The symbol vanished from the screen, replaced an instant later by the head and shoulders of a woman. Her dark red hair was tied back, and her leaf green eyes were covered by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Despite her lack of cosmetics and the impersonal, clinical expression on her face, she was very pretty. She appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties. Behind the woman, Mildred could just make out black-topped lab tables laden with glassware.
Mildred recognized her. Dr. Connaught O’Brien had enjoyed her fifteen minutes of fame in the late 1990s. A biologist and an outspoken proponent of eugenics and selective breeding, she had made the lecture-and-talk-show circuit for a few months before vanishing from the public eye.
The woman’s basic thesis was that technology had changed and improved every aspect of human society, yet the human race itself was trapped in an evolutionary corral. O’Brien had maintained that human development had to catch up to technical advances.
The media had pinned the catch-all label “techno-genics” as a buzzword to categorize her theories. It was one she had strenuously objected to, but the appellation stuck. As Mildred recalled, during the storm of negative publicity, O’Brien had been dismissed from her post at Johns Hopkins University, amid accusations that she was Josef Mengele in drag. Obviously, when she had vanished, it was to work for Overproject Excalibur.
In a clear voice, touched lightly by a hint of an Irish brogue, Connaught O’Brien stated, “The third revolution of human progress is well under way. It affects us so deeply that some people in high places would rather maintain an uneasy silence than see it through to its fruition. Mission Invictus is the only true success in Overproject Excalibur, and yet that success is now threatened by the same powers that insisted upon its implementation in the first place.”
A line of anger creased O’Brien’s brow. “You who are seeing this and hearing my words know to whom I am referring. You say I have gone too far in developing a human organism that will survive in the postholocaust world. This is not a new accusation. I will not bore you with a recitation of my own personal injuries suffered by the small-minded attitude of the mainstream scientific community in the course of my work as a geneticist.”
“I agreed to work for Overproject Excalibur to be free of those constraints, of those misunderstandings. My assignment was to create a superior life-form that exhibited the necessary adaptive traits for survival in the new world, including reproduction. Given the immutable fact that time did not permit breeding a superior race in terms of normal gestation periods and maturity cycles, I was forced to a single conclusion. Mutation.”
O’Brien’s voice vibrated with passion. “It wasn’t just for money or to expand the fields of knowledge that I embarked on the course I followed. Certainly, money has no meaning now. It is a matter of conscience. You yourselves dictated that Mission Invictus was the only rational means to restore order and harmony to the world. I adhered to your schedules, built upon the findings of others in the field of pan-tropic science.”
Mildred sighed. She should have known. Before skydark, pantropy was a primarily theoretical field to bioengineer a strain of humanity that could survive and thrive in new environments. She had seen living evidence that pantropy hadn’t been restricted to a set of mere hypotheses, so she wasn’t surprised by O’Brien’s assertion.
“The Unisex Program and the Genesis Project were deemed failures,” O’Brien’s image continued. “Mission Invictus is not, however you may argue it. I will not explain how my biochemically synthesized gene mutations were utilized in the creation of the Alpha and Epsilon subjects. The fact that I succeeded where those others failed should provide the smallest hint of the magnitude of this miracle. The loss of Epsilon does not invalidate the miracle. No one regrets the accident more than I, but I am able to maintain my perspective while all about me, everyone has lost theirs. Now, on the dawn of a new age of human evolution, the same old primitive fear sets in again. The fear of the inferior man facing the superior man.”