Safari: A Technothriller

by Alexander Plansky

  “Holy shit, Sydney? Is that you?” she said, her voice quieter now.

  Sydney ran up to the bars. “I saw your room earlier today. What the hell happened? They told us you left.”

  She looked on the brink of tears. “Those bastards kidnapped me. They injected me with something and then I woke up here. They’re doing experiments with these weird fucking animals. Someone’s always here and I don’t even know what’s day or night anymore. How long have I been here?”

  “I think it’s very early Sunday morning,” Sydney said, rubbing her head. How long had she been out? There was no light down here so it could’ve been the middle of the day for all she knew. “So nearly four days.”

  “I think they’re doing something to me,” Courtney said, looking manic. “I can feel it in my bones. And I’ve had this fever non-stop.”

  The wail reached her ears again. Both she and Courtney looked in the direction of the other passageway.

  “There they are. I don’t know what they’re doing or what the hell that thing is, I just want to get out of here.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Sydney said, moving away from the cages. The hybrids were still snarling behind her but she figured the bars were well designed.

  “Don’t leave!” Courtney called after her. “We need to get out of here!”

  But Sydney was barely even registering her anymore. Maybe it was just the drugs, but she felt inexplicably drawn to the creature’s call. All other considerations seemed secondary at this point as she stepped onto the cool metal flooring and proceeded down the corridor.

  It looked similar to the one she had been in before, but it didn’t end in a T-junction. There was a laboratory with several large windows running the along the right side of the hall. Inside, it was dark save for the glow of several flat screen monitors. One of the computers closest to her appeared to be running some kind of gene sequencing program, but everything else was a blur in the background.

  Along the left side of the hallway were two operating rooms. The first was dark but the lights were on in the second at the far end of the corridor, casting an ominous glow onto the floor. Again she heard the howl, but this time she could make out voices too, barely louder than whispers from here. She inched closer, a knot forming tighter in her stomach the nearer she drew. The voices became clearer.

  “…get me more anesthetic.”

  “Preparing next charge.”

  Slowly, she peered around the corner and through the viewing window. About half a dozen people dressed in light blue medical scrubs were clustered around something on an operating table. There were several bright surgical lights positioned around them as they worked, but the rest of the room was dark save for the glow cast by several monitors. Three were along the back wall, showing x-rays and a mapping of what looked like a brain. Another two were observed by a sitting technician. At this angle, she couldn’t see what was on them but the glow of the screens illuminated the man’s face and his medical mask.

  “Reed, I need you over here,” a woman said. Sydney recognized her voice. It was Graves. Then a man moved and walked around the table towards her, suddenly giving Sydney a much better view.

  Normally, her instinct would have been to turn away but instead she looked on in horrified fascination. The creature was over six feet long from its head to its feet. It had tan fur, a lion-like face, and sharp claws. That wasn’t the odd part.

  What disturbed her the most was that it looked almost human.

  The thing lay on its back, fastened to the table by several sturdy-looking black leather straps, one of which was pulled tightly over its forehead. Beyond that, she saw that the skullcap had been removed and the brain was exposed. Graves was probing it with some sort of instrument she couldn’t make out, but it appeared to be hooked up to whatever the technician was monitoring.

  There were also electrodes with wires taped to various points all over the creature’s body from its temples, pectorals, biceps, abdomen, and calves that she could see. She realized those were electrodes. The creature’s eyes were fixated on the ceiling with jagged breaths coming from its mouth.

  “Abdominal stimulant in three, two, one…,” Graves announced.

  The technician pressed something. There was a zap and the abomination spasmed, restrained by the straps. Its yellow eyes seemed to bulge out of its head and the same awful cry escaped its mouth.

  “Muscle readings are good,” the technician announced.

  Suddenly, Graves looked towards her. In all her shock, Sydney hadn’t realized that she’d stumbled out of her cover and was standing in full view of the window.

  “Shit, get her!” the woman barked, pointing with a bloody gloved hand.

  Sydney turned and ran back the way she came. Behind her, she heard the operating room door burst open and the sound of footsteps after her. She experienced a major head rush as she re-entered the cavern and nearly fell over. Clutching her brow, she managed to make it back to the original hallway and swerved left.

  She didn’t even know where she was going. She just knew she needed to get the fuck out of–

  A gloved hand roughly grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back. Suddenly, two other technicians were restraining her as well. She could only vaguely make out who was talking behind their medical masks and the blue light beamed down from above as they lowered her towards the floor.

  “Hold her steady,” an American accent said, preparing a syringe.

  “Please don’t,” she murmured.

  “I told you she didn’t have enough anesthetic, you idiot,” a female voice, this one Kenyan, said.

  “We didn’t have enough time to check,” the American said. “Graves said to hurry.” Suddenly she felt the syringe enter the side of her neck. “Easy, easy,” the man said.

  “What are you doing?” came a familiar voice. Ramsay’s. The three technicians’ heads turned. From down the corridor, she heard loud footsteps striding towards them. “Get that out of her.”

