VOTF:Life~aka~Deity 2: To Play God is Human…

“NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by
the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated,
that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion
of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within,
why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves
by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For
what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many
strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the
whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer?”
~An Excerpt from the Introduction to Thomas Hobbes’s LEVIATHAN, cira 1651

Life. It is a gift from a god. Humans can’t create, we can only continue, merge and split, change, form, deform, reform. It an unsurmountable ability that has been denied from us.

Until Tomorrow…

Many moons ago, there lived a people called the C’itcante. They were a happy and peaceful people, a people who looked to their chilrdren, their herds and themselves, in that order.

I remember the old lab days. We were chosen individuals, separated by choice, from our peers. This was a good thing, as our peers seemed to be a simple and embarrassing group, the males thinking with their other head, the females thinking about that other head. We though, were more.

The C’itcante lived their lives herding goats in the broad meadows within the valleys. The goats, or Pintro, as they were called, were used for everything. The babies weaned on goat milk, children ate goat cheese and bread, men and woman feasted its flesh. They wore goat skin, used goat bone as tools and trained goats to pull small carts. Life was good for the C’itcante.

Each of us had our own special projects. Deek had his clocks, Angie played with her chemicals, I had my cell samples. I was interested in metamorphosis. Some cells actually mutate and change radically during this phase. Even growth changes cells. I was riveted.

One hot lazy summer day, a young lad was watching the goats when a stranger appeared. He was blue all over from the blue feather woven into his blue hair down to the blue moccasins on his blue feet. “Boy,” he said. “Why do you sit here, watching the goats on such a fine morning? Don’t you want to be fishing with your friends?”

I developed a hormone that could take a regular tomato plant and turn it blue. Completely. It was a small endo-strain that told the tomato that all the pigments it should produce should be a version of blue-14. It was kind of cool, seeing a blue plant with blue fruit. Novelty plant food and such paid for over half my student loans.

“I would like to be fishing, good sir, but I promised to watch the sheep.” The Blue Man smiled a blue grin. “Well, boy. It just so happens that my dog and I needed to stop for a rest. I’m getting old and he’s so small, these hills and mountains are a bit much for us. We’ll watch the herd while you play. Days like this are made for boys like you to play. Go on now” The Blue man reached into his medicine bag, and pulled out a small puppy. He bent down low to the ground, placed the puppy on a large tuft of grass and sat down next to it. The boy stared at him for a moment, then carefully left, looking back every now and then to see if the blue man was still there. He was.

What made my start-up business challenging was a combination of different things. Blue plants have different requirements than regular ones. Different lights are needed and so on. The hardest and funnest part is getting requests. “Ooh! can you make that match this color?” or “Can you do that with this or that plant.” It was fun, challenging, and I made enough money to hire a helper, someone to watch the plants while I was working in the lab.

The Blue man came every day for many moons. Every day, the boy would start the task. The Blue man would set down his puppy and sit. The boy would take off, at a run now, and play with the other boys. at the end of the day, the boy would come back to the heard and drive them back to the pens, where they slept safely.

Then I got a contract that would change my work forever. I remember the day clearly. An old man, a dying daughter, a tree. It was a tragic story and I knew I would help, not because of the look in his eyes or the tears on her face, but because of how he held that little tree.

One morning, after the many moons had passed, one of the village elders came to the boy and asked if he had noticed anything odd about the goats. Now the boy had become a good liar and truthfully told the man that he had not seen anything out of the ordinary. As far as the boy new, nothing had changed for several moons, save the young getting bigger, which is prone to occur. The elder nodded and went back to his hut. The boy told the blue man what the elder had asked. The blue man smiled his blue smile and told the boy the fish looked particularly big on the rocky side of the river. The boy thanked the man and ran off.

You have no idea how much work it is to genetically engineer something currently alive. It’s hard. Believe me. It involves doing a lot of work, then its one injection of the virus and from there, you have little to do but pray. I mean, trusting that you covered every little scrap of DNA is one thing. then you have to trust it to a VIRUS could mutate at any time.

Time passed, and once again, the elder came to the boy. He asked if the goats had been getting enough to eat. The boy frown and told the elder he thought they had and asked why he was asking. The elder told him that one or two of the goats looked leaner than they should be at this time of year. The boy dutifully lied to the elder, saying that he hadn’t noticed. The blue man smiled when he was told and told the boy that there was a monstrous trout at the river bend.

If you must mutate a thing currently alive, it is almost ALWAYS better to do it to something that can’t really feel pain. As soon as the virus had run its course, I had a sample under a microscope. There was only one mutation and that had turned the wood a bit pinkish. I doubted no one would notice or care.

Now the boy, simple though he was, was now suspicious. He left in his usual manner, but looped around and sat in the bushes near the clearing, so he could see what occurred while he was gone. The blue man lay down on the hill. Then he reached into his medicine bag but, instead of a small puppy, he pulled out the largest wolf the boy had ever seen. The man set the wolf down and it tore into the flock, blood and fur flying everywhere. The boy let out a gasp and ran to the village.

It was the last thing I put my heart into. The rest of my work seemed unimportant or trivial. I think it was the main reason I joined the facility and began the Super Salad Project, as we called it. The fact of the government inspection of our campus had little to do with it. Yes, my methods were technically illegal, the campus had no idea I kept a fair imitation of a bio-weaponry lab in my refrigerator, and, I guess, I could have accidentally created humanity’s down fall, but I think it was the little tree that did it for me.

He told the chief, who looked at him with disdaining eyes. “Play somewhere else, little one. We are working.” He ran to his mother. “Oh, dear one, don’t make such fearful stories.” He ran around the village, telling everyone he saw. Few stopped and none believed. The boy, crying now, sat down in a heap next to the old oak tree. He heard a calm voice from above. “Come child, tell me your story.” The boy looked up but could see no one in the thin branches above him. “Who… who’s there?” he called. The voice answered again, calm and soothing. “Just me, the old Oak. Come child, why are you crying?” The boy, a little eased at such a soothing voice told his tale of deceit and woe. The voice didn’t speak commandingly, it just listened, occasionally speaking a kind word or asking about a small detail. Finally, the boy concluded his tale “and… and … I ran around town and…. and… no one would listen!” The voice gave a sagecious sigh and without warning, a brown man swung out of the tree. He was completely brown from head to toe, just like the blue man was blue. He smiled kindly at the child, who was staring in shock at this man who came from nowhere.

Delilah was to one who met me at the door. She had this aura about her, as if she was more… real than anything I had ever known. There are people you hate on first site, people you like. When you met her, you knew that you were her friend before either of you had existed. Itts hard to put into words.

To be continued at a later time….