The van rumbled down the dirt road, kicking up dust that rose high above the towering pines and into the clear late-summer sky. Inside the van were two government men. One spoke to the other in clipped syllables at regular intervals, and the other, the driver, stayed silent, making noncommittal noises in response to his companion’s terse jargon.
Eventually, after a few more dull country minutes, the road gave way to a clearing, and the clearing gave way to a house. It was really more of a shack, the kind that clutters cramped trailer parks and deep hollers in this mountainous part of the country. The air smelled of decaying pine, and there was a fence in the back, standing through sheer willpower alone. In all other universes, this house would hold nothing of importance.
The two men exited the car. They moved to the door, steadily homing in on their target, and knocked three times, each louder than the last.
A girl opened the door and looked them over, her expression turning to blank, stark-white fear once they flashed their badges. She was confused, but in the dim corners of her mind, she knew why they were here.
Her brother. Her younger brother, that thing which crawled from her mother’s womb one awful September night, as the wind howled through the pines and oaks outside. Formless thing, nothing but a mouth, what might be called limbs flailing against its crib in what might be called anger if it were like any other child.
And she was right. That was exactly what they were here for.
One of the men, the driver, looked past her, towards a door at the end of the hallway. There was a noise like crying coming from behind it. Turning to the girl, he spoke.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Down the hall. Straight down.” Her eyes sank sharply to the floor, focused on an ant crawling up one of the men’s shoes, trying to distract herself. It wasn’t working.
Both men nodded tersely, then prowled down the hall. Their footsteps were somehow silent on the normally creaky floorboards, and the girl sank into a couch across the room, trying to pretend they weren’t there at all. It still wasn’t working.
The room at the end of the hall was sparse, simple, and utilitarian. It laid in contrast to the rest of the house, which was cluttered beyond belief. The girl’s mother was sitting on a bed in the corner, eyes downcast and makeup running.
No words were exchanged. The other agent, the passenger, silently handed the mother, face far too old for her body, over a folder. The letters inside, edged in black, would sign her son’s life away. Her sweet, bubbling, malformed mess of a son.
She couldn’t say no. The compensation offered to her and her family would be enough to lift them from the dark holler they had made their home and into something a little more comfortable. When she had her son, it was like he exuded an invisible miasma over their little household. Her husband had left, and she was angry at first, but now she realized he had the good sense to go sooner. Signing the letters was really the only course of action she should take.
So, in exchange for the promise of a life far from the wretched hills she and her daughter called home, she handed her bulbous, pulsing offspring over, and the two men took their leave, disappearing in a cloud of dust, exhaust, and unanswered questions.
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In some bizarre, backhanded way, the child’s existence made sense.
It made sense that the technicians and nurses couldn’t figure out what to do. It made sense that they had no way to respond to the contradiction the poor, misshapen thing represented.
It was an anomaly as much statistically as it was physically. Initial scans and tests presented the assembled doctors with a list of defects so long that they feared they would kill the babe by looking at it wrong.
The heart and lungs functioned as normal; everything else went violently sideways. Stomach and bowels joined into one short, malformed branching organ that fed into a fused bladder and testicle, which excreted a foul slurry out of what passed for a urinary system.
Any limbs were a mere suggestion. They were pseudopod-like things, flailing about seemingly uncontrollably at any stimuli, somehow able to move although they completely lacked any bone structure. In fact, the only skeletal structures present were the skull, ribcage, spine, and a half-formed hint of a pelvis. It was hairless, hermaphroditic. It had no nose, one eye and what might pass for a mouth on some lesser lifeform. Head and neck were as one, fusing into the torso into a bulbous sac with no clear beginning and end.
Stupid, impossible fragmentary thing. Shored up on the examination table as its genome was sequenced, human and alive in spite of itself, looking straight out of some primordial ooze.
In some impossible way, that thing was their ticket.
Agents S and J watched over the scene in the examination room from behind a one-way window. They had brought it here, drove to a nameless backwater and dredged it up. If all went well with the child, they would be promoted, given higher field assignments that didn’t necessarily involve plundering down a dark hollow in search of monsters.
J breathed deeply, then turned away from the glass, an unreadable look on his curious boyish face. He turned to S. “Do you think this will work? This plan seems rather… convoluted.”
S grinned. “We have to trust Command. I have my doubts too, for the record. But you and I must keep the faith.”
“Doesn’t mean I like it. You see what the lab boys did to the mice?”
