by Daniel Quinn
“Do you think this is it?” Echo said.
In the tank, Victor’s arm unfolded and smacked against the glass, an eye swiveling toward them. The fingers were strangely elongated, and already they could make out the tip of a sharp, dagger-like nail as he pressed his palm against the thick encasement.
“We’re getting closer,” he said.
Despite the apparent physical differences, Alpha felt a strange kinship to the piebald creature. They did, after all, share a common genetic sequence, albeit one now far removed from each other. He had to still himself against pressing his own hand against the glass, so strong was the urge to make contact in even that minor way.
Slowly, he led Echo away, back to the workstations where Bravo, Charlie, and Delta monitored the synthesis chambers.
“Purge Uniform’s tank and begin prepping the chamber for Subject Whiskey. Continue monitoring Subject Victor and alert me immediately if any other irregularities arise.”
He couldn’t help but notice his headache subside now that Victor was out sight and out of reach. If this current headache were a single instance, he would not have been so troubled by it. The fact that a slow burning pain began to encase his brain each time he personally examined Victor was enough to convince him that their current subject was, if not the direct cause, then at least more than casually related. This oddity was curious enough on its own, but he mentally filed it away for the moment. His growling stomach reminded him of more pressing matters.
He moved to the door, Echo following beside him as she so often did.
Leaving the lab, he was greeted immediately by Papa’s face. His own face, in fact, albeit one that was substantially older and wizened, the shared furrows of their brows and the lined recesses around each side of their mouths far more pronounced in Papa’s features.
The corridor was lined with imagery of Papa. In each of the photos, Papa proudly displayed his Raëlian pendant, the large silver icon of the Star of David intertwined with a swastika hanging loosely over his chest from a long gold chain. There were photos of the orbital mining magnate christening his latest asteroid platforms—one of which Alpha knew was this very same base—more of the man shaking hands with UN representatives and various presidents and dignitaries, and images of him with staff, researchers, lab workers, and miners.
There were no more rock pushers at this facility. No more researchers and lab techs, aside from Alpha and his team. The veins of this particular asteroid had run dry ages ago, and the platform had officially been shuttered for more than twenty years. Papa’s deep pockets, though, and some fanciful accounting kept the lights on and the equipment running.
As they passed through the corridor highlighting Papa’s achievements, Alpha was again struck by the disparity in Echo’s appearance. While she carried many of Papa’s features, she was unmistakably softer and appealingly feminine. Her skin carried a more youthful appearance, the laugh lines around her lips gentle and more charming than the severe set their old progenitor was marked with, and which, in time, would mar Alpha’s own features. For her part, Echo looked as if she had merely inherited his features, as if she were Papa’s daughter rather than a genetic duplicate. A mishap with the protein loads, some fat-fingered amino acid sequencing, and a minor dose of genetic gap filler during the earlier stages of synthesis had flipped a few too many switches. This was not to say that the production of Echo was a failure so much as it was a decidedly welcome outcome.
Alpha was, strictly speaking, the purest of Papa’s clones. He was the original, second only to the progenitor. As they worked further down the line, each successive generation grew a bit more distant from Alpha and Papa, and were nurtured to be more distinct. Echo had been the apex of that distinctive cultivation, and Alpha had been convinced they were edging that much closer to the truth, stripping back the layers of genetic impurities to achieve something nearer an answer to a question that was virtually indefinable by admission.
Where did humans come from?
That was the question. Papa believed he had both the answer and the method for discovery. And that the necessary research could be conducted here, in this defunct orbital mining station operating as an off-books, privately funded black site.
Sometime during their walk, Alpha realized that Echo had hooked her hand around his and that their fingers were intertwined. When they reached his quarters, his hunger was momentarily forgotten and replaced with an equally base desire.
Their lips pressed together, her hands pulling his body close. In the tight confines between them, he worked loose the buttons of her blouse and slacks, and she shimmied out of her underwear while he stripped.
Not for the first time, he questioned the nature of their lovemaking. They had been partners for a handful of years, nearly the entirety of Echo’s life. At the start of their affair, Alpha had been hesitant to pursue her, struck by the strangely incestuous nature of such a fling. Being nearly an exact genetic duplicate, he began to view sex with Echo as a nearly masturbatory experience. Although she possessed female anatomy, Alpha was keenly aware that he was, in essence, making love with, and to, himself.
While the nature of their relationship was an intellectual curiosity, the physicality was unbridled and shameless. They enjoyed both their own bodies and one another’s with frequent abandon.
Even as her body bucked against his, his mind turned over the riddles of Uniform’s failure and Victor’s early achievement of cohesion. There was so very little separating success from abortion, and the genetic lines they used for replication were altered only slightly. The aim was to reach an answer that was as genetically pure as possible. To discover and recreate the common ancestor that had made progeny of Homo habilis, Homo gautengensis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus, and down through the evolutionary chain that led to Homo floresiensis and, finally, Homo sapiens.
As Alpha and his kin carried out their work, this latest iteration of Victor and its achingly unfamiliar construction appeared to be proving Papa’s hypothesis correct.
