Rise of the Transgenics (3 page)

Still, hope abounded, and his hope sat safely
ensconced in the hard drive of his prize, the desktop computer that
nestled on a large metal stand in the center of the room. Outside
of the cot and the cabinets, the stand was the only piece of
regular furniture around, that and the laptop on it.

What was unusual was the chamber in the far
right corner. It stood out, and rightly so, for it was, Harry felt,
the key to solving the riddle of the bridge between human and
animal. The engineers had nicknamed it the Genesis Chamber for its
supposed ability to filter out and subsequently transform an animal
into something more human. In Anastasia’s case, it was designed to
turn her completely human again.

Anastasia was his girlfriend. She’d been a
young Russian woman roughly his age—late teens—but her genes had
been infused with those of a cat, an Ussuri cat, to be precise. The
Ussuri was a rather rare Russian breed, and she’d been made
something less human—and something more.

Unfortunately, the process was incomplete,
and she’d devolved. Her animal genes had overpowered the human
ones, forcing them to lie dormant, and turned her into a common
house cat. He knew, though, that she was anything but common.

Observing the machine with a critical eye,
Harry made a few adjustments to the mini-computer on top of it that
would receive the data from the main computer. He stood back to
ponder the possibilities. Seven feet long, three feet in
circumference, it was a cigar tube of life—and possibly death. He’d
never tested it, because he wanted to make sure—
had
to make
sure—that his calculations were correct. One slip and Anastasia
wouldn’t make it.

She lay curled up next to the chamber, her
black spots providing a nice picture on her gray fur. Harry, much
as he cared for her, knew very little about her background. He knew
that she was of Russian descent, but she’d appeared in New York six
months earlier, an amnesiac, unable to remember who she was and how
she got there. The only thing he knew at first was her
name—Anastasia.

“We found out, didn’t we?” he said softly,
still staring at her.

He’d not only found out about her, he’d also
discovered something more. He’d found love for the first time in
his young life. The son of a transgenics researcher, Harry was a
walking example of the classic social nerd, a shy young man with no
sense of how to talk to the opposite sex without sweating heavily.
Everyone out there, he assumed, had someone. In a fit of youthful
angst, he had wondered if he was destined to be one of the
permanently single people populating the planet.

Upon meeting Anastasia, though, he’d entered
a world where nothing was what it seemed. Prior to his fateful
meeting with destiny, he’d been sent to jail for illegal transgenic
research. He’d only done computer simulations, but the FBI hadn’t
taken kindly to it, and the same government group had him taken out
of prison to work under their aegis.

He’d first met Anastasia here in this same
lab, she as a prisoner and he as a semi-prisoner. She was roughly
five-six, slender, and with a decidedly feminine appearance in
spite of the fur. They’d gotten to know each other under a bizarre
set of circumstances. Along the way, they’d grown to care for each
other. The thought of someone actually creating a transgenic was
bizarre in and of itself to him. Nature, perverse as it might have
seemed, had interfered, turning her into a cat, and now he was hard
at work, attempting to bring her back...

A meow broke his train of thought down
flashback lane. Anastasia had woken up and was in the process of
stretching out, arching her back. With slow and measured movements
of her head, she started grooming her body with a delicate pink
tongue. Cleanup job finished, she wandered over to his position,
jumped up on his lap, and nuzzled his face. “Are you ready?” she
asked.

For anyone else, it would have been crazy to
think that a cat could talk. He’d thought so himself, but the
certain Russian scientist named Nurmelev—now dead—who’d created
Anastasia had assured him that she could talk—and she did. Her jaw
worked in such a manner to fashion words, and her mind, adult and
active, was able to process thought on a human level.

“Almost ready,” he answered, giving her back
a few strokes and fondling her ears.

She replied by purring loudly and rubbing her
body against his. Had she been human, a person might have thought
that the rubbing was of a very personal nature. Now, though, Harry
had done it out of simple affection. If he managed to bring her
back, though, then that was a different matter. “It might hurt a
lot,” he cautioned. It also might kill her, but if she was willing
to risk it...

