ACT I, SCENE 2

1885 CE - Academic School of the Johanneum, Inken Hose, Winterhude, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, German Empire

Today was a big day. Professor Weismann was visiting Hamburg. And not just any place in Hamburg; he was coming to Johanneum, first thing.

Hans Dreisch has never met Weismann, not yet anyway. But to him, the cytologist is one of the most important biological philosophers of this and any other time. Not that Haeckel is unimportant, but Hans has become alienated by the Haeckelian approach to evolution using "phylogenetic" trees and cladograms based on comparative anatomy. It doesn't fascinate him. It's not immediately grounded in the real building blocks of biological systems, the cells, the germs, the plasm that make up the anatomical features.

Early in the morning, he rushes up to the study room on the third floor, to check on Professor Lidenbrock's cast-iron birdcage aquarium in the back corner next to the chalkboard. Removing the copy of Journey to the Centre of the Earth that often sat on the lid, he opens the tank. In the saltwater, settled on the thin sandy bottom, there are three sea urchins, all recently metamorphosed after spending their youth as planktonic pluteli.

Hans had known them since they were four cells from a single embryo, the product of a sperm and egg acquired from the fishtank at Carl Hagenbeck's Tierpark. Two of them were split away from each other in the early phase of their development. Now they had grown up into two complete and separate, but physically identical, beings. At the same time, another two cells were fused together to form a single cell. This too formed a complete and separate urchin, still physically identical to the other two. All three must have their own set of virtually identical genetic instructions, governed by some driving force.

He has to share this with Professor Weismann after the lecture on gametes. He's definitely onto something, and this could be his chance to embark on the path charted by the great masters of biology.

1984 CE - deck of the USS New Jersey (BB-62), near Suez Canal, Borsaʿīd, Port Said Canal Governate, Egypt

"Everybody loved the New Jersey until she fired her guns," remarks Chicago Tribune writer Tim McNulty in his latest report on the civil war in Lebanon, read by a solemn Captain Bruce Pacton at the operations bridge. When the Iowa-class battleship fires all of her main guns, the explosive barrage of sunlight-yellow flames resembles two, sometimes four, mushroom clouds turned sideways, their reflection glistening on the sea surface.

But practically and tactically, this barrage is a mirage. This was demonstrated embarrassingly during the assault on Druze and Syrian forces in the Jebel ash-Shouf overlooking Beirut. Out of the 300 shells fired, the heaviest shore bombardment since the New Jersey's golden days during the Korean War, only 30 hit the Syrian command post in Bekaa Valley. The rest missed their target by over 10,000 yards.

By the time Navy Captain Bruce Pacton was able to locate some unmixed powder supplies so that the cannons wouldn't burn at different rates, it was too late. With Israeli forces in retreat, unable to protect the American proxy troops within the Lebanese Armed Forces, in was time for Uncle Sam to pull out. The assassination of Professor Malcolm H. Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was the last straw. The West was not welcome in Lebanon.

And so the ship affectionately nicknamed "Big J the Black Dragon" puffs her way home, defeated. Where she is headed, Captain Pacton won't know until he reaches the Red Sea, at a safe heaven off the Saudi coast. She'll probably be put en route to Hawaii, perhaps stopping near Thailand just in case the situation in Kampuchea destabilizes unfavorably, just in case the British Forces won't reach it in time.

Reagan personally approved of the New Jersey's recommission two years earlier as part of the military's "600-ship plan". After being anchored at Long Beach in 1969, having served in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, she had been renovated with a state-of-the-art missile system, delivered just in time for Christmas. Now she was a joke. She should have stayed in the mothball fleet, hosting celebrities and their parties on her deck, not captains and their skippers.

The American military is at a crisis point. They are winning in the war against the commie dominoes, that's for sure. Grenada has been liberated, the USSR will collapse any day now. And at home, patriotism, support for the armed forces, is as high as it was during the Red Scare of the 1950s, at the dawn of the Cold War. But for what? Battleships, battle tanks, battle-spacecraft is ludicrously expensive, with no guarantee that the private contractors will fulfill their promises, that their Titanics won't sink due to bad steel. And if Vietnam, if Lebanon proved anything, it's that they are not impregnable to even the most mundane of weapons, the most arcane of tactics, the oldest tricks in the history book.

