Xeno Sapiens

By Victor Allen

Headhunted by a national conglomerate to engineer humans for deep space travel, geneticist Ingrid Milner can read between the lines. She is wanted for a Frankenstein project; to fabricate a genetic werewolf.
She works in secret, but she is not unknown. Set against her is the enigmatic Josh Hall, a fire-breathing minister with a sordid past who will stick at nothing, not even his own destruction, to bring her down.
As her creation comes together molecule by painful molecule, unrelenting forces build against each other. God, Nature, the power of human insanity and hubris coalesce in an overwhelming wave.
But as the forces collide, a new player emerges, one part and parcel of the charged darkness of madness and arrogance. Nothing so powerful can be contained, and it will lash out...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victor Allen
• Release date: Jun 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310438295

Victor Allen

Born in North Carolina in 1961, Victor Allen has lived a charmed, black and white, and almost disreputable life. Turned down by the military at age seventeen because of a bad heart (We would take, his recruiter told him, the women and children before we would take you), he spent a wasted year at NCSU, where he augmented his scant college funds by working part-time as a stripper (what the heck? Everybody looks good when they're eighteen), a pastime he quickly gave up one night when he discovered -to his mortification- his divorced, middle-aged mother sitting in the audience. Giving NCSU the good old college miss, he satisfied his adventurous spirit and wanderlust by moving out West in his late teens, first to Colorado and later, Wyoming, and working in the construction trades. Uprooted from his small town upbringing and thrust into a world of real Cowboys and Indians, oil field roughnecks, biker gangs and pool sharks, he spent his youth travelling the country, following the work, settling at various times in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Wyoming. Along the way he met a myriad of interesting people including Hollywood, a young, Native American man, so called because he wore his sunglasses all the time, even at night; Cinderella K from Owensville, Missouri (the nice laundry lady who turned his shorts into pinkies); Lori P., the Colorado snake lady and her pet boa constrictor, Amanda; the pool hustler par excellence, Johnny M.; TJ, Moon, and Roundman, good folks, but bikers, all; his little blond girlfriend, Lisa; Maureen, the very funny lady from London with the very proper English accent, who he met while living outside of Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, SC, and her daughter, Marie, with her practically incomprehensible cockney twang; the ever bubbly Samantha from FLA; and all the (well, never mind). :-). Plus way too many others too numerous to list. He has weathered gunfire, barroom brawls (I didn't get this crooked nose and all these scars on my face from kissin), a three-day mechanical breakdown in the heart of the Louisiana bayous, drunken riots- complete with car burnings and overturnings, Budweiser, bonfires and shootin' irons (it was all in good fun, though,)- ; a hundred year blizzard, floods, two direct lightning strikes, a hurricane which sent a tree crashing through his roof, and an unnerving late night encounter with a man who subsequently proved to be a murderer, surviving it all with a rather uncom...

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Xeno Sapiens

by

Victor Allen

Smashwords Edition

copyright © 2012

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Table of Contents

#Prologue

#The Wish

#Looking for God

#The Carriage Man

#The Hunt

#Epilogue

Excerpts from other books by Victor Allen

#Essex

#A-Sides

#The Lost Village

#Wandil Land

#We are the dead

#Katerina Cheplik

Prologue

1986

FOR SEVENTY-two hours blue blades of lightning split the sky over the wind-lashed canopy of jungle while the skies wept on the operative’s own little half acre of hell.

A bull whip of thunder cracked as he rocked back and forth inside his mosquito netting. He cried out in his dementia, raindrops gleaming like stars in the mud-caked spikes of his blond crew cut. Fever sweat rolled down his forehead and chest in greasy rivers that the rains couldn’t wash away. Sometime during his three day limbo, alternating between rounds of fever and bone-chilling cold, he had ripped his fatigues to shreds, using the rags to wipe down his sweat drenched body. Poisonous tree-dwelling snakes and venomous scorpions watched his racking convulsions with cold, unblinking eyes. His rifle, which he would normally have protected like an only child, had started to rust, its Starlight scope now a flat, uninspired black with its protective coating of lubricant washed away.