  “We’re re-sedating her,” the American explained, carefully withdrawing the needle. “She got free while we were helping Graves with the–”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ramsay said. Dazed, she looked up to see him standing with military posture before them. Noticing she was conscious, he strode forward and bent down to look into her eyes.

  “Dr. Sans wants to see you.”

  ITERATIONS

  She seemed to faze in and out of consciousness through what happened next. The three technicians helped her into an elevator, then she was being led through a clean-white corridor that seemed somehow familiar to her. It was only once they were outside and in the rain that she realized they’d been under the veterinary labs the whole time, she’d just been too out of it to put it together. The cave should have been the giveaway.

  Ramsay led them along the path with a flashlight as it wound through the forest. She could see the lights of the lodge through the trees up ahead. There was a rumble of thunder off in the distance, but overall the storm seemed to be lightening up. Finally, they walked out onto the patio and up to the front double doors of the building.

  Inside, she was taken to the dining room where a lone figure sat at the far end of the wooden table. It was Sans. He smiled when he saw her and gestured for her to take a seat. At the other end of the table, a plate with a heap of meat had been set with a glass of water.

  “Please, take a seat,” Sans said, gesturing to the chair. “You must be famished.”

  As she sat down, she suddenly noticed she was starving and began ravenously eating the ribs of some animal. She stopped, realizing she was using her bare hands.

  Sans laughed. “Oh, it’s alright. Go ahead.” He watched her carefully as she continued. “You’re probably worried about Andy, but don’t worry, he’s quite alright.”

  She ate in silence for a few minutes and Sans watched her with measured fascination. She had cleaned half the plate when she paused to down the entire glass of water. She wiped her mouth and said, “Do you
mind if I ask a question?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  Sans smiled. “It’s complicated, but I’ll explain. One of the downsides of being here, so far from civilization, is that I have so few with whom I can share my excitement with.”

  “I saw the trophies.”

  “I had assumed,” he said. “But do you know what they are?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say you spliced lion and hyena genes and grew an embryo in an artificial womb.”

  “Not quite. It’s best if I start from the beginning. The very beginning.” He folded his hands on the table and glanced out at the window. Raindrops rolled down the glass. “As you know, my parents brought me here all the time as a child and taught me how to hunt. At school, I was never particularly good at making friends. My EQ was never as high as my IQ, and it didn’t help that my speech patterns were…less than perfect. Hunting was the only thing outside of academics that I truly excelled at, and above that, enjoyed. High school, university, and years in the pharma and biotech industries came and went, but hunting was the one constant. Even now, since my wife’s passing, it’s all I can find joy in. There was only one problem.”

  Sydney stopped eating as he took a deep breath and drummed his fingers on the table. “It began to grow boring.” Sans scoffed to himself. “I didn’t think it could happen and I denied it for years. But it finally became clear to me as I dispatched a charging rhino with ease and felt not even a twinge of fear. Killing it felt rote, almost mechanical, like something I was programmed to do. Hunting isn’t about killing, it’s about thrill. Take that away and you’re just watching things die at your own hand. There was no purpose in it anymore, no feeling that I was a lesser creature earning my survival against nature’s finest. I didn’t want to feel like a god, I wanted to feel like an animal.

  “Initially, I was terrified. This wasn’t long after Jane died, you must understand, and I had gone around the world to try and find the one thing I thought I had left. And at that moment, staring down at the dead rhino, I realized I’d lost that. The only thing left to do was look to science. The cloning project here was already underway as a proof of concept for the company, but I wondered if hybrid species would provide a new challenge. Sadly, they didn’t. I tried exactly what you described. I originally went for wild-raised versions of hybrids you see at the zoos – the ligers, the leopons. These were certainly a step up, but after a time, they too began to lose my interest.

  “For a time, I thought there was no animal nature could throw at me – not even any of the possible Panthera genus hybrids – that I couldn’t defeat with minimal effort. I realized that since I had beaten the game, the only way to continue to play was by new rules – my rules.”

  He seemed almost happy, clearly delighting in telling her all of this. “It was around the same time that my company really began expanding on the gene therapy front. That was a subject that had always interested me, the notion that you could change the genetic makeup of a living organism. For most scientists, it’s a means to correct defects and cure diseases, giving hope to those who would otherwise spend their lives without any. In fact, had the technology been sufficiently developed at the time, it probably would have saved Jane’s life. That was, of course, why I had SansCorp pursue it in the first place. Alas, all this effort wouldn’t bring her back and my mind wandered to other applications for it, ones that would solve my personal dilemma. I saw it as a means to control evolution.”

  She paused from eating. The calmness with which he proceeded was becoming unsettling. “When you think about it, humans have already been doing something similar for thousands of years with selective breeding and domestication. I wanted to do the opposite, to make animals more dangerous and unpredictable than nature had ever intended. To make the biggest game even bigger.”

  “So you created the perfect prey,” she said. That’s obviously where he’s going with this.

  Sans almost chuckled to himself. “Sadly, no. I took some of the cloned lions I had here and began performing gene therapy on them to insert DNA from a mix of other predators, primarily the hyena and the leopard. Over time, I began incorporating specific hormones and hybrid DNA from ligers too, to increase the size.”

