Destined
By Aneth Oren 2013
Disclaimer: I own nothing except original characters
Uploading two chapters in one day! Woe. Please review and tell me if you like or not the story.
Listening to Kyla La grange, Sympathy
Chapter 3
Vincent had spent half the night walking the deserted streets of Toronto, the other half huddled at an abandoned construction site. Once he came across a couple of homeless men and they had offered to share their meager food rations with him, knowing he was their good angel. He spoke to them, about nothing really, but Vincent listened for they were his eyes and ears. Near dawn he headed for home, restless and bored. He wasn't tired. And he wondered at that. More than once JT had hinted at Vincent's continued agility and youthful looks. It was true, he reflected, that he suffered no aches or pains as would plague anyone growing older. And that was the brunt of it. His hair was still the same blue black it had been in his teens, twenties and thirties. No frost of time touched his temples or weaved throughout his hair. It was as if time meant nothing for him. Was this a byproduct of Muirfield's experiments? Had they somehow screwed up his biological clock?
He reached the warehouse. It was dark and silent. Vincent checked his watch. It was 6:30, an hour before Reggie got up. A light dusting of snow covered the ground, giving the world an ethereal and delicate quality.
He pulled the metal door open and let it close behind him. He could see JT huddled over a laptop, the soft glow of the screen illuminating his face. He was about to ask JT what he was doing, when Vanessa Chandler's unhurried voice reached him. Acting on pure instinct, Vincent froze and lifted panicked eyes in the direction he knew his daughter slept.
"Hey, Vincent, you're not gonna believe this!" JT called out. He pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. "So, before you go Kyle Reese on me, listen up." He picked up a manila envelope and turned it over in his hands.
"This package was left outside." JT began "There was a dvd inside."
"A package?" Vincent at last found his voice. "Whatever happened to 'Muirfield is circling?'" Vincent was beginning to get angry. "That's my daughter sleeping over there, JT!"
"I know, Vincent. But there's some stuff on this dvd you need to listen to. Some stuff Vanessa Chandler's been up to."
Vincent was about to say he wasn't interested in whatever Vanessa Chandler had been doing when he noticed something strange about the woman whose frozen image appeared on the laptop screen.
"So she's alive. Catherine was right. And she's gotten older." Vincent muttered. Her dark hair was now peppered with gray and the skin under her eyes was yellowed and wrinkled.
"No kidding big guy." JT swung the laptop over to him. "It has been ten years, you know. Just because some of us don't seem to get any older doesn't mean everyone gets to stay young."
"I know." Vincent said, and despite his misgivings he was curious. "What does she say?"
"Oh, stuff." JT said picking at a nonexistent piece of lint on his plaid shirt.
"What stuff?" Vincent asked suspicion coloring his voice.
"Stuff. About you. About Catherine." JT answered with caution, all the while studying Vincent's face.
At the mention of her name, Vincent gave JT a long look, "I once told her we could never marry." His eyes took on a wistful longing.
JT's eyes misted and he cleared his throat. "Come on Mr. Atlas. You need to hear this." JT hit the replay and selected large screen before swinging the laptop around for Vincent. "And pay attention. I'm giving a quiz later."
The screen darkened a moment and then was filled with Vanessa Chandler's face. She looked older, worn out, and tired. In her customary low voice she began.
"Vincent. This video is being prepared and delivered by people you can trust." Vincent snorted in derision. Vanessa continued. "I know my track record with you is not good, but there are some things you need to know. Especially now." Dr. Chandler looked away from the camera and then refocused her attention back to the lens. "I suppose I should start at the beginning. My involvement with the experiments conducted by Muirfield began at a much earlier period than most people know. I immigrated with my parents and brother from China. Everyone who knew my family soon realized my brother was very special and at 16 he was being considered for the Rhodes program. I graduated from USC with a degree in biochemistry. Our parents were both geneticists who were working on the applications of cross species dna sequencing being funded by the Chinese government."
Vincent wasn't liking the direction this was going and he tried to ignore the knot forming in his stomach.
"My brother's name was Zhao. Our family name was Li. Even at an early age Zhao was very inventive and creative, someone who believed science held the answer to all of society's problems. He had an idea once, that he could rectify and even enhance man's genetic material through deliberate dna manipulation." Vincent stared hard at the screen. So Zhao, aka Muirfield, was Dr. Chandler's brother. Did she know he had killed her brother? "He wanted to eradicate disease and suffering. But, " Here Dr. Chandler paused. "Sometimes not all things go according to plan. Zhao had envisioned a world free of sickness. His work was, unfortunately, stolen and put on the internet. A recruiter from a government think tank saw the work, believed it had merit and gave it to the U.S. military." Dr. Chandler took a deep breath. "Soon the CIA had gotten its hands on Zhao's work and they offered my brother a great deal of money for it. They wanted him to test his applications in the field. Zhao saw the chance to do good." Vincent paused the video.
"What's the matter?" Asked JT.
Vincent shook his head. "This woman is really something else, you know that? She thinks we're gonna feel sorry for her little brother." Vincent shook his head in disgust. JT shrugged.