Whatever had given rise to those early attempts at humanity had not been a purely simple act of evolution. Like Papa, he was hesitant to call it creation, for that carried many unseemly religious connotations that spoke more toward fantasy than any scientifically proven reality. He preferred to think of it more as manipulation.
Witnessing the trajectory of Victor’s development, though, a single negative, but pervasive, thought began to wriggle through his mind. He couldn’t help but wonder if, perhaps, given the gross disparities between Victor’s form and the modern human, that the answer may ultimately be even simpler. Certainly not creation, perhaps not even manipulation. He worried that the answer boiled down to pure tragedy. That Papa’s hypothesis was only partly correct in its presumptive capacity, but less so in its explanations.
Lying in the heated afterglow, with Echo pressed tightly against his side and lightly snoring, her head resting on his chest, he began to wonder at the possibility that the answer to humanity’s rise had come as a result of nothing more than a simple mistake.
II
A collection of mistakes lined the walls and shelves of a defunct ore processing station that had been converted into a storage facility.
Alpha normally enjoyed spending time in this section of the black site, despite the plainly macabre nature of his surroundings. Here, he could gaze upon their past efforts, a mixture of wild successes and stunning failures.
Uniform’s termination had left him in a rut, more focused on their past errors than usual. And the questionable viability of Victor continually twisted in his mind as he pondered if the physical aberrations of that particular subject were deformities or a natural occurrence of the subject they were attempting to replicate. Or, perhaps, “recreate” was a more accurate term, as he had never seen nor heard of such a creature in his life.
He slowly roamed through the maze of storage racks, occasionally stopping to soak in the details of their research. Beneath the overhead lighting tract, the li
quid preserving the relics of disused flesh and tumorous lumps that vaguely resembled bipedal creatures radiated a warm, amber glow.
The other subjects varied in size and shape and genetic lineage, as did the maladies that had provoked their termination either naturally or through a systematic elimination conducted by the research group. In a large cylinder, Alpha studied lidless eyes that were too familiar, surrounded by a lumpy, misbegotten skull resulting from Proteus syndrome. The lips were far too large, the nose a violently configured clay-like structure, the bones of his cranium stretching the skin and twisting it into overinflated knots that buried one ear beneath a tumor covered in a patchwork clump of hair. The subject had died before reaching full maturity, but the cause had been a deep vein thrombosis rather than a complication from the physical disorders he had suffered.
In another smaller jar was a fetus that had begun showing its trauma at the accelerated equivalent of eight weeks. Because this subject’s phonetic call sign was Juliet, the gene structure had been coded to produce a second female. However, the protein structures had been incorrectly sequenced. In normal fetal development, by eight weeks the embryo develops eyes, eyelids, arms, legs, fingers and toes, mouth, lips, fingernails, and detectable brainwaves. Slightly above the now-shortened umbilical cord, a small arm grew from the subject’s belly. Its second arm was in the correct position, but grotesquely shortened, with fingers blooming from the shoulder joints. The mouth had failed to separate properly, cutting a small slit of an orifice into the creature’s transparent and reptilian visage. Alpha had elected to terminate rather than proceed any further, accepting that they were clearly on the wrong track with Juliet.
Echo had actually cried that night, and he’d held her in his arms, crying with her even though he could not quite articulate why.
Some jars he studied intently, others he gave barely a glimpse. His pace increased slightly, his steps growing heavier, as he recognized the futility of coming to this room.
Victor was unique in his aberrations, his mutations. There had not been anything similar in all the decades of research that had been conducted at this facility. Nothing.
Rather than finding comfort in their years of progress built off these past errors, Alpha found himself further lost and troubled.
His sense of disquietude spiked sharply at the blaring of the emergency klaxon, a notification of trouble in the lab scrolling onto the translucent display overlay grafted across his forearm.
~*~
“Put down the glass,” Charlie demanded. His voice carried a sharp edge, both hands open and stretched out before him in a plea.
Delta held Bravo in a chokehold, a large sliver of broken glass gripped tightly in his free hand. Blood pooled between the shiv and his palm, dripping down in solitary drops across Bravo’s chest. The remains of a drinking vessel lay scattered across the floor.
“We can talk this out, Delta,” Alpha said. “Just do like Charlie asked. C’mon. There’s no reason for this.”
Delta’s lips peeled back from gritted teeth, a high-pitched moan curdling deeply through his throat. His eyes were red and watery, and he violently shook his head.
He jabbed the pointed edge of his makeshift blade into Bravo’s cheek and drew a jagged line upward, to his temple.
Bravo gurgled a scream, both his hands clutching at Delta’s forearm, trying to pry the limb away from his empurpled face. The glass continued up, into his hairline, digging a trench across his scalp and over his ear, up higher across the crown of his head. Blood sheeted down his face.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. “Fuck!”
Echo took a tentative step forward, but Alpha blocked her with his arm. He gave her a quick shake of his head.
“Delta. Listen to me.”
