((This is not canon nor intended to become canon. Its simply a story I thought would be interesting))
“Director Roberts, this way please.”
The air conditioning in the place was oppressively cold as always, she noted. The FBI liked it that way, of course. Interrogation rooms were never supposed to be pleasant. Still, Andrea Roberts wondered if it was less a matter of proven best practices and more that a polar bear actually called the shots on these sorts of decisions. The junior agent opened the door into a well-lit viewing room, furniture centered around a large closed-circuit television system.
Several monitors flanked a central HDTV, showing multiple angles for the same subject. In this case geneticist Murry Asher Davis. Older gentleman, about 75. Thin but not gaunt. Still some color in his cheeks. White hair, thin and combed back, contrasting think dark glasses issued by the jail. Seemed healthy enough for having spent 30 years in jail.
“Where are we at?” Roberts asked.
“He’s been cooperative, ma’am. We have been interviewing him primarily about his time at jail. Small talk. He seems happy to have someone to talk to that isn’t incarcerated.”
“Have you asked him about the incident yet?”
“No ma’am. Per your orders.”
Andrea bit her finger, calloused as it was. Bad habit but it beat smoking. The higher ups liked pulling ol’ MAD out now and then, wanting him to talk about the development of the fluffies. He was always open about that. Talking shop, it seemed. He loved talking about searching for DNA on the project. Cats, dogs, fish, geckos, frogs, birds, nematodes and even tardigrades.
When it came to his part in helping the terrorists responsible for the raid? He usually stonewalled them then and there. He’d lean back in his chair, smile, and ask if he could go back to his cell.
She figured what was really going on was showmanship. Not his, of course. He was a permanent guest of the United States Government. Publicly reviled by those that remembered him, politically inconsequential so nobody put any effort into getting him out. The fact that after the raid he turned himself in certainly cemented things any ways. No, the higher outs liked to trot him out now and then for their own entertainment. Until now.
Earlier they got him going on topic. Social and environmental stressors on fish and lizards. Observations of butterflies and moths from larval stage to adulthood. Genetic noise and cruft within the genome being repurposed by Hasbio for “programming” and future expansion.
Standing behind the operator, she leaned down a microphone and ordered, “Ask him about New Mexico.”
“So, Doctor Davis,” she heard from the room. “We did have a question for you concerning your old line of work.”
“Of course, young man. You folks always do!”
“Do you catch the news while in your cell?”
“Sometimes. When you’ve been alive as long as I have you realize its mostly reruns at this point.”
“Well, I’ve got something for you to read.”
Andrea watched intently. The body language consultants noted he was probably a good poker player. Not obvious tells as he read. One page down. Two. Three. Four.
“Do you have than this summary?” he asked.
“We thought you’d ask,” replied the agent, handing a substantially thicker document over the table.
“What is he reading, boss?”
“Shhh!”
He knows something, she thought. Tiny micro-expressions began to spread through his body. A twinge at the temples. A momentary tightening at the cheeks. Tightening of his thumbs. Breathing sped up a hair. She looked at a different monitor.
Page 16 of the Yamato-Chung report.
Still in the introduction, laying out the procedures for the experiment. 14,000 fluffies, half male, half female, various ages. All kept separate and in smaller groups of 1,000 each with one group per sex being the control. The rest were being tested with different long-term flufficides that a government contractor had put up for bid. The pens had been treated one, two, three, four, five, and six months ago to test the efficacy of them at each stage of the chemical decay before becoming completely inert.
In theory the flufficide only needed to encounter a small portion of a herd. A herd of 1000 was highly unusual but was also a recognizable step towards an impending megaherd. One that was turned to trigger an alarm using the many photo and video satellites used by the government, smartphone GPS/map companies, and more. Through social contact it would spread, interact with their biology producing a toxin that would spread through bodily fluids and ingestion. Social creatures like fluffies would regularly groom each other, mate, and either through poor social status, “sorry poopies,” or hunger ingest feces.
The toxin itself damaged their kidneys. Well, really, any kidneys. Hence the short active life of the instigating flufficide. It took time to work and was readily treatable if diagnosed in a human or normal animal. There was even an antidote of sorts that could be spread in a similar fashion for the rest of the ecosystem.
“Aaaah, parthenogenesis and spontaneous transexual metamorphosis occurred in three male subjects plus ten females.”
“What the what now?”
Andrea did a double take at the screen. He was smiling. His poker face was gone. His whole façade was gone. She could read everything.
“I suppose your friends in the building want to know what that means. Parthenogenesis is a form of asexual reproduction for some rather interesting life forms out there. I know, I know, asexual reproduction is boring is what they say. But its not! It’s quite fascinating.” He grinned.
“But I’m afraid whoever wrote your report was quite incorrect. There was no spontaneous transformation between male to female in stallion herds there.”
“I’m coming down.”
Roberts ran out of the viewing room, down the hall, throwing open a pair of doors going from the private section of the building to the “public” area. Other agents got out of her way as soon as they saw her coming, quiet stares soon replaced hushed questions when she passed.
She stopped in front of J16, paused to collect herself, then entered.
Murray was still smiling.
“You should’ve seen this poor boy’s face. Went white as a sheet! Was it something I said, or something you said?”
“You, out.”
The agent excused himself.
“Ah, the worker bees are getting kicked out. Are you the queen here?”
“Its all over your face, David.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose it is.”
“Tell me what I’m seeing.”
