H.A.D.E.S. Facility, 5 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface, 20xx.
A solitary cloaked man sits at his desk in the deepest chamber of the subterranean facility, a large armored bunker capable of surviving any kind of weapon known to man. He carefully retrieves and plugs in the futuristic flash drive that has never left his presence to his laptop. A few clicks and clacks later, the necessary files flash across his screen, and the faintest hint of a cold, predatory smile passes over his lips as he reads them, knowing that the man who has written them has already been marked for death.
+++++++++++++++++++H.D.P. Log Set 56, Hasbio Division+++++++++++++++++++++++
Log 028921HDP_01, time since Project Eden Inception: 01d/04h/34m.
“Well now, how does one start a journal about taking on a task fit for God himself? Did He write down his thoughts when He created the world? Oh, how I would love to read his thoughts on us, and platypuses, but alas. Well, let us start with what they gave me to work with. First, they certainly didn’t scrimp on the facility. Brand new bioreactors, genotyping equipment and databases, advanced PCR and CRISPR technology that still must be top secret, given that it is at least a decade ahead of anything available commercially. Second, my team is likewise exceptionally qualified, to the point where I have finally figured out where several of my supposedly missing and presumed dead professors and proteges have ended up…I wonder if their significant others are aware of the fact they are still alive? Some of them should know, good people that they are, but the same NDAs that shield Jessica’s life prohibit it. Third, Hasbio seems to have a logistics system that spans across all continents and markets, legal or otherwise. I asked them, as an offhand joke, if they could please get me a live thyacline, as a fresh DNA sample and behavioral analysis would be extremely beneficial to such a difficult endeavor. Suffice to say…the famed species is not dead. In fact, it still seems to have breeding pairs, given the two, male and female, that I am presently staring at in their enclosure.
I don’t know who Hasbio is connected to…and now I’m not sure that I want to know…but they are powerful. Governmental level at least, possibly intergovernmental. Why whatever organization is truly behind this is so concerned about these damn ponies is beyond me…only that I must be careful. Just do my job, and accept the treatment saving my daughter’s life. I do not think prying would be conducive to either her lifespan, or mine. We start our endeavor tomorrow, just the very basics. Figuring out what exactly Faust wants, and more importantly, how to even begin approaching that. And someone has to go in and get that thylacine DNA sample…if not solely for this ‘Eden’ project, as that damn man insists on calling it, for posterity.”
Log 029123HDP_27, time since Project Eden Inception: 50d/12h/17m.
“After much discussion, we have decided to go with the American Appaloosa as our basic genetic template for these…I still don’t know what we are going to call them frankly, chimeric horses. Good health, a decent range of coat colors, and available enough to acquire the amount of stock we were going to need without raising ethical suspicions. We decided that before tackling any other aspect of the project, we needed to see if it was even possible to make a standard horse as small as Faust was hoping to get it. It had to be small enough to rival dogs and cats as a species that could be sold to as many people in many different living conditions as possible. This necessitated a deep dive into the genes surrounding the expression of height in horses, and to aide with the project, we acquired a number of Falabella ponies as well, as they were, before our accomplishment, the shortest known horse breed whose smallest foals were born at the height we were targeting. And soon, we will begin our experiments.
I’m not exactly comfortable with what we are going to have to do to pull this off in a reasonable time frame. A selective breeding program, sped up immensely by genetic editing in vitro via multiple methods: retrovirus vectors, RNA editing, CRISPR to edit the genes controlling for height, then implanting the edited fertilized eggs into mares. We won’t know exactly which specific edits will cause what results or which vectors will be the most effective, especially on Faust’s timetable. Countless fetuses will die long before they are born, and of those that survive, almost all will die at birth or shortly after. I feel like we are kids trying to jam whatever peg works in there and hoping that it ends well, frankly. But if I want my daughter to live, this is what I have to do.”
Log 029992HDP_127, time since Project Eden Inception: 660d/17h/57m.
“It has been almost six hundred and eleven days since we have embarked in what I will now have to call the most ambitious genetic engineering project in human history. I have to admit, initially, I thought this a fool’s errand, destined to failure after failure with nothing to show for billions of dollars worth of research, even with the caliber of our team and with our equipment. Today, however, was a true breakthrough day, and I am proud of it despite my reservations with Hasbio and irritation with Faust and his unrealistic timetables. We have successfully managed to get our first subject foal to the height size that it would need to be to grow into an adult horse the size of a Jack Russel terrier. It died shortly after birth, problems with organ and brain development that we have been struggling with throughout the entire project,but it is a size reduction of eighty percent. This has not come without a substantial and regrettable cost, but it really is a true breakthrough.
