At-Will Phenotyping

by Dave Hangman

Ten years as a fugitive through the solar system had transformed them on the inside. One of their first forms of camouflage had been to produce estrogen, giving their body a feminine appearance. When they arrived on Earth, they were amazed at the use their old associates had made of their synthetic genome. A damn drug had been concocted that turned people into hybrid freaks. It was as if no one was happy to be what they really were anymore.

Behind that big business was a single company, At-will Phenotyping, and running it, his old friend Dr. Mason Evershed. They had asked him for a business meeting. They knew he would grant it. The bait they had set for him was too juicy and that man’s ambition was infinite.

Evershed’s personal assistant was a modified feline woman with slanted eyes and moon-shaped pupils. No one used humans for such functions anymore. Having someone like that meant they were swimming in opulence.

“Miss… Deya Oddball?” Evershed asked as he shook their hand. They wore an odd high bun with their hair pulled back over their forehead.

Evershed gestured for them to sit down. He had gray hair, a neatly groomed short beard, rimless high-tech glasses, and a smug attitude they didn’t remember.

“A rather strange last name,” he commented. They just smiled, holding his gaze. “I was very impressed by the studies you have sent me. A protobacterium symbiotic with humans. A rhizobium capable of fixing nitrogen. If we had skin coated with chemical receptors, we could become autotrophic beings, capable of producing our own food.”

“I see you understand the value of what I intend to sell you.”

“It’s a field that our company has not yet ventured into. At the moment we are content with giving people the opportunity to be what they want to be, transforming their morphology and behavior at will. It’s a very lucrative business.”

“Which has its days numbered,” they assured. “Many of your current phenotypes are already being sold on the black market and two of your direct competitors have announced that they are also working with… synthetic genome,” they pronounced the last words with a certain amount of reticence.

“I see you are well informed,” he smiled nervously.

“You, at heart, work in the identity and aesthetics business. Side businesses. I’m offering you to dominate the food sector, a basic need for 100% of people. Your current business is mere child’s play in comparison. Are you going to pass up an opportunity like this?”

Evershed shifted uncomfortably in his armchair. His arrogant attitude was gone.

“Why have you come to us?”

“I need someone to develop a new phenotype, a skin that synthesizes everything our metabolism needs from inorganic substances. Can you imagine what could happen to your company if I offer it to one of your competitors?”

The doctor’s steady gaze reflected a strange mixture of aversion and fear.

“Where do you have that protobacterium?” he asked.

“It’s symbiotic with me.” Evershed was puzzled.

“There’s no lab sample?” They shook their head. “Not a single one? Have you stolen the protobacterium by inoculating it into your own body?”

“No, doctor. Far from it. Let me tell you a story and you will understand how it got to me,” he looked at them intrigued. “The story begins with a humanoid figure walking across a plain of rock and ice under a tenuous atmosphere of carbon dioxide. They are not wearing a spacesuit, but an exoskeleton of biological origin that prevents them from freezing at more than a hundred degrees below zero. Jupiter’s great red spot gazes down at them. Sound familiar?”

“Callisto!” he exclaimed with a surprised look on his face.

“That’s right, doctor. The stranger approaches the main dome of the HOPE experimental base and keys in the access code. The outer door of the airlock opens and they enter inside. Once the cabin has been pressurized, they break free of the organic shell as if they were an insect shedding its skin. When the inner door opens, four members of the expedition greet them nervously, pointing tasers at them.”

“Lieutenant Andrew Jones,” the doctor pronounced that name with genuine fear.

“Indeed, he mysteriously disappeared two weeks earlier on a routine reconnaissance mission, but now stood before them grotesquely transformed. He has a horn protruding from his forehead from the sphenoid and two antennae with something resembling the moving eyes of a crab. His own eyes glow eerily in the gloom. His head has two prominent occipital hemispheres separated by a large fissure. They look like two intertwined brains, one of them clearly non-human and rapidly developing…” Evershed listened in fright. “Colonel Fowler wanted to know what had happened to him…” said Miss Oddball, pausing to let their interlocutor continue.