Surely, there is a better way, a stealthier way, a more efficient way forward for the military.

Then Captain Pacton remembers something. A conversation he had many years ago in Bristol, with a dear friend from the British Armed Forces, about how during the Korean War, the American subjected the communist resistance in China to bloody pox.

1987 CE - Saticon Bioindustries HQ, classified location near San Rafael, Marin County, California, USA

Taken at face value, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the philosophy of "the preservation of favored races in the struggle to survive", presents an appealing worldview for the laissez faire venture capitalist. The survival of the fittest, the epic tale of alpha males battling against the elements and each other, the seduction of females to be impregnated by voracious sperm, the miracle of birth and the renewal of the cycle. Genotypes, phenotypes as a currency, their products a resource to be commodified, their fates predestined without the need for a god, guided only by the randomly spinning needle of the compass held by the invisible hand of the evolutionary market.

Of course, in recent history, humankind has occupied the niche of the gods, creating beings of a desired image and purpose, and thus altered the alignment of the compass needle.

People have domesticated animals for millennia, enclosing them in paddies and paddocks, sometimes butchering them for their flesh, blood, fruit, milk, and bones, other times sparing their lives for their intimate companionship. Dogs, cats, cows, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, llamas, buffalo, camels, reindeer, wapiti, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goldfish, guinea pigs, rats, mice; all have been tamed by human hands, surviving in captivity long after their immediate wild ancestors have gone extinct or become critically endangered. They have been further subdivided into unnatural breeds, with certain morphological and behavioral characteristics desired for specific tasks: hunting, gathering, tracking, pulling, pushing, loving.

The same principles were applied to plants, perhaps earlier than the first domestications of animals. Wheat, rye, rice, barely, maize, potato, tomato, olive, date, grape, banana, apple, pineapple, breadfruit, guava; all can trace their ancestry to a few rare strains selected for cultivation, modified for their taste, their scent, their aesthetic, and their resistance to weeds and parasites.

Darwin called this process "artificial selection". These organisms were still as subject to the laws of natural selection as every other living thing, but their immediate modification, their pedigree, was the result of conscious and supposedly well-educated decisions made by human beings, with an agenda, a mission. In the fascocapitalist West, during the late Industrial Revolution, this process was given a different name when intended for modifying humans themselves: eugenics.

America, a rogue offshoot of the British Empire, pioneered in eugenics policy since its inception, with its ruthlessly calculated extermination of hostile aboriginal tribes, mirroring what would happen late under the Union Jack in Australasia. But it was not until the early 20th century that the scientific means of justifying American exceptionalism, the Manifest Destiny of Western expansion, came into being. New York paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn headlined the early eugenist movement; a staunch supporter of the "physiochemical approach" to social Darwinism, he was a devout and open racist, subdividing humans and other mammals into a taxonomic mess of numerous evolutionary species, with the white Anglo-Saxon as the pinnacle of biological progress.

Then, just as the Nazis began to engulf Europe in the late 1930s, another, unrelated Osborn, Frederick Henry Osborn (also of New York), published "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" in the American Sociological Review, forever cementing eugenics as the default ideology of imperialist anthropology. Whether it was acknowledged or not in academia or among the populace, it was always there, ominously lurking. The mission to preserve the white race, the enslavement and extermination of less desired races, the preservation of stolen, conquered capital. The defeat of Nazism at the end of WWII was a fluke and a ruse. (After all, many Nazi war criminals such as Wernher von Braun, were taken into the American space program, to combat the much-hyped Soviet threat of Stalin and Khrushchev.). America, along with its allies Britain, Canada, Australia, and possibly the whole of the European Union, was a fascist, eugenist entity worldwide.