“I did,” S sighed, “and I didn’t much like it either. It’s all for the greater good.”
“It’ll be like gas, right? And it’ll be quick?”
“Don’t know.” He was lying through his teeth. Agent S had higher security clearance than J regarding this matter. What few benefits seniority provided were cashing their checks.
The story he told Agent J was a sanitized version of the truth. Command had been developing a nanoswarm gas that could be applied in any number of situations, including to overwrite genetic information in human and animal subjects. The nanites that composed the gas could be programmed with any valid DNA sequence, provided it was wholly intact. In this particular case, the gas overwrote DNA with that of the malformed infant’s. And that was the kicker.
S told J that due to the stress on the body, the effects of the gas killed anybody that inhaled it. That was only a half-truth.
If the species of each source of genes was the same, the subject remained alive. By all accounts, this should have been impossible accounting for recessive genes, but in all cases the DNA in the gas completely replaced the target genome sections. Worse, it could be dialed to varying effect to only target certain genomes.
And, of course, any changes were painful, and not instantaneous. The most severe phenotypic shifts were found to take close to two weeks to fully present themselves.
So that was what Command had done. What they had sent J and S deep into the bowels of the dark, cold hills to find. Lord knows how they’ll use it, S thought to himself. Despite his higher clearance, and thus his greater knowledge of the situation, the implications still left him perturbed. J must’ve noticed the look on his pockmarked, wrinkled face, because he turned and asked if he was alright.
“Fine. I’m fine. Just a bit queasy. Can’t help it.”
J nervously laughed and rubbed the back of his neck at that. “Can’t blame you, honestly. God, I was white-knuckling the whole way back here. Had no idea what to do if anything went wrong. I’m glad you were there.”
S’s expression loosened up a bit and he muttered a noncommittal noise in response. Good kid, he thought. Got a nice head on his shoulders.
Then, as if to dispel that notion, S caught J taking a furtive glance over his shoulder in his peripheral vision, then leaning over with a conspiratorial look in his eyes.
“Listen, I know I don’t have the clearance, but do you think you could sneak me in to see some of the… y’know?”
“The answer is no,” S responded, “and as much as I trust you as a partner, I can’t let you in. It’d breach protocol. Besides, I pretty much already told you what happens.”
“I know what you told me,” J mumbled, casting his eyes downward and staring a hole in the linoleum flooring. He took a breath and looked back up, with an air of wavering confidence in his voice. “See, I did some looking on the database and the animal tests are declassified, at least at my level. The DNA replacement worked between the same species of mice, so why wouldn’t it work for humans?”
“Once again, agent, that’s classified.” S muttered darkly. He hadn’t meant to put any kind of bite in his tone, but hoped the message came across to J. Making it seem as though the younger man had ruffled his feathers a bit, he turned away, maintaining the same perturbed look he’d given him earlier.
J opened his mouth as if to protest, then closed it again. He turned away for a moment, expression unreadable but curiosity evident in the tenseness of his posture. S prayed, for both of their sakes, he wouldn’t investigate further.
The consequences would be dire if he did.
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Agent J sat in bed, staring at the ceiling of his small studio apartment. Over and over, his mind circled back to the bed. Little monster child, laid there like a beached whale on the cold metal table. Sterile examination room, men and women in coats poking, prodding, watching as the malformed babe gushed its life forth. Him and S, silently observing through the one-way window, unwilling voyeurs. He rotated the whole scene in his head, felt his memory of the events of the day contort and twist as he began to fall asleep.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
As the ghost of the memory sank into the agent’s rapidly fading consciousness, one of its tendrils hooked onto one of the folds of his brain and refused to let go. He was dragged into wakefulness again at the feeling of it hanging on.
Ah, right. The animal testing data in Command’s database he dug up. S seemed a bit perturbed that he’d found that info, despite it being public, when he brought it up in the observation room. J thought for a minute; he could be misreading the older man, but he didn’t often see S visibly uneasy like he was earlier.
That had to mean something. He wouldn’t have reacted like that if it didn’t mean something.
He knew S had higher clearance. He also knew that S didn’t often take advantage of said higher clearance often.
Gradually, J was pulled back to wakefulness as his mind ran circles around the problem. S had sworn to him multiple times that the human tests all resulted in fatalities. Hell, he’d been in the room for most of them. Yet, whenever J tried to press the issue, tried to find out where they’d found volunteers or what kind of DNA they were even testing with, he’d always been met with a stern “Classified” from S. Even so, he never seemed perturbed like he did in the observation room.
