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Humanzee

By Shawn Daring

By Shawn DaringPublished 3 years ago 24 min read
1
Humanzee
Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

I know, I know, this doesn’t seem fair to you right now. Still, just give me a chance, listen to my story, my past, and maybe you’ll understand why this is happening.

Even when I was just eight years old, my mom couldn’t help but disapprove of my plans for the future.

“When I grow up, I want to be a monkey!”

Sighing, she would calmly explain for the millionth time to me that it was impossible for me to become a monkey, that playing pretend was fine but not when adults wanted me to be serious. Looking back, I’m sure she was only annoyed because my ten-year old cousin had started proclaiming to all the aunties and uncles that he was going to be a doctor when he grew up just like his daddy.

“Okay, if I can’t be one, I’ll just live with them. And you won’t be there to make me brush my teeth and comb my hair!”

I probably would have become some free-range, anti-toothpaste hippy if she hadn’t finally given in and decided to give me all the monkey toys, documentaries, zoo trips, movies, and books she could get her hands on. I think I still have that first plushie somewhere, that I named “tails.” But it was the books that really did the trick, showing me that serious adults could live in the jungle if they wanted to.

“Mummy! I want to be like Jane Goodall when I grow up. I want to be a, uh, primate-oh-loge-ith?”

My dad promised her it was a phase, that I would probably grow out of it by the time I learned how to pronounce primatologist. And sure, over the years, it would change to wildlife veterinarian, or ecologist, or environmental scientist, or animal behavior specialist, and, I’m embarrassed to admit, even to SoundCloud rapper the year that Ramya broke up with me. But, in the end, I’d always go back to Jane Goodall, who lived as an ape to study apes, even learning their language and sleeping with them.

I set out to graduate high school at 16, because you have to be pretty young and healthy to live with apes, and I wasn’t going to waste that time sitting in a classroom reading Shakespeare. When I did what I said I would do, my parents were so proud of me that they said I could have whatever I wanted as my grad gift, even a car. Of course, all I wanted at that age was to meet Jane Goodall in person, so my mom drove me 5 hours to the state college to attend her guest lecture. She even stood next to me when I got to meet Jane Goodall, whose wrinkles and scars suggested she had lived a full life many times over.

“Hi, wow, um, it’s an honor Doctor” I said, doing my best to sound coherent. At that moment, nobody would have guessed I was the boy genius who won the high school state science fair as a freshman. “I was just, uh, well I read your book when I was a little kid, ‘My Life with the Chimpanzees’ and I’ve wanted to be a primatologist pretty much my whole life.” I was so flustered, I ended up going on a long tangent about how I got bit by a gray langar that I tried to pet when I was visiting family in India and had to get a rabies shot. Eventually, I asked her the question that I had written down in my diary the night before and practiced saying over and over so I would get it right: “Do you have any advice for aspiring primatologists?”

And, to her credit, my mother didn’t scold me for crying the whole ride home. She told me she was sure Dr. Goodall didn’t mean to discourage me, that she was simply being realistic about the future when she told me it was very unlikely I’d be able to study any of The Great Apes (those are Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Orangutangs, and Bonobos by the way) in the wild, because humans are destroying the planet. Her advice was to figure out how to save all these species, because she only had so many years left on Earth and won’t be able to.

Maybe I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you now if this never happened. Okay, you’re right, it was my choice to take her advice to heart. I stopped using plastic bags, stopped eating meat and dairy and even honey (it belongs to the bees who made it), bought a used Nissan Leaf as my first car, composted, recycled, used CFL’s, and took five-minute cold showers. I did everything I was supposed to do, but I knew it wasn’t going to be enough, that no matter how many times I brought my groceries home in a reusable tote bag or brought my metal straw with me to the college dining hall. Because poachers were killing off the 2,000 Western Lowland Gorillas that were left, and the very Chimpanzees that Dr. Goodall lived with in Tanzania were dying every day from polio due to increased human contact.

And who was I to judge people for taking up space in their own country, or killing one gorilla they didn’t care about so they could have money to feed their family? What was the solution: force the country of Tanzania to undergo population control to save the chimps? Get funding to hire armed guards to protect Gorillas, nomadic Gorillas? I really thought I’d have some better answers after undergrad, even if I overloaded on credits to finish in 2.5 years.

