Here’s a little ditty about our reason for existence.

From the observation deck adjacent to the bridge, Over 1, commander of the harvester Lux Aeterna, looked over the small but beautiful blue and green planet below his orbiting ship.

“Sir,” Low Under 14 broke the commander’s reverie as he snapped a Wedj version of a smart salute. “Sir, I thought you might like to see this. It’s translated.” He handed a small crystalline object to his superior.

The commander absentmindedly reached out one of his eight tentacles and took the report, “all right, then. Dismissed.” The underling left and Over 1 continued to gaze at the shining planet. After a while he inflated all four lungs and with a great sigh inserted the crystal into a seat on the control panel before him. He began to read.

***

I’m pretty scared—hell, I’m terrified!—so you’ve got to give me a little credit here. The only thing I can think to do is write this down and hope someone finds it. I’ll do the best I can under the circumstances. There isn’t a lot of time.

I studied law enforcement at university so I don’t know much of anything about this science stuff but the few bits and pieces I’ve picked up over the years. I’m chief of security for this crazy, demented, sick, and totally whacked out research scientist. The guy’s seriously—mad. Outside—ordinary guy, you’d never guess. Inside—geesh! God help me . . . us.

Years ago, at the beginning, Doc was cool, and it was a really good job. I had noooo idea it would turn out this way. You’ve got to believe me.

It all started with this mousy doctor named Hermann Kessler back toward the end of the Second World War. Though not very forceful or charismatic, Kessler nevertheless was a genius. Searching for ways to create a “super soldier,” he stumbled over a somewhat unique twist to endocrinology regarding its relationship with genetics. His resultant radical work transcended medical ethics, brought scorn from his peers and eventually got him forcefully ejected from the medical profession like a ticking bomb.

However, some people—Adolph Hitler and other European and Asian powers, political and commercial—were intrigued by his research and combined resources to create the highly secret Endocrine Response Research laboratory in Switzerland.

Unfortunately, Kessler, his research, and the ERR lab survived the war to the present day. Along with Kessler’s work, ERR supports and researches many taboo scientific endeavors, human cloning and bioweaponry, for instance and in particular.

Okay, in case you don’t know, the endocrine system is comprised of an array of organs and glands that secrete hormones to regulate the metabolism and immune system of the human body.

You may have heard at some time or other of the hypothalamus, pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, and, of course, Lovecraft’s famous pineal gland. The pancreas, testes and ovaries are also considered part of the endocrine system.

Kessler’s research centered on creating a hyperfunction of the endocrine system, bombarding the body with massive doses of hormones, which, under ordinary circumstances, would have destructive and most likely fatal effect. Kessler, quite by accident, discovered a technique to create an endocrinologic hyperfunction that causes all the cells in an organism to rewrite their genetic code. With a concoction of various hormones he found he could cause massive cellular de- and reconstruction!

However, he could find no way to control the recombination, a necessary step in creating a super soldier. You can’t begin to imagine . . . God help me for some of the things I’ve seen.

Kessler’s early research failed miserably and horribly, the problem lay in the utter lack of control. But that didn’t stop the good doctor. Like some insane little kid who’d managed to get his grubby hands on the building blocks of life itself he engaged in making some true abominations—blasphemies!

Enter my boss, endocrinologist and molecular biologist Dr. Delbert Fairchild. I met Doc in a dojo in Lauderdale on spring break. After the group workout I sparred with some of the locals and I guess he liked my style. We went for some drinks on the boardwalk.

Doc said he was studying for a second PhD in Organic Biochemistry at Harvard and I was soon to graduate from Penn State with a BS in law enforcement. I was hoping for the Bureau but they didn’t like my grades. I wasn’t really looking forward to a career in the State Police and a job taking pictures on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Doc told me he would be doing some extended traveling after graduation and could use some backup just in case he got in a tight spot overseas. I thought, hey, a little adventure, see the world, get some culture, why not? So we hooked up.

Doc’s no slouch in the genius department and he’s no wimpy little puss like Kessler either. I was with him one evening in Lauderdale when some junkie attempted to mug us with a knife. Doc waved me off and proceeded to quite skillfully and pitilessly kick the poor moron’s ass.

Kessler’s work interested Doc and he managed to track him down on the Internet. After some negotiation and extensive interviewing we went to Switzerland and Doc was accepted into ERR. Doc asked me if I’d stick with him and, being unattached and without much family (a couple cousins somewhere), I readily agreed.

That was about ten years ago. Since then my regular duties, when not accompanying Doc, are centered on security at the lab. Thanks to Doc and my degree from Penn State I was the number two guy in the state of the art ERR security department in Switzerland. The chief of security heads the entire international security force, ERR has numerous labs located all over the globe, so I didn’t see him very often.

