Bezoar's Experiment

Bezoar's Experiment

by Cleve Taylor

It is 2034 on a tiny privately owned island off the coast of Belfast, Maine. The island houses the biocyber laboratory of CupolaBio Industries, a playground for the brilliant but psychotic billionaire cyber bio-engineer known simply as Bezoar, who uses the laboratory to indulge in his most exotic biocyber fantasies without government or peer interference or oversight. His areas of interest are bound only by his morals, and since he has no morals, he has no bounds.

Back in the year 2020, during a fitful night where he dreamed that he lived inside the brain of an octopus, he awakened to the hoot of a barn owl. This naturally led him to wonder about the owl's incredible hearing ability which the owl uses to identify and track the minute rustlings of small unseen prey. He wondered if he could use Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Pallindromic Repeats (CRISPR Cas9) technology to introduce the owl’s hearing ability into a human cell and then grow that cell into a living human. He knew of no practical use for such a person; his only interest was in the challenge of merging owl and human abilities. If he grew bored with the project, he would simply dispose of any sentient creatures resulting from his research.

Since he had so many cells so close at hand, he used cells from his own body. If anything came of his research, he would not have the family of a cell donor suing him. For the barn owl, he had his staff find the nest of the owl that had awakened him and they took an owlet from the nest from which to collect cells. They had to identify the DNA strings in the owl that addressed hearing, and hearing DNA in the human genome so that cutting and splicing would be limited to that single feature.

That was fourteen years ago. CRISPR did the job. The only problem was that, somehow, eating and other miscellaneous DNA strands were inserted into the human cell along with the hearing strands. Bezoar recognized this early on, but he was curious to see how his creature would develop, so he let it evolve unregulated.

Now, fourteen years later he was reasonably sure that what he had now is what he would have if he allowed his experiment to continue another ten or twenty years.

Bezoar had no feelings about his creation one way or the other. It was just a blown experiment. He studied the thing in front of him. It had no vocal cords, but it could communicate through sign language, guttural hoots, and body language. It only ate live animals. When very young this consisted of laboratory mice and as it grew it ate larger animals like rabbits, fur and all, and regurgitated owl-like pellets.

He had coal black eyes and his head was rounded like the Tytoalba, barn owl, with which he shared DNA. He had no ears, just holes through which sound traveled. And he did have the owls super hearing capability. He could hear and identify his feeder's car when it entered the parking lot after driving from the small airport. No one else could hear the car.

Bezoar wondered how much of him was in the creature. The original intent was that the result would be basically him but with owl-like hearing. The lack of vocal cords had scuttled any such interest and no attempt had been made to exploit any inherited intelligence. Mostly the lab staff was so repulsed by its eating habits that they ignored whatever else their boss had created.

He decided, thinking to himself, "Time to get rid of this thing. I'll have it put to sleep tomorrow and cremated with the lab waste."

Bezoar's creature had just been sitting there, ignoring Bezoar's presence. Suddenly it sat up, alert, its black eyes wide. It thought to itself, "Doesn't this fool know that I can hear what he thinks? I have no desire to die. I am not through with my experiments with these people. It is time to get rid of this person."

It went to the shoulder level opening in its cage where food, blankets, and supplies were passed through to it and its trash was returned to the staff. The opening was almost, but not quite, large enough to insert a head through.

"Hoo, Hoo. Hoo hoo hooh?" It was clearly trying to communicate with Bezoar. To Bezoar's surprise, it gave a come-hither nod, and clumsily motioned to Bezoar to come over to the opening. It appeared that the creature wanted to give Bezoar something.

Curious, Bezoar went to the opening and stooped over a little to better see what the creature had in its hands. In a split second the only thing in the creature’s hands was Bezoar's head.

The next morning staff found Bezoar's body pulled up next to the bars of the cage with several parts missing and torn away.

Bezoar's creature stood in the corner of the cage regurgitating large pellets.