Because We Can (220 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 2 on 1 review (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Domochevsky (View user info) at 2005-07-19 00:21:06 EDT
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
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"This... this is Dr. Burnell. I'm a researcher in Dr. Richard Howell's lab. It's been about seven hours since the accident. I'm still not sure what happened. It seemed almost too cliched when the generator went down unexpectedly, and the lights flickered ominously. I think the lab's redundancy generator failed to activate quickly enough, resulting in a disruption to the stasis array's power that lasted long enough to activate the emergency protocols built into the hardware...
Number fourteen and twenty-two had broken out of their chambers before they could be restrained... I was in the Delta Lab when the containment alarms went off, and was able to hide in this research office. From the surveillance monitors here I can see that the others are dead. All of them. Kaminski, Rice, Cohen and the intern from Harvard... Well, Kenny was moving a little while ago, but I think he's succumbed to his injuries... He lost a lot of blood by the looks of it. I haven't seen Dr. Howell at all, he must not have been around when it happened.
I'm leaving this as my record of... No. My confession of what was going on here. What we've done. There's just no way to truly atone for it.
I met Dr. Howell at an academic conference in 1997. I was a graduate student at the time, busily piecing together my thesis on the theoretics of the stasis systems I'd designed. If they worked it would be the technology that would send men to the furthest reaches of our galaxy and beyond, without suffering from the debilitation of premature osteoporosis associated with zero-g environments.
You see, when in space the bones degenerate about 4-5% each month, and even with 6-8 hours of exercise to stimulate bone regeneration it is impossible to fully retrograde the process. This makes it implausible to send manned missions anywhere past our moon, let alone other planets and star systems.
My system was simple, really; fool the body into thinking it was in a gravitized environment by two methods. First the subject's head was placed in an electromagnetically charged helmet designed to remove the brain's sense of its own body, and secondly, to place the body in a locally-gravitized gyroscope-like device that spins around the body suspended in an electrolyte solution. With these two systems in place, it was possible to trick the body into continually renewing bone growth for an indefinite period of time. This kind of breakthrough would be essential to astronauts on long-duration missions, and held potential with other time-dependant applications.
I had been working on my stasis arrays since my undergraduate days, but had recently been offered a substantial grant by NASA to continue my research under government jurisdiction.
At the conference, Dr. Howell sought me out quickly, and immediately appealed to my austere naivete with as he extolled the virtues of his scholarly pursuit. Howell was an evolutionary biologist, and held several advanced degrees in chemistry, biology and theoretical physics. He had spent the better part of his career developing human embryonic alteration methods and researching Darwinian aspects of human evolution.
He expressed a strangely intense interest in my research, and shortly after the conference offered me both fame and a research budget rivaling my recent grant; under the condition that I work directly under him on a highly hush-hush project of his. Being young, and wishing to make my mark upon the scientific world, I accepted.
A few months into my time with Dr. Howell, I knew that the research we were conducting was far from normal. Even paranormal would have been a stretch... He was obsessed with human evolution and the fact that we as a species had no natural physical defenses. He perseverated on this "imperfection" as he would call it, often spending late nights in his office staring at his exhaustive collection of texts as if trying to divine the answers he sought from their presence.
When I first came to work at his lab, he placed me in the disease research center. My graduate work had nothing to do with this field, but could never get a straight answer from him about why he placed me there.
Over the next year and a half it became clearer as to why he needed my research on stasis. Howell sought to circumvent the slow nature of evolution by tinkering with the timeframe. He had been cross-breeding human embryos with animal DNA to produce hybridizations that should not have been viable, and without a way to force the zygotes to mature there would have been no way to further his research. That is why he needed me. By retrofitting my stasis arrays to his needs, he had found a way to stimulate faster than normal growth of the zygotes, and force the maturation of otherwise unviable test-subjects.
In retrospect, he was most likely insane.
He did not mention to any of the research staff what he was doing. The rest of us were all working on the projects Howell was using to cover for his other research. We all had our inklings as to what Howell was up to, but not until he showed me the fruits of his-no, 'our'-accomplishment; the adult specimens.