"Just listen, Vincent. It starts to get good about now."
"Oh, so there's more?"
JT nodded. "Oh trust me, much more."
"Bring it on, then." Vincent muttered. The video went on.
"Zhao saw the chance to do good." Dr. Chandler repeated. "He agreed to share his work and began to implement it in the field. The code name Muirfield was chosen because of its obscurity: it was the name of the author of the primer my brother and I used to learn English. The war in Afghanistan was going very poorly, there was little funding for it. It was not a popular war. The American government saw an opportunity using Zhao's work to not only create units of super soldiers, but also commercial opportunities to be used in the private sectors by powerful conglomerates. It was thought to be a win-win for everybody. Big business got super guinea pigs and the government got money. We could create custom ordered soldiers to do just about anything, from soldiers impervious to fire to soldiers unaffected by deep water pressures. These soldiers could be used for just about anything normal human beings could not be exposed to. You know how we obtained volunteers, but now I have to explain to you we were told all of the volunteers had been covered as to the true nature of the experiments. The CIA lied to everyone. And they were very convincing." Vincent closed his eyes, uncertain as to whether he should go on.
"Keep listening." JT urged.
"One aspect of the experiments you must keep in mind, Vincent, is the issue of continuity. How were we going to keep the numbers of test subjects steady and perhaps even grow them? Where would we get new volunteers?" In the video, Dr. Chandler sits down.
"We considered cloning you, but that was a disaster. The clones did not accept dna transfer from the parent, so we had to do double the work." Vincent frowned.
"Then it was suggested we grow the numbers through the traditional means. Impregnation of the females. But mating between beasts was risky. Mating between a beast and non beast was out of the question. Some of our scientists even volunteered for the tests but this led us nowhere very quickly. So…" Dr. Chandler trailed off. "It remained an open issue, until my brother solved that problem. He required a dna matched non morphing beast to be mated to a particular morphing beast. If the beast was a male, then his mate would be a non-morphing female whose estrogen levels would be raised to make her more desirable in her beast's eyes. The increased, matched pheromones would ensure and secure that the physical attraction was mutual, resulting in a higher desire to mate. Toward this end we selected specific beasts and grew mated pairs for bonding and impregnation."
Dr. Chandler delivered this stunning piece of information with as much calm and aplomb as one would've used to order apple pie with ice cream. Vincent blinked, uncertain he had heard right.
"Did she just…"
"Yep. She did." JT interjected. "Dude. She's saying Catherine was a beast!"
Vincent suddenly heard Catherine's voice in his head. "We're destined."
Destined? He thought, but by whom and for what?
Vincent shook his head. "No, no. I knew Catherine. She was not a beast."
JT scratched his head and reached for the bottle of Tums. "Wait. Let me play the last part back. Maybe you need to hear it again!"
"That's not necessary." Vincent said. "Catherine was not a beast. I knew her, JT!"
"Well, I guess you didn't know her as well as you thought."
Vincent felt as if all the air in his lungs had been squeezed out. "So what Dr. Chandler is saying is that Catherine was made for me, we were made for each other, so I could…"
"Inpregnate her." JT finished for him. "They created you guys to be a mated pair so you could have little beasties running around. I suppose Muirfield thought they could collect you guys later on, you know, like some weird Easter beastie hunt." He gave a little chuckle but sobered up and cleared his throat at Vincen't glare. "Well, I was just saying…"
"This is unbelievable." Vincent managed to say. His thoughts were a jumbled mess. "So this is why I couldn't push her away and she couldn't stay away."
"Muirfield mated you guys at the dna level… You couldn't resist one another. You were driven to be together."
"But how?" Vincent asked. "How could they get their hands on Catherine's dna?"
"Dr. Chandler gets into all that." JT said, popping two more Tums into his mouth. "There's more." He added quietly.
"I don't want to know more." Vincent said.
But they did watch more. After finishing the rest of the video they knew their days in the warehouse were numbered. Together they waited for Reggie to wake up.
"What do we tell her?" JT asked.
"Nothing. We tell her nothing. We've prepared her for this. How often have we drilled her that one day this may come? She knows how important it is to move without asking a hundred questions. If we stay calm she'll take her cue from us. She'll come without question. She's still a child, JT" Vincent reminded him, "For all of her intelligence, she still has the emotions of a child. She'll take her cue from us." Vincent looked around. "What we need to do is to get our gear together and put whatever is essential in boxes we can move easily."
"Well," JT began, "You're the strongest of us."
Understanding the subtle message, Vincent gave JT a little smile and began piling laptops and PC's into boxes. Without much effort he lifted these into the grocery carts JT had piled into a corner. They had sat there, for at least a year, waiting for the day that had come at last. Now, they would be put to good use.
As usual Reggie woke up at 7:30 and by 8 am they had left the warehouse for good.
Thanks to my kick ass beta, MayaLala, the BEST beta in all of ffn. She sure knows her stuff! Thanks, Maya, you're a gem!
