The Soulless II (667 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 17 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Anthony Locascio (View user info) at 2005-03-24 15:30:15 EST
Sorry to keep you waiting, Jack.
http://www.ubersite.com/m/62497 (Installment 1)
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The bright flash of light and cacophony of voices exploded him out of slumber in a nanosecond, elevating his pulse and injecting a stream of hot, electric adrenaline into his blood. TV cameras were being shoved at him, even as he stumbled out of his chair and got to his feet. They seemed to be asking questions, but they spoke so quickly, and all at the same time, that they could have been babbling at him in Mandarin for all he understood. One phrase stood out, picked out from the rubble of their avalanche of questions. "Animal cruely." He glanced up at the video cameras to see the contorted remains of the chimps, most of them curled up in fetal positions, none of them moving. With a cry of rage, he shoved his way through the crowd to the front of the primate enclosure. The TV cameras followed like obedient hounds.
What he saw was what everyone in California would see that night on the local news: dead chimpanzees lying in pools of viscera. Blood and bile leaked out of their mouths, and bloody sores had erupted over the hairless portions of their palms and faces. Most had defecated and urinated in their death throes and lay motionless in their own filth. All had the glaze of death on their faces. The stench of death, feces, and infection permeated the room. When he turned, he saw her.
That bitch. That was the only way he could remember it. There had been Meredith, his fresh-faced grad assistant. The one whose legs had turned so many heads. Bosell could never think of her name in his thoughts, only able to bring himself to refer to her as that bitch. She was smirking, the same sort of smirk that Kerr had on his face - the self-satisfied look of somebody who knows they have you thoroughly fucked. When his incredulous stare got past that smirk, he noticed the green armband she wore, a common identifier of the Animal Liberation Front. Understanding stole over him so quickly that he was moving before he realized it, pushing through the crowd, screaming in rage, promising to kill her. Hands closed about him, restraining him. He struggled, the cameras capturing hate in his eyes.
That bitch. She had cost him everything. The administration turned on him in a heartbeat, declaring his research unsanctioned by the university and the result of "misappropriations of funds." There was talk of a criminal investigation, but a since a hard look at records would reveal that he had been funded with full knowledge of his research, it was dropped. It was enough to destroy his reputation and dissociate the university from him. His proposed professorship was cancelled. The university investigated a way to revoke his Ph.D., but that course met with resistance from other degreed professors who were fearful of similar actions against them. The net effect was he was his reputation as a researcher was publicly destroyed and nobody in the scientific community would touch him with a forty foot pole. The few minor research positions he interviewed drew picketing from animal rights groups, guaranteeing he would never work in any scientific institution of merit again. All because of that bitch. Until Joshua came around again.
It really was too perfect. When Joshua invited him for coffee at his mansion in Miami, he was in total control. Bosell had been destroyed, his education was useless, his life's work ready for the incinerator. If Joshua had offered him a few breadcrumbs, what could he have done but accept? And Joshua was offering much more - the administration of a scientific project of immense proportions, nearly unlimited resources, and complete autonomy in design. The main caveat would once have sent Bosell storming from the room. Now, given the humiliation and academic rape he'd suffered, it wasn't an issue anymore. The prospect of weaponizing his work was fine with him.
The briefcase Joshua had brought was filled with crisp hundreds. Bosell had opened the case, spat on it, and shoved it back at his surprised benefactor. That had been the only time Bosell had seen any real emotion in him, a look of dark anger crossing his brow that quickly faded when the doctor told him what he really wanted as payment. That look had been replaced with a laugh so genuine it might have made Bosell shudder if he had not wanted so direly to be taken seriously. Joshua had known Bosell was serious though, had known it immediately. Just for that, Bosell had been inclined toward loyalty.
Joshua had come back three days later with exactly what Bosell had wanted - a small microrecorder. His hands had been shaking when it was pressed gently into them, and when he looked up at Joshua and saw him smiling knowingly, he realized that he multimillionaire businessman was enjoying this as much as he was. He didn't bother to play it until later - Joshua was not a man who played around with lies and deception, another of his most cherished qualities. He simply reached across the table and shook the slender man's hand before leaving. On the way home, he stopped at a vintner's boutique and selected some their best 50 year-old brandy before continuing home, killing all the lights and closing all the shades. He sat down in his leather recliner, drank from the thick glass bottle of liquor and played the tape.
