by A. D. Winch
When she spoke she did not rush, as if each word brought a new thought into her mind or awoke a distant memory. Professor Schwarzkopf did not move. The image had paralysed him, and he listened to her every word as if he had never heard another person speak before.
“This is disc one of four. Both pods contain identical discs. Disc one is a history, an autobiography if you like. Disc two details my research with supportive data. Disc three explains how I spliced together DNA, the building blocks of life. And Disc four goes into depth about how I created life.”
Professor Schwarzkopf pressed pause. He was in shock. He checked his wind-up watch and the length of the video file. He had enough time to watch it before the rest of the team arrived for their slot on Jean Kurtz’s rota.
A pair of headphones rested on top of the screen. Professor Schwarzkopf plugged them in, turned the screen slightly, so Doctor Khan could not see what he was watching, and pressed play.
“It is of the most urgent importance that none of these discs fall into the wrong hands. It would be better for the world if they were destroyed than for this to happen. I do not choose my words lightly.
“From the late nineteen forties through to the early sixties I worked at a top secret military base in the USA with my husband. We were in charge of dissecting an alien craft and using its technology to further our own. At first we worked closely together but in nineteen sixty-one, with the craft’s possibilities exhausted, we were handed separate assignments. Mine was in the relatively new field of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. In simple terms, I was given the job of creating the world’s first robot using the alien technology. My husband was moved into the field of biology and physiology.
“We were government scientists and sworn to secrecy. For this reason, we never discussed our work in our own quarters, or anywhere else for that matter.”
She paused and ran her fingers over her hair until she was happy that it was still in place. For a moment her eyes lost their shine and became vacant, as if something inside her had died, and then she continued.
“One morning in nineteen sixty-six, I felt sick and did not go into the lab. By the afternoon, I felt much better and decided to busy myself at home by tidying our quarters. After finishing every other room, I decided to clean my husband’s study, a room I rarely went into. Unlike me, he always brought his work home. It was what he lived for and what eventually took his life away. On top of his desk was a file marked ‘OPERATION MULATTO. TOP SECRET.’ Curiosity got the better of me, and I sat down to read it. The documents detailed plans to create a separate and superior race of beings who would, initially at least, be soldiers. They would be fitter, stronger, smarter and able to communicate between themselves without words if necessary. To build such an army they were experimenting with joining together alien/human DNA to create Identical Hybrid Beings or IHBs. I simply called them Hybrids. I was shocked and appalled. It went against everything I believed in but, as I was not meant to see these files, I said nothing.
Two or three days later my husband brought his Director back for dinner.”
“Angel,” Schwarzkopf whispered bitterly to himself. Ingrid had always called him the Director. She shied away from using his military rank which at that time was Master Staff Sergeant.
“After a few bourbons had loosened his tongue, the Director talked at length about his vision for the future. It was to be a future in which the USA was the only global superpower, unchallenged by the rest of the world, with its own superior army. I looked over at my husband. He had drunk too much, and his eyes had glazed over.
“After the Director left I quizzed my husband on what had been said about superior power. His eyes were animated, sparkling even, and after another glass of bourbon, he probably said much more than he meant to. I still remember his words to this day. ‘Imagine a world where everyone is fitter, stronger, healthier, cleverer and no one is different. No poor people, no sick people, no needy people. A new era. Isn’t that something to aim for, a leap forward in human evolution orchestrated by science.’”
Professor Schwarzkopf sighed. He couldn’t remember if he had said those exact words, but he had definitely felt that way.
“Maybe I should have said something there and then but, regrettably, I said nothing. Fear held my tongue. I couldn’t say a word. I didn’t see a new era. I saw a catastrophe for humankind. Evolution takes millions of years. To mess with it in this way was against the very meaning of life. We evolved until we could breathe on land; we evolved thumbs until we could pick up objects and use tools; we evolved an advanced brain until we ruled the planet, and we all evolved differently. No two humans are the same, not even twins, and it is this difference that makes us human and keeps us advancing or evolving. A race of Hybrids who are all identical would not be a step forward in evolution. It would be a step backwards. If they succeeded in creating an army of genetically engineered soldiers, what would be next? Who is to say that it would stop there? Would they then create different Hybrids to fill different roles? Hybrid police or scientists or fruit pickers or accountants or cleaners, each of them with a life mapped out for them before they are even born. It would be like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”
Why did you never say? thought Professor Schwarzkopf.
She stopped talking, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them again, she pulled a metallic bag from off camera. A clear tube protruded from one end, and she placed this in her mouth. After a few gulps, she let go of the bag. Slowly it floated away.
“I’m sorry. I am preaching and speculating. Speculation is guesswork, and it is not science. I will return to my story and the facts.” She paused and looked apologetic. “It was at this time that I discovered I was pregnant.”
A coughing fit gripped Professor Schwarzkopf with such force that Khan looked across at him until it had subsided. He paused the film and replayed Ingrid’s last sentence.
“It was at this time that I discovered I was pregnant.”
He paused it again.
I was right, he thought, she was pregnant. He let the confirmation sink in before pressing play again.
