Introspection

In Saint Belyaev's hospital room 113, Dr. Robert Sawyer looks at a computer screen. He strokes his wrinkled and freckled right hand through his grey, widows-peak hair. It’s an act of stress and anxiety: the heartache and pain that he feels are enormous… instead of a grand breakthrough, his nuclear bunker contemporaries would have an ‘I told you so’ moment. He looks at his computer screen, which has chromosomes and DNA spirals of varying lengths on it.

It looks like there is too much damage to her genetic structure.

Vilya, a baby chimp, is the culmination of years of theorizing, testing, and hope. He remembers the first selection process, his attempts to slowly eradicate a certain nature from a primate when he first saw the innocent eyes of her parents. Roshi and Sonya were special. Unlike the other chimps that were presented to him, they had the sweetest dispositions, an inherent desire to share, and the widest smiles he had ever seen in a primate (even humans).

They were the perfect subjects with which to begin “Project World Peace,” a scientific attempt to breed violence out of humanity. The same violence that caused every single war, battle, fistfight.

They were so exemplary that Robert even had a custom heart-shaped locket made for Vilya to wear. The interior of the locket is engraved with the names Roshi and Sonya.

Robert begins to sob. The tears cause him to take off his glasses and wipe his face before they reached his lab coat. He knows what both the immediate and distant future hold for him. Years of research are looking to be a complete failure, a grandiose way to waste time from his life’s finite clock.

He reaches the cage and looks at the baby chimp. Through the bars, he notices the pain she feels. She is curled up in the back of the cage, facing the back wall. There is a certain sense of accomplishment associated with her: a unique specimen who had never been seen before in the history of the world.

He taps an iron bar.

She reacts by facing him and slowly crawling towards him. She puts her nose through the bars and whimpers for his attention. With her tiny hands, reminiscent of his children, she grabs his finger with as much force as she can muster.

“There, there, baby, I know you’re in pain.”

He strokes her nose and in between her eyes. She tilts her head up and relishes the moment. This is some of the only enjoyment she will ever feel; her cage is both her cradle and grave.

“Your mommy and daddy are in the other room. I’m here for you,” Robert whispers.

He opens the cage door and gently picks her little body up. She is now in his hand, leaning up against his body. They head to a refrigerator. He opens the door, picks up a milk bottle, and lets Vilya suck on it.

She coos.

“Your mommy and daddy did the same thing when they were babies. You remind me a lot of them.”

She coos louder.

“You are a unique piece of the world. I can, without a doubt, say that nothing else in this world can mirror you. Nothing else has had the meticulous selection that you have had. This whole phase of my life has been dedicated to you. I hope you know that I think you’re the most special thing this earth has to offer.”

She stops cooing.

“Looks like you’ve had enough,” he says. He looks at a mirror and stares into his own bloodshot eyes.

He places her back in her cage and shuts the door. As he travels back to his computer, he contemplates what this all means. What results was he overlooking? How could this have happened? Where did he go wrong? He scans the results over again, giving all of his possible focus towards the proper examination.

Nothing changes. The results spell out the same doom. He thinks to himself, “Roshi and Sonya… they looked happy in those cages. Vilya doesn’t. She knows nothing else in this world. All she knows is pain and the cage. She has never seen the outside light. This is because of me.”

He switches over to a word processing program and begins typing.

Dr. Robert Sawyer

Saint Belyaev’s Hospital

“Project World Peace”

07/12/2031

Results of Trial 001

The offspring of subject 001 and 002 has exhibited, what seems to be, problems that will be lifelong, severe, and ultimately not worth the goal of this trial and the mission statement of ‘Project World Peace’. I have examined both the genetic structure and the chemical balances of both of the subjects, along with their physical makeups, trying to determine if there was some sort of inherent defect that was going to doom this trial from the beginning. All of the tests came back fine. That is why I displayed such confidence in the efficacy of subject 003, the offspring of subjects 001 and 002.

Subject 003’s birth went smoothly, but she was severely undersized. Also, her hair was slightly off-colored. When I was editing her genetics, I was careful not to interfere with any physical structures. It seems that these defects in her physical structure were due to pleiotropy. Her legs are undersized in comparison with the rest of her body. She often moans and cries from what appears to be a constant stream of pain. I have not yet identified from where this pain is coming.