About four years ago Doc’s lab moved to a new location in southern Maine, USA. It’s near a little vacation town just north of the New Hampshire border. A small group of fishermen base there and with the exception of the summer season it’s quiet as a tomb most of the year. Just the thing for mad scientist types.

Recently things have been getting really bizarre. Mapping the human genome, technical advances in electron microscopy and other measurement devices, as well as the deep pockets of investors have bolstered the research immensely. I hadn’t seen Kessler, who’s at least 80 these days, for some time. However, it’s not like it’s the first time he’s been in absentia for an extended period, so what? I found out where, or better, what, he was this afternoon.

I guess bizarre doesn’t really explain it. Actually, just get yourself a good bottle of whiskey or something and get loaded. There’s nothing you can do.

Sorry for that, I’m desperate. Lately Doc has been wreaking havoc on local Atlantic fish in the old concrete block boathouse attached to the lab; there haven’t been any boats in it for years. That’s where we were this afternoon when the shit hit the fan.

The boathouse has five bays that open up directly onto the Atlantic. Each bay has a roll-up door and there’s a concrete walkway around the slots with various cubbyholes, shelving and closets for boating gear. Underwater wire fencing separates the bays. Wire fence also encloses the front sections of the bays that are underwater. Each bay was loaded with a different variety of fish. I recognized mackerel, haddock, cod, and maybe flounder?

There is another concrete walkway, wider and stepped back, about fifteen feet above the water level. On one side of this mezzanine are windowalls behind which computer equipment and other paraphernalia huff, buzz, wink and churn away. Doc was inside there with a clipboard.

The windowalls continue around the back of the dock and terminate about where I was standing by a door that leads to the lab. There’s a steel stair leading down to the back of the first floor dock and catwalk along the front, just above the roll-up doors, from which a steel ladder descends into each of the bays.

God only knew what Doc had in mind for the fish in those bays but it probably had something to do with the “cocktail” they’d devised just before we moved out of Switzerland. The cocktail is a mixture of hormones and nanobots that trigger and mediate an endocrinologic hyperfunction.

The nanobots, a recent innovation, are tiny molecular-sized robots that not only allow the mutating hormone to fit into any receptor on the target cells (in this case, all of them—sort of a molecular Radio Shack receptor adapter) but also help minimize negative systemic reaction to the hyperfunction. The nanobots, Doc’s contribution to the scheme, seemed to be the key to controlling the recombinant process. At least that’s what Doc told me; I can only tell you what I’ve been told. Oh, God.

I remember what the cocktail did to a monkey once. It was horrible. Doc had asked me if I wanted to see the recent advances in the technique and, God forgive me, I said, “sure.”

A lab tech injected the poor creature with a blue-green dayglo liquid. “We’re going for neutral reaction, here, Mark,” Doc said to me. “In other words we don’t want it to change into anything specific.”

The monkey just sat there for a while, rolling its lips back, picking its head and making those little falsetto bleats. I began to think nothing was going to happen. I looked at Doc. He was staring intensely at the monkey, glaring at it. Like he was willing something to happen. I didn’t like it, he looked, well—disturbed.

Then the monkey started buzzing. Yes, that’s the only way to describe it, it was buzzing—the sound came up from somewhere deep in its guts. It fell into a limp fetal position with its hands over its head and the buzzing took on a deeper tone.

“Watch its hair,” Doc said.

Shortly the monkey’s hair began to fall out and slide off its body to the steel table and from there onto the floor below. The animal’s skin began to take on a golden glow as if it were a light source of its own becoming at first translucent and then actually transparent. It was like looking through clear, golden jelly. I could see the internal structures of the animal clearly. And then they were somehow blurring, the bones, muscles, veins and arteries, the organs all seemed to be getting indistinct and were merging into new forms like some kind of fantastic organic kaleidoscope.

Doc was entranced, the golden glow highlighting his lined face from below, ghoulish. He whispered, “Just look at that.”

The monkey’s body began lose its shape, appendages merging with the torso, until all that was left was a glowing golden blob on the table. Coruscation of darker colors began to appear like waving fingers or tentacles within the mass, merging and flowing, the pitiful blob moved in an eerie and indescribable way.

“God,” I said, trying to control my stomach, “Doc, what did you do to it?”

“Improved it immensely,” he said, “I’ve made it a God. This life form can now survive almost anywhere in the universe and with that we’re ready to try our hand at some basic life-form design.”

I looked at it. “Why would something like that want to survive?” I asked myself. I didn’t even want to go where “basic life-form design” would take me.