A five day old cactus of beard stabbed his neck with a thousand tiny spines. He was a normally fastidious man who would never have appeared unshaven or with soiled uniform had he been able to help it. He had drunk gallons of the lukewarm rainwater to prevent dehydration and now his stomach felt like an engorged balloon, swelled like a fermenting sausage. Many times during the last three days he had gagged up a mess of slick, watery vomit.

The sniper had separated from his unit after a fire fight three days before, leaving on his own. He liked the solitude. Rare as hen’s teeth was the supervisor who complained about the operative’s unorthodox methods, or about the body counts he brought back from his solo excursions, proved by a count of right ears threaded through a string on his belt. The sniper’s reputation was well known. He didn’t need to pad his kills.

Most overt, overseas US military action had ended with the bombing of the US Marine corps barracks by a suicide truck bomber in Beirut, but clandestine paramilitary ops by private security firms hadn’t. There was still work to be done. He had been part of a special operations group formed to coordinate and monitor the operations of the Contras in Nicaragua. He believed the Contras to be not as bad as the Sandinistas, but not very much better.

The sights and sounds of too many things and too many people gone wrong plagued him like unquiet, cackling demons. He remembered the cowardly greasers of his unit scampering from their first fire fight with imported Cuban regulars as if der geist der stats vernient was tagging at their heels. He recalled the lizard eyed Contra commanders of the insurgents standing in the center of any one of a dozen identical villages and licking their lips as they gave the order Burn it all. The brass hats of the clandestine American SOG’s, controlling this non-war from air conditioned offices in Monroe, Louisiana, had issued the no prisoners order far more often than sanity could stand.

He had seen his own buddies with their balls hacked off and stuffed in their mouths, his buddies cut in half by mines, his friends dying of septicemia after stepping on shit smeared pongee sticks, all tricks imported from the Vietcong. His only real friend during his two stints, Snow, had been mostly obliterated by a mortar shell last year. Snow had been his spotter and the operator had never bothered to break in a new one. Everyone thought Snow was so named because of his corn silk mop of white hair, but the sniper knew better. Snow was the only man he had met in Nicaragua who was as coldly efficient and ruthless as himself. It had seemed the most sardonic thing of all for Snow to have been killed so anonymously. Death had been very personal to Snow, his preferred weapons of killing being the knife and the garrote. After the mortar attack, the operative had carried Snow’s severed head twenty miles in his rucksack, scavenging the only recognizable remains back to his CO so that Snow’s family would know that he had bought it and wouldn’t be consigned to the purgatory of the MIA.

The operative liked his present gig better. He was no longer constricted by half-witted rules of engagement. He was involved in a shadow war where no holds were barred and he was free to do as he pleased. Though his favored weapons were still those of the sniper, he had found a sawed off shotgun and machete to be serviceable tools. Fear and terror were what the enemy understood, and fear and terror were what he used.

Now death had come for him as well, heralded not in the form of an unheard bullet or a land mine, but in some jungle sickness that descended amidst the wasted weapons and derelict machinery of war. A fever swept him away in its dark and unalterable current to a place where he had no options but to pray for either his death, or some guidance, alone.

The God that had orphaned him by healing his mother and turning her away from him in a bright eyed and unwholesome religious mania would now have to save him. It was the only way a wrathful God could extract every ounce of torment He could. He wanted a vision from that God, but all he got was the febrile trembling and blistering delirium of fever. He had expected nothing so grand as a burning bush or a pillar of fire, both of which he had already seen in Nicaragua, and both of which had been man made. He had seen through his powder blue eyes the thousand small horrors God used to reveal the wickedness and astounding perversity of the human animal. He felt privileged to be the only man able to see through it all.

The sniper had turned a cold eye to the atrocities, but at last the fever had forced him to see. The pinkos and peaceniks and the long haired freaks thought they knew the answer, but they were all stumbling around in the dark. God’s real purpose was so clear that everyone else simply looked past it.

