Rise of the Transgenics (4 page)

“They’re the engineers,” Farrell
whispered.

Harry had never met them before. He also
hadn’t seen the other man who sat at the far end of the table.
Forty-ish, short and rotund, with a pale porcine face, he fidgeted
with some notes. Merton made the preliminary introductions and laid
out his instructions to his team of engineers.

That left the chubby man, who introduced
himself as Doctor Halsey. He remained quiet throughout the
presentation. However, when the topic of transgenic research and
application came up, he raised his eyebrows when Merton announced
that Harry would be in charge of the whole thing.

“And I’m not?” he queried in a high-pitched
voice. “Sir,” he said to Merton, “I’m one of the top transgenic
researchers in North America. I deserve to be given the chance at
experimenting on the cat.”

Poor choice of words, as Anastasia jumped
onto the table, quickly padded across it, squatted down on her
haunches, and spat in Halsey’s face. “I’m not a lab rat,” she
said.

While the engineers didn’t say anything
except to murmur a collective “What in the hell” comment, Halsey
almost had a stroke. His face turned white, his mouth began to
quiver in disbelief, and he looked helplessly at his boss. “It
talks?”

Anastasia underscored her point by slashing
his hand and he screamed in pain. “Don’t ever call me
it,
you moron,” she stated. “I’m a girl. I was before, and with Harry’s
help, I will be again.”

Merton lost his temper at that point and
slammed his fist on the table, startling everyone. “Goldman’s in
charge,” he stated in no uncertain terms. “Do I make myself
clear?”

Only Farrell seemed unperturbed and gazed
unconcernedly at all the action going on. Merton impatiently waved
the scientist out. Halsey, bleeding hand and all, hastily left the
room. The door slammed shut and the man in charge turned to Harry.
“That means I want results, young man.”

Well, at least he didn’t call me kid, Harry
thought. He then articulated what needed to be done. “Sir, I have
the specs. I explained everything in this,” he held up his
findings, “what the engineers have to do.”

He handed over a sheet of paper, and Merton
studied it intently, finally passing it over to the engineers. One
of them said, “We’ve already built a smaller model.”

“And it works, at least the prototype does—on
paper,” Harry added.

One of the engineers smiled confidently. “We
can build this.”

Merton turned back to Harry. “I’ll be honest
with you, Goldman. I’m not a scientist. This is something that’s
over my head. Anyway, we’re not alone in this project, not anymore.
A special sub-division attached to the government has taken over.
It’s not my call, I don’t like working under another government
agency’s direction, but I don’t have a choice. We’re now working
for Applied Scientific Research, ASR for short, and they want to
know what to do.”

Harry felt a bit snowed by everything, but
his girlfriend, anger now spent, decided to pad back to his
position and settled herself into his lap. Just holding Anastasia
comforted him.

Merton continued his speech and reiterated
his earlier point. He wanted results. “It’s a private laboratory.
We made a contract with them, and since they’re handling the
funding, they want a finished product.”

“And that would be...?” Harry asked, already
having a pretty good idea of what they wanted.

Rubbing his chin, he added, “And what they
want is simple. They want to know how the process began and what it
takes to reverse it.”

This was a little difficult for Harry to
swallow. The Russians involved with their transgenic experiments
were trying to create the perfect spy, so why wouldn’t the America
government do the same? Wisely, though, he kept his mouth shut.
Merton’s gaze met everyone else’s in the room, and then he tapped
the paper with a meaty forefinger. “Are you sure this will
work?”

“It should,” answered Harry, hoping that he
sounded confident enough. In reality, it was all guesswork. Bright
as he was, there were only so many things he knew. However, he
didn’t want to admit weakness in front of the man who controlled
his destiny as well as Anastasia’s.

The Director hemmed and hawed, read over the
paper again, and finally, gave the go-ahead to build a larger
version of the prototype that would ostensibly shift Anastasia’s
form from feline to human. “This is on you, son,” he warned, and
with that, he dismissed everyone.