“Why would something like that want to survive?” I asked myself again as the dayglo goo was dropped into the fish cages this afternoon. About five minutes later the water began to churn and I could see the beginnings of that golden glow emanate from each one of the bays. Doc was making notes on his clipboard and speaking into a clip-mic hanging from his ear.

Suddenly a general alarm began keening; it was the alarm that meant a test subject had escaped. I couldn’t stop a cold shiver. Trouble.

Of course my fears were not unfounded. One of the doors inside the lab burst open and a thing, like a bunch of those skinny balloons clowns make animals out of, sort of rolled-tumbled-crawled in. It was buzzing; only this buzzing was far more terrible than anything I’d heard previously. It was like someone was chain-sawing my brain. The people in the lab, Doc included, were down on their knees.

“Kessler!” Doc screamed at the top of his lungs. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

And, so help me, a voice like grated Hell shaped itself out of the growling buzz. “I’m finishing this experiment you fool. I’m finishing it once and for all.” The tumbling shape rolled over to Doc and enveloped Doc’s head in some kind of plastic goo. At the same time it grabbed the closest lab tech in the same way. God help me, I could hear their muffled screams through the goo, the glass and all.

For the first time in my life I was really scared. This shit’s really out of control; I actually pissed my pants. And what the fuck happened to Kessler?

Meanwhile, down in the bays the fish were becoming. What, I don’t know, but they were furiously churning the water and I could see some of them slipping through the wire fence into the ocean outside.

The creature released the captured lab tech, a young woman. Doubled over in pain, she suddenly stood up straight and began undressing. The sight of her pert young body covered with dark strands of liquid goo in the midst of growling, undulating, glistening, buzzing, insanity completed the horror.

She walked to the door and came into the dock area on the far side away from me, climbed the railing and dove into the water below. What could I do? In spite of my own panic I ran over and jumped in after her.

I guess I thought I could save her but by the time I got her over to the ladder she was already becoming. As I moved her up the ladder I could see through her glistening, transparent skin. Her body had rapidly changed into what looked like a bowling ball with a bouquet of flowers blooming from the top and, in spite of her apparent lack of appendages, she continued up the ladder on her own power.

When we got to the landing, right outside the lab where the Doc was emitting his own golden glow, she changed into something like a giant flounder. I’m only telling you what I saw—a giant golden flounder inside a golden jelly shell.

“It’s over! It’s over!,” Kessler’s growling buzz ripped at my guts. “The reaction is unstoppable and will consume all life on earth!” It’s hard to imagine the cliché maniacal laugh in growling chainsaw but I’ll never forget it. “We will all live forever!” the twisting, writhing mass exulted.

The young girl kept transmogrifying and everyone in the lab began to shrivel and contort out of shape as well. I ran for the door and kept pumping until I was out of the complex. As I dug for my keys I looked back at the building and it didn’t look any different from any other day. That sent a shudder through my whole body because underneath, way under, where the mind dissolves into blackness and the walls close in there was that horrible, ratcheting, excruciating buzz.

Well, I’ve made it the whole way back to the little flat I have in town. It’s summer and there are a lot of people about at the local carnival. They might have an interesting night, maybe.

Looking over toward the lab, perched up on the hills surrounding the town, I can see a golden glow getting impossibly brighter even though the sun has already gone down.

I’m writing this for anyone who finds it; though I really doubt it’s going to happen. My skin is beginning to look a little golden and, Lord have mercy, I can hear that buzz. Oh God!

***

Mid Under 34 looked up from his scanning console on the command deck of the Lux Aeterna. “This is just what we’re looking for, Commander. Planet Cy433 is loaded with proto-form, ready to harvest.”

Over 1 concurred with his underling “Finish your scans, 34,” he said, “then dispatch the harvesters. There are several seed worlds on the other side of this galaxy waiting for us.”

The Commander scanned the planet from his personal array. Ordinary breeder, nothing remarkable, been on the list a long time, he thought. But there was something peculiar about this planet, something he was missing, some teasing, dancing memory just outside his consciousness.

He queried his database on Cy433 and when the data began to flow onto his screen he sat up straight (as Wedj can, that is) and wave-blinked several rows of his eyes. There it was, this planet had gone harvest-ready many years before it’s time.

Just then Low Under 27 came in with another scouting report. “I located the epicenter of the cascade, Commander. It was some kind of laboratory.”

Yes, sometimes an indigenous life form could break the amino-peptide stasis ahead of time. “Let me guess,” said the commander, “humans?”

Low Under 27 wave-blinked. “How did you know?”

Over 1 gave the Wedj equivalent of a chuckle, a clicking sound like a playing card on bicycle spokes, and said, “Isn’t it always?”

How else could an apologue like this end?

Copyright © 2014 H. Robert Schumacher, Jr.