“I wanted to bring up a child in a world full of diversity and colour. Not a world dominated by one global power and full of Hybrids. My next actions were not thought out; each was impulsive, and each act led to the next. I began a chain of events which, once started, I was unable to stop.
“I had been feeling unwell for a while and one evening I used this to my advantage. We had already agreed that I would leave the base for a few days to recover, and I had been granted permission by Major Marshall. The evening before I was going to leave I packed one suitcase with my essential belongings and alien DNA I had already taken from the labs. I had a second suitcase which I filled with explosives I had stolen from the stores that afternoon. I told Major Marshall I had to leave early and needed to say goodbye to my husband. Major Marshall was extremely busy, but he was also understanding, and even drove me by jeep to the old hangar. The time was just after six when I arrived, and I had made my husband promise to leave before this. The underground lab was empty, and I quickly placed explosives set the timer and left. Fortunately, Major Marshall had not waited for me, so I walked out of the old hangar and into the desert away from the base. I never returned and never saw my husband again.”
Angel was telling me the truth, thought Professor Schwarzkopf incredulously. Ingrid did plant the explosives, even if they weren’t meant to kill me.
“Only twenty years later did I discover, at least to some degree, what had happened that night. The explosion had indeed stopped my husband’s work, and he was moved from this assignment to creating engines, rockets and missiles instead. At the time, I had no way of knowing that I had been successful. A secret explosion, underground, and on a secret base was never going to make the public news.
“I managed to disappear off the radar. From the USA, I tried to travel into Canada but failed but then I managed to get to the Soviet Union in
stead. After some time, I fled down to the Ukraine as it is called now, into Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia as it was then and finally fleeing into Austria and Western Europe. Times were harsh, especially after giving birth, but behind the Iron Curtain, I was an enemy of the United States of America, with secrets to sell, and at first this made me a very dear friend of the Soviets.”
“Mein Gott,” murmured Professor Schwarzkopf to himself. “She did go to the USSR.”
“As I mentioned, I had no way of knowing if my husband’s work had been destroyed or not. Eating away at the back of my mind was one thought and one thought alone. What if they were still working towards the creation of their Hybrid army? And if they were, how could they be stopped? Over the following years, I debated with myself, almost daily, the best response to these questions. In the end, when I arrived back in the West, I felt I had no choice but to follow a similar course of action myself. If they were to create an identical army of Hybrids to help them take over the planet, then I would create two unique humans who could help defend it. Two people who would be made up of the greatest human beings on the planet.
“In justifying this to myself, I argued that these two may assist the next stage of human evolution but this would not be for certain. They would not be a leap forward, but rather the scientific equivalent of giving evolution a helping hand. If Darwin was right, as I feel he was, nature would decide whether this next stage would live on or die out - the survival of the fittest.
“Over the next few years I collected the genes and DNA from many great and talented people to go with my alien samples. On days when I was not trying to splice them together, I worked on creating a test tube baby. All my research was conducted in complete secrecy. Only two others knew what I was doing, but I am one hundred percent certain that they will not share this information with anyone else unless it is essential.
“In the early nineties the person I was running from found me working at the European Space Operations Centre.”
Angel! thought Professor Schwarzkopf.
“He wanted me to come back to the USA and, when I refused, I feared for my life. If my visas and travel patterns were to be believed, I had vanished into India. In fact, I had moved not more than two hundred kilometres away, to a place that was impossible to find on Earth.
“I moved into space and have been living here, on the European Space Station, for a number of years. Mostly I am alone.”
She paused, lost in thought.
“I refuse to go back to Earth. The European Space Centre tolerate me and my whims because some of my work here provides a large percentage of their funds each year. Truthfully, I know I am an embarrassment to them - a cranky old lady who refuses to come back down to Earth. For this reason, my existence is barely mentioned within the centre walls in Germany and never outside. John Glenn travelled into space at the age of seventy-seven, and he is applauded as a hero. I travel into space at seventy-eight, and I am spoken about in hushed whispers.
“Really, I should be grateful. The peace, solitude, closer proximity to the sun and environment here have allowed me to complete my research and make discoveries I could never have made on Earth.”
She stopped talking and stepped out of the camera shot, revealing white plastic walls, covered with faint flashing lights. Floating around in front of them and leaking tiny droplets of water was the bag from which she had drunk earlier.
A large, white blur filled the screen and then Ingrid appeared back in the shot. For a split second, she looked frightened and vulnerable; then a broad smile appeared across her face. Her eyes were warm, and she looked as if she had suddenly blossomed. She placed two small objects far too close to the camera and let go of them. They were very blurred. All Professor Schwarzkopf could make out on the screen were two splodges of colour, one blue and one yellow.
“These little wonders are Adam and Eve,” she announced proudly.
Gradually the small blobs floated away from the camera and came into focus. They were two smiling babies. One had beautiful ebony skin, black hair and looked like a girl. The other was a pale boy with blond hair.
Black and white lines filled the screen. The video playback stopped. Professor Schwarzkopf rewound the video a few seconds and paused it.
