Trading Futures 3.

By TimeTraveller-1900

The laboratory was like something out of a horror movie, a modern 23rd-century Frankenstein's lab, although instead of one single monster there were dozens inside shower cubicle tanks filled with formaldehyde. The bodies within the tanks were horrific. They were human-based, but their features were warped with the best or worst features of various marine species that were unique in their own way.

The humans within the tanks were clones, accelerated in growth and combined with animal DNA at the start, but many of the hybrid clones were at varying stages of development, some were adults, there were clones at the stages of teenage years, and others were underdeveloped. One body was a cross between a hammerhead shark, a mako shark, and a sea snake. The effects of the different DNA had made this particular clone with the head of a human mixed with the scales of a snake, and the elongated, streamlined head of a mako shark, with the eyestalks of a hammerhead shark. Slashed into the throat were two lines of gill slits. Another was no older than an infant

Dr Stockman took a deep breath as he walked through the laboratory. He was the only scientist in the research team who had the guts, the actual guts, to come and walk through this laboratory. The other scientists were scared shitless and they had issues being here, seeing as how they felt he was taking the line of their research too far. Stockman didn't care what they felt. He had the backing of the government behind him, but even before the Minbari occupation had begun he had realised that humanity was physically and mentally inferior compared to the other races they encountered. The fact so many people were unable to really fight back against the Minbari in a straight fight only confirmed that in his mind, and so Stockman had begun experimenting with combining ape DNA with that of humans to make them stronger.

For the most part, Stockman had succeeded in his work, but he had only been able to genetically enhance a few people with the DNA of chimpanzees and ordinary domestic cats to make people smarter and stronger. Not enough to make a major difference, but he had been working on a number of plans designed to genetically enhance millions. Unfortunately, his efforts largely came too late since he'd been forced to make do, and he hadn't been able to get all the equipment needed. And he was forced to work by himself, but he managed to succeed.

But now things were different.

Stockman's work had reached the ears of many within EarthGov, and he had been consulted on what he had been trying to accomplish the first time around and he had told the President and some of the other senators of what he had been trying to do. With EarthGov's help, Stockman had gathered together a team of scientists who worked in genetics, medicine, biology, and cybernetics in order to create new ways of making humanity better.

Many people considered some of the members of the team as mad or weird - and to Stockman, a few of them were weird and a little bit strange in some areas, but at the same time they were brilliant in their fields, but he had wanted scientists who were different from the norm which was precisely what he wanted.

He wanted scientists who were not afraid to go down unorthodox routes to get what they felt was best. He wanted people with imagination, thought, and creativity. He must have made quite a good enough case because now he was in charge of a group of scientists who were working on improving the human race. The Minbari had killed so many people when they had occupied the planet and as a result many were frightened, and realistically it would likely take years if not ever for them to get back out into the galaxy.

The human race needed to be ready to fight back, and since the fusion rockets had begun launching over the last three years to rebuild the colonies on the moon, Mars, and Io, Stockman was just pleased he had convinced his colleagues and friends this laboratory was simply for medical research and to perfect the techniques of augmenting people, otherwise, he would have had problems. Stockman tried to come into the lab every day to see just what kind of level his work had reached. While everyone saw the finished work in this laboratory as grisly and disgusting, Stockman saw it as progress, plain and simple.

And space had reopened the door to scientific discovery. Stockman had been one of the geneticists assigned to study a life form discovered deep within Europa's oceans, which had never been discovered before since the Centauri's offering of jump gates and hyperspace had largely made solar system research a thing of the past since they would be able to settle on other habitable earth-like worlds quickly. But since the Minbari destroyed their jump engines and shut down the gates and took their supplies of Quantium 40, they had to work with what they had.

The life form had been a microorganism, one of many, which had been used recently to heal the planet's oceans and the sky. While some of the dust from the mass driver bombardments would likely remain for decades to come until they finally settled, the planet's healing was underway. But Stockman had begun studying the microorganisms for anything they could grant to his work.

It wasn't a surprise that he was able to come up with several medical treatments. Discovering a bacteria that reminded him of the Star Wars liquid bacta, which healed injuries by introducing a benign form of bacteria, Stockman and his team had been responsible for saving many lives since someone bathed in a tank full of warm bacta would be healed fairly quickly of burns more effectively than previous methods. But that wasn't all.