The recording was fantastic
And he'd done a fine job of it. His facility had been built just the way he'd imagined. In one wing, a massive air-conditioned room housed a supercomputer that could go through billions of base pairs in the human genome. A 100 petabit network connected him to four other such machines. Another contained a DNA sequencer, a protein coater, and a TEM microscope. His every request had been satisfied. Over a billion dollars had been poured into his work. Doing so from scratch with a team of ordinary scientists would have cost far more. The greatest portion of his work was already done - the substitution of foreign genes into a host organism. The last great hurdle, suppressing a massive immune reaction, lay before him. For over ten thousand days, the doctor of genetics had sat behind his desk in the witching hours, working twenty-hour days for three-week stretches. A staff was available to him twenty-four hours, all of them highly stressed from the coarse, abrasive, and unmannerly project head. Only one, Jeremiah Quadias, made any effort to be in his company. Bosell regarded him as an opportunistic prick, but the scrawny, fledgling scientist was useful to him as well as highly intelligent, and more than once the questions he continually asked had given direction to the overall project. Another such inquiry by Quadias had led Bosell to the final piece of the puzzle, modifying the retrovirus to elude the immune system by protein substitution.
What seemed like the end to a very long journey was actually only the beginning of hell - of fourteen prototypes, all had turned out to be totally useless. The first three had been catatonic, seeming barely sentient, responding only to a very few basic stimuli. Bosell had ordered them terminated after extensive testing. The specimens seemed to be perfect in every way, a frustration that led him to pitch his laptop computer through one of the glass viewing windows one evening. Fed up with the prospect of returning to the drawing board, Bosell ordered a rapid series of prototyping done, each containing progressively more of his specially tailored genes. The ED series, a gene group that enhanced endurance and bodily stamina, was followed by his MT series, a set of genes that would standardize brain function among all the specimens. Beginning with the fourth prototype and continuing on, each specimen had exhibited the same sort of near-catatonia for a period of time before suddenly being overcome with an uncontrollable maniacal rage. Kerr and his team would be called in and gun the thing down in a hail of 5.56mm bullets. He had not informed them of his implementation of the ED and MT series, and the thing had caught them all by surprise when it withstood several direct hits, charging into their ranks screaming in rage, sending men flying like dried leaves. The latest prototype, the one that had nearly killed them all, had been the most successful as well as the biggest failure - twelve hits failed to stop it. Elevated hematocrit levels had clotted the quarter-sized holes in its torso
User Reviews
Submitted by BlazinBull (user info) at 2008-01-31 10:17:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Viper_04 (user info) at 2005-11-11 07:45:52 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Onward.....onward!
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2005-11-09 08:33:16 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2005-05-02 14:36:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
more people shoudl be reading this.
Submitted by Jungle_Jimanee (user info) at 2005-04-12 11:06:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Great!
Submitted by thecaes (user info) at 2005-04-12 10:18:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Awesome. Sort of cut off though...not where I expected the installment to end.
Also, I expected that Bosell's requested 'payment' would have been having Meredith killed. Wouldn't they just have provided him with all that equipment anyway?
Submitted by nrduncan (user info) at 2005-04-06 13:30:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Dannie (user info) at 2005-04-04 13:51:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by munkeypants (user info) at 2005-04-01 15:26:14 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Phinch (user info) at 2005-03-30 11:30:13 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Hey Anthony-
Can you email me? I don't care if it's a year from when I posted this rating, drop me a line. I want to talk to you about something.
phinch.at.gmail.com
Submitted by Degreeless_Capibara (user info) at 2005-03-26 00:15:21 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I don't think I've ever spend so much time reading anything in my life.
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2005-03-25 08:49:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Heh.
Research? He's an expert in the field of genetic engineering! Show him the picture of the rhinocerous with a gorilla's ass that you synthesized in your basement.
Submitted by domenad (user info) at 2005-03-24 19:53:31 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
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Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-03-24 19:45:46 (#)
Ranking: 2
Are you some brainaic with a background in this stuff... or like me, do you find that research is a bitch that eats into your writing time but pays off in the end?
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My wife is a biologist, she supplied me with most of my stuff on human cloning and gene therapy.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-03-24 19:48:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
If it's all just research paying off, then 'double-well-done.'
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-03-24 19:45:46 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Shit, man!
I have been waiting ages to read this (all day I mean) but I kept getting interrupted at work. I finally printed out this part, and read it while blasting through a smoke outside.
Good stuff here. Not sure what's going on yet, but I WILL stay tuned.
Now.
Are you some brainaic with a background in this stuff... or like me, do you find that research is a bitch that eats into your writing time but pays off in the end?
Submitted by LadyPlural (user info) at 2005-03-24 16:05:14 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Hot damn, you had better finish this.
Submitted by jumpinjellyfish (user info) at 2005-03-24 15:52:46 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Wonderful writing...keep them coming!