In this freeze frame, Ingrid looked fearful and frantic, but in spite of this, Professor Schwarzkopf thought she was still beautiful. Her grey hair had not been brushed, and untidy strands fell over her face, but he didn’t care. There were bags below her bloodshot eyes, but they were still the colour of the sky. The white gown which she wore had been buttoned wrongly, but it made him smile as he remembered similar occasions in their past.
In her arms, she held a black baby and white baby. They were dressed in silver baby grows and looked fast asleep.
“Black Queen and White King,” Professor Schwarzkopf muttered to himself and then thoughts fell like dominoes in his head.
Ingrid created her own IHBs before us! No wonder Angel was desperate to get his hands on those kids, she achieved his goal and beat him. In doing so, she probably scared him into thinking that the IHBs will be working against him rather than for him. The moment she created them, she signed their death warrants.
Suddenly, Professor Schwarzkopf was overcome with fear. He began to cough and tried to calm himself down. He looked across at Doctor Khan, only a few metres away, but she was too engrossed in her screen to worry about Professor Schwarzkopf this time.
“Why have I not seen this before?” he asked himself, “Why did I not know about this? Why was this kept from me?”
Professor Schwarzkopf stared at the screen and tried to take it all in. He couldn’t. He took a piece of scrap paper and a black pencil, and tried to scribble down his thoughts. He tried to be constructive and to plan his actions but all he managed to do was draw angry lines with such force that he almost ripped the paper. He scrawled it up into a ball and walked around the lab. The pencil was still in his hand, and he twirled it in his fingers.
He found himself in front of the dart.
It had all started with this, he thought to himself, when you opened it, Ingrid.
The dart opened silently and, in a moment of rage Professor Schwarzkopf threw what he had in his hand at it. The pencil snapped in two and, at that instant, Professor Schwarzkopf realised how foolish and reckless he was being. He picked up a broken piece of the pencil, closed the dart and returned to his desk.
“What happened to her?” he asked himself. If Angel knew where she was and what she was doing, he would not have let her live. His mind filled with more questions and he tried to answer them. Adam and Eve were the girl and the boy that the OSS had been relentlessly pursuing. The boy is thirteen, so that means the video is at least that old. There were only two space stations capable of supporting astronauts at that time. One was the International Space Station, and the other was the European Space Station, which had…
He clicked the internet icon on his computer and typed ‘European Space Station.’ His first hit was the BBC, and he read the headline, ‘Internal Error causes European Space Station to explode.’ CNN read ‘Computer error blamed for Space Station Explosion’ and all the hits on the first page led to the same, similar event. None of them mentioned that any onboard deaths.
It wasn’t a computer error, thought Professor Schwarzkopf.
He clicked ‘next’ on the screen. The same hits appeared but at the bottom of the page was a headline that differed from the rest. It read ‘European Space Station Cover-up!’
Professor Schwarzkopf clicked on the headline and was taken to a conspiracy theory website. He scanned the short article.
‘The media have widely reported that the European Space Station exploded due to computer malfunction but is this really true? I think not! On the same day, two ‘training missiles’ mysteriously vanished while being tested from Diego Garcia! A coincidence? I think not! When contacted the US Military refused to comment! I think that tells us all we need to know!’
/> Professor Schwarzkopf looked at his watch. The next team would arrive any minute. He cleared his internet history and shutdown the computer.
There was no proof, only the exclamations of a conspiracy theorist, but what if that person was right? The Ingrid he had just watched was not as calm as the one he remembered. Maybe she had changed since she left him or maybe she was worried for her safety.
Professor Schwarzkopf did not know what to feel. He didn’t know if he felt angry or sad or cheated or scared or… he just didn’t know. He looked at his hands; they were shaking. I’m in a state of shock he told himself and breathed deeply. The shaking subsided but didn’t stop completely, and he returned the memory stick as calmly as possible to Doctor Khan before leaving the lab.
On the way out, he met Professors Warne and Li coming in. They did not greet him. Professor Schwarzkopf walked in a daze until he was out in the open air. The temperature was warm and pleasant, and the sky was clear. He poured a hot tea from a dispenser and sat down at a free table outside the hangar’s entrance. His hands held the plastic tea cup tightly; they were no longer shaking.
Everyone knew, he thought, except me. They knew about Ingrid, about the children, about where the pods came from, about the aliens, and they didn’t breathe a word. Maybe they thought she was mad. Maybe they didn’t want to shatter my view of her. As quickly as Professor Schwarzkopf thought this he dismissed the idea. Kurtz would have loved telling me about my ‘mad’ wife, he thought. Unless she had been told not to?
Buddy Angel! The name exploded into his head. He’s been using me and bending the truth to suit his needs, whenever he wanted. He dangled Ingrid’s photo in front of my face to force me to stay when he had most probably had her killed. He needed my knowledge, and he made me a prisoner without putting up bars. He’s desperate to create a ‘super army for a super power’ as Ingrid called it and he’s using me to achieve that.
Professor Schwarzkopf didn’t need time to grieve; he had done that many years ago already. Instead, his thoughts continued to race. What if Ingrid was right about the aliens from the crash? What if Angel was working with them? He’s not the same man he was. He looks twenty years younger than me.