At this point my mother would always ask me why I was so dead-set on these “monkeys” (I tried to get her to say non-human primates). Why not study Birds or Bears or Jaguars or literally any other animal that might still be around in 20 years? I never could give her a direct answer. Maybe you could have someone in this lab come examine my brain and figure out why this obsession stook.

If I had to guess, it’s because they are so humanlike. Everyone knows that Bonobos and Chimpanzees' DNA is a 99.85% match to our own. Looking into your eyes right now, I couldn’t tell you with 100% certainty whether you were a man or an ape. Go to the zoo one day, and you’ll see what I mean. You can see the gears turning behind their eyes, and it’s nothing like how a dog looks when they’re searching for a treat or something. We’ve taught these guys sign language, had them solve complex puzzles, you name it. And sure, as Dr. Goodall will tell you, they certainly have a dark side. A good chunk of her research was spent proving that chimpanzees engage in war with rivaling tribes. She even obtained video evidence of a female cannibalizing her own baby. Unflanged male Orangutans - the ones without those huge cheek pads- frequently engage in “enforced copulation.” Given how smart we know apes are, well, it’s possible they have some concept of morality, it’s possible they know what they are doing is wrong. Still, however violent primates might be, they usually only kill if it helps the survival of their tribe, there’s no “ape crusades” or racism or homophobia. Actually, pretty much all female bonobos show attraction to both genders. And silver-back gorillas, the leaders of their pack, if you ignore the fact that they demand first dibs on all the females, they’re basically benevolent dictators. They eat last, and despite being the biggest, they don’t hoard food, and they help the juvenile males build their nests each time they set up camp in a new spot. Wouldn’t it be in their best interest to kill these juveniles, who will challenge them when they are grown? Show me one human dictator who doesn’t keep the finest things for himself, who cares, or is even aware, of the plight of his subjects?

Hey at least pay attention! Okay, fine, I guess you don’t like non-human primate trivia. Where was I? Oh yes! Well, with no plan to save the Great Apes yet, I did what any confused teenager who needs to appease his parents would do: I went to grad school. Twice. I got a Ph.D. in Conservation Biology and in Genetic Engineering. The first one needs no explanation, and if you ask my mom why I got the second one, she’ll tell you it’s because I watched Jurassic Park too many times.

I got it because Dr. Goodall was a liar. She had plenty of time on Earth, lived to be 103 in fact. She was 93 when I met her again at a research conference, shortly after I got my first Ph.D. She came up to me actually, asking where she knew me from.

“Your guest lecture at Washington State, 2016 maybe? I was the youngest member in the audience.”

She told me she never forget a face and asked if I had solved ‘the issue’ yet. I told her I had a Ph. D in this thing and years of research experience, but still no ideas that hadn’t been tried yet. I knew my thesis on saving Gorillas was painfully unrealistic, I just needed to submit something that sounded smart so I could graduate. She said that she’d let me in on a secret, that nobody in this field had any optimism that The Great Apes could be saved by normal conservation methods, and that the only people who could possibly do it were the genetic engineers. She told me that she hoped someone young like me could genetically engineer Great Apes that can survive tropical climates so we could sustain populations on uninhabited islands, or maybe make ones that could be raised in captivity and let into the wild later with no problems. With a twinkle in her eye, she also suggested we could just make a bunch of clones.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. My hero, the woman who I basically let dictate the course of my life, was a crazy old woman. An ape on an island! Imagine! Still, her nonsensical ramblings did get the ball running. What if we made tinier tweaks, like chimpanzees that could survive Polio, and slowly introduced them into the wild? Or engineer Orangutans with a slightly more sensitive fight-or-flight response, so that it would be harder for poachers to kill them? If Mountain Gorillas could survive at an elevation even 200 feet higher, they wouldn’t be shot by farmers protecting their crops. When I got my second Ph. D., I was bursting at the seam with ideas, and I even had proof-of-concept for a couple. All I needed was some money, a lab, and a competent team.

Of course nobody would give it to me. Which University gives two shits about saving the Great Apes? We didn’t have Coca-Cola on our side like the Polar Bears did. Listen man, only a handful of people in the world care about anyone besides themselves. As a double-doctorate, my best guess is that there’s 200 people in the world who think about the Great Apes on a daily basis, and 0 out of those 200 have the money to do anything about it.

