She carded through the door of her lab, and the lights kicked on automatically. Butterflies wrestled in her stomach. She made the call. The minutes dragged on as she waited. Time enough for her to wonder at the strange twists of fate that had led her to this place. Time enough to begin to wonder if her mother’s God would approve.
Big men in white suits arrived with the young gladiator strapped to a gurney. Silas and Benjamin stepped in behind them. As per her orders, the specimen was sedated but not fully anesthetized. It could make the difference on her tests.
The men lifted the creature from the gurney and strapped it onto the silver specimen table in the center of the room. It writhed sluggishly for
a moment before slumping into catatonia. Vidonia took her recorder from the front pocket of her lab coat and placed it on the table.
She hit the record button and began. “October twenty-second, initial evaluation of Helix project specimen at”—she paused, flipping through the pages Silas had provided her with—“age one hundred ninety-three days. And three hundred fifteen days since surrogate implantation by blastocyst F.”
She paused, looking at Silas and Ben. Then she turned back to the table and let her eyes play over the entire length of the organism.
“Specimen appears healthy. No signs of illness or injury. It has an approximate dorsoventral length of one hundred forty centimeters.” She looked at the digital readout on the table. “A weight of twenty-four kilograms. Skin is highly unusual in its reflective qualities and shows marked hyperpigmentation. No evidence of hair or dermal papillae.” She bent close, running a latexed finger across the abdomen. “Dermis appears smooth and absent of coetaneous structures of any kind. Specimen is hexapoidal, with three sets of differentiated symmetrical limbs. Upper posterior limbs appear modified for flight. Upper anterior limbs terminate in four digits”—she flexed the organism’s hand—“and an opposable thumb. Each digit terminates in a nail or claw, subdermal status of which is unknown at this time.”
“Be careful,” Silas said. He held up his hand.
She took a long breath. It wasn’t fear she felt but excitement. A slight tremor thrummed in her left leg, so she stepped back from the table and poured herself a glass of water from the sink against the wall. She felt the coolness slide down her throat and settle in her stomach. Ben and Silas remained silhouettes beyond the bright ring of light, and she was thankful of that. She stepped back to the table.
“The cranium is large, oblong in general shape, tapering to a point in the back. The eyes are large and forward-facing, light gray in color, with vertical pupils. Approximate field of binocular vision is”—here she stopped, her face tensed in thought—“one hundred sixty degrees.” Behind her, Silas made a sound. She went on.
“Immature or flaccid cartilaginous ears sit high atop the head. The
cartilage is thick at the base, thinning near the tip. The face is large, prognothic, and hyper-robust in bone structure. The mouth is broad and forward-projecting.”
She used a wooden tongue depressor to open the creature’s jaw, looked in. “Dental pattern is complex and differentiated, atypical mammalian pattern. Omnivore, probably.”
“Omnivore?” Silas spoke from the shadows.
“It’s hard to tell for sure. The large canines provide a tearing apparatus in the front, but the molars are five-cusped—good for grinding up tough grains or vegetable matter. I’m not sure what to make of this second row of teeth. The pattern is unique, to my knowledge—looks like they could be used for shearing of some kind, almost like a row of wire cutters. I can’t imagine what foods they could be used for.”
“Bone shearing,” Silas said. His hand flexed.
“Yeah, maybe that.”
She turned the recorder off and began the next phase of the evaluation.
It started with the drawing of blood. The shiny black organism shivered oddly as she took twenty-five ccs from its right forelimb. She then took twenty-five ccs from its left hind limb. She placed the blood samples into the refrigeration unit beneath the counter and wheeled the specimen to the X-ray machine. She motioned for Silas and Ben to get behind the leaded glass and made final adjustments to the orientation of the machine. She joined the men and hit the button.
They let her work without commenting, and she was silently pleased at their deference for her expertise. She activated the fluoroscope again and watched the image assemble on the computer screen. When the read was complete, she stepped around and rotated the position of the specimen for a final shot. She didn’t bother to print out the sheets—time enough for that later. She wanted the specimen in an altered state for as short a span of time as possible. The effect that drugs might have on the organism was difficult to calculate.
