Excerpt: Science or Madness (Working Title)

There are some thing that should never have been messed with. There are some things that should never have left the pages of books and words of stories. Yet there are those who couldn’t resist those who just couldn’t stop tampering despite the horrors that they created. Life hadn’t been the same since the scientists wouldn’t stop and know when enough was enough.

It was a good plan at the start. They started with cures for the various forms of cancer, something the world wanted and had been searching for for years. From there it was to things equally as life threatening like AIDs or HIV. Then they moved to things that while not life threatening could still use cures like Anemia in its various forms, such as Sickle Cell Anemia, and the common cold. After that was done and there were no ‘big’ things left to cure or fix the scientists became divided on where to go next. Some said they should continue on their current path curing various illnesses and diseases, the others said they needed to ‘fix’ humanity as a whole. They all had their own reasons but one that several seemed to share was that humanity’s dependence on machines was something that needed to be dealt with as it was a great folly of the race as a whole. So these scientists set to making man stronger and faster, giving them the ability to fly, to breath under the water without assistance, or break a brick wall with their fist.

Maybe if they had given up when they failed things wouldn’t have gotten to the point it did, but there was always a way to convince themselves to keep going. “Just one more try” and “It is for the good of us all” were two of the most common ones, the things that these men and women told themselves at night to sleep and during the day to justify their continued experiments. For years they failed making one deformed and barely human creature after another. Things that were so unrecognizable as ever having been close to human that only say the eyes, the mouth, or a foot could been truly called ‘human’ in their look. These ‘creatures’ these ‘imperfects’ as they were called were kept in cages like animals all for being what they had been made to be.

Yet the experiments continued despite it all tweaking the DNA here or there or adding in other DNA until after several years they finally got it right. And get it right they did, but the creatures they made were even less human then they earlier attempts despite how ‘perfect’ they looked they still were not ‘right’. These creatures, these chimeras, couldn’t even speak and they ran mostly on instant rather then the human logic that the scientists had been hoping for. While not all the ‘imperfect’ chimeras could speak or reason as they wanted many could do one or the other, usually use human logic, and at least attempt or come close to the other.

So after some thought and tests they came up with a plan rather then splicing several DNAs together they used at most two in a single experiment. With this there came more experiments more tests, and more poor souls who could be called no more then chimera. Still it didn’t stop, in truth there was probably nothing by this point that could stop the experiments, the quest to ‘fix’ humanity. Maybe if more people knew what was happening, if more knew what was being done to the embryos in those labs, but they didn’t so things kept on as they had with only the scientists and their assistants knowing what they were doing.

With their new policy in place things slowly started to change as they started to find places where tweaking changed it just enough to do what they wanted and nothing more. Well almost nothing more, there were of course the physical changes. Some of the first successes were with wings, humans with raven and dove wings or in one scientists case bat wings though those experiments were also covered entirely in a bat’s skin making them black from head to toe. The first attempts though still weren’t quite ‘perfect’ while they had wings the wings were too small to support their owners in flight so more tweaking and fixing was done until they had them ‘perfect’. Humans with feathered white, feathered black, or leathery black wings that were large enough to support them in flight were made, though such human were also tweaked to have hollow skeletons like an avian to better allow them to fly properly.

From wings to eliminate dependence on planes they moved to power to remove dependence on the various wrecking machines and heavy lifters. Making humans who were part bull or bear they took a while to perfect that two but as with the wings they managed it and once more they tweaked the bones of these ‘new human’ making their bones more dense to help prevent breaking. To solve the dependence on devices that let humans breath under water they made various forms of ‘fish-men’ giving their experiments gills, though some earlier ones only had gills and there for were forced into a life completely in the water and were considered quite ‘imperfect’ by their creators and like so many before them left in cages to, essentially, rot. After all if they weren’t perfect what good were they?

With those things ‘fixed’ some of the scientists were satisfied, but others saw in these experiments the chance to create all the creatures of myth and legend. After all they already had ‘angels’, ‘fallen angels’, and even ‘dragons’ of a sort with the experiments to give humans wings. With the experiments to give the race more power they had made Minotaurs, Big Foot, and the sasquatch. Then the wish to give humans gills had made mermaids in various forms. So why not create other creatures? Why not make other things from myth and legend real?

It was something that they shouldn’t have done, but the scientific mind doesn’t always thing logically. It was just another thing to, in the end, add to the long list of things that shouldn’t have been done, in the name of science or improving humanity, yet it was and it was done in the name of both. The new round of experiments started with simple things, non-human things even. Things like giving a horse wings like a Pegasus or a horn like a unicorn. The horn was easier as it was something that could happen naturally, though it was a deformity when it did, all they had to do was tweak the DNA enough to make it a ‘permeate’ deformity which didn’t take as long as it had to manage some other experiments. With unicorns a reality they switched to splicing DNA once more putting dove wings on horses making the Pegasus of myth and legend a reality. They even went on to make a rabbit with antelope horns creating the legendary jackalope and combining a human and a horse in such way that the centaurs of stories were made reality.

Then there were those who made local legends truths one such creature being the Taniwha or Tanewha which was mainly modifying various local animals to make them fit the legends. Another creature was the Haast Eagle which was said to be a bird large enough to carry off a sheep and take down animals as large as an ostrich. Neither of which were probably the best creatures to have made real rather then myth, but all the same the scientists who did so didn’t seem to care. In fact they were followed by more such ‘dangerous’ creatures. They created the giant squid or kraken, Loch Nis, the Sphinx, Gryphons, Sirens or Harpys, and even a form of a Naga. Such dangerous, and in some cases large, creatures are more that should never have seen the light of day, but someone didn’t agree and made them all the same.

Still things might have been able to continue on as they were if not for the accident. Such large creatures can’t be kept for long especially something as large as a kraken. As the creatures started to out grow their cages, cells, and pools things started to go wrong. They wanted out and they were getting out one way or another.