Subjects 001 and 002 are active in their avoidance of her. Whenever I place them in an open space together, subject 003 will crawl towards subjects 001 and 002, but they will go to the other side of the room. I feared that their captivity and genetic testing could have possibly harmed the vasopressin and oxytocin levels of the parent subjects, yet all of the tests came back in the normal ranges. It seems that some sort of evolutionary defense system is acting when they are together. I will refer this to the evolutionary biology team, but my theory goes as follows: The parent subjects cannot turn off their sense of being in the wilderness. They believe, consciously or unconsciously, subject 003 will bring their group down with her deformities, possibly causing them to die as well.

I have exhausted every form and remedy when it comes to trial 001, but there is no evident solution. Perhaps it was a stroke of bad luck and our procedures were correct. I fear this is not the case. I fear that mother nature’s grasp on genetics is more complex than we could have ever imagined. Sure, selective breeding could be an effective measure to reduce aggression in animals, but I am beginning to doubt whether or not aggression could ever be eliminated in these subjects. Like Belyaev’s foxes, we are seeing that these traits are finely interwoven into the detailed genetic makeup of these animals. It is hard to alter one without unintentionally altering another one---perhaps impossible.

Status: Closed

Result: Failure

Subjects 001 and 002 will be kept for further examination and possibly another trial. Subject 003 will be euthanized on this date.

He stops typing, prints out the report, and reads it over. It hurts to read. Now, what are they going to make of the real trial? If they did not succeed on an animal subject, then what type of atrocities were they going to commit in the future? It is all too big to contemplate at the moment. He is forced to resolve another issue.

In his office, he walks to an examination table. He brings over a host of chemicals and a syringe.

He returns to her cage. Vilya screams in her typical tone. It is almost an exact copy of her parents’ scream. It brings him back to when they first encountered Roshi and Sonya, the bright stars among hundreds in a world that made infinitely more sense.

“You’re no longer going to be in pain,” Sawyer whispers, “I’ll make sure that your pain is gone. I’m sorry for doing this to you. If I knew what was going to come of all of this, I never would have brought you into such a miserable world.”

He begins to carry her towards the table. She wraps her arms around his neck and now their eyes are locked. She manages to produce a large smile, just like her mother’s.

“You know,” remarks Sawyer as they approached the examination table, “many of the people that I have known in my field have called us ‘glorified primates’. I’m not so sure about that anymore. After dealing with you and your parents, I am starting to question if we should be glorified. We have the same negatives as you guys: we fight, kill each other, steal from one another, and form tribes to defend territory. We both share a certain purity though. We both can get so much joy from seeing the smile of another one of our kind. It doesn’t even have to be from our kind. It can be from a different kind. Like I get whenever I see your wide smile.”

He places her down on the examination table, strapping her legs and arms down so that she would not be able to move. She cries from the pain of the straps being too tight. “I’m so sorry. There’s nothing I can do. If you moved around, I’d only cause you more pain.”

Sawyer moves over to his chemical stash; he pulls a pair of gloves out of a dispensary and puts them over his hands. After a deep breath, he picks up the syringe and begins filling it.

It is filled to the top.

He takes a step towards the table and gazes at Vilya’s terrified expression and locket. It stops him for a moment: in ten years, was he going to be doing the same thing to a human toddler? Was he going to have to face the same expression, but from his kind? Would the toddler’s locket be reminiscent of Vilya’s?

After the pause, Sawyer puts a band around her arm to constrict the blood flow. He reaches down for her right arm and searches for a prominent vein. Once he finds one, he places the syringe in the vein.

“When I was a kid, I believed that animals made it to heaven. I believed that humans and animals would all live together and be happy together. Maybe you believe in the same type of thing. If only you could understand me. Maybe I could soothe you by telling you there’s a heaven where chimps go to swing on trees all day and rub each other’s shoulders. That would be a beautiful place for you, wouldn’t it? You could see your parents every day. Your kind deserves that type of place. Humans don’t.”

Sawyer presses down on the syringe. The chemicals begin to flow through her veins. After a few seconds, a noticeable calmness began to come across Vilya’s face. She shuts her eyes and stops crying. Her breathing slows… it comes to a halt.

He checks her pulse: nothing. The straps are removed from her arms and legs. Her body is now limp with death. Sawyer breathes a sigh of relief: no more cries of pain and agony.

Before disposing of her body, Sawyer removes her locket, putting it in his pocket for keepsakes. He finds a clear bag waste bag, puts her in it, and puts her body in a bin. On the front of the bin is a taped sign.

Rushing to get this experience over with, he carries the bin out into the quiet hallway of Saint Belyaev Hospital’s geneticist wing. He puts the bin on the ground, notices nobody in the hallway, and quickly shuts his door returning to his office.

The sign reads:

Biohazard Waste

Dispose of properly