Fraction

Fraction Chapter 37 - 152729

"My dad is still alive?!" came a voice from behind the door. Leo face-palmed. "Who was the idiot in charge of sound-proofing the doors?!" he shouted. Rosa pointed at him. "Oh..." he said as he moved to the door and opened it. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, kid." He said as he let Edward in, "But I was just speaking figuratively. You can go to your room now... and this time, all the way to your room." Edward stared at him. Rosa stared at him. "What?!" Leo said, "Oh forgive me if I don't want to scar the kid for life by telling him the truth!" The stare-down continued. "Oh fine! I'm not one for exposition... but just this once!" Edward could hear his own heart beating. He was finally going to know the truth. The whole truth. He did not know what to feel. Leo began the story without any of his previous reluctance.

The idea was simple. Evolution worked via small copying mistakes in the DNA chains which lead to changes in the organism itself. Forgive the scientific jargon. There is no other way to do this without enraging the scientific community. However, if you are that allergic to actual science, you could just skip the next two paragraphs. I promise to include a more Right Wing explanation in the near future. Moving on... these changes weren't always helpful. However, on the rare occasions that a useful change was mutated, as the term goes, it really helped the organism's chances of survival in its environment. Ariana Winchester had once jokingly remarked, "At first, the environment decided what DNA changes were useful. Somewhere down the road, came the DNA changes that lead to us. And now we have transcended the environment itself. We decide how it changes. In a way, the environment is being controlled by the very DNA it once controlled. And then these changes in the environment in turn lead to consequential changes in the definition of what is a useful mutation. So it's a control-ception." At this point, you may have cleverly deduced that she did not have a future in stand-up comedy. You are correct.

Well, her husband laughed anyway. He laughed and then followed that thought further down the rabbit hole. There should be a way to create a controlled environment which would allow him to control what kind of mutations occurred on the test subject. You understand where this is going, right? He didn't just want to observe or study evolution. He wanted to take the reins and steer it his own way. "I wasn't there when it all began..." Leo said, "But from what I heard, it was nothing short of a scientific slaughter shadowed from society's senses so smoothly that it sends shivers down my spine." He started off with rats. At first, it was one failure after another. Millions of rats put through the most extreme conditions in hopes of weeding out the wrong mutations... and weed out he did. Rats went extinct. Through the clever use of the media, this fact was hidden in plain sight. They even funded the making of a sequel to Ratatouille. Despite his phenomenal failures, Daryl's great grandfather continued his work, moving through different species... trying to get it to work.

In the last year of his life, he succeeded. A monkey that could speak human languages as fluently as a human. However, there was a shocking addition to the gene pool. Pardon my lack of enthusiasm. Shocking would be a very mild word to use. The monkey somehow had evolved the ability to increase or decrease his own body size at will. The other scientists in the team were overjoyed. No one understood what had happened but they were inundated with excitement. Using nothing more than a controlled environment, they had succeeded in manipulating the genetic makeup of an organism. However, the man himself was not impressed. How could he have not foreseen this? Was there an unknown factor involved? Something that evaded even the calculative prowess of modern technology? It was unacceptable. Supposing such a factor existed, he had gone ahead and triggered it without knowing a single thing about it. "Your great-great-grandfather was... I don't know how to put this..." Leo said, "He... surely had his own brand of genius... and an equally unpredictable eccentricity." Examine him. That was the order. Every test known to man. Legality and morality had been chewed up and excreted away long ago. No one in the team could understand why the government was even allowing this to happen, let alone support it to this extent.