by Ted Kosmatka
“So this is about the gladiator competition,” she said.
He nodded.
“Is it the contestant?”
“It’s supposed to be. We’re not sure what it is, actually. We were hoping you could help us find out.”
“I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
“We need you to help find out what it is we’re dealing with.”
She paused. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. But with all due respect, shouldn’t you already know?”
“We should, but we don’t.”
“It is an engineered organism, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She crossed her arms in front of her, wanting to ask more. Instead, she said the only thing that really mattered. “I’ll help any way I can.”
“Thank you.”
Silas dribbled the ball.
“What went wrong today?” Ben asked Silas.
Silas turned toward him. “That’s a long story,” Silas said. He shot the ball again, and it sprang away from the hoop at a high angle. He trotted after.
“I don’t mind long stories,” Ben pressed. “What happened?” The glib undercurrent in his face had drained away now.
Silas tossed him the ball. “Three points, shoot.”
Behind his glasses, Ben’s blue eyes were bright in the angle of the sun. The ball rotated in his hands. He bent, straightened, shot. The ball spanked high against the backboard and skipped across the pavement, toward the grass.
Silas snagged it as it bounced. “Nothing so important,” he said. “And maybe not such a long story, really, come to think of it.”
Silas shot the ball. It dropped through the hoop with a swish of net.
“It opened its wings today,” Silas said. “That’s all. It stretched them out, eight feet, maybe.”
Ben’s face lost some of its tension. “That’s what has you out here shooting baskets?” he asked.
“No, you should have seen it. Those wings. It was goddamned beautiful, Ben. That’s what has me out here.”
“IT HAS wings?” she asked. Unless she was mistaken, there was little room for flight beneath the steel netting of the gladiator arena.
She followed alongside the two men as they walked through the grass toward the lab. From this perspective the buildings were low, squat boxes of glass and steel. The windows reflected green tress, blue sky, white clouds.
“Yeah, but it will never fly,” Ben said. “Too complicated. No one has ever bioengineered that trick from scratch.”
“I don’t know about that anymore,” Silas said. He hooked an arm around the ball and carried it against his hip. He turned to her. “C’mon, I guess it’s time we introduced you to Felix.”
“Felix?” she asked.
“A little nickname,” Ben said. “The petri dishes were labeled alphabetically alongside the Helix project heading. Embryo F was the first to start dividing in one of the surrogates. F-Helix.”
“Cute.”
“It’s been called a lot of things, but cute isn’t one.”
She raised an eyebrow. “But it’s beautiful?”
“Beautiful and cute are two different things,” Ben said. “Sharks are beautiful.”
“How far back did you take the design process?” she asked.
This time it was Silas who answered. “All the way to raw code.”
“Down to individual gene splices?”
“Down to nucleotide base-pair sequence,” Silas said. “We made genes.”
“I didn’t realize that was possible.”
Silas looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Genome assembly took a year. We used a blank to start.”
“A blank?”
“Oh, that’s what we call a cow ovum without the nucleus. We’ve got the patent on that one.”
“Kind of like a seedless orange.”
“Yeah.”
“So where’d you get this amazing seedless cow?”
“We engineered it. It’s actually one of Benjamin’s ideas, and how he ended up working for me in the first place. Now we’ve got an entire brood of them as frozen blastocysts. You can denucleate an ovum manually, but it’s a very slow process, and it weakens the cell. It’s much better if the ovum naturally lacks its nucleus.”
“So you thaw one out every time you produce a gladiator?”
“No, this is an entirely new process. We’ve never gone all the way back to raw code before. Cell infusion was the most difficult part, and we decided to use the scatter approach and thawed several hundred blanks. DNA insertion killed 99.7 percent of the cells. Three survived, and of those three, only one successfully implanted in the cow’s uterus.”
“I’m still not sure what exactly is expected of me,” she said.
“Pretend it’s a specimen dropped from the sky,” Silas said. “Pretend that you don’t know where it came from or what makes it tick. Pretend that it’s the organism that will take the theoretical out of theoretical xenobiology.”
“I’ve been waiting a long time for an organism like that.”
“What would you do to try and understand it? How would you predict how it might develop?”
Her mind whirled at the implication. She followed the men into the building. How could they know so little about their own creation?
Five minutes later, she understood.
SHE GAZED through the thick glass of the nursery. Ben and Silas stood behind her, giving her space.
She wasn’t sure what she was seeing at first, but her heart beat quicker in her chest.
Alien, yes, she agreed.
That was the only word she could think to describe it. She had never seen skin like that. The fluorescent lighting reflected in its deep blackness. The blood-red hands.
She knew enough about genetic engineering to know the thing she was looking at shouldn’t have been possible. It was too far ahead. She had expected an uncomfortable Frankenstein, a predator hewn together in bits and pieces from across order Carnivora.
Like most scientists, she followed the gladiator competition closely, and nothing she’d ever seen or read had led her to anticipate what she was looking at now. She watched the creature through the glass, and slowly, by degrees, she came to agree with Silas on another point. It was beautiful. But it was a terrible sort of beauty.
