In the beginning God created
the
heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
That’s not what happened when
the Hybrids
were created.
Hybrid history as recorded by Elias.
Lucien stood on the roof of a tall building, a part
of—yet apart from the world that passed by underneath it. It didn’t know him. If
it did, it would never have accepted him. When there was a lull in traffic, he
jumped. The twenty-story building didn’t faze him, and the chance that someone
was looking up was laugh-worthy. Humans didn’t look up. They moved with their
eyes firmly in front of them while some had a modicum of self-preservation and
tried to watch what was going on around them.
When he landed, he slipped out of the shadows he
merged with and melted into the street traffic. He walked until he came to Café
Bean. It was an upper-crust café that served some of the best coffee in the
city. It’s where executives sent their assistants for a mid-morning coffee or
their afternoon lunch with another cup of coffee.
He sent the barista a smile when he walked in and
then went to sit with the others waiting for him. After his tea was delivered,
he acknowledged them.
“What was so important I needed to come here?” Two
other males were sitting at the table. Each of them was a Hybrid, someone and something
that shouldn’t exist. There was nothing like human ingenuity and scientists who
thought men were nothing but test subjects.
“Good morning, Lucien,” Damian greeted before he
took a sip of his coffee.
Lucien ignored his friend turning to look at
Mikhail. “Good morning, Lucien.” Mikhail’s lips twitched, he enjoyed messing
with him.
Lucien closed his eyes, not something he would
usually do around others before replying. “Morning, Damian and Mikhail. Why are
we here?” There was a note of laughter in his voice. If anyone could erase his
bad mood, it was the friends with whom he shared his new life.
“Have you seen the news?” Damian asked him.
He had seen it; that was the cause of his bad mood.
If things weren’t hard enough, the government decided to do them one better.
“Genetic experiment… The government takes full
responsibility… We aren’t God, shouldn’t be playing with man’s DNA… Did I miss
anything?”
“Lots,” Mikhail said. “But that sound bite will
do.”
The project had been touted as man’s next big
evolutionary step. Not that mankind knew about it. It was kept hush-hush. Only
those among the need-to-know knew. It never went as high up as the president;
they called it plausible deniability. The truth was they didn’t care what he
thought.
The plan was simple, easy, really. The experiments
started in a petri dish until the right team of scientists walked in one day and
found life.
Man thought he became God.
The experiments continued until they realized that
growing a child from the DNA they collected was still out of their reach even
in the world of clones and in vitro fertilization. Their God status was reduced
to only being gods, but that didn’t deter them.
It was time for human trials. They wanted
patriots, men who were loyal to country, family, and the American dream. They
were plucked from battlefields, reported MIA to a family that would mourn, to
children who would grow up without a father. What was one fatherless child
compared to the future of the human race?
When they had an army of superior white men to
lead them into the future, it was time for step two. Mixing their genes with
the general population. They brought in willing and sometimes not-so-willing
women to reproduce with those males. The rewards they promised the women for
their children never manifested. The thought of superior children, the next
great evolution in mankind, never occurred.
The scientists weren’t defeated. They went back to
the modern age of egg and sperm and sat back as they waited for the first egg
to be fertilized. It was to their shock, their utter horror, that the sperm
destroyed the egg, attacking it like it was a foreign toxic substance.
Man’s next evolutionary step had become a dead
end. The project was decommissioned; the males who were genetically manipulated
either destroyed or left to live a long life in solitary confinement. That’s
what the internal documents that were highly redacted suggested. The world
would go on, never knowing what they could have become.
Where the slightly ethical scientists ended, the
mad scientists began.
“The government didn’t tell the media our names or
even what we looked like. They leaked just enough information that anyone with
half a brain will be able to figure it out,” Mikhail said drumming his fingers
on the table to keep from clenching them.
Lucien spied several humans, giving them second
and third looks. Not that it was out of the ordinary, but today in light of the
media, they were now wondering if they had been correct all along.
“They want to draw us out. To reinforce the
understanding that we are no longer human.” Damian’s hand fisted to control his
anger as the coffee in their cups heated.
“Having you around guarantees me the perfect cup
of tea,” Lucien dead panned, making Damian’s lips twitch.
They looked from their coffee to his tea and
sighed. Lucien was a lost cause as a coffee drinker.
“It’s time we came out of the shadows and made
this an equal playing field,” Mikhail said. He was tired of playing games with
a government and a military that would destroy them if they could.
“I agree, but why put effort into repudiating the
government when we are an evolutionary dead end. Our scientists agree we are
not able to procreate with human females,” Lucien said.
“But we can procreate,” Mikhail reminded them.
Their scientists had run every genetic factor on their sperm, finding out that
they could father the next race, just not with the females available to them.
