lobster. She skated it on top of the ice a few feet away. “Here, Winston,” she called.
The monster came. He was a powerful swimmer, and his lime green dorsal ridge cast a small roostertail of water behind him. There was no showing off or fancy dolphin leaps this time. He came to a halt just behind the lobster and heaved his head and shoulders up through the thin ice, facing them.
Winston’s face was so fantastic that he was either revolting or supremely beautiful. There was no middle ground, no ordinariness by which to judge him. His head was wider than it was high, the nostrils were flared and black, his skin slick. He had lips, human shaped, but bleached of all colors. His teeth were a mess, crooked in gums too weak to keep order, broken from chewing on bones, rotting. The scalp wanted to grow, but his frog genes stunted it, and the result was pimpled follicles. Half in, half out of the ice, he reached for the lobster and started nipping away the shell. He burrowed into the viscera and took it like a string of spaghetti. All the while, he pretended not to be studying them.
“Hello, Winston,” said Miranda.
His ear stubs rotated.
“How’s my little prince?”
The monster spoke. He didn’t bark or hoot. His sounds were very close to human speech, a series of garbling and glottal stops. The string of wet noises marched on. He was talking about something with great consideration.
“It’s real language,” she informed her father. “If you listen carefully, now and then, you can make out certain words. Almost in English. I think his hyoid bone is malformed. He can’t shape sounds. But he definitely has things to say. And he understands me.”
“You’ve built yourself a pet. A parrot. You taught him words.”
“That’s the strange part.” Miranda looked back at her father. “The day he was born, he already knew how to speak. He came out of the incubator with a full vocabulary.”
“Enough,” her father snapped.
“That’s what I said. I didn’t believe it. But it kept happening.”
“What,” he demanded.
“He kept remembering things.”
He snorted. “Miranda.”
She went on. “Old things. Things from my past.”