“How?”
“We still don’t know,” one of them answered for both.
HER LAB took only two days to assemble.
The supplies she requested arrived more quickly than she would have thought possible. She found it somewhat unsettling, in fact, to receive a piece of equipment within hours of requesting it—equipment that might cost more than she would earn in ten years. She was used to the pace of the university, where requests were ignored or just flat out scoffed at until you had slogged through reams of documentation and waded through months of purchasing committees. Yesterday, most of her special orders had arrived via jet, leaving her to wonder at the vast resources at the project’s disposal.
She unpacked new boxes of glassware, Pyrex, latex gloves, flasks and beakers, and a scientific scale that measured to the sixth decimal place. She unpacked goggles and long metal tongs and a box of syringes. She unpacked calipers for the measurement of anatomical features. She unpacked medical supplies and electronics, and she put them all away. Slowly, slowly, she unpacked her disbelief at being here. She put that away, too.
She put everything into drawers and cabinets and onto shelves, and each time took a moment to stare at the items she put away in an attempt to commit to memory where exactly she’d put them. She considered labeling the drawers but decided against it. Instead, she followed the same system she had at the university: a medical/biological/electronic gradient that ran from left to right across the room, with the most commonly used items always in the top drawers.
When the lab was complete, she spent the remainder of the evening watching Felix and going over the next day’s strategy in her mind. She had been waiting eleven years for an opportu
nity to use her knowledge and skills for something other than an academic exercise. That opportunity hadn’t come in the form she’d anticipated, but it was here, and she was going to see to it that the job was done right.
When she first began studying xenobiology, she’d been attracted by the newness of it all. It was a wide-open speculative field, the kind of field a person could make a mark in, the razor’s edge of new science. There had been an atmosphere of optimism then, within the scientific community, that it was only a matter of time before man discovered extraterrestrial life. The universe was, after all, just so damned big. Her field of expertise rose in anticipation of that day. The moons of Saturn and Neptune had seemed particularly promising, at least at the single-cell level. But now the Sol system moons had all been probed, and if life was out there, then it was way out there. But she’d never regretted her field of study. She knew what drove her.
From an early age she’d hungered to understand the world around her. The sciences had drawn her just as naturally as a flame drew insects in Brazil. The Brazil of her youth.
Her mother had said, during that final argument all those years ago, that science had become her religion. Vidonia had denied it then, but as a ten-year-old, she had lacked too much the understanding of herself to explain the void it filled in her. Now, if biology was her denomination, she supposed that she had to admit to a certain degree of zealotry. But like many zealots, she had come about her faith through hardship.
She was born thirty-seven years ago in the slums of Bahia, Brazil. She’d never known her father. Of those early years, there was much she tried to forget: her mother most and least of all.
Her mother was a fancy girl, kept by men from time to time, and she wore her Catholicism like a shield against her sins. Life had been hard for them. Vidonia remembered the long periods of hunger, punctuated by occasional bursts of borrowed opulence. Her mother hadn’t been beautiful, but her skin was light, and for certain kinds of men, this was enough. Vidonia never learned her father’s name, but whoever he was, she knew she had his complexion.
She attended school for the first time when she was seven years old. She hadn’t been able to read, but still their tests had pointed her out, pulled her from the throng of slum children. They took notice of her, asked questions. They provided special tutors, and later, special classes. When she was ten, and they wanted to send her away, her mother resisted. By then, her mother had made several siblings for her to watch in the afternoon and needed the babysitter so she could go out and earn her money. Besides that, her mother learned there would be no formal religious training at the school for the sciences.
It was no wonder, really, how learning came to be so important to Vidonia. It had pulled her from the despair of the streets as no cathedraled savior ever could have.
Her educational route, after that, had run a circuitous course, leading her through ecology, microbiology, and genetics. Eventually, at the age of twenty-two, it led her to the United States, where she continued her studies in the life sciences.
Once she learned the rules that undergirded life on earth, it seemed only logical to attempt to apply them against a new backdrop. For her, the field of theoretical xenobiology was the inevitable destination of a long voyage.
Now, as she watched the strange organism romp through the nursery beyond the glass, she couldn’t help but feel that it had all been worth it. Here it was, at last. This creature was something different.
She didn’t understand fully how it came to be, but she didn’t have to. It was something new, and now it was her job to see if the rules had changed.
SHE WOKE early the next morning to her small, functional room. She’d decided yesterday that it suited her. She barely felt the water on her skin, tasted nothing of the toothpaste. Her clothes matched only because she had packed them that way. Her mind was elsewhere. She thought of John only in passing and only to marvel at having not thought of him the whole day before. Something about that felt good to her, not thinking of him, but she didn’t dwell.
She carded through the door of her lab, and the lights kicked on automatically. Butterflies wrestled in her stomach. She made the call. The minutes dragged on as she waited. Time enough for her to wonder at the strange twists of fate that had led her to this place. Time enough to begin to wonder if her mother’s God would approve.