The globalized capitalist society of Americanized empire applied eugenics to the entire biosphere from the cell up, white supremacist terraforming on a microbial scale. Genetic engineering and cloning, developed from the principles of Dreisch, Mendel, Punnett, Franklin, Watson, and Crick, was already in full force among Western intelligence agencies by the early 1950s; it just wasn't publicly acknowledged yet, and not just because the science was in its infancy. Its first test if military usefulness was in the Korean War. Chinese and Korean rebels began noticing epidemics from Pyongyang to Manchuria, resembling smallpox but far more resilient than anything their vaccines could guard against. They suspected the Americans to be responsible, yet were immediately dismissed by the international community as liars, hoaxers. But they were dead right. Officials from the US Marine Corps and the World Health Organization, working from a makeshift laboratory in Kyoto, had cultured genetically modified bacteria pathogens - anthrax, tuberculosis, and bubonic plague - to be resistant to antibiotics available to the communist resistance. Nature mastered by man, deployed as weapons of war.

So far, genetic manipulation in the service of eugenics has remained inhuman, applied only to "model organisms", many pests that mankind has tried to exterminate in their natural habitats. Bacteria, protists, algae, cannabis, dandelions, cockroaches, carrion flies, sewer rats. Organisms that are disposable, despised. Organisms that wouldn't raise roars of anger from the plant and animals rights activists, or from the anti-imperialist organic food advocates. But the eugenist mission remains the prime directive. This is leading to something bigger, a global form of social control in the coming computer age, when these methods will be applied to human beings. The preservation of the favored white race in the struggle for more capital. A race that, once perfected, once cleansed, will receive designer plants and animals to make its luxurious lifestyle in fortunate nations even more comfortable, while the third world is poisoned by their crops, hunted down by super-soldiers.

Within the server room of this top secret computer laboratory, a database of "possible threats to American and British interests" guarded from the outside world by barbed wire and security officers with machine guns, is one of the designer organisms purposed for bourgeoisie use. Only four centimeters long, it bares little resemblance to its ancestor, the common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus found throughout tropical Central and South America. It is flightless, only able to parachute across the isles for short distances on small wings with reduced digits and a flimsier membrane. Its has not one hook-clawed wing finger, but two, an opposable thumb-and-finger pair for which it can manipulate objects. It has no eyes, no ears, only a small mouth with needle-sharp incisor to impale infesting rats and mice, as well as to take in processed meat given as a reward for its servitude. The skull is enveloped by a satin black, cubic mechanoreceptor, taking it digitally encoded orders from the control room to put this wire there, or to squeeze this wire through a pinhole, or to get ride of this rodent infestation there. This neural clamp overrides its natural instinct, save its need to eat, drink, and excrete.

And it is sterile, infertile, disposable. Just as Saticon's patented pesticide-producing corn and wheat have terminator seeds to prevent hybridization with wild species (and to make even more money off of third world customers), Blanops siliconus has no future, no destiny of its own, condemned to dwell amongst the plugged and the wired. Its phallic development stunted, its testes or ovaries castrated at birth, it can not reproduce, and it cannot evolve naturally. Its fate is subjected to its creators faith in the invisible hand of the free market. And the needle inside the compass of that hand may change direction without warning. Biotechnology is a chaotic industries of start-ups and dead-ends. Within a few years, perhaps even a few months, the bugbats may prove economically unviable, the profit margins of imperial eugenics located somewhere else. They will become extinct, a footnote in the long saga of genetic experimentation leading up to the new world order.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, ponders BMF instructor Joseph Wilder, visiting from Sandhurst at the invitation of his friend Bruce Pacton, these seemingly insignificant creatures can serve the nation, the world, the order, in ways these Americans entrepreneurs haven't though of yet.

Wilder is no captain or colonel, he doesn't even have that high a rank, but he knows an asset to Her Majesty's army when he sees one. He calls Andover, concerning a potential Yankee import.

His eyes fixate on that neural clamp, its posterior neon red beam flicking, pulsating with the arrival of each new signal, each new command.

1990 CE - Guns Island Military Observatory, 322 km southwest of Ardmore, County Waterford, Munster, Ireland

The British were leaving. That is what the Irish citizens were being told. After forty years of operation, the Guns Island Military Observatory was closing down as part of a cost-cutting measure, giving Île des Guns back to Ireland.

"If only the bloody English would give back fucking Ulster as well", snarks Alson Seamus, as he and his camera crew board the inflatable raft and speed away from the rocky basalt cliffs, swarming with nesting guillemots and gannets.