Back in the lab, Harry, his girlfriend, and
Farrell, sat around the table discussing the matter quietly. “I
don’t trust them,” Anastasia said. “The Russian scientist made me,
so who’s to say that your people won’t do the same to someone
else?”

Farrell, who’d said not a word during the
meeting, tapped the computer. He had a thoughtful look on his face.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “All I know is that I’ve been
tasked to watch over you and help you out if I can. I haven’t heard
anything about creating superspies from the Director or anyone
else.”

“If you did, would you tell us?” Harry
probed. His BS-O-Meter had gone off during the meeting when ASR was
mentioned, and now it was working overtime. “You didn’t tell us
that we were going to be working with another agency.”

The agent spread his hands wide in a gesture
of innocence. “I’m on a need-to-know basis, kid, and you didn’t
need to know. Even
I
didn’t know at first. Merton only told
me about this sub-division when you agreed to work for us. I didn’t
see the need to break silence about it.”

Uh-huh, and
now
he tells us.
Harry’s first thought was to tell the whole agency to take a huge
sock and cram it in a very dark place, but he caught the pleading
look in Anastasia’s eyes. She wanted to be human, or at the very
least as she once was, half and half. Love could make a person do
things they wouldn’t do under ordinary circumstances. So he
swallowed his misgivings and said, “I’ll get to work.”

Harry’s mind snapped back to the present and
he turned his attention to his computer. After going over the
figures time and time again, now...now he thought that it would
work. Farrell walked over to the chamber, touched it here and
there, and then turned around. “Is this thing ready?”

Harry had already set some calculations in
motion and was waiting for the download. The computer gave a faint
beep and the readout came.
Probability of
success
—
97 percent.

Anastasia came over to stare at the screen
and bobbed her head a few times. “I’m ready.”

Harry wasn’t sure, but his percentages had
never been higher. Licking his lips, he said, “Let’s try it.”

Farrell whipped out his cellphone. “Bring
down the serum.”

The serum was what would ostensibly begin the
transformation. Its function was to turn on the human DNA and
deactivate the animal genes. Once again, Nurmelev’s notes had
proved invaluable, incomplete as they were, and Harry had done the
rest. A knock on the door came, Farrell opened it, and another
agent handed him a vial of clear liquid along with a syringe.

Immediately, he took it over to Harry. “This
is from ASR. They handled all the chemistry involved. It’s magic
time.”

Preparing the injection, Harry whispered to
his girlfriend, “This might hurt a little—”

“Get on with it,” Anastasia cut him off. “I’m
not backing down now.”

Quickly he injected her, she gave a faint
moan, and her body started to shake. “I can feel it tingling all
over,” she said, and her voice sounded unsteady.

The tingling meant that something was
happening, and hopefully, it was a positive reaction. He picked her
up under one arm, went to the chamber and switched it on, and a
faint humming noise began.

Cradling her in his arms, he gave her a tiny
kiss on her mouth. Weird though it might have seemed to anyone
else, he loved his girlfriend more than anything and didn’t care
who saw. Placing her gently inside, he said, “Lie down.”

After she lay down, he closed the lid, locked
it into place, and tapped a computer key. “Now or never,” he said,
feeling his heart jump with trepidation.

Farrell glanced at the chamber and back at
him. “Do it.”

Harry pressed the
Enter
button. If
everything worked, the entire process would take only five minutes.
The humming rose to a sharp whine, the lights dimmed, and the
chamber began to shake. Smoke poured out from the top, obscuring
the view. A few seconds later, he heard her begin to scream. The
agent yelled “Cut the power!”

He was about to, but Anastasia’s voice knifed
through the din and she screamed back in a voice human and yet not,
“I can do this!”

And so he waited...waited...and four minutes
and thirty interminable seconds later, sparks showering the floor,
he killed the power. Running over to the chamber, he waved the
smoke away. He carefully lifted the lid and found Anastasia lying
there, back in half-cat, half-human form, and unconscious.