After all these years, God had decided to share the fires of destruction. The operative’s discovery didn’t take on the form of an epiphany -no scales fell from his eyes- but upon the realization something inside him tore free in a bone jarring shudder and the fever broke. God had healed him, as he had healed his mother, and God would use him.

When he emerged from the jungle after the three day monsoon, his mind was clean and uncluttered. The sun had appeared, but its brilliance was an ember beside the fiery light of the sniper’s master plan.

Ronnie Sykes scrambled to his feet as Josh wearily trudged out of the bush. He blinked rapidly, startled out of his sun induced doze. He stood atop the half-roof of a scavenged Cadillac that had been modified for jungle use with huge, oversize tires and a rollbar craning out over a roof that had been sheared away with a cutting torch above the front seats. His M-16 dangled carelessly by his side.

Where you been, Josh, Ronnie asked, grinning like a dog shitting peach pits. "Man, we thought you was dead."

You couldn’t get that lucky.

Josh measured Ronnie as if he were a lamb at the slaughter. Strange the lamb should have one gold tooth and black skin. Sykes wore a dirty T-shirt, cut off fatigues, and mud caked army boots. A pack of Camels and a bright, purple feather were tucked into the stained red band around his Kevlar helmet. Hot sun flashed off his sweaty skin.

Some storm, right, man, Ronnie grinned. Your radio go down? You diggin’ on living in the bush for three days?

Not so bad, Josh said, easing into the warm, convincing smile that one day would endear him to millions. I prayed a lot.

That is how, in the summer of 1986, a monster was created in the bellowing mouth of a Central American thunderstorm.

THE WISH

1

When Ingrid Milner opened her door on the first day of September 2001, the tall man standing there said, Have I got an offer for you.

Excuse me?

It was the line a snake oil salesman or carny pitchman might use, but this man was neither. Alex Clifton was smart and good looking; a man who moved with the silky intent of a bank president conducting a billion dollar deal. His suit was calming and well worn; his briefcase easily borne like an old friend with whom many pleasant evenings had been spent by the fireside.

He had rolled up outside Ingrid’s small apartment in Tampa, Florida, in a black, rented sedan, as quotidian as it was forgettable. After producing his credentials and being allowed inside, Clifton sat on the couch and hefted his briefcase onto the coffee table. The stiff rattle of new paper caught her attention as Ingrid brought coffee from the kitchen.

We’re not dropping in hat in hand, he said. We are willing to pay well for your services. Clifton sat back and took a careful sip of coffee.

Clifton’s manner was carefully cultivated, yet Ingrid sensed something a trifled trouble, a trifle dangerous about him. His tailored suit seemed too snug around the collar, his eyes a little too eager to dart around and pry at personal things that didn’t want seeing.

It sounds more like a bribe, Ingrid said. First, your boss, Merrifield, tells me I’ll have a free hand, now you’re practically stuffing stacks of cash in my pockets. It’s hard not to look for strings.

Clifton’s dark eyes crinkled at the corners. Some of his inner sun burned away the cold fog around him.

Let’s not have any confusion about this, he grinned. Let’s call it an incentive to secure your services. I won’t mince words over what has to be done to acquire your abilities, Miss Milner.

Call me Ingrid, please, she said dryly. Merrifield already does.

As you wish, Ingrid. Your name invariably comes up at the top of the list of candidates. No small feat for a woman not yet twenty-four years old, especially when you consider that the field of molecular eugenics is virtually as male dominated as the field of mathematics.

You’ve done your homework.

A full twelve years of it.

I beg your pardon, Ingrid said, as if she had misheard something.

I’m a geneticist myself, Clifton said. MD from Bowman Gray school of medicine. Right now, though, my official title is sycophant to smooth the way. Merrifield thought it would be easier to turn a doctor into a salesman than the other way around. Jon’s been called a lot of things, but illogical isn’t one of them.