  “What did you use for the vector? A retrovirus?” she asked.

  Sans looked impressed. “Close. A lentivirus, actually.”

  Sydney nodded. Viruses already had the ability to alter an organism’s DNA, so when a virus was created to infect the host’s cells with specific new genes, it could be used to correct errors in the genetic code. Retroviral vectors were already some of the most common and reliable forms of gene therapy, but lentiviruses (which were members of the Retroviridae family) could insert genes into non-dividing cells, which made them more effective. And, as with standard retroviruses, the genes they inserted could be passed onto the next generation.

  “The trophies you saw in my office are from the latest iteration. They are…difficult to hunt, but far from perfect. The hormone imbalance from the new DNA has given them strange behaviors. They will often kill large groups of animals and not eat all of them simply as a display of dominance and to establish territory. I believe you came across an example of that earlier this week. They are excellent at seeing in the dark but cannot adjust their eyes well to daylight, so they are strictly nocturnal. There are twelve of them, and most live in the cave system that connects to the labs. We have a few in cages right now to run periodic tests.”

  “They killed Jones?”

  “Dear Richard decided to take an evening stroll through the cave. He must’ve thought the entrance was still inside the electromagnetic boundary. He thought wrong.”

  “Have any ever gotten past the boundary?”

  “No, they all have tracking implants that are monitored in the lab. In fact everything, the entire electromagnetic system including the exterior border, is run from there. Mercifully, we’ve never had a failure of any of the emitters. What I have created here is meant to stay here. If any of them ever got off the reserve, it would be catastrophic.”

  A silence hung between them for a moment. There was something else she wanted to ask, something that waned her appetite even as she continued eating.

  “What was that thing on the operating table?”

  “What thing?”

  “I woke up and explored the cave. I saw what Nurse Graves was doing to that thing.”

  Sans smirked. “I suppose I should tell you now that Nurse Graves is actually Doctor Graves. She has a PhD in Genetics from Columbia. As for that ‘thing’ you so eloquently referred to, that is the next iteration of my project. It took quite a lot of convincing to get the board to fund a new private gene therapy venture, but I promised them it had applications far beyond what I was doing here. And I suppose one day, it will.”

  “But what is it?”

  “The evolution of big-game hunting. But you would know it best by what it was.” A sly smile formed on his face. “I believe you knew him as Brandon.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. Suddenly, she didn’t feel hungry anymore.

  Sans found her shift in mood amusing. “You see Sydney, the hybrids kept me busy. They served their purpose, but I realized it was time to get even bolder. I needed a prey that possessed the intellect of the most intelligent species on Earth – which, as hard as it is to believe at times, is in fact us – with the primal instinct, claws, and teeth of the greatest predators walking the planet today. If I could insert the genes of different animals into a lion, why couldn’t I do it to a human being?”

  “To hunt them for sport?”

  “You don’t understand, Sydney. This is where the vanguard of science and hunting become one. This is an exciting frontier that we here, on this reserve” – he pointed his finger down to the ground – “are being the first to witness.”

  “But it’s murder!”

  “Murder? That’s what they said about euthanasia. That’s what they said ab
out abortion. The truth is, murder is a subjective construct. You only believe that this is murder because that’s what society has spoon-fed you.”

  “Euthanasia is a mercy kill, and abortion is when the thing doesn’t even know what it is yet. You’re talking about taking a healthy person with a life, transforming them against their will, and then killing them just so you can mount their head on a wall!”

  “That’s a drastic misreading of my intentions, Sydney. Brandon is an experiment, and you can’t have progress without experimentation.” He appeared happy, as if they were discussing movies or sports. “All those rich dentists who come to this continent to find the thrill of their lives have no idea how pedestrian they are. My purpose is not to wipe out the last of the endangered species, but to create a new prey that will give me the perfect challenge I have longed for all my life.”

  Then he paused, his mood growing darker. “But sadly, Brandon is not the end of my search. You see, the lentivirus I gave him – which had mostly lion DNA – suffered some of the same hormonal issues as the standard hybrids, which explains his abrupt change in behavior earlier this week. He’s feral and unpredictable, certainly a formidable foe, but not the challenge I’m looking for. I want something that mixes thought with instinct and I’m afraid Brandon has been reduced to mere impulses. The virus worked all too well. He has become, quite literally, an animal.” His eyes watched his fingers drum gently on the wood.

  Then he looked up. “The second specimen, however, has shown much more promise.”

  The icy grip of fear enveloped her. “Who’s the second specimen?” she said softly, almost as if it were a statement rather than a question. She already knew.

  Sans smiled as Ramsay said behind her, “Are the drugs really working that well? I would’ve thought she’d notice by now.”

  Suddenly, the little things she’d overlooked before became much more apparent. Her teeth were hurting again and her skin felt strange. She remembered how she’d scratched herself earlier giving a pinch and looked at her nails. They were turning black and starting to curl down like claws.