“Then I guess I’ll have to wait a little
longer,” she said. With a sudden spring, she jumped down to the
ground in a graceful motion, padded her way over to the chamber,
and sat on her haunches, looking at it with longing. “I don’t mind
the pain,” she said. “I just want to be human again, or as close to
it as possible.”

Harry got up and went over to the chamber.
The FBI’s research division had prepared everything. All it needed
was a subject. “I told you before that I might not be able to
filter out the animal DNA,” he said, touching the chamber again
while checking out a few switches. “If it works, you might be like
you once were. I’ve solved the devolving problem on paper and in
computer simulations. I’m not sure it’ll work in real life.”

Anastasia’s first transformation had taken
place over the course of months, according to the late Doctor
Nurmelev. He’d used a number of drugs along with genetic
manipulation, and the results had been nothing short of incredible.
The Genesis Chamber—theoretically—could do the same thing in a few
minutes. If it worked, if it didn’t mutate a person further,
if...if...if...

The sound of a throaty rumble made him look
at Anastasia. Her yellow eyes, bright and beautiful, had question
marks dancing in them along with worry and perhaps a bit of fear,
but he also saw love. Yes, there was love. They’d been together
only once, right before she devolved, but he knew in his heart that
he’d do anything to bring her back. It was only right that she be
given the chance. And as dangerous as this was, he had the feeling
that it would work.

“That’s a lot of ifs,” she said, but an
all-too-human note of longing broke through when she said, “I’m
willing to risk it,” and her feeling sent a rush of emotion
cascading through him.

“Let’s hope that it does,” a voice said from
behind them.

Harry didn’t have to turn around. He knew the
voice belonged to Miles Farrell, the agent who was his handler. A
tall, lean man in his fifties with a tough-looking hatchet face and
a no-BS attitude, Farrell had acted as his go-between ever since
this case had arisen.

In a moment of wonder, Harry flashed back to
the day, not so long before, when the agent had found out about
Anastasia’s secret, the fact of her being able to speak. He’d been
working in the lab as usual, running simulations and going over
notes, and his girlfriend had jumped on his lap, whining about
being hungry.

“I’m not in the mood for cat chow,” she’d
said, sounding grumpy. “Don’t these idiots know that I’m particular
about what I eat? I may look like a cat, but that doesn’t mean I
think like one.”

Harry chuckled. He’d been making do with
stale sandwiches and water with limp day-old veggies. What he
wouldn’t have given for a pizza right now! “I’ll ask Fearless
Leader if he can get something different for a change.”

“So what do you want, filet mignon or salmon
steak?” a voice growled from the doorway.

Harry’s first thought was
oh crap, now he
knows,
but he kept a straight face and replied, “I sort of like
steak. Perhaps she wants the same.”

Stupid comment, but what else could he say?
Farrell didn’t seem to find it all amusing and strode in, waving
his arms in agitation. “How the hell long has this been going on,
kid?”

Kid, he calls me kid, Harry thought in the
sourest of all mental voices
.
“First off, you didn’t ask,
and I didn’t have to tell you,” he answered, peeved at being
thought of as a teenager.

Well, he
was
a teenager, but he also
happened to be one of the foremost transgenic researchers in North
America, young years and all. Genius or nerd, it depended on who
you spoke to. He thought of himself as a researcher, nothing
more.

Farrell didn’t say another word. Instead, he
looked at Anastasia, his expression moving from skepticism to
acceptance. It seemed as though he was able to process the
impossible faster than most, also to accept it faster than most.
“So you can talk?”

“Meow,” she answered, but her lips curled up
in the semblance of a smile. Ordinary cats couldn’t smile. It was a
well-known fact they couldn’t, as they didn’t possess the necessary
jaw structure to do so. Anastasia could, though, and as a breed
unto herself, she could do a whole lot more.

This time Farrell’s face turned red and his
hand slapped the desk and jarred the computer. “Don’t screw around
with me! You could talk all this time and you didn’t say jack to me
about it?”