You’re a project member?

I am.

Tell me more about it, Ingrid suggested.

It’s a non disclosure project, Clifton said easily. That in itself is no big deal. I know little more than the bare bones, nor am I likely to, until someone accepts the commission as project director.

Ingrid persisted. What’s your stake?

"My own research has gone pretty much along the same lines as yours, but in answer to your question, this is my job and one that I like very much. But I’m only an Indian. You’ll be the chief. I can tell you that the project is not -for lack of a better term- small time."

Should that impress me?

Impressive or not means little. It’s a simple fact. Clifton’s expression was skillfully neutral.

If you’re after some new biotoxin or plague organism, Ingrid said, I’ll tell you now to look elsewhere. I’ve always been willing to take the good with the bad, but I won’t be a party to something like that.

Clifton looked pained, but continued patiently.

What you’re talking about could be whipped up by any half bright grad student. We’re not prepared to pay top dollar for the most eminent researcher in the field if we could get the same job done for a lot less of the folding green. We’re not a bunch of stooges and I can make some deductions on my own. You’re wanted for something much bigger and better. Clifton drained the last of his coffee, now barely warm, and awaited a reaction.

The offer had been delivered not in a bitter pill ultimatum, but in a sugar coated, silky bribe. After the thin veneer of scientific ethics was stripped away, it was not a wholly unattractive proposition. Researchers had feet of clay and they all had their particular toys they wanted to play with. She had seen it countless times, even at small, Delian University.

But she would proceed cautiously. Clifton might talk as if he could be milked for everything from a centrifuge to an entire genetics lab, but Ingrid’s own dealings with other slick, corporate types had convinced her that they might promise the moon and deliver a jug of lead laced white lightning in its stead.

"What can you tell me," Ingrid asked.

Like most covert projects, it’s non disclosure, and code named. Project Change.

That’s a pretty uninspired choice.

You don’t like it?

What I don’t like, Ingrid said, is the word covert.

Semantics. Nobody is going to hold a gun to your head. We can’t afford to invest huge sums of money into something this big only to have the first hacker that comes along steal such sensitive and expensive information. The cover is our only form of protection.

Ingrid thought at least half of that might be true. She’d had her own experiences with computer hacking.

Well, Mr. Clifton...

Call me Alex.

Alex, then. I have my own reasons for even considering involvement in something like this, but I won’t dive head first into an empty pool. I personally believe Robert Oppenheimer would have never had his pangs of conscience about the atomic bomb if he had failed. But I’m not Robert Oppenheimer, and I’ve never intended to fail.

Nobody’s asking you to kill anyone.

"Then what exactly are you asking?"

Alright, Clifton said. You’re wanted for a project to construct enhanced biological organisms. What type I’m not at liberty to say until we have your commitment. But it’s not a bug, or a virus, that much I can say. I’m not a flag waving patriot or a machine, and I don’t make policy. If Uncle Sam is footing the bill, so what? He’s been funding you here at the university for years. Clifton smiled quite sincerely.

"You are an ingratiating bastard," Ingrid said.

Clifton carefully ignored the comment.

It wouldn’t be wise of us to try and keep you in the dark about the project, but the truth is that I -nor the project committee members- don’t know you from Eve. I assumed you had probably worked under non disclosure rules before. That was my error. Now, I need to know if working under those conditions really would be against your will.

Do I have to enlist, Ingrid asked, only half jokingly.

Clifton smiled. Not at all. You will be required to sign certain documents and make certain pledges. You will be required to maintain proper identification. You will have to give up your post at the University and move to the project site. Expenses paid, naturally. You may not discuss the project with any unauthorized persons. Not mom, dad, boyfriend, husband or fly on the wall until the project is declassified. By the way, you aren’t Catholic are you?

No. Why?

At least we don’t have to worry about a priest.

Ingrid wasn’t sure whether Clifton was kidding or not.