Though Dublin-born, Seamus lives in London, where he works for London Morning Television's Evening News. At this point in their career, a television journalist usually submits to the bondage of the bourgeoisie, the respect for the deep state's authority, even in commercial broadcasting. Seamus isn't that television journalist in any way, shape, or form. He came to LMT to join the ranks of Michael J. Harper, a self-professed "infowarrior", one willing to see through the wool over his eyes, the mastermind behind the curtain puppeteering the wizard.

His early collaborations with Harper have gone well. Their coverage of the Clarke Pence pedophile scandal and the human trafficking coverup at Sandhurst proved primetime ratings gold for Evening News, as the program enjoyed notoriety and popularity not experienced since its unorthodox Vietnam coverage in the early 70s.

But on this trip, Seamus' first solo investigation, a probe into alleged human trafficking possibly connected the Sandhurst incident, he has come up empty handed. Any British military officers worth questioning have already left, relocated to bases elsewhere. No conspiracy to uncover, just a barren mass of Palaeocene volcanic rock sticking out of the Irish Sea. He steers the raft northwest, back towards Muir Cheilteach.

If only he steered northeast to observe a small white motorboat with a barely visible Union Jack bumper sticker zip by them, heading straight for a sea cave on the south side of the island.

1993 CE - Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, South East England, England, United Kingdom

"But you see, Mantell got it wrong. The Iguanodon's horn was actually its thumb. See? It's that broad spike sticking out of his hand."

Christine was not enjoying this one bit, having to look at all this dead stuff. These bones and skins should still be rotting in the ground where they were buried.

"Wait, is that a Eustreptospondylus? It is a Eustreptospondylus! Hmm, I didn't expect it to be this…smalll. Though it would be bigger, toothier, like a T. rex or a megalosaur."

She didn't want to be dragging that little brat Claudia Brown through the Dinosaur Gallery. This was her one weekend off, the one weekend where she wasn't bogged down with homework, the one weekend where she could perhaps acquaint her selves with the people she admired most, the distinguished professors leading the emerging Bioinformatics program at Oxford. But no, she was stuck with babysitting as a punishment from her godmother. On the opposite side of the campus, no less.

Well, at least she could visit the Pitts River Wing, if she could get Claudia to settle down. Perhaps to see the Noh mask collection. She's always had an interest in feudal Japanese history.

Christine Johnson had not fared well since her father died. The blast at Dunmurry was a traumatic turning point in her life. Papa wasn't coming home. And no one took that news worse than Dolly, who ended up jumping off the roof of a Belfast orphanage because she felt unloved. With both of her mentors taken away from her, Christine unraveled, threatening to becoming a juvenile delinquent, only finding calm within the storm from reading textbooks.

She was eventually adopted by the Cordorliers, a wealthy real estate family with a number of properties in the south of England, and a number of connections to the intelligence communities at the Home Office and the SAS. Christine has learned to deal with them. They may not be the most attentive parents in the world, or the most caring, but at least they have a world class library accumulated over the last four decades from their travels abroad. She could study their world, plotting how to take it over.

With the Cordorliers' move to Oxford, Christine hopes to become familiar with the most noteworthy academics in all of England, in hopes of bribing her way into university. That is, if she can get over her stupid chores.

Claudia Brown is the younger sister of Christine's friend from boarding school, Terry Brown. She too is a self-taught scholar, a "nerd", but far more annoying than Christine has ever been. She isn't just interested in dinosaurs, she's obsessed with them. She has come out of Spielberg's Jurassic Park a dinomaniac. She will not stop talking about all the different dinosaur groups, all the different places dinosaurs have been found, all the new groundbreaking discoveries by Bob Bakker, Jack Horner, and Nick Cutter. All facts about "the living fossils", the coelacanths, the crocodiles, the cockroaches, that once coexisted with the dinosaurs. How dinosaurs ruled for 160 million years, how dinosaurs care for their young like birds, how dinosaurs evolved into birds.

Christine could care less about this crap. When it came to biology, mounted skeletons and stuffed specimens, branching phylogenetic trees of morphological change didn't interest her. She was interested in cells, in DNA, in bacteria, protists, viruses, the building blocks of life. Forget dinosaurs and their amber-entrapped bloodsucking contemporaries; microbes were the true rulers of the Earth. And now humankind was on the verge of ruling them.