“Is she breathing?” Harry asked, anxious that
he’d failed. Losing Anastasia...no, he couldn’t bear the thought of
it.

Farrell bent over and put his ear to her
mouth. “Yeah, she’s still breathing. Let me move her.”

The agent took off his jacket and placed it
over her nude form. Taking her in his arms, he carried her over to
the cot and gently placed her on it. Straightening up, he asked,
“When will we know if it worked? I mean, her memory could be messed
up or her brain...”

His voice trailed off, but Harry knew what he
meant. Brain damage was a very real possibility and he didn’t want
to contemplate the alternative to total success. “We’ll know when
she wakes up.”

As Anastasia slept, Harry watched her closely,
wondering if he’d done the right thing and hoping for the best.
Sitting at the computer, he leaned back in the chair, kept his eyes
on his girlfriend, but the stress of the experiment caught up to
him and he nodded off.

The early days, they’d been good. Days with
his parents in his hometown of Portland, days of happiness, he
remembered them well. Talks with his parents, experiments at home
and then in a university lab, the joys of learning and discovering
and creating, those happy memories swirled in his subconscious.

Other memories competed, though, and these
were not happy ones. Shy, withdrawn, weak and mild in temperament,
he’d made the perfect target for bullies to use as a punching bag.
And he hated himself for it.

The only reason he persevered was due to an
above average intelligence, which had been classified at the genius
level, and the willingness to apply it. Since he proved to be too
bright for regular school, he was allowed to study at home and
experiment as well. It didn’t solve the problem of being weak and
nerdy, but he felt grateful for the opportunity of academic
freedom.

His parents also served as his bedrock. They
were both researchers, quiet and good people who only wanted the
best for him. Unfortunately, DNA proved to win out over life. In
what would have been Harry’s senior year in high school, his father
died from pancreatic cancer and his mother followed him into death
a short time later.

Alone now, truly alone, Harry had only his
wits and intelligence to carry him through it all. He’d started his
research in order to perfect a cure for cancer, and had almost
achieved the impossible when he was arrested. Farrell had taken him
in and had broken him out of prison a short time later. “You’re
working for us, kid,” he’d said at the time.

Taken to New York, he’d met Anastasia, and
through a series of adventures too impossible for the average
person to believe, they’d met creatures. The first enemy was a bear
creature—Ivan—who was a monster and a killer. They’d also met Doug,
a transgenic dog who’d sacrificed himself to save both him and
Anastasia, and the biggest monster of them all, Nurmelev, a warped
genius and scientist.

It had been Nurmelev’s doing all along. He’d
willingly explained everything he knew about Anastasia. A
prostitute, dying from AIDS, she’d made her way to a hospital in
Kiev. Nurmelev had found her there, and taken her away. He’d
experimented on her, and had turned her into something not quite
human, yet better than human in her own way. Nurmelev’s research
was the reason Harry was trying to undo the damage that the Russian
scientist had caused.

And he had done so much damage. Along with
the damage, there’d been a lot of deaths, inflicted mainly by Ivan,
the bear-monster. He’d trailed Harry to New York, attacked and
murdered numerous people, and had done so willingly.

Barely escaping with their lives, Harry,
Doug, and Anastasia had made their way to the Catskill Mountains.
There, Nurmelev had told him tales of the fantastic, tales that
involved mass experimentation subsidized by powerful members of
Russian society.

Harry had seen firsthand the successes of the
program—Anastasia, for one and Doug, for another—and he’d also seen
the failures. They were horrible mutations that didn’t live very
long once their forms had been altered.

It was all part of the plan, Nurmelev said,
the plan to build the perfect spy. “The plan itself is not
original,” the scientist had said at the time. “It is because it
is
so unoriginal that it will work.”

The plan consisted of creating the perfect
spy, a cat or dog that would infiltrate the enemies’ military or
computer installations, steal secrets, and deliver them to their
handlers. Intelligence would remain human, but the form would be
that of an animal’s, and no one would be the wiser. As silly as it
sounded, when Harry heard the scientist lay out the details, he
knew it would work.