Using a scalpel, she shaved off bits of skin from the lower back of the organism. “Typically the least sensitive part of the dermis,” she
said, as she put the sample into a plastic cup, which was then placed alongside the blood samples in the refrigeration unit.
Nuclear resonance was last, and would be most telling. Her students had called it the magic camera, and the magic camera could see all. The creature barely stirred as the big men in white maneuvered its slumped form into the cylinder. Across the room from the scanner, Silas and Ben stood, looking over her shoulder at the computer screen. The image told a strange story as it rotated.
She tried to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. Instead, she tried to appear calm, and this she had some success with. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was seeing. Certain organs she recognized; others were strange to her. “There’s the liver,” she said, pointing to the conspicuously placed organ. It was a start, a point of reference. She found the heart next, narrowing the focus of the machine until she could watch the blood coursing through the arteries and veins. She blinked her eyes, squinted, but the heart still had six chambers.
“Oh, shit,” Silas said. He’d counted, too.
“What the hell do we have here?” Ben asked.
“I’m going to need some time … to analyze this,” she said.
“How long?” Silas asked.
“A whole career.”
“You don’t have a career.”
“I do now. This is going to take a while.”
CHAPTER NINE
S
ilas concentrated on his footfalls. The morning was cool and dry—perfect running weather—but the last quarter of a mile was always the most difficult. There were several regular morning runners at Helix, and he’d gotten offers to partner up, but he preferred to face it alone. He lengthened his stride, determined to eat the remaining distance as quickly as he could. There had been a time when running relaxed him, but those years were behind him now. At forty-three, running still relieved tension, but it left him more exhausted than tranquil. He wasn’t able to stop thinking about the project, but after five miles, he didn’t have the energy to care, so running still served its purpose.
He rounded the last bend in the path and began the final stretch to the compound general. In the distance, in front of the lab, he could see the flag waving colorfully at the top of its pole. He could see the five interlocked rings. It was silly, he knew, but his eyesight was something he was proud of. He’d noticed, over the years, that most of his colleagues had developed the need for reading glasses or surgery to correct weakening visual acuity, but his own vision had remained strong. He’d read once that myopia was a disease of modern living and could be traced, in many cases, to a childhood spent too much indoors, where the eye focuses almost exclusively within a distance of ten or twenty feet. Silas had spent much of his own youth outside. Eyes ever on the horizon. A portent, perhaps, of the man he would become.
He sprinted the last hundred yards and did his cool-down walk to the elevator. Back at his office, he took a long, hot shower, being careful not to get water in his bad ear, and did a quick shave in the sudsy steam. Then he toweled himself dry and put on fresh lab whites. After a quick stubble check in the mirror, he looked at his watch. It was time for Vidonia’s report. V-day.
He stepped into Vidonia’s lab, knocking twice on the open door. She turned, and her face was unreadable. She motioned him in and continued spreading the sheets out on the table. He’d made a point to stay out of her way for the last two and a half weeks. She’d been pulling all-nighters, so he knew she wasn’t in need of any motivational speeches on his part. He only needed to stay out of her way. She wanted to understand this thing as badly as he did, if perhaps for different reasons.
He waited for her to speak.
“I’ve done a complete workup on the specimen—well, as complete as I could in the amount of time I’ve had. I’m just going to shoot straight with you on this; there’s still a lot I don’t understand.”
“That’s fine. What
do
you have for me?”
She turned on the underlighting and touched the first plasticine page lying on the glass. “Enough to keep me awake at night.”
He looked down, and the image on the dark sheet was nonsense to him.
“As far as I can discern,” she said, her fingers wandering across the image, “these are the primary digestive organs: the pancreas, gallbladder, and liver. The stomach, here”—she pointed—“is multicompartmental. I think this specimen will be able to digest some pretty tough foodstuffs if the need arises. The intestine is medium-length—typical omnivore. The lung capacity of the organism is enormous. As is the blood volume pumped out by the heart. You’re going to have quite an athlete on your hands.”
