Erasure and Affirmation (Hypernaturals 11)

Tour of the Clinic

"What exactly would coming over be like? I mean, I know about Marvin and what he went through, but... I can't come over and not have Lori do it. Two of us at once? How would that even work?" Danny asked at dinner.

Jessica gave him a very reassuring smile. "Well, Danny, we would not do it the way we did Marvin."

"Oh, no!" Mom agreed.

"Why not?" Lori asked.

Vera perked up at that information too, looking up from her phone where she had been texting with Angel about something. If you want to keep a secret from Vampires, type out messages on your phone. If you talk, even in the other room, we can hear you.

Maybe wedding planning. A lot of that going around these days.

"Well. It is supposed to be a secret, but you know Mom and I have been working up in the clinic on the Siren lab results. Come on. We'll show you what we have created." Mom said.

"I'll stay here with the girls." Rachel said. "I know about this already."

"So do I but I never get tired of hearing about it." Helen said.

"Revenge Porn for you, my dear." Rachel said.

"So?" Helen asked her.

"So, nothing." Rachel replied.

We all trooped over to the medical clinic over the big garage. Mom, Dad, Vera, Helen, Jessica, Danny, Lori, and me.

Mom and Jessica pulled out five cylinders from their mad scientist cabinets. This entire room has changed over the last month or so. New equipment everywhere. Centrifuges and spectroscopes. Refrigerated cabinets. All kinds of chemicals and a hood assembly. Sort of like the Siren lab, but also missing many things. No test animals, for one thing.

I wonder how the hamsters are doing?

Mom explained.

"Adrian had an idea. He kicked it around with Denise, Angel, and Morgan. They liked it. It went up the chain. They liked it. Helen especially."

"I got the idea from something Jessica was talking about in bed." I said.

Mom held up a cylinder hand-labeled 'D'. "Jessica and I looked through all the things the Sirens did over years of development. Their plans to create a weapon that would make a Vampire back into a human. Their reasoning was simple: Vampires were converted in one direction by a Viral complex overwriting their human genetic structures. Why not the other way? That is what Viruses do. They insert themselves. Human DNA is littered with Viral and even bacterial gene sequences from the beginning of life. All modern gene-editing techniques are based upon how viruses do it. The Sirens's reasoned, why not teach a different Virus to do what they wanted it to do? It sounds simple, but it is not. The mechanisms that are involved evolved over millions of years. Evolution picking out the ones that worked the best. Have this work of the ages be undone by Sirens in a few years? It is not possible inside current technology. You would be amazed at how little we actually know about how genes work even now. Every time we turn around we find single traits influenced by multiple sequences, all over the place, and then affected by epigenetics besides."

Mom held up the cylinder again and looked at it fondly. "However, along the way, the Siren's developed many useful things. This is one of them and the core of Adrian's inspiration."

"It looks like an autoinjector, like for insulin or various other related drugs for diabetes." Lori said.

"It mostly is." Jessica said. "Ultimately, we'd put the serum currently in there into a dart for injection, but this is what we used here as we prototyped the process."