“Do you suggest that we try to find other races
around the galaxy that we are compatible with or find the original aliens that
our DNA is now linked with?” Damain asked. He didn’t expect any answers. These
were questions they asked themselves in the beginning when it still hadn’t sunk
in what had been done to them.
Lucien’s phone rang; he looked around before
answering. The person on the other end was frantic.
“Josh, calm down. What happened? I see. Keep your
peace; I am meeting with the other two. When a decision is made all will be
informed, until then you are no more than you present.” He frowned before
placing the phone on the table beside his cup of tea.
“Josh was called into his supervisor's office to
be asked if he had seen the news on those Hybrids masquerading as humans.”
“Humans are quite descriptive.” Mikhail laughed.
“Give it some time; we’ll be the nightmare they
discipline their children with.” The thought of children gave each of them a
soul-deep pain. It wasn’t that they wanted to be fathers right now, but every
other male had an opportunity that had been denied them and others like them.
That was one of the reasons the old ones had been picked, loyal to family.
“We have a decision to make, one we can no longer
put off.” Lucien placed his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. They
had walked up to this line many times only to back off. They were part of this
world and thus far had placed more importance on it than on their lives. One
leak to the media had changed all that. Now they would have to fight to protect
the lives of those they cared for, their brothers.
“How much longer can we hide, Lucien? How much
longer can we ask our people to put the wellbeing of those who would see them
dead before their own?” Damian said. “Now that the humans know about us, the
media will dig until they find the next tidbit of news and exploit it.”
Lucien knew they were right. They had played by
the rules the pure humans placed upon them. Those humans had broken the rules
leaving more than enough room on the playing field for them to steal the ball.
The next choice was obvious, but that didn’t stop him from playing the human
side of this game.
“What does it matter? We might not even be alive
in a year or ten.”
“The opposite is also true. We may be alive a hundred or a thousand years from now. The scientists, not even ours, can figure out the decomposition rate of our cells.” Mikhail took another sip of his coffee.
“Apoptosis, that’s what Galen calls it. He hates the word decomposition,
says that is what happens after death.” Damian chuckled, thinking about their
other brother.
That was what the future
looked like for them. They had no knowledge of when or if they would die. Their
chance of having a family was gone, and now the world would be watching them with
wary eyes.
“Not every female wants
a child,” Mikhail said.
He was right, of course.
Lucien flashed back to the scientists who thought the answer to their problem
was simple. They would take females, turn them into Hybrids and mate them with
males who hadn’t been part of the test. If one option fails, follow up with
another.
“This is a brand-new
future,” one scientist had taunted him as he placed him in a viewing room. “I
want you to see what you will never have.”
On the other side of the
two-way glass were twenty women. They were all naked and strapped down. The
oldest couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. In their mouths was an athletic
guard worn to keep their teeth from breaking through the painful process.
“You will be the mothers
of the next race of humans,” one of the scientists told the women as he checked
to make sure the straps were secure.
A covering was dropped
over each female. It was clear so they could see what was happening within.
They would be given a serum that would change their DNA, but they would also be
bombarded with a light that would make the internal DNA change possible. One
did not work without the other.
They were white and fit.
Most of them had blue eyes and blonde hair. The perfect master race, or so the
scientists thought. The clear glass domes lit up with a light that caressed the
women's skin on the table like it was a lover. The light made their skin
shimmer with a glow reminiscent of a beautiful pearl.
With a word from the
lead scientist, the serum was pumped into their veins. Lucien waited. His hand
was now on the window wanting to touch one of the women below. Could one of
them be a match for him? Could she grant him children and a life that would
make becoming a monster worth it?
Then the thrashing came,
followed by horrifying screams that penetrated the guards placed in their
mouths. The scientists ran to stop the serum. The lights dimmed, and all that
was left was the bloody remnants of once beautiful women.
Once was never enough.
They killed thousands of women in their quest for a better race until
eventually it was noted that the process was not viable on the females of their
race. Why was the question they never could answer. Eventually, they assured
themselves the fault lies with the female. The x-gene that allowed her to
become female also stopped her from advancing on the evolutionary scale. There
would never be a human female Hybrid. It was an end to what could have been the
master race.
“They should have
stopped when they realized that the process wasn’t viable with females,” Damian
said, having no trouble following Lucien’s train of thought.
“You ask them to do the
impossible. They betrayed the world and then used their experiments that
wouldn’t grant them a master race on those who wouldn’t kowtow to them or their
threats. We are the result of revenge gone awry,” Mikhail spoke, his eyes
flashing.
“It is time to step out
of the shadows.” Lucien stood, allowing the cloak he kept in place to fall. His
two brothers stood doing the same.
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