Inwardly nodding to himself, his mind’s eye at last refocused, he got up, put his uniform back on, headed silently to his car and began the short drive to Command’s central HQ fifteen minutes away.
He had something he needed to look into.
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It was near midnight, but a fair amount of people worked that late at Command, especially in the hospital wing, where J surmised the tests were taking place. He badged into the main area no problem, under the guise of a surprise late shift courtesy of S.
Now he needed to find out where the hell S was.
The hospital wing was a massive, cavernous building. It was used as a standard hospital, yes, but it was also used for medical research and experimentation. A few outside companies linked closely to command, mainly defense contractors, had their own separate wings, but the building was mostly dominated by Command. It was three floors of a few big hallways and rooms with smaller, labyrinthine networks of hallways and tunnels connecting a few. One of the secretaries pulled a prank on J about a week after he got out of the Academy that involved going to a room in one of these snaking, narrow hallways that didn’t exist. He still got ribbed about it.
Agent J wasn’t stupid. He had a hunch they’d conducted human tests using the child’s DNA at some point. At the end of the day, Command was a military organization, and as such any and all technology developed was weaponized or connected to weapons technology to some degree. And he had a strong suspicion, almost a certainty, that S was involved.
He continued down the wider hallways, skirting past night nurses and frazzled looking medical technicians clearly a coffee or two short. No one seemed to pay him any mind as he ambled past. He was moving at a brisk pace, keeping in time with the orderlies, and he was in his uniform. J fit in perfectly.
As he made his way towards the end of one of the massive hallways, he spotted a nurse he remembered from a brief stay in the hospital following being wounded on one of his first missions. The nurse, a thirty-something man with a short beard, noticed him too, and gave him a strange look as he noticed J walking up to him.
As J made his way to the nurse, he decided he’d keep it brief. They both stopped in a corner of the hall so they didn’t get in the way of the rest of the hospital traffic, and J leaned into the nurse with an eager glint in his eyes before the other man could get a word out.
“Friend to friend, have you seen Agent S here at all?” J leaned back and watched for his reaction.
More of that strange look. He paused, rubbed his deepening eyebags and mumbled “When I was over in Wing F, yeah. Saw him duck down one of the halls on the right of the main one, just past the reception desk. Couldn’t tell it was him at first. He was moving fast.”
J grinned, pleased he had struck gold so soon. He flashed the nurse a brief thumbs up and left before he could ask any questions.
The short walk to Wing F was rather uneventful. A few cramped minutes in one of the smaller hallways dodging orderlies and one particularly frazzled looking doctor later, he burst through a set of wide hospital doors into the wing’s main hallway.
Wing F was cold and dead. All the lights were off, save for one over the empty reception desk in the center of a large lobby. Right away J knew something wasn’t right, that there should be people here, but he moved forward anyway. As he tried to make sense of the emptiness of the place, he placated his rising unease with the thought that maybe everyone in this wing didn’t work past midnight.
The moon shone through a large circular skylight. Wing F was on the top floor of the building, and the moon illuminated the deserted hallway like a celestial floodlight. J put his hand on his holster, not sure what else to do. It shouldn’t be this empty, right?
A light turned on down one of the hallways, and none other than Agent S stepped out into the yawning maw of the main hallway, standing opposite Agent J on the other side of the reception desk.
He turned to face J. His face was blank, unreadable. J grinned, took his hand off his holster and approached the older man, suspicion giving way to blind trust.
Before he could get a word out, S raised his gun, pointing it directly at the younger agent’s chest. J stopped dead in his tracks, breath hitching, standing still in the middle of the moonlit atrium.
Outside, the night was clear, the moon was a pale, sickly yellow, and the early autumn leaves came tumbling down from a large oak in the hospital courtyard. For a moment, the ebb and flow of time seemed to halt, as both men attempted to take stock of the situation.
After a few seconds that seemed to stretch into eternity, the older man spoke, his voice bouncing through the empty hallways like a gong.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” His tone was calm, suffused with practiced evenness specifically for situations such as this.
Agent J had no response. As he faced Agent S, his superior, a man he trusted more than his own parents, his suspicions, previously formless and untethered, sharply clicked into place. Like the Byzantine corridors of the hospital, implications turned into sinister, winding truths, coagulating and bending in his mind as he stared down the barrel of S’s service pistol.
J inhaled. Looked to the side, then up. Made his peace with what was about to happen.
