"This is our most exciting new experiment!" The man's coarse voice was full of pride, though he quickly fell to silence, shifting uncomfortably under the static scrutiny of the inspector before him, whose expression did not suit the phrase exciting.
A brief silence, underscored by the humorless rasp of pen over paper. "And these are the specimens?" the inspector glanced into the darkness of the first cage; bestial eyes flashed luminescence before the contorted frame pressed back into shadow.
"Yep- pretty little freaks," the anxious man gave a throaty chuckle, banging on the cage bars to demonstrate. The skittish shape inside flinched back, a whisper of warm flesh amidst metallic resonance.
The inspector adjusted his glasses, showing neither approval nor disapproval. "I see. And this is your first successful cross?"
The man's gusto deflated a bit, and he watched carefully for a reaction as he gave his response, every sentence spoken as to a bear trap's grinning teeth.
"This is the only successful cross. The Geospizini gene was the only one to take. We had limited success with the lupine strain but other than that..."
The innocuous click of a ballpoint pen resonated like the thud of a guillotine blade. The man fell silent, as the scratch of paper hung in the air like a hushed scream. The inspector, ever impassive, looked at last away from the cage to fix the geneticist with his steady bespectacled gaze.
"That is unfortunate." He began walking in the direction of the door, the man hurrying to escort him, "Send periodic reports of your follow-up studies. We invested a great deal in the human hybrid project, and we expect results."
The quiet snick of the door cut short whatever genuflection the man struck up, and the silhouettes of the two men bled into the distance as they left the room at the end of the hall, all the while watched by two incredibly deep blue eyes in the shadows of the cage marked no. 23.
Part 1:
There were many of us, in the beginning. I cannot say for sure how many. Eight? Ten? More? I did not know numbers then, so there is no way to tell for sure. But in the beginning, it felt as though there was only myself, and a world around me made up of blackness and the echoing sound of my own breath, filling the space. I can picture it from the outside now, what was only darkness then. All awash in cruel fluorescent lights and the smell of antiseptic. A tidy row of geometric cages, faced in one-way glass. The room was as silent as the womb, fetuses dreaming in darkness, waiting to be born into a world of light and sound.
In the dark, in the very beginning, we had no thoughts. To have thoughts you needed words, and at the very beginning we had only a vast and endless silence. At the very beginning I would rock my frail body quietly, forward and back. Knees to my chest I would rock. Quiet. Day in and day out, back and forth. There was an animal simplicity in the action, forward and back. I may have been the only one, alone in the center of the cage. Empty air on all sides of me, cold and unknowable in the dark. I simply rocked. Forward and back, forward and back. Animal simplicity, animal faith. Forward and back in the dark.
I did not exist then, in the sense that there was no self that began and ended at my fingertips. A heart beat, but it was not my own. A breath sounded, but it was only a part of the primordial dark. My skin was not a barrier, but something porous, something through which energy flowed- until something touched me.
Nothing touched me, in the center of the cage. I scrambled back, but I kept silence. I did not know sound. I looked, though I could not say whether my eyes had been open or closed. At the top of the cage, there was a small barred gap, and through that small barred gap, another pair of eyes probed the dark. It was a small enough gap that the rest of the figure was obscured; all I could see were the eyes. I do not know what those eyes found, and I could not tell you even now what their owner must have felt. But the eyes didn't waver, and for the second time an impossibly thin white arm reached through the darkness- hanging this time, waiting for me. Yes, there was a me, now. From the moment another existence had brushed against mine, there was a need to differentiate. And so there was a him, and there was a me. My first conscious thought. I must have been a wild thing: still snarling, hair matted, eyes wide. But those dark eyes simply looked at me, an unchanging gaze. That white hand still waited, an unerring promise. He must have felt so alone.
Something in me woke up in that moment, something changed; I took the thin hand in my own. I half-rose to a half-crouch (it was as much as the little cage would permit) and slowly crept toward the other side of the space, toward the little barred gap at the top of the wall. I can recognize now what was foreign to me then, as I looked those dark eyes level with my wild ones: he was smiling.
That was the very beginning, when we were very small, though I don't know how small. Children. Small enough to be hidden from the light. Small enough to steal comfort through a four inch hole, and small enough for it to be enough.