She calmly sat on her haunches, licking her
forepaw, then dropped her foreleg to stand up and stare him in the
face. “And if I had, what would you have done? Stuck me in a cage,
denied me my freedom? We went through all this before. I’m sick of
it.”

With that, she jumped off Harry’s lap and
strolled unconcernedly to the corner. Farrell watched her go and
then demanded, “Well?”

Harry shrugged. “She’s got a point. You
captured her once before, remember? And in case you’ve forgotten,
you agreed to let me keep her here. You never asked me if she could
speak or not. And I
need
her. You asked me to work for you,
and at the beginning, you said that all I had to do was to reverse
the process. I think that I can do it, but I need time. If I screw
up one little calculation, then she’s history and your program
means nothing.”

The agent’s eyes bulged in disbelief. “Kid,
you got a real smart mouth on you,” he sputtered. “When you talk
about screwing, you have no idea who you’re screwing with. We could
still toss you in jail—”

“And there goes your spy program,” Anastasia
said from the corner. “I can get out of here any time I want,
you’ll never catch me, and you’ll look like a fool. Think about
that.”

“I never said anything about you spying for
us,” Farrell countered with a totally innocent air. He put on what
Harry thought was a very bad performance at acting the injured
party in this whole affair.

She offered a throaty laugh. “You also never
said anything about Harry creating programs for you to game on, but
he did.”

Harry chuckled at that last thought. Farrell
had asked him to redo a video game he liked—Justice Served, Version
2.0—and Harry obliged him. Farrell played the game in his spare
time, but he never figured that anyone knew about it outside of
Harry. He was wrong.

This time, Anastasia joined in the laughter
and it didn’t stop until the agent strode angrily from the room,
spewing curses as he went. Once the door slammed shut, though,
Harry sobered up and wondered if the agency would really take away
his program. A shudder of fear ran through him. His girlfriend
didn’t seem to be overly concerned as she lay down to take a nap.
She didn’t have to worry—much.

As luck would have it, the agent came through
for them the next day. Striding into the room with another man,
Farrell introduced him as “New York FBI Bureau Director, Andrew
Merton.”

Merton was a very tall, massively built man
in his sixties, craggy-faced and with cold, calculating blue eyes.
With a head of snowy white hair, he resembled a Yeti. “I see we
have a talking cat,” he stated without a hint of emotion in his
voice, and Harry wondered why all agents had to give the public the
robot routine. Maybe it was part of basic training.

Anastasia noiselessly jumped up on the table
to regard him with curiosity. “I wasn’t always a cat,” she said. “I
was human once. I want to be again.”

Merton’s expression, one of blandness, never
shifted. “I’ll have to talk this over with the proper people,” he
said and exited the room.

Talking this over with the proper
people
meant meetings, round-the-clock ones at times, and
getting used to the way the government operated. How it operated
was that Harry drew up plans and gave them to Farrell. In turn,
Farrell handed them over to his superior.

While all the paperwork was necessary, the
real work lay in actually figuring out
how
the
transformation could be achieved. In his notes, the late Doctor
Nurmelev had mentioned something about a chamber that would rapidly
transform the subject from human to animal or vice-versa. To anyone
else, it would have seemed like sheer fantasy. However, Harry read
over the notes, got the gist, and knew that it could be done.

Nurmelev’s notes were incomplete, and that
meant Harry had to rely on his own intelligence and intuition. He
drew up computer models, and the specifications got passed on to a
team of engineers. They built a small-scale chamber and Harry
tested it. It ran, and on a computer simulation, it showed that it
could indeed, reverse the transformation. Still, he wasn’t quite
sure if it was worthwhile testing it on a human being.

Science could not be held back, though, and
about three months after he’d started working for the FBI, he got
the call to attend a meeting. “This is where you get your chance,
kid,” Farrell said, and Harry stifled the urge to roll his
eyes.

In a room upstairs, everyone took their seats
around a large wooden table, pitchers of ice water and glasses at
the ready. Merton, Farrell, and Harry sat at one end, with
Anastasia perched in Harry’s lap. Three men sat in the middle.
Harry nudged Farrell’s arm. “Who are those guys?”