The project is scheduled for three years, Clifton said, referring to the papers he had spread before him. He had put on a pair of croupier’s glasses, looking like a wizened old accountant poring over the day’s receipts. Your salary will be two hundred thousand dollars per year...

Ingrid’s jaw dropped. Clifton did an expert job of not noticing, continuing by rote.

...plus all the materials, assistants and lab apparatus you need.

Wait, wait, Ingrid interrupted. I haven’t agreed to anything yet. She was still reeling over her salary. I’m not a hack for hire to the highest bidder.

Clifton seemed genuinely puzzled. His glasses slipped back on his nose when he looked up.

Top drawer projects, he said, demand top drawer salaries.

But you can’t tell me these things. Isn’t there something I should sign? An oath of allegiance or something?

I haven’t told you anything, he said. "The only specific I’ve given you is your salary. I had planned to propose further meetings to inform you gradually. Until you’re willing to commit, we can’t tell even you most things."

She mentally ran over the points Clifton had made. He had gabbed on and on and told her nothing. She had almost gotten to like him, but he now seemed to be nothing more than a silver tongued devil of the Fed. She would keep that in mind and not be taken in by his flashes of boyish ingenuousness.

I hope you don’t mind my speaking frankly like this, he went on, all warmth and teddy bear cuddly. My bosses and I haven’t always met on level ground, but I believe in being honest with people. He gave another hopeful smile.

Ingrid returned it with a less than welcoming stare.

I can’t give you an answer right now. I have to know what’s expected of me. Picking up and shoving off for three years is a big step.

We weren’t expecting an answer right away. Could we meet again next week? That will give you time to examine the issues. If you’re favorably inclined, we could get into a few more specifics then.

Fine.

Wonderful. Clifton stood and placed his glasses in a black case. He rummaged in his briefcase and pulled out a form.

I’d like for you to read this and, if you have no objection, sign it.

What is it?

Boiler plate stuff. All it says is that you agree not to discuss the content of this meeting with anyone else. It doesn’t obligate you in any other way.

She scanned the form. It was just as Clifton said. She scribbled her name at the bottom. The page vanished into Clifton’s briefcase.

It’s been a pleasure, Clifton said. You have my card. Please call if you need to change the appointment.

Ingrid led him to the door. They stood there a few moments, the warm salt air blowing through the portal.

You haven’t really told me anything, you know. About the most I got out of this meeting was your name.

Clifton considered. His eyes took on a sage gleam that would have looked more at home behind his spectacles. He retreated to the coffee table, selected a manila folder from his briefcase, and gave it to Ingrid.

I guess I don’t need to tell you that you can never tell anyone what is in that folder. More than just my job is on the line.

He left quickly, without even saying good bye. She watched him through the bamboo blinds of her living room window as he drove away. She looked with some hesitation at the folder on her coffee table, foolishly imagining that it was some kind of Pandora’s box that would loose evils on the world once she opened it.

Still, with a sigh, she sat down to read it.

2

Clifton drove downtown to the Burbank Electra office building where Parker, Usher and Foster technologies had rented an entire floor of the twenty story building for a short term, three month lease. Half an hour after leaving Ingrid, Clifton made his report to Merrifield.

I think we can sign her on.

Merrifield was pleased. His boast he would recruit the best bioengineer money could buy now seemed to have more substance than shadow.

There had been misgivings about the project in general; no one in the sacred halls of government wanted to assume the moral authority for the results. Merrifield had little tolerance for the soul searching and wrangling that went on amongst the bioethicists and cadres of lawyers. It had been his experience that the progress of science steamed along its course with its own sort of manifest destiny and anything else was simply a holding action.

The lawyers had bitched about the constitutionality of the project (as if lawyers had ever given a furry rat’s ass about the constitution), arguing that slavery was illegal. Listening to the gutless government attorneys always put Merrifield in mind of an old joke: What do you do when you find a lawyer buried up to his neck in sand? Get more sand.