They were by every definition monsters, monsters with human intelligence but animal ferocity. Their eyes shone with the spark on sentient life. They seemed to understand Howell when he spoke, or at least responded as if they did. Most could not speak, because the hybridization process left them without functional voice boxes. There were a couple, however, that managed to choke out a word here and there. Number seventeen, which had been a male zygote crossed with what appeared to be a wolf or some large dog, would moan in a horrendous cacophony. Seventeen knew only two words; 'food' and 'kill'. He snapped his grotesque visage at me when Howell 'introduced' us, and in a voice that would turn cold the blood in any living being snarled 'kill'. To look into his eyes was to glimpse the depths of hatred and contempt.
Howell claimed that the experiments, all thirty-six he carried out so far, were as mentally proficient as any human being, and could be taught like any normal person. I never saw any indication of it, but many of the specimens would express themselves as artistically as their bodies allowed when they were presented with the means to do so. Seventeen would draw when given a pad and pen. As best as I could tell, he only drew himself gorging upon the carcasses of animals... or people. He would press the drawing pad against his small Plexiglas enclosure and moan 'food'.
Howell claimed that the first run was a success, albeit not perfectly transmuted from their original components. He sought to create a more perfect union between the natural abilities of the animal and the intelligence of the human.
The day before he terminated the first thirty-six subjects, I was about to leave when I heard a commotion from the holding room. I went in to make sure everything was all right, and found seventeen in a highly agitated state. He was pounding the walls of his enclosure and growling. When he saw me enter, he grabbed off of the floor a scrap of paper with some of his 'art' on it. It was another of his self-portraits in which he was eating someone or something. He pressed it against the glass as I approached, and looking directly at me snarled 'you'.
I dropped my papers and quickly left the room.
The next day, after the specimens had been put down, I told Howell about what had happened.
'Next time they will be better.' He consoled me.
A month later, he removed me from disease research, and reassigned me to his new pet project. He needed my help to fine-tune the stasis systems to support his second series of experiments. It took months of work to properly calibrate them, and in the meantime Howell... no, both of us... worked to perfect the hybridization process. I had my reservations, but chose to bite my tongue and wait for the results. Howell had convinced me that there was hugely beneficial potential in his work.
The adjustments to the experiment meant a lengthening of the incubation process. The previous set had taken six months, but these would take at least two years in stasis to mature.
So we waited. Howell grew in obsession and I in uneasiness about his work. As his creations matured from the zygotic stage at which he hybridized them, it was clear that these were vastly superior to the first series. They looked like almost completely normal humans, save for the occasional claw or overdeveloped musculature. They reached adult size about two weeks ago... Howell chose to trust our calculations and not wake them before the 747th day of incubation. That would have been tomorrow.
Howell was so proud of himself; he had finally succeeded in creating a completely viable hybrid between human and animal.
Eighteen months into the second series, I had finally completed my doctoral work and received my degree. I went to find Howell, to tell him that at the conclusion of this project I would be leaving. I ran across him in the lab, staring blankly into fourteen's capsule. The room was dark besides the glow of computer terminals and the orange hue from the stasis chamber. Number fourteen was a female fused with some exotic breed of snake. Her lean muscle mass was forty percent above normal, giving her body a hard, angular look. The feminine curves of her hips and breasts were understated, perhaps by the accelerated development. The only thing that wasn't quickened by the stasis array was hair growth, so her red hair barely brushed her cheeks. This gave her a fairly masculine appearance, but still, fourteen was a beautiful adolescent.
Howell pressed his hand into the glass and sighed heavily. 'She's quite attractive, don't you think?' he muttered.
I felt a tinge of sadness then, for both number fourteen and Howell. I asked him then, 'Why did we do this?' I had meant it rhetorically.
He did not turn towards me.
'Because we can.' He said.
I had never stopped to think if we should...
I know it is only a matter of time before they find me here. I've seen them on the monitors, pacing the halls. I am going to die. There is a serene peace obtained when you give up your last shred of hope. It is actually sort of... pleasant. I suppose I could try sneaking into the lab next-door and scrounging up a syringe and enough epinephrine to kill myself with, but it almost seems more fitting to die at their hands. Poetic, almost. I'm sorry for having had a hand in this, but they are the shape my sins have taken, and I can't run from that... It's what I deserve, I thi-
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I can hear them in the next room now. It won't be much longer.
I'm going to sign off now. I don't think there's any more to say.
I wonder... if anyone will ever see this...
This is Dr. Simon Francis Burnell...
...Goodbye."
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