Then he moved, unholstered his gun and ducked behind a chair. A lone shot rang forth. Missed, hitting the wall. Scrabbling, frantic movement. Two more shots from both guns, overlapping each other.
J kept moving, keeping as silent as possible despite how hard his heart was hammering. He had questions, but those could wait until he got out of here alive.
S kept to his feet, closing the gap between him and the younger agent swiftly. Apart from the chairs and the desk, there wasn’t much cover in the atrium, and almost none in the hallway. He just had to wait for the younger man to get cocky.
Three more shots rang out as the agents exchanged fire. S knew he had to finish this quickly.
His time came soon enough.
A gap in the chairs revealed one of J’s pant legs, and he took the shot. Hit him square in the knee. The younger man fell, incapacitated. He faltered with his gun, jamming it in the process, and looked up wildly at the older man approaching.
S squatted down, met the younger man’s terrified gaze head-on. He was shaking. There was fear in his eyes cut through with a look of utter betrayal. S knew the young man’s world was crumbling before his eyes and sympathized. Better to get him under quickly.
J, for his part, could hardly get a word out. As they looked at each other, J felt something deep in his brain crack as he fully registered the look in the older man’s eyes.
Finally, he replied. “Why? Was I right?”
S nodded. “Yes. How unfortunate.”
J uttered a confused noise halfway between a question and an accusation as S sunk the sedative into his arm, plunging through suit, skin, and meeting the appropriate vein head-on.
The young man soon went unconscious, and S fastened a tourniquet out of his sleeve, picked him up in a fireman’s carry, and hauled him down the narrow hallway he had come from.
A door slammed. Then silence.
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Intelligence Command Bureau Of The United American Nations
Martin Elrose Center for Biological Research
Live Experimentation and Testing Form #901615
CLASSIFIED - For internal use only
Summary Of Experiment: Live animal and human testing of DNA overwrite function of nanoswarm gas MEC-[OMITTED] with outside genome.
Independent Variable(s): MEC-[OMITTED] multi-purpose nanoswarm gas.
Dependent Variable(s): Fourteen animals representing two examples of each class of the subphylum Vertebrata, two three human volunteers.
Control: Complete genome sequence of [OMITTED], a two year old [OMITTED] exhibiting unique and debilitating birth defects, many of which have never been documented in live births.
Selected Results:
Note: Ten out of the fourteen animals and both of the two out of the three human subjects demonstrated immediately fatal results. This is a list of subjects that survived past initial exposure.
* One-year old male calf (Bos taurus): Exhibited severe femoral, fibular/tibular and tarsal deformations and artificial doubling of left ventricle of heart. Upon closer examination the bones in the legs of the calf had been replaced with a cartilaginous substitute similar to that of a cephalopod. Terminated and disposed of upon conclusion of experiments.
* Three-year old female American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos): Exhibited profound swelling and skeletal deformation of cranial areas, as well as overall increased bone density. Intelligence tests showed markedly increased aptitude in all areas, most notably [OMITTED], and brain scans confirmed the amount of neurons in the crow’s brain has effectively doubled. Increased bone density renders flight impossible. Transferred to [OMITTED] in Wing D.
* Four year old female Asian water monitor (Varanus salvator): Exhibited shortening of tail and hind legs, both of which fully assimilated into the body mass of the [OMITTED]. Following this, degradation and eventual disappearance of the [OMITTED] was noted. Scales transmuted into thick, restrictive scutes, heavily hindering the subject's movement capabilities. Terminated and disposed of upon conclusion of experiments.
* Two year old male chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes): Exhibited complete loss of body hair and closure/assimilation of nasal passageways. Bone structure in upper limbs markedly deteriorated, large, beak-like keratinous growths observed on the [OMITTED] and [OMITTED]. Growths fully function as additional [OMITTED] and have a direct link to the [OMITTED]. Terminated and disposed of upon conclusion of experiments.
* Twenty-seven year old human male volunteer (Homo sapiens): Was formerly employed in an official investigative capacity at the Intelligence Command Bureau. Volunteer was selected from a larger control group based on persistent and immediate life-threatening medical complications. Subject experienced rapid tissue growth and development of gill-like structures along the [OMITTED], followed by formation of keratinous structures on the outside of the [OMITTED] and the [OMITTED]. MRI scans show keratinous structures effectively replace function of the skeletal system. Transferred to [OMITTED] in [OMITTED] Division.