C.Noel Carlson
Prologue
The thing woke up.
It opened its eyes but was blinded by a harsh fluorescent glare. It stared upward anyway, confused at its life. Disjointed images darted through its mind. Fever. Blood.
“Hand me that,” said a female voice. The voice was calm, but betrayed a waver that might have been fear or excitement.
“I don’t believe it,” said a second voice, male.
The thing felt pressure, and a dull but steady pricking moved up the lower part of its body. It wanted to sit up. It felt hungry, but nauseated. No, not hungry, it thought, aware that it could think again. Just deprived of something. Something important. Something I’ll never get back.
It tried to sit up but was apparently unable. The pricking stopped, and the thing felt somewhat more whole. It opened its mouth and sucked in a breath, which turned out to be a letdown. It didn’t seem to need the air, but it was refreshing anyway. It heard a clatter of metal instruments on a steel tray.
A hand appeared, momentarily blocking out the light. The fingers were elongated, spidery. The hand curled and snapped the spidery fingers in front of the thing’s eyes and it blinked.
“Focus,” said the female voice. “That’s good.” The light moved to the side and her face appeared, wearing a surgical splashguard. The mask was covered in clotted, odorous blood.
My blood, the thing realized.
The eyes above the mask were wrong somehow. Very wrong. They were deep green, so deep in fact that the thing couldn’t stop looking at them. The thing felt that if it kept looking, the darkness would abate long enough to see the horror behind the veil. But it didn’t. The darkness just smoldered. The thing on the gurney stared, but could not summon the correct amount of fear. Whatever they had taken away made the concept of danger obsolete.
“Do you know your name?” The green-eyed female asked.
The thing thought a minute. “David,” it finally decided.
The male voice in the corner spouted glee. “Excellent! Remarkable!”
“And what happened to David?”
“Sick...plague.” A swirl of nasty memories made David squeeze his eyes shut. Fever. Hunger. Rage. My wife...oh god, what did I do to my wife?
“Yes. The fever has abated. But you are no longer David.”
“We’ll be rewarded for this,” the male voice said. “This is a breakthrough. The world is at our feet, Marla!”
“Shut up. We’re far from finished.”
“What am I? Why can’t I be David?”
“We’ve made you new. You’re a prototype, deconstructed and reanimated. You’ll never die. As far as we know.”
Two sets of hands grasped his arms and pulled him to his feet. He felt leaden, disjointed, unfamiliar. He looked around the small operating room and at the unnaturally tall woman and her shorter male assistant. He saw the assistant’s deep brown eyes of the same distasteful quality as the female’s. He looked at his naked body, and saw that it wasn’t his. Seams of course stitching ran across his joints, up his torso, crisscrossing and joining a patchwork of different colors of skin, limbs that didn’t match.
“Beautiful,” the male breathed. “Incredible.”
David realized that what they’d taken from him was himself. David was a memory, a whole lifetime in fact, but they were right. He was gone. He was not David anymore. How could he be? He took another useless breath to steel himself.
“What am I, then? What is my name?”
The male and female surgeons looked at each other, silent.
Rage. The thing who had been David lunged at her, fumbling for her throat, a snarl caught in his teeth. His reach was shorter than he was used to and he only managed to grab the front of her blue scrubs before the man caught him. For his giddy voice, the male was surprisingly strong. His hands were icy cold, like a corpse. “NO!” The assistant shouted. “Stay back!”
David recoiled, an unexplainable force accompanying the command. He somehow knew he MUST stay back, or cease to exist.
The woman rose from the corner where she had crouched in a feline reaction to his attack. Her eyes were wide, and she was laughing. The male surgical assistant and the thing who wasn’t David stared at her.
“Xenogen,” she said. “We’ll call it Xenogen. A strange new race.”