So, I did what any 23-year-old with student loans for 3 different degrees who thought he would never be able to achieve his life goals would do. I got drunk. Then I got high. Then I cried. Then I binged watched a shitty CW show and ate hot Cheetos and didn’t shower for a week. And then, finally, I put my dream on hold and started applying for any jobs I was qualified for, trying to convince myself that if I saved enough I could fund my own ideas.

I was a high school biology teacher for students who couldn’t care less about biology for a bit. Then I was a tour guide at a zoo, which was better. I got hired for a few guest lectures here and there and got some money off of a blog I started. After a year of hopping around, I finally found a job where I could actually use one of my PH. D’s.

Bear with me, because this isn’t one of those jobs you can sum up in one line. Well, if you had to, it would be “non-human primate specialist,” but that doesn’t really mean anything. See this little sticker on my driver’s license? It means that I’m an organ donor; my whole family is too. We have landed on the Moon and made phones that can only be unlocked with face scans, but our best idea for saving sick people is to give them organs from people who died young. For a while, we’ve tried to put human stem cells in pig embryos, which, if done correctly, could create pigs with human kidneys and livers and such. Imagine that: an entire barn full of pigs we could harvest for their organs! Imagine how many lives could be saved!

The thing is, as you might imagine, pigs and humans are pretty damn different. The pigs that they could make were just the tiniest bit human, about .0001% human and 99.999% pig. These experiments are called chimeras, not hybrids, because hybrids have to be 50-50. And, so far, no pig embryo with human stem cells has survived longer than 3 days of gestation.

Like I was saying before, chimpanzees are much closer to humans than pigs are. Some early simulations suggested that a chimpanzee chimera could have about 13% of their cells be human cells. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it makes a pretty big difference. People got pretty antsy about starting this project, because creating any sort of chimpanzee chimera could get really fucked up really fast. What if that 13% is enough for them to speak human languages, to beg to be released? It’s definitely possible, especially if those human stem cells migrate to the brain region. Would we still harvest them for organs?

When the lab reached out to me, they assured me that wasn’t their intention. All embryos would be destroyed 14 days into gestation, if we could even get that far, which is right before a central nervous system develops. The end goal of the research was simply to observe how the human stem cells interacted with the chimpanzee cells and use what we learned to make the pig chimeras successfully come to term. I made them promise up and down that they wouldn’t ever try to hit 15 days, as did 12 different government agencies and 30 different watchdog non-profits. I did as much due diligence as I could, even when I was broke as hell working dead-end jobs. Can you at least give me some credit for that?

When they brought me in, the best they could do was 8 days, which shocked the global science community. I’ll spare you all the boring details this time, but just 1 year after they brought me in, we were able to hit 13 days. For the first time in my life, my parents were truly proud of me. They sat all the uncles and aunties down and explained what I was doing in depth. Although, they had started to ask me when I was going to find a girl and get married.

Anyways, I was so close to getting to 14 days, so close to being able to use our findings to help the people making pig chimeras. We had more funding than we knew what to do with, because everyone wanted to say they played a role in this. There were even whispers about me getting a Nobel Prize.

That’s when we were paid a visit by GeneWatch, one of the non-profit watchdogs, because they didn’t think the government watching our every move was enough. I hated these guys. They usually never know anything about the science behind what we are doing, and always assume the worst of us. And they always want to touch everything and annoy my team while we are trying to work.

This inspector seemed nice enough at first, even shook my hand and introduced himself as “Mister W.” I thought that was a bit weird but didn’t have time to dwell on it because within seconds he tried to touch one of our Erlenmeyer flasks without putting gloves on first. Our gray-haired microbiologist looked like he was seconds away from murdering Mr. W when he asked if he could look at the embryos through a microscope to “see if they were really only 13 days old,” because it’s impossible to determine the age of an embryo that way. He also spent 10 minutes interrogating Dr. Suarez on his experience as a veterinarian, because he thought someone with that background would only be present if we intended to make real animals. Once we had finally convinced this Mr. W we were taking all the ethical precautions we said that we were, he invited me to lunch. Obviously, I didn’t want to sit and have some old white guy lecture me about ethics, but if I refused, they’d accuse our group of being unwilling to answer all of their questions.