But the secrets of the genetic structure were being rapidly unraveled and there was a next, logical step that had to be -and would be- taken by somebody. Merrifield, always straddling a dicey edge between warmongering neocons and soylent green liberals, had had to bring all his considerable power and political leverage to the table to blunt that challenge.

As for Ingrid, no one knew if she could be brought into a project with the sole purpose of creating a Genetically modified human being (and that was as unexciting a term as Merrifield could come up with). A background check revealed that she was about as politically motivated as a tree sloth, a rarity among college students who believed themselves enlightened, but had simply been indoctrinated by sixties Bolsheviks who had found a home masquerading as professors at America’s universities. A glance into the real workings of the power machine -the BIS in Basel, the CFR and MIC, Bilderbergs and Rothschilds, Wall Street, and The City -London’s Banking District- was usually enough to send them scurrying back to their love-ins and protests with their red tails between their legs. Merrifield would catch Ingrid fresh and show her the real workings of power without any preconceived notions. And the time was now. Something big was in the wind, like the scent of smoke from far away.

A new term had been floating around in the pentagon, uttered a little more urgently recently. Asymmetrical warfare. There had been hints and teases in the intelligence community, the thousand threats attended to every day given greater weight.

Did you have to twist her arm, Merrifield asked.

Clifton sat down in a well padded chair, his omnipresent briefcase resting on its own battered hide. The two of them would have made a fine addition to a den of Threadneedle Street thieves, smoking fat cigars and swirling hard liquor around in tumblers.

There’s enough resentment festering inside her without rubbing salt into the gouge. She’s smart enough not to turn down two hundred K for being allowed to do exactly what she wants.

You left the packet?

Did I have another option?

Merrifield sighed. I suppose not. I never took her for a turnip head. So now Miss Milner knows all. Will it hold her to the line?

Clifton chewed his lip thoughtfully. Hard to say. Just don’t let her think we’re using her as a patsy. She mentioned Robert Oppenheimer. She said that she believed he had expected to fail in his effort to build the A- bomb, and when he didn’t, he had a sudden attack of conscience. I think she’s fighting that already. Are we expecting to become Jonas Salks, or Hitlers?

It’s a job, no more, Merrifield said. An important job, but with all that high minded crap aside, the simple truth remains that we have to do it before someone else does. I think the benefits of the project will be great enough to cover us no matter how much shit Josh Hall can sling. May his soul burn in hell.

Josh Hall was the outspoken leader of a radical religious sect known as the ‘Natural Christians’ publicly, and privately, by some, as the Neoclassic People’s Temple. Hall, even with his twelve hundred dollar suits and fleet of Cadillacs, could still make Jerry Falwell sound like Madlyn Murray O’Hare.

He advocated a return to the ‘natural order’ as God intended. The ‘natural order’ to Merrifield’s mind was pestilence and suffering. Not so secretly, Merrifield believed this to be Hall’s agenda. He didn’t want to help; he wanted to burn down the whole house of cards. Hall didn’t believe in doctors or science, just prayer. The horror stories were becoming as plentiful and tawdry as junk jewelry at a five and dime.

One story -a story with all the earmarks of an urban legend, but one which rang true to Merrifield- weighed on him. Allegedly, a ten year old girl had had contracted gangrene after being scratched by a rusty nail. The girl’s parents, acolytes of Josh Hall, had refused to allow their daughter to be saved by a quarter’s worth of penicillin. Instead, they stayed by their daughter’s bedside and prayed as the gangrene escalated to septicemia and their daughter became more feverish and pain wracked before finally perishing. Penicillin might be a poor substitute for God, but it would have been a damn sight more effective.

So, Merrifield said, coming back to the present. What do you think?

"I think that once the shock dies down, the things we’ll have learned along they way will shut up the hue and cry from John Q. Public. It will be a fait accompli."

We have no guarantees, Merrifield said. He swiveled around in his chair and tapped a pencil on his desk. His unbuttoned jacket allowed a generous portion of white shirted belly to roll over his belt.