The bodies of the test subjects in this laboratory were living proof of some of his contributions to medical research, and it wasn't just in genetics and biology - just a month ago, he and his team had worked on creating prosthetic hands and legs which granted not only great durability but great strength and dexterity, far better than anything previously used before. They were the work of a scientist who was seen as mad, although they had actually been thrown into prison for their experiments into cybernetics and bionics which pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, after a few months in the research team had come up with prosthetics to replace the hearts, lungs, and some other organs in the body, and that came from studying the medical data from the cloned test subjects in this laboratory.

Stockman was not stupid.

He was more than aware there were people out there who assumed he was a modern-day mad scientist, the chief of mad scientists. But thanks to his work and his efforts, he had already discovered treatments for many different problems, and now humanity's quality of life was improved. Stockman was not just looking to augment humanity, he was trying to make life easier for his people.

For the next hour, while he went from one tank to the next, Stockman considered what he was going to do next before he turned and walked out of the laboratory.

X

For the next three years, Stockman and his team continued with their experiments. They created live human embryos and genetically enhanced them to make them stronger, faster, and smarter while some people were to be given cybernetic replacements, so work in that field was ongoing and increasingly highly sophisticated techniques emerged from the radically improved science would ensure the human race became better.

Stockman was seen as something of a hypocrite by some. For a geneticist who wished to enhance the human race, he wasn't seeming very interested in curing disease. Many people, including those within his own team, were under the impression that Stockman would want to ensure that humans became immune to disease.

Others wondered if perhaps they should use genetics to create a perfect society. In this society, everyone would be genetically profiled to do what was needed.

People who would be grown to fight would be genetically engineered to become aggressive, to have senses such as eyesight and hearing enhanced until they could spot movement out of the corner of their eyes while being able to hear a pin drop from 10 feet away, possessing incredible strength and speed and a tough musculature and bone structure to make them harder, stronger.

People who would be scientists would be genetically engineered with intellects of incredible capacity and ability. They would be programmed with huge amounts of knowledge and information and would possess the means to make incredible leaps in mathematical calculation.

Or the human race could do without things like sleep through some kind of advanced manipulation, but Stockman refused. He felt his process was the correct way to go. He wanted to make humanity stronger and faster, he didn't want to take away too much. He didn't like the idea of removing their ability to sleep, as he quite liked sleeping.

He also didn't like the idea of creating a caste-like society, much like an ant colony.

Or the type of society the Minbari possessed, with a passive Religious caste and an aggressive Warrior Caste. Stockman actually compared the kind of result of those particular people who had wanted to use his work to transform humanity into a structured society to the Minbari, horrifying many. Humans did not want to be anything like the Minbari, not socially and not genetically. The idea was disgusting to them.

But while Stockman was more than happy to remove things like the potential for motor neurone disease, he had come to realise things like blindness and deafness didn't mean those same people could not make some form of contribution to society. Indeed, he had learnt from a blind teacher when he was a child, and that teacher had proven they could teach with a deft hand despite their disability.

But it was the intellect and the strength that Stockman was more interested in, and while his beliefs that illness and disabilities brought him some controversies since he genuinely believed humanity should continue to move on, struggling against them, he finally created the means to make humans smarter and stronger. He came up with a genetic treatment with the help of his team which would increase the intellect and strength in fully grown people without needing to hack into embryos. People who had survived the Minbari invasion and the occupation found their IQs leaping ahead, and they found their reflexes and strength were much greater than anything they'd had before.

But Stockman knew while he had made a good start, humanity would need centuries to become truly superior. One thing he had done was to secretly look into the telepathic gene, and he had discovered it had been artificially induced into the human race. He would continue studying the gene for the rest of his life, making incredible discoveries as he went.

Author's Note - One thing I never understood about the Babylon 5 universe was how the Earth Alliance didn't visibly dial back their place in the galaxy as if the Earth-Minbari war never happened. I can understand the Babylon project needing to create peace, at the same time there should have been projects on Earth meant to accelerate humanity's development on the galactic stage. And if some of those projects were technological or biological, so what?