“Dr. Brahma, I must say I’m quite impressed. I never thought that we would get this close to a chimpanzee chimera in my lifetime, nor that the person to do so would be this young. I read that Washington Post article on you too, and I really felt bad about all those Gorillas dying out. With only 23 mountain gorillas left now, it seems like there’s no hope for them.”

“23, that’s the exact number. How did you even know that?”

“Well, we do our research over at GeneWatch. We like to get to know the main scientists in charge and figure out whether we need to continue to keep an eye on them. Little chats like this are honestly much more useful than our inspections. I wanted to ask you, do you think you could actually bring a chimpanzee chimera to term within the next 5 years or so?”

“Seriously, if you’re going to throw a trick question at me at least make it subtle, man. Like we told you over and over again, we destroy the embryo’s at 14 days, no if’s and’s or but’s. You even saw the machines the government put in that send messages to every relevant organization the second it detects a 15-day old embryo.”

“Yes, yes I trust you Doctor. I’m just asking out of personal curiosity now. Could you take it to term?”

“Yeah, I don’t think you are. But I don’t think you’re going to leave us alone until you get your answer either, are you? I can’t keep having my team distracted, so yeah, I could probably get it done within 5 years. But, even then, there’s no guarantee that the chimera would survive, nor do we know exactly what environment to raise it in. Pigs are just much more suited for that portion of it. So, like I told BBC 2 days ago, it’s in nobody's best interest to actually bring these things to life. And I fucking love chimpanzee’s, you think I want to harvest them for organs?”

“My my, I did not think one the world’s best scientists would be so foul mouthed. But Doctor, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I’m sure you’ve heard of that phrase before. Theoretically, if you had the funding, the team, the motivation, and the time, do you think you could figure out how to make the chimpanzee chimeras survive into adulthood?”

“Fine, if you want to talk theoretically, it’s possible. But right now, I’m the only one in the world who could make that work, and you’d have to put a gun to my head before I harm any animal, let alone an animal that’s 13% human. Well, actually, if you wanted it to survive into sexual maturity, it could probably only be 10% human. Anyways, you look like someone who majored in Business. How could someone even get billions of dollars of funding for an illegal project without the IRS noticing? Someone smarter than you would catch us pretty quickly. Are you happy now?”

“You wouldn’t harm any animal? You’re perfectly okay with sending your findings to the pig chimera team?”

“That’s totally different. I’m not even on that project, we are just sending them our data. That’s how science works if you didn’t know. Plus, I’m a vegan, unlike you.”

“So your values aren’t for sale?”

“Yes! You’re finally starting to get it aren’t you?”

“Take a bite of my burger.”

“What the fuck? Are you deaf? I just told you I’m vegan. And that has your spit on it too! This is too weird, are you even from GeneWatch or just a pervert?”

Instead of responding, that creep slowly took a checkbook and pen out of his blazer pocket. He wrote me a check for a million dollars like we were on a gameshow. You can imagine how surreal this all felt for me, I genuinely thought this was a lucid dream.

“It’s yours if you take a bite. What would a million dollars mean to you?”

“Okay, you’re definitely just dumb. You think I can just cash a check like that with no questions asked? I’d be arrested in seconds!”

“Oh, that would be troublesome, wouldn’t it. If only we could, say, create a shell company in your name, and make it look like we’re funding some other research you do on the side.”

“Like you could do that.”

“Not me, the people I work for.”

“They’d create a shell company just for me to take a bite of a burger?”

“You know what, forget about the burger and the money. I’ll admit, you’re not the type of man to sell out for a few bucks. That trick usually works though. What I’m going to offer you is something better: the change to achieve a dream you abandoned many years ago. I’m going to give you all the funding you need to carry out your ideas and save The Great Apes. Whether you go with cloning, or genetic engineering, whatever. You’ll be fully funded.”

“Bullshit, nobody has that kind of money. And you haven’t even told me what you want from me yet.”

“Right! Sorry. GeneWatch is a watchdog group, but not in the typical sense. We keep an eye out for people who are actually close to achieving living, breathing chimera’s, because that’s what we want. I think you might be the one, kid. Congratulations! Some of the richest, most powerful people in the world are going to fulfill your every wish if you just give them what they want.”

“Okay, let’s say I believe you, for some weird reason. What do you even want these chimeras for? If it’s organ harvesting, there’s already plenty of ways to get that shit on the black market.”