If it can be done, she’s the one to make it happen. I think we’ve got a better chance with this than with some of the other white elephants we could lay at the government’s door.

How do you want to go on?

I’ve set up a meeting a week from today. She has to know we’re all willing to have our heads on the chopping block.

Easy enough, Merrifield said. How did she take not being told everything outright?

She knows how big money projects work. She knows we don’t want to tip our hand too soon. She’ll respect that.

You think so?

I’ve done pretty well following my instincts. They’re good ones.

Better leave the thinking to me, Cliffy, Merrifield admonished.

Merrifield slowly turned his chair around. Out the large picture window in his office, he looked down on the city of Tampa. You can go now, Alex, he said absently. Please brief me again before our meeting.

Fine.

Clifton stood. He wished he could call Merrifield a hot blooded, bucket-headed imperious fool, all apt qualifiers. Still, despite their ostensible amicability, Clifton always remembered who was boss.

Outside the window, life went on its routine in the city, its streets and buildings and alleys unaware of the schemes and plots hatched within its borders everyday.

3

Ingrid walked across the brick courtyard laid out in front of the Courier bio lab. Brisk September had planted its chill kiss on the rest of the nation, but had no power to pucker in northern Florida. Stiff Palmetto trees ground away mechanically in the salty sea breeze while a rainbow of Azaleas bloomed in the controlled, glass environment of the Speith greenhouse.

Her heels clacked like tabla drums against the bricks. She had slept uneasily the previous night, less from her apprehension at what her decision might be than from the blackly exciting information in the manila folder.

Her initial reaction had been one of dismay that anyone would have the moral effrontery to even attempt such a thing. But as she had read, her reaction had morphed into morbid curiosity and finally, a dark fascination. Could such a thing be done? She now understood why the project had been entrusted to a complex that was as powerful and faceless as the government itself. Such things as were proposed could only be done under the auspices of power so great that it could crush opposition, economies, or entire nations with a phone call or a directive as simple as ordering a cheeseburger and fries.

Mornin’, Ingrid.

Ingrid looked up. Hubert Ashe pushed his cart of cleaning supplies before him like a burden. He was the stereotypical janitor and handyman with a feather duster in his back pocket and an engineer’s cap on his head. He could have been anywhere between forty to two hundred years old.

Good Morning, Hubert. How are you?

Tolerable. He gave her a paternal scrutiny. You, now. Looks like somebody could walk to town on your lower lip. Don’t look like you slept much, either.

I hoped it didn’t show that much.

Sticks out like a sore thumb. You been out drinkin’ and carousin’ with them young men, I’ll wager. He grinned benignly.

You know better than that. You’re right. I didn’t sleep much. I’m thinking about leaving the University.

Hubert gave her a closer scrutiny. He picked a brown stained and splintered toothpick from his mouth and pursed his lips gently. The wrinkles in his neck showed up plainly against his white jacket. He straightened up behind his cart and looked into the burning sun, his hands in his back pockets.

Nice day, he said, staring into the distance. Real nice. Seems the sun shines brighter when it has to take the sting out of bad news. We’ll miss you.

I haven’t made up my mind, yet. I haven’t even mentioned it to my father. You’re the first to know.

Where you gonna go?

Away, Ingrid said vaguely, Clifton’s warning and the enormity of the information in the file still fresh in her mind. Up north, sort of.

Hubert snapped his fingers. I’ll bet you’re goin’ to New York. You be careful, gal. They’s a shifty lot up there. You get out to one of them bars and some slicker come struttin’ up to you like a Tom Turkey and offer you a job as one of them Radio City Rackettes.

Ingrid thought of the unappealing scar bisecting her chest. Doubtful.

Well, mind you don’t forget what I said, anyway.

I never do. She lowered her voice. Can I tell you something?

You could talk all day. I’d listen.

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be perfect. Not just for me, but for my daddy. After my mother died, I was all he had left of her. You understand this is something I could never tell him?

Yes.

