“It’s not right. I don’t like it at all,” Ahmed muttered, “Why does it figure that our next big project would also be a shape-changer?”
We were both off our shifts and we found ourselves in the observation deck again.
I shrugged, “In this crazy universe, wonder what our odds were?”
“At least this time we’re prepared.”
“Prepared? How?”
“Remember a couple months back when the Academic Board commissioned the creation of those hivemind symbiotes?”
“Oh yeah, those things. I heard the bio-tech guys raving all about them. ‘The next big stage in evolution’, ‘the ultimate survivors’. Hell, I even heard them call’em ‘Darwin’s species’.”
Ahmed snorted over some of the more cheesy titles, “Someone puts too much of their time into poetry rather than science.”
“Whatever happened to those things? Did they die out? The irony would be staggering.”
“The little abominations started growing past our control. In the gene shop we called them ‘Changlings’, and boy was that true. At the beginning everything was fine, no trouble at all. It was directly after we gave them the second round of Tessaract radiation and the mutagen cocktail that things got weird. Their whole physiology began to change, same with their minds. They we’re actually horses initially, and they quickly began to evolve the hivemind abilities like we wanted, and they even started to gain sustenance from emotion rather than food like we planned.”
My eyes widened, “That’s phenomenal! What happened afterwards?”
Ahmed sighed and lean on the railing, “Well, the simplest way to put it was they simply didn’t stop evolving. Then their bug parts started becoming more and more prominent. We only realized how deep of crap we were in when they gained immunity to their electric shock cages. It was even worse when we found out about their shapeshifting powers. Must have come from the whole adaptation ability to begin with. We lost good people trying to clean up that mess after they locked that part of complex up for quarantine.”
“How’d you get them?”
“We didn’t want to use fire except as a last resort, but we ended up using cold instead. We found some old cryo-cannons and used them to ice the drones, which was the easiest part honestly, taking out the dumb ones. The smart ones, ooooooh, they were infinitely worse. The Queen and the candidates for Queen were still independent thinkers, and they organized the drones into deadly hunter packs.”
He paused, and his eyes glazed over. “I almost didn’t make it out of there, you know. I got stabbed right in the gut by a drone. Didn’t see him coming. They took me to their Queen, and it was then that I found you don’t necessarily have to be a human woman to be a complete bitch. Her eyes were cold, cold green. She had a cutthroat sense of royalty about her, and so much mad arrogance. She was going to have the drones tear me apart, with me cursing all the way. She would’ve too, if the rest of the clean-up crew hadn’t have arrived then. They hit them with some kind of compound they had just brewed up to lock up part of their shapeshifting powers. Then they locked them up in cryo-sleep, and they put them in a hole that none of those damned rejects could get out of.”
“Tartarus?”
“Yeah, probably the product of another of our ‘esteemed poets’. Should have just come right out and called it ‘Hell’. To get there, we had to go up to the surface in heavy duty rad-suits, drive about 30 kliks north and west, and we placed them down deep in the earth where they’d never be found and where no tremors could wake them from future drilling.”
“Did you get vacation for medical leave?”
“One month was all, and my gut still gives me crap about it all the time. I’m getting too old for this, and I never wanted to be a scientist to begin with! I really despise the caste system the Academic Board has been allowed to put in place.”
“But the Assignment Protocols have kept everyone employed and fed for the past 60ish years,” I asked, taking on the role of devil's advocate.
“Call it what you want. Dress up a pig and give it lipstick, but a pig is a pig, and those codes don’t let people be happy. If I was born two hundred, hell, even a hundred years ago, I could have gotten any job I wanted.”
“What job would you have wanted?”
Ahmed shifted his gaze over to me; his face was veiled in suppressed embarrassment, “You promise not to laugh?”
“Only if it’s not funny.”
“I always wanted to be a painter.”
“Really?” I asked, completely stunned by this unexpected revelation.
“Yeah. I even painted with whatever I could find until they employed me at 14.”
We said our good nights, and I made my way to the elevator.
“Hey Red!”
I turned to look back at Ahmed, “What?”
“We all had dreams as kids. What about you? What did you want to be?”
I had my own bout of embarrassment to overcome, and I flicked one of my bangs out of the way of my vision, “Well, I always wanted to be a storyteller.”
I made my way back to my apartment. Dusk and Dawn were happy to see me. After we finished dessert, I felt like practicing my little used talent. “How about we have a little story time?”
“Is that something from the television?” Dusk asked inquisitively.
“No silly! A story is something that you make up for fun! I tell it to you, and you imagine what I’m talking about.” I said as I tussled her mane.
The three of us went back into the closet where the girls bedded down for the night. Dawn looked up at me, “Soooo..what’s the story?”
“Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there lived two princesses..”