“Well, everyone has their own ideas. Think about it, these chimeras would have the strength of four men, be smarter than chimpanzees, but still dumber than humans. It’s the ultimate labor force! Oh, and then there’s the vain old-money people who want a pet that nobody else has: normal chimpanzees are too mainstream. And think about their use in the military too! An insignificant warlord could take over his whole country if he had ape soldiers that could shoot, climb trees, and survive in the jungle just fine. But between you and me, being super rich and powerful kind of sucks. At some point, there’s nothing that gives you excitement anymore, not even illegal drugs. Sometimes they do things just so that they can feel alive again for 2 seconds. How is it any different from buying a private island that they never use, or running for President?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to harm animals just so some rich dick can get his daily hit of dopamine.”

“Okay, don’t think about that then. Think about how this is the only chance you have to save The Great Apes before they are gone forever. You and I both know there’s no other way you’ll get the funding that you need. You wouldn’t make, say, 100 humanzees- that’s what we are calling them for now - to save 4 entire species? You’re a scientist, certainly you understand the logic behind sacrificing the few to save the many. Are you telling me you wouldn’t shoot one person to save 100 either? Or that you’d refuse to help the pig chimera team that you know could potentially save every single person on the organ transplant waiting list?”

I was silent for a while. He took this as a sign he was winning.

“You wouldn’t even be harming them, really. We’ll let you raise them in the conditions that you think are best. And, when their new owners get them, they’d be treated like any pet, or worker, or soldier. Rich people are nihilistic, not sadistic, there’s a difference Doctor. You’ll go down in history for this, by the way.”

“I haven’t given you an answer yet. And you haven’t proved that this isn’t some elaborate scheme for you to expose me and my team as unethical.”

“Unfortunately, there’s nothing I could show you or tell you that would prove what I’m saying is true.” He gently placed a plane ticket on the table. “Meet me and my bosses in Switzerland in 2 weeks. If nothing else, you’ll get an all-expense paid vacation. Think about it, that’s all we are asking. Think about the Gorilla’s and all that.”

I did think about the Gorillas, and the Chimpanzees, and the Bonobos, and the Orangutans, who nobody had the means of saving.

I thought about how I would feel if they went extinct, and I knew I could have done something about it but chose not to.

I thought about me explaining what a Gorilla was to my son in 10 or so years, the same way my dad had to explain to me what dial-up internet was.

I thought about how proud my mom would be if I saved The Great Apes, and how distraught she’d be if she ever found out how I did it.

I thought about what these humanzees would look like, less hairy than chimps, a more human-like nose perhaps, but still walking on all fours and having 200 pounds of pure muscle, which would be enough for most people to justify treating them as disposable. Especially when I could just keep making more.

I thought about how I’d feel raising these humanzees, knowing that they’d be used as cannon fodder or exotic pets or forced to do physical labor.

I thought about that little kid surrounded by books and documentaries and toys, the kid who only became a man because he was focused on solving one specific problem.

I thought about the boy genius who could have just gone into finance or something and actually had money in the bank and a good social life if he weren’t so stubborn.

I thought about what I wanted written on my tombstone, what I wanted people to say at my funeral.

I thought about the kind of mark I wanted to leave on the world after I was gone.

I thought about that trolley problem they posed to us in my freshman philosophy class, not the base version, but one of the more interesting variations. Would you pull the lever if it were your best friend on one track and four strangers on the other? And, if you did, are you a bad person, or just doing what anyone else would have done?

I still don’t know the answer to that second question, but as I’m sitting here telling you this story, you can guess what my answer to the first question is. I never wanted to bring all of you into this world just to bring you so much pain, but I tell each and every one of you this story before I have to send you off to GeneWatch HQ, because I don’t want you to think your sacrifice is in vain. You’re going to save the species that makes up 90% of your body.

None of you have spoken beyond simple statements and commands so far. It’s about as much as a 5-year-old human might be able to say. Still, it’s quite possible you can understand language better than you speak it. I, for one, think it’s worth explaining this to you just in case. Anyways, if you’ll just let me put this leash around your neck — hey give it back! This isn’t a game, I don’t want to come in there and get it from you. Okay, fine, now can you just, no this isn’t for my neck, oh my god don’t pull that hard! Help he’s trying to kill me I can’t brea—

Fantasy
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About the Creator

Shawn Daring

Aspiring fiction writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia

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