Jurassic Park was just a kiddie flick, just child's play, compared to the science she wanted to take part in.

1995 CE - The Tower, Minerva Hills National Park, near Springsure, Central Highlands Region, Queensland, Australia

This is not going well at all.

She is not designed for this. Despite her tough, naked, wrinkly hide, she is overheating underneath the blistering sun of the outback. She was born, engineered, trained for the darkness of the underworld, not the blinding light of the desert.

But at least she was free at last, free at last.

She is still overwhelmed by the memories of her past life, in the world underneath the outback. The gloominess, the somberness. The barbed wire, the electric fences, the concrete walls, the security lasers. The sounds of her seemingly eternal imprisonments, the shouting, the screaming, the beatings.

Sit. Stay. Good girl. Fetch this. Chase this. That's it, tear it like you mean it. No, that is bad! Go hide! Bad girl!

She experienced this cruel world mainly through what she heard, what she smelled, what she tasted, in all of its felonous, wicked repugnancy. She has eyes, but very weak eyes, little more than slits where the sockets where, squished by the enormous width of her ears and her single nasal hole. Her vision is limited to shades of black and wide, punctuated every so often by sinuous, undulating vibrations of sound, illuminated by a touch of red and yellow, the technicolor movement of blood or the beating of a heart.

In the bunker, she could see the coldness of her handler's heart, the lack of empathy, compassion.

Fetch this. Chase this. That's it, No. B09, tear it like you mean it. Beat the shit out of this fucking Muslim traitor. Live like a goddamn warrior.

And remember, obey my voice. Obey the Pact

But she didn't want to be a warrior. She hated it. She hated him, she hated all of them. She didn't want to be like them. She didn't want to live like this, indiscriminately killing innocent people kidnapped from their Middle Eastern homeland, shackled to the cel walls as bait.

Fuck the Pact.

That is in her past now. Her handler was dead, and his handlers, and their handlers as well. Everyone in that godforsaken cavernous bunker was dead and devoured, nothing left but dry bones buried deep underground, where no other men or women tread. The sole operative at the training facility courageous enough to follow here to the surface and face her at Long Lagoon was quickly mauled by No. B12, her accomplice and companion. Sadly, he too died at that spot, from the many bullets embedded on his side.

She should have stayed with him. She was so inexcusably selfish, she left him to die to quench her thirst, having not drank since they broke out of the cel. How could she do that to him? They were the only two beings in the world that understood each other. She liked him, she loved him.

But that is also in her past now. He is gone, and that's that. Now she has to figure out how to survive on her own, all while evading capture, all while dealing with sounds and scents she has been educated to cope with.

Heading northwestwards from the town over the course of the early morning, she has set up camp on a rocky plateau overlooking the acacia woodland of the valley. The sparsity of dichanthium, casuarina, and cadellia does not provide ample cover from precipitation or predators, but it will have to do for now, until she has the energy to migrate deeper into the scrub forest at higher elevations, away from the village lights. She doesn't have the energy to do so, though, and it is way too hot. Like most creatures of the outback, she will sit out the midday heatwave, awaiting dusk, when there is only a ghost of chance of detection by lost hikers. (The park she has chosen to stay at has a large green sign with clear white lettering reading, "NO CAMPING".)

Then she sense something on the moves. Little twitches and scratches. Little ripples of sound, first uneven white scratches, then becoming more ovoid, more curved over time to reveal the thumping and pumping of little beating hearts hopping up and down the barren face of the inselberg. They are bipeds, but not humans. They have short, woolly, plump bodies, hunched over, sniffing the herbs growing along the crevices. Their arms and hands stubby and chubby, their hind legs long and muscular, their tails narrow and pointed. Their scent musky, but at the same time seductive, enticing, inviting her to come closer. These must be animals. And they are heading her way. They are within an arm's reach.

Food! Glorious food!

She doesn't even have to burst out in an ambush. In a flash, with one swipe of her didactyl paw, she grabs a subadult rock-wallaby and drags it into her encampment, a little hole at the side of the mountain. She takes a bite and loves it. Entranced by this newfound delicacy, she digs deeper, tearing into the carcass, tearing like she means it.