“NO!” Delta shouted. And then he spun Bravo around and shoved him away, his clone tripping over his own feet, slipping in the pool his blood had made, and fell hard. His hands reached out in reflex to break his fall, his palms slamming into shards of glass tinkling in the widening crimson bath.
Alpha stepped forward, Charlie doing the same but from Delta’s flank. If they could get Bravo out of the way, or maybe tackle Delta together, one of them securing the arm he held the weapon in—
And then Delta reversed his grip on the shard of glass and shoved it into his eye at a violently upward angle. They could hear the pointy shard break through the thin shelf of orbital bone and pierce his brain.
Delta roared and tore the improvised blade loose, taking his eye with it. He flicked the eyeball off, then took a deep breath and stabbed himself in the face once more. Then he raised his head back and rammed the glass into his carotid, twisting it on its edge and drawing it across his throat.
He choked on his blood, sputtering it out between his lips as he fell to his knees.
A moment later, he was dead.
Bravo had rolled onto his back with a shuddering moan. One hand reached out, his fingers curling in the gore until he found another shard of glass. Over and over and over, he punched the shard into his throat. By the time Charlie and Alpha were able to restrain him, he was gone, it had happened so fast.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said again, his face white as a sheet, he was nearly ready to faint.
Alpha turned away and looked toward the synthesis chamber. Toward Victor.
That… thing… seemed to be watching them. A sharp bolt of pain dinged across the inside of Alpha’s skull, forcing him to look away, to look back toward the grisly chaos of Delta and Bravo’s bodies lying prone only a few feet in front of him.
~*~
Alpha and the remnants of his team of duplicates gathered around a semicircular conference table. A steaming cup of coffee sat before each member. The display monitor projected information from Delta’s autopsy report atop the center of the table.
“The glass shard entered at a forty-degree angle, and pierced Delta’s brain. However, you’ll see a rather severe abnormality to the surrounding region of tissue.”
Echo leaned closer to the projection, her slim fingers hovering over the imagery. “It almost looks like—”
“Jelly,” Charlie finished. “But… from a stab wound? That’s not likely.”
“No, it’s not,” Alpha agreed. “The amount of physical trauma is highly inconsistent with the findings. Yet, somehow, the frontal lobe is nothing more than mush.”
“What about Bravo?” Echo said.
“Nothing outside of what was expected. His injuries were consistent with what we observed. This,” Alpha waved toward the projection, “was the only abnormality I could discover.”
“Maybe a degenerative condition?” Charlie said. “Could it be a sequencing failure, some type of genetic breakdown?”
Alpha shrugged. He had another theory, but not one he was quite ready to share. He was more curious about the path of this conversation and whether or not his duplicates would arrive at a similar conclusion.
“We can rule out suicide,” Echo said.
“That was never really on the table to begin with,” Alpha said.
“Why not?”
“I’ve never felt suicidal. Charlie, have you?”
Charlie shook his head. Each of them had been curated from the same genetic source, Papa, and each had the same cerebral mapping and memories of their progenitor. Papa was not genetically predisposed to depression and had never had suicidal impulses, which meant that his progeny had never experienced either. With the genetic factors largely accounted for, that left only environmental factors, and the mining station was kept as relaxed and comfortable as possible. A psychotic break of this scale, in the case of Delta, was simply improbable, if not outright impossible.
“So, what then?” Charlie said.
Alpha took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Victor.”
His duplicates exchanged glances, and a slight, fleeting wash of relief swept across him. They knew, he realized, chiding himself for feeling surprise. Of course they knew. They had to.
Ec
ho pursed her lips, incredulous. “Are you suggesting that Victor telepathically controlled Delta and Bravo? That he used some kind of mind control to manipulate them into killing themselves?”
“Not just manipulated,” Alpha said. “Consumed them. Whatever control Victor was able to exert over Delta was enough to turn a part of his brain into pudding. We cannot simply allow this level of power to continue unchecked.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Charlie sputtered, turning toward Echo with venomous intent. “Victor is still developing. He’s not even reached post-birth viability and already he’s able to mentally dominate another organism and exert his will.”
“If that’s so, then we’ve created the first legitimately viable telepathic humanoid,” Echo argued. “The potential research applications of this are extraordinary! And you want to flush it all away?”
“Yes, I do,” Alpha said.
“We can’t.”
“What are your thoughts, Charlie?” he asked.
Charlie merely shrugged. “The project is a failure.”
“Or a remarkable success,” Echo said. Alpha noted the way she occupied her chair, her body slanting in his direction, one leg tucked beneath the other, her hand gripping the sole of her bare foot. She’d kicked her shoes off onto the floor, as she usually did at the start of meetings such as these, another unique habit unshared by either Alpha or Charlie.
Despite himself, Alpha let loose a sharp bark of laughter. “You’re both right, in your own ways. Victor represents both a success and a massive failure. Regardless, what we must do next is clear. Purge Victor.”
Charlie nodded.
Echo shook her head, eyes wide. “No! This is it. This is the breakthrough we’ve been looking for.”
“It’s not,” Alpha argued. “This is larger than that, and goes well beyond our mission parameters.”
“We cannot simply destroy him.”