“Rewarded patience, I suppose.”
“Patience for…?”
He smiled again. “Did you know that fluffies are really quite complex, from a genetics standpoint?”
Andrea watched him. Seeing him up close like this was more informative, and he was smug. Pleased with himself. It was easy to tell from a screen, sure, but a recording was never the same as a live performance. This was a speech starting. No, a monologue. The pages turning in his mind were almost audible, each step rehearsed in his mind hundreds of times.
Arms crossed, the director sat back, staring dead-faced at the lecture turned performance. It was his time to shine, all being recorded for the most powerful people on the earth. But she had the front row seat.
“I hope I’m not boring you with all this, ah…” he paused.
“You can call me Andrea.”
“A strong name for a queen.”
Universities would fight for the footage of this later, she thought. Six hours filled with advanced theoretical genetics went by, coffee refilled, and the lecture continued.
The standing but unofficial policy from her predecessor and his predecessor was if he wanted to speak you let him. If someone wants to hang themselves, you let them pull out as much rope as they want.
“Now, Queen Andrea, I think that lays out the basics. You’ve been quite attentive this whole time!”
“My earpiece is tuned into the Yankees game, sorry.”
He chuckled. “Liar. I have seen good students before and you are a studier. You probably graduated with honors. I think you got the gist of what I was saying.”
Andrea frowned. She did.
“I’d like to know why you faked being with PETA.”
“Oh, you are sharp! I had not even gotten to that yet. What gave it away?”
“You’ve not once talked about animal welfare or the rights of the fluffies. Really, you have talked about nothing abstract or philosophical at all. You’re talking like a zoological engineer if anything.”
“Now, I suppose this will be going to far lesser people than yourself. Should I give a too-long, didn’t read version of this? Maybe sum it up, nice and pretty with a bow on top?”
“I think it would be appreciated. You know how they love their sound-bites.”
“Where’s the camera?” Murray asked, smoothing back wisps of white hair.
“You’re looking at one in the corner there. Is this the Reader’s Digest version of your manifesto?”
“Oooh, right once more. Ahead of me again.”
A sip of water, throat cleared, and he looked to where the walls met the ceiling.
“Hello. My name is Doctor Murry Asher Davis. Well over 30 years ago I joined the Hasbio corporation to engage in the creation of an artificial life form you so affectionately call the fluffy. 30 years ago I was arrested helping PETA release them into the wild. While it is true that I helped, I was not and am not a member of PETA.”
Another sip.
“50 years ago I was originally planning to go into environmental studies. I was so passionate back then! I was going to help save the world from climate change! Ah, to be young and innocent again. But I didn’t. I went into genetics. Do you know why, Mister and Madam Politicians? Because of you. Because everywhere I looked I saw that you had this incredible capability to ignore the data. Because it was inconvenient. Because your constituents didn’t like it. Because your campaign donors and their dark money made you turn a blind eye. Because at the end of the day your role wasn’t to leaders but to be lead down the path of least resistance.”
Murray took off his glasses with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other.
“So I too joined you. Genetics offered better money. Maybe I improved some lives, but frankly I only helped line the pockets of some very amoral people. And I became amoral. Amorality, I find, eventually leads to evil via negligence.”
He smiled.
“But Hasbio gave me a new chance at life. I sat at my desk, working and researching, creating this perfect, innocent being. Ideal in every way, or so the goal was. A children’s toy! I was an empty god creating a mockery of what I had cherished years before. A thing with no true place in the world, with a marketing budget and retail supply chain. And then PETA caught wind of it and started to talk to me about making a difference.”
Murray paused for a moment, collecting himself.
“So, with the tools before me, I had an epiphany. I could make a problem that you couldn’t ignore. That your lazy, complacent voters couldn’t ignore. That your corporate masters couldn’t ignore. And I’d use PETA to do it.”
Laughter mixed with tears as he spoke. Her stomach twisted into a knot.
“The ‘wasted space’ in each fluffy was set aside for expansion. Hasbio thought, and I expect still thinks, its unclaimed. After the raid they lost the staff and resources to know what was there. But I know what’s there. I hid parts of DNA from animals that can change their sexes or reproduce asexually in that genetic wasteland Hasbio gave me. No one fluffy had all the components needed to do either. Hundreds could mate in any combination and not get the sequences right. Hundreds of generations could do it and not do so.”
Andrea watched as Murray’s shoulders grew heavy. He moved back, settling into a chair. She grew unsettled realizing her posture matched his.
“But I knew… I KNEW that they would come together. It was a one in a hundred billion chance. And I’m not being figurative here. I did the math. Took me a year to do the math, actually.”
His laughter was bitter, she noted.
“But here we are, 30 years later and actually a little ahead of schedule. With their rapid maturing process and large broods, the pre-alpha fluffies released by PETA were a genetic time bomb waiting to go off. By this point I’d expect over 14 trillion fluffies to have passed through this world, and I think even you ‘world leaders’ can understand what I’m getting to now.”
Director Andrea Roberts felt the urge to leave the room. Maybe quietly. Maybe screaming. But nails clenched into the chair told her to stay. He was almost done.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the world, I would like to tell you that the genome has solved the puzzle I presented to it a billion fluffy generations ago. The United States government has already discovered fluffies in New Mexico that have no need for sexual reproduction. They are literally indistinguishable from normal fluffies you see on the street, have in your home, or wander around the world feral. And if you do not drive them to extinction immediately, they will be the death of you.”