Big men in white suits arrived with the young gladiator strapped to a gurney. Silas and Benjamin stepped in behind them. As per her orders, the specimen was sedated but not fully anesthetized. It could make the difference on her tests.
The men lifted the creature from the gurney and strapped it onto the silver specimen table in the center of the room. It writhed sluggishly for a moment before slumping into catatonia. Vidonia took her recorder from the front pocket of her lab coat and placed it on the table.
She hit the record button and began. “October twenty-second, initial evaluation of Helix project specimen at”—she paused, flipping through the pages Silas had provided her with—“age one hundred ninety-three days. And three hundred fifteen days since surrogate implantation by blastocyst F.”
She paused, looking at Silas and Ben. Then she turned back to the table and let her eyes play over the entire length of the organism.
“Specimen appears healthy. No signs of illness or injury. It has an approximate dorsoventral length of one hundred forty centimeters.” She looked at the digital readout on the table. “A weight of twenty-four kilograms. Skin is highly unusual in its reflective qualities and shows marked hyperpigmentation. No evidence of hair or dermal papillae.” She bent close, running a latexed finger across the abdomen. “Dermis appears smooth and absent of coetaneous structures of any kind. Specimen is hexapoidal, with three sets of differentiated symmetrical limbs. Upper posterior limbs appear modified for flight. Upper anterior limbs terminate in four digits”—she flexed the organism’s hand—“and an opposable thumb. Each digit terminates in a nail or claw, subdermal status of which is unknown at this time.”
“Be careful,” Silas said. He held up his hand.
She took a long breath. It wasn’t fear she felt but excitement. A slight tremor thrummed in her left leg, so she stepped back from the table and poured herself a glass of water from the sink against the wall. She felt the coolness slide down her throat and settle in her stomach. Ben and Silas remained silhouettes beyond the bright ring of light, and she was thankful of that. She stepped back to the table.
“The cranium is large, oblong in general shape, tapering to a point in the back. The eyes are large and forward-facing, light gray in color, with vertical pupils. Approximate field of binocular vision is”—here she stopped, her face tensed in thought—“one hundred sixty degrees.” Behind her, Silas made a sound. She went on.
“Immature or flaccid cartilaginous ears sit high atop the head. The cartilage is thick at the base, thinning near the tip. The face is large, prognothic, and hyper-robust in bone structure. The mouth is broad and forward-projecting.”
She used a wooden tongue depressor to open the creature’s jaw, looked in. “Dental pattern is complex and differentiated, atypical mammalian pattern. Omnivore, probably.”
“Omnivore?” Silas spoke from the shadows.
“It’s hard to tell for sure. The large canines provide a tearing apparatus in the front, but the molars are five-cusped—good for grinding up tough grains or vegetable matter. I’m not sure what to make of this second row of teeth. The pattern is unique, to my knowledge—looks like they could be used for shearing of some kind, almost like a row of wire cutters. I can’t imagine what foods they could be used for.”
“Bone shearing,” Silas said. His hand flexed.
“Yeah, maybe that.”
She turned the recorder off and began the next phase of the evaluation.
It started with the drawing of blood. The shiny black organism shivered oddly as she took twenty-five ccs from its right forelimb. She then took twenty-five ccs from its left hind limb. She placed the blood
samples into the refrigeration unit beneath the counter and wheeled the specimen to the X-ray machine. She motioned for Silas and Ben to get behind the leaded glass and made final adjustments to the orientation of the machine. She joined the men and hit the button.
They let her work without commenting, and she was silently pleased at their deference for her expertise. She activated the fluoroscope again and watched the image assemble on the computer screen. When the read was complete, she stepped around and rotated the position of the specimen for a final shot. She didn’t bother to print out the sheets—time enough for that later. She wanted the specimen in an altered state for as short a span of time as possible. The effect that drugs might have on the organism was difficult to calculate.
Using a scalpel, she shaved off bits of skin from the lower back of the organism. “Typically the least sensitive part of the dermis,” she said, as she put the sample into a plastic cup, which was then placed alongside the blood samples in the refrigeration unit.
Nuclear resonance was last, and would be most telling. Her students had called it the magic camera, and the magic camera could see all. The creature barely stirred as the big men in white maneuvered its slumped form into the cylinder. Across the room from the scanner, Silas and Ben stood, looking over her shoulder at the computer screen. The image told a strange story as it rotated.
She tried to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. Instead, she tried to appear calm, and this she had some success with. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was seeing. Certain organs she recognized; others were strange to her. “There’s the liver,” she said, pointing to the conspicuously placed organ. It was a start, a point of reference. She found the heart next, narrowing the focus of the machine until she could watch the blood coursing through the arteries and veins. She blinked her eyes, squinted, but the heart still had six chambers.
“Oh, shit,” Silas said. He’d counted, too.
“What the hell do we have here?” Ben asked.