Dead of the Nite

She sipped her coffee slowly before she started her oratory. "My father was a famed geneticist, a pioneer in
cloning. If I told you his name, you would instantly recognize it for it is infamous within the medical and scientific
community. I assumed my mother's maiden name after schoolmates began calling me Frankenstein's
daughter. My father despondent by ridicule took his own life leaving my mother and I to our own devices.
Mother had her own ancestral estate on an island near Majorca as well as land in the Alps within Alsace Lorraine.
Within these remote estates, we found peace for a while. I was provided with the finest schooling
money could buy and excelled scholastically. When I turned 16 a package was delivered to me. My mother
was livid when she saw the seal on the package. My father's crest was embedded in the red wax. My mother
begged me to burn it without opening it but it was my father's, a father I dearly loved and I could not part
with it. The package contained my father's journals, his life work. Frankenstein was trying to perfect the reanimation
of life, but my father was trying to perfect the creation of life. Within the journals were the key to
eliminating the need of evolution, a way to recreate the human form in a variety of adaptive jumps allowing
survival in an infinite numbers of hostile environments. Imagine divers that need no SCUBA, Eskimos that no
longer require clothing to survive the elements, desert dwellers that can survive on the same water ration a
camel would. Through selective genetic splicing, anything was possible provided the host DNA strands were
correctly correlated. Some of the theories were recognized and widely lauded for their theoretical possibilities.
It wasn't until my father crossed from theory to experimentation that the ridicule began. The church was
the first to criticize the theory, but science criticized the experimentation. They compared my father to Hitler.
They labeled him "The new Father of the Master Race." As I read on, I became enamored with the concepts.
I wanted to prove my father's theories. It became my life's ambition to restore my father's reputation and
help mankind at the same time. I also knew that under my real name, the cloud of my father's reputation
would forever stall the pursuit of my ambition. So, I obliterated every association with him allowing me freedom
to achieve my goals. No one else besides my mother knows anything about this, no one but you. Will
you help me?" She was so beautiful, so noble, so vulnerable, God help me, I couldn't refuse. She stayed in
my room the rest of that night. In the morning, we went to the lab after an early breakfast. Professor Colsen
was already there. She stared at me with contempt and a fury that I had rarely seen in my short life, then she
smiled. The smile was cold, dark and decidedly evil. I was glad when she left the lab. For the first time, Simone
showed me the depth of her work, every intricate detail. It was unbelievable. Her theories were light years
beyond what I thought was the cutting edge of genetics. She was taking genetic manipulation and cloning to
a new frontier. She had found a way to mix traits found in varying families, classifications and subspecies of
life and splice them into human DNA. If correct in her assumptions, minor sequencing changes in a single cell
introduced in the forming ova would breed a new race in a single step. Evolution would be passé. Immense
jumps in the evolutionary process would be available in a single step providing new adaptive races where
needed and to suit every environment. Furthermore, the DNA was dominant, self-replicating and bioresistant
producing exact images of the original in every generation. No birth defects, no medical conditions,
immune systems that could be modified pre-birth to fight any virus or bacteria that evolution could produce.
The concept was staggering. I would have thought it a great storyline for comic books if I wasn't looking at
the theoretical proof now before my eyes. Then a chill went down my spine. It occurred to me, people would
kill for this information, not just any one particular faction of people but anyone. People would kill to have it,
kill to stop it, or kill because of the possibilities of what it could do. I calmed myself.