Getting the organs and brain to develop properly will doubtless prove to be a massive problem, as will the other specifications of Faust. He wants us to create, in its genetic code, unicorns, pegasi, and ‘alicorns’, which are apparently some kind of bastardized mix between the two. Not only that, but he wants us to make sure these little horses can’t hurt children-ever. A horn strong enough to survive, but incapable of hurting a child? Hooves that meet the same criteria, that still need to be hard enough to survive on urban surfaces? Fur as soft as silk and hypoallergenic to boot? I can already tell that this is going to take years, if we even get past the first obstacle, and long hours. I won’t be seeing Jessica much, if at all, but…we need that treatment…and one day she’ll understand why her dad worked so much…one day.”
Log 034845HDP_2445, time since Project Eden Inception: 1837d/15h/20m.
“Today has been…frustrating. Faust has pulled one of my best researchers, Dr. Jellenheimer, and his team off Project Eden, after they had been making substantial progress towards our goal with their subjects, to start another one at the request of ‘several high-ranking members of the military’, and they are taking their research with them as well. I have to admit, I did not handle this with my usual professional poise. Both Faust and I had to be seen to by the facility’s doctor after our meeting, and whatever goodwill that might have existed between us is definitely over.
What was I supposed to do, though? His loss will set us back months, possibly years. Thousands upon thousands of man hours lost. Faust said it was an unfortunate but necessary loss due to the connections the company has with the military and implicitly hinted that they have been funding part of our project. Fine, but you could have at least left us the genetic code, and taken someone less talented than my best researcher.
It’s not a deathblow to the project, I suppose. After all, what he created wasn’t exactly what we were going for. Creepy, beady eyes, sharp teeth, an odd structure…his subjects were unsettling, even with no real consciousness in them yet. That’s another problem we have run into…having to pull and stitch together our subjects from so many different DNA sources has had…detrimental effects on our subject’s cognitive health. Our most promising subjects are born alive…barely…but are effectively comatose. Enough for the basic functions of breathing, et cetera, nothing more. Good luck to Jellenheimer, I suppose. It’s not going to be easy for him to try to breathe true life into whatever the hell kind of miniature bioweapon the U.S. military clearly sees in his creatures, and to be honest, I would rather not know what they have planned for it.”
Log 054843HDP_6232, time since Project Eden Inception: 3532d/2h/06m.
“It is done. We finally have our first stable subject, at least, physically. Millions of man hours spent, an unfathomable amount of money, countless dead animals, and more than a few divorces and disinheritances among our team. I’ve saved Jessica’s life…at the cost of missing most of her childhood. She starts high school tomorrow, and I won’t even be there to bring her to it on her first day. I know she thinks of me as cold, uncaring, and obsessed with work…but…she’s still here. Something that would have not been true ten years ago. One day, maybe when these things are done and the NDAs expire, I can tell her what I did for her. That I worked all these ninety hour weeks for her and only her. One day.
It resembles more of a small, fuzzy, mutant pig-horse than a true pony, and we have not perfected the form of the alicorn, pegasi, or unicorn variants, but it is close enough and that is the price we have had to pay to keep the damn thing alive to maturity. It is really a miracle we have gotten it stable to begin with, with everything we had to modify, splice together, and construct. Horse, rhino, dog, cat, chinchilla, rat, thycaline, pig…almost every mammalian family is represented in it in some way, shape, or form. And yes, that includes a bit of our own DNA as well, specifically in shaping the damn thing’s brain. I can already imagine the dressing-down my medical ethics professor would give me for what I have done…but to replicate the work of God, sometimes you have to use the methods of Satan.
We have not yet solved the problem of consciousness, let alone sentience, however. I basically had to force feed the poor white thing from the moment it plopped out of one of our mutant breeding mares along with its seven dead brothers and sisters all the way into its maturity. It is still in a coma-like state. It can breathe. It can have food shoved into it and digested. It can void itself. It can even ejaculate with viable sperm, if stimulated properly. But it has not opened its eyes. It doesn’t make any real verbalizations or sounds It just exists. We have crafted the form of this…as Faust has so lovingly put it “fluffy pony”…but not the substance.
I told Faust my concerns, that even though we have accomplished this, more than worthy of several Nobel prizes, it may be impossible to produce more than the pitiful white thing that he saw. I did not like the smile that he then gave me, nor the pat on the back that followed. Even less the revelation that we would be getting a massive influx of new team members who had already been working on that problem for as long as we had been working on the physical aspect. Neuroscientists and computer engineers of the same caliber as my own team. I am ever more certain that this has to be about more than these creatures-if that program cost anything ours did, won’t recoup the cost of sales for at least half a century, and no CEO looks that far ahead for a product.
Still…I am proud. Proud that we have accomplished what even I thought was impossible, against all odds. That we have mimicked God, even if only on such a small level. And if we manage to imbue this form with consciousness…are we not gods ourselves?”