I devoted myself to research. Now I’ve got an opportunity that comes along once in a million lifetimes. Maybe it’s never come along before. But I don’t know if I can leave what I’ve got here to go off to some uncharted territory. Especially now, since the furor has died down and I’m back to being a halfway normal person.

You don’t know if there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

Something like that.

Hubert’s answering smile was warm and wide in his sun reddened face.

You’re a good girl, Ingrid. Like I said, we’re gonna miss you, but your mind is made up, ain’t it?

She knew she had never really deliberated the question. She only wanted someone to tell her it was alright.

You always know what I want to hear, don’t you?

I just tell you the way it is. You gonna have trouble tellin’ your daddy?

I don’t think so. Daddy wants what I want.

Your daddy don’t look at you like the son he never had?

I’ve never thought he was disappointed in me.

He shouldn’t be. You’ve made your mark here, and this little burg isn’t big enough to hold you. It’s time to move on to bigger things.

I wonder, Ingrid said gloomily. I’m almost afraid to go on to anything with even the barest whiff of controversy.

Would your own conscience set right with you if you deprive the world of all you can do?

He’s saying I’m selfish. Was he right?

I don’t talk so well, but I ain’t stupid. I read the papers and I hear what’s going on. It was a raw deal, what they tried to do to you.

Ingrid slowly reddened, part embarrassment, but mostly anger, and she didn’t kid herself about that. During her sophomore year she had been apprenticed to Dr. David Grey, head of the life sciences department and within three months the student had raced ahead of the teacher. She began hearing the word prodigy quite often, genius a little less often.

She had been fascinated with the concept of Parthenogenesis; the spontaneous development of an unfertilized ovum into an embryo. She had learned that the ‘virgin birth’ was, in reality, pretty common. Perhaps one child in ten thousand was a product of parthenogenesis: a natural clone of the mother.

She had begun her studies with albino rats. From the females she extracted unfertilized ova and destroyed their nuclei with UV light. Into these ready made incubators she placed the stomach cells of a big, ill tempered male albino rat named Herod. The ova somehow recognized they had a full complement of chromosomes and began to divide in normal cell meiosis. When the surrogate ova reached the blastula stage, she surgically implanted them into the wombs of several non albino rats. After a three week gestation, fourteen albino rats, exact genetic duplicates of Herod, were born to normal mothers. Ingrid had succeeded in cloning a male offspring from a dissimilar ovum without benefit of fertilization.

Parthenogenesis with a twist.

In step two, Ingrid sacrificed a few more of Herod’s stomach cells to the surgeon’s knife. She removed the Y chromosome and replaced it with the X chromosome from a female, non albino rat. She repeated the cloning procedure and was rewarded with a litter of albino rats from a non albino mother. The substantial difference here was that a male albino rat had supplied the nuclear catalyst with a change in sex chromosome and produced female versions of Herod.

Next, she hurried along nature’s own processes. After cataloging the formidable sequence of DNA phosphates and sugars, she set about synthetically reconstructing the chains of genetic instructions. And here Synthetic was the operative word.

Tedious was far too tame a word for the work and Ingrid had enlisted the aid of a cybernerd named Jake MacMillan to help her list the multitudinous codons that made up the chain of a single chromosome. She had burned a lot of midnight oil to come up with the huge, six thousand page volume of the rat’s genome.

She then synthesized the proteins, a far easier task, by using commercially available hybridomas to churn out specific proteins. From viable ova she removed the X chromosomes, then scattered the mix of synthetic chromosomes into her prepared dish of ova, a process known as shotgunning. The ova absorbed the synthetic chromosomes in almost equal proportions of X to Y.

The ova with the normal X chromosomes were fertilized immediately by an X or Y sperm cell. A few of the ova with the single Y chromosome appeared to be fertilized by Y sperm cells, but spontaneously aborted after a few divisions. In the crazy, internal circuitry of DNA the cells realized that the YY combination was not what nature had intended. Ingrid had