“I’ve been thinking about that heart,” Silas said. “The specimen, as you like to call it, isn’t built along avian lines. Too big, too heavy. But if something like this were to actually take flight, it would probably need some outsized cardiovascular equipment to fuel the wing muscles.”
“It certainly would.”
“The six chambers?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, Silas. It could be a flight adaptation. It could be a practical joke that worked out well. All I can tell you is that the heart is strong, and the pectoral muscles have an unusual striation pattern I’ve never seen before.”
Silas rubbed his eyes, then looked down at the transparency again. “So do you think it will fly?”
“I doubt it. But there are some interesting modifications here. Anything is possible.”
She took a step farther down the table, pointing to a different sheet. “And the sharps at the end of the digits are anchored to the bone—they’re true talons, not just heavy-duty fingernails.”
She picked up another sheet. “The sense organs were the most difficult to evaluate, because there is no way of knowing how the organism experiences the world around it. But certain inferences can be made, and I’ve gone to exhaustive measures to see to it that my evaluations are accurate. If I have erred, it is on the side of caution. With that said, I have to admit that the eyes gave me pause. There is a distinct tapetum lucidium across the retina, and the cone configuration confirms that the specimen has nocturnally adapted vision.”
Silas couldn’t think of a response. It was getting crazier and crazier.
“The visual resolution is better than my ability to test. The hearing, too, is off the scale, but I noticed several peaks in acuity.” She handed him a sheet. “The largest was at three thousand hertz, well out of the human range of hearing. The second-largest peak was at one hundred twenty hertz, the average frequency of human speech.”
“So it’s a good listener.”
“It does more than listen.”
“You ran an oscillogram?”
“I had a hunch, so I went with it. I figured it had that bipolar auditory acuity for a reason, and when I tested its vocalizations, I found I was right. Half the waveform was above three thousand five hundred hertz.” She slid another transparency under the light. “As you can see
from the waterfall spectrogram, there is a clear distinction here”—she pointed to a flat spot within the three-dimensional range of peaks and valleys. “Everything on this side we can hear; everything on the other side, we can’t.”
“So this means what?”
“It hears us fine, but we can only pick up about half of its vocalizations.”
Silas nodded and picked up the fifth sheet, holding it up to the light. A dark oblong shape in a case of bone. He didn’t have to ask her what it showed. “How large?”
“Cranial capacity is probably nineteen hundred ccs.”
Silas whistled softly. “That’s a lot of gray matter.”
“Larger than an average human brain.”
“This thing isn’t full-grown yet,” he said. “What kind of brain-to-body mass index are we talking about?”
“Top-heavy,” she said. “The numbers aren’t as meaningful at this stage of development, but the specimen certainly seems likely to surpass our index. The study of the heart could take one career; the study of the brain could take another.” She pointed at the dark image captured in the plasticine. “The cerebral cortex is highly folded and highly specialized. Both the telencephalon and corpus callosum—if those terms even apply, which they may not—are unusual in their association to the other parts of the brain.”
“I’m not an anatomist, doctor.”
“The brain is huge, and I don’t understand the way it’s organized. About all I can say is that the structures responsible for the higher functions appear to represent a large percentage of the overall mass. I’m shooting in the dark here, but I think this specimen has the potential to be very, very intelligent.”
She put the last sheet of plasticine down on the table. “What the hell
is
this thing?” she asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“No.” She touched his arm. “What
is
it? I can’t do my job effectively if I’m working in a vacuum. This doesn’t make sense. The night
vision, the hearing, the wings. None of these things could help a gladiator in the arena. You need to level with me. Where did this thing come from?”
Silas sighed. She was right. He pulled out a stool and sat. “How much do you know about computer theory?”
“Theory? Not much. The basics, I guess.”
“Ever hear of the Brannin computer?”