“Jones didn’t know,” continued the geneticist. “He woke up in the middle of the icy plain of Callisto and, without knowing how, his senses told him where the base was. So, he started walking toward it.”

“Fowler asked them where they had gotten that exoskeleton from which they had broken away.”

“Jones stumped us, he thought he had made it himself.”

“And that’s where you come in, Dr. Evershed. You ran a thousand tests on the newly reinstated man, every test you had at your disposal in the moon base lab. What did you discover?”

“He had hyperspectral vision,” he replied, “from infrared to ultraviolet. He could see in the dark and distinguish polarized light. His strange horn detected magnetic fields. His skull was covered by a network of small ducts through which ran a gelatinous substance with sacs filled with electroreceptor cells.

“And what did that mean?” Deya Oddball looked at him smiling.

“He could sense the electrical impulses of any living organism. No one could remain hidden from him.”

“What you had discovered was exciting and, at the same time, terrifying, wasn’t it?”

“His new biosynthetic brain contained genes capable of encoding proteins that allowed him to modify the behavior of his cells,” he continued, still impressed. “Faced with an external stimulus, it could activate those genes and produce specialized organs as needed.”

“Impressive!” they exclaimed sarcastically. “Did they know who could have endowed them with something like that?”

“No,” Evershed replied nervously. “Jones didn’t know. He didn’t even remember being away for two weeks. I don’t know how he survived,” he said naively.

“But you did know, didn’t you, Dr. Evershed?”

“Me? … well …”

“What was the purpose of the HOPE experimental base on Callisto?” they asked flatly.

“I think you already know,” he said in an inaudible tone, almost to himself.

“An alien genome had been discovered on that moon of Jupiter. You had been studying it for several years and were aware of its enormous potential. You had seen it produce all sorts of dangerous and uncontrolled hybrid phenotypes, which is why you kept it isolated on that distant moon. But now you, and you alone, decided that the time had come to test it on humans, thus making a mad dash. Lieutenant Andrew Jones was just your guinea pig.”

“Yes, but it didn’t produce the expected results,” he complained. “We were puzzled. Until he disappeared, we didn’t see any effect on him.”

“Because you are a pathetic, bumbling genetic engineer.”

He swallowed without daring to retort. “What happened to him so that, when he came back, he would have undergone that transformation?” asked the geneticist intrigued. “Do you know?”

“Well, the real owners of that new genome put it to work properly.”

Dr. Mason Evershed was stunned, his eyes wide open in pure amazement. “Was there an alien laboratory?” he asked candidly.

“You always sensed it, didn’t you, doctor?” He nodded slightly, much to his regret. “No one knows how or where they did it. But they left us a unique and unrepeatable being, perhaps to make us realize how limited our knowledge was and how reckless we were being.”

Miss Oddball paused and let the doctor absorb the idea.

“You, for your part, never confessed to Jones what you had done to them.”

“I didn’t know what had happened, or whether we had caused it,” he justified himself.

“You preferred to imbue the matter with mystique. You made them believe that the inexplicable transformation they had undergone was actually a gift to humanity. You told them that we could take a giant leap forward in the development of gene therapies for the treatment of diseases. So, you extracted from them some of those new alien neurons with genes capable of modifying cell behavior. They collaborated, naively. From them you synthesized your adenovirus serum. But deep down, you were thinking of something very different.”

“I saw an opportunity and I took it,” he shouted heatedly, jumping up nervously from his seat. He went to a small minibar and without offering anything to his guest, poured himself a double drink. “I left Callisto with my drug. Not only could it restore defective cellular functions. The enhanced alien genome made it possible to transform phenotypes at will, to modify people as they wished.”

“That’s how you created your company, producing degenerative spawn with which to enrich yourself.”

“Very few people know that when I was stationed on the moons of Jupiter, I got alien genome samples. How do you know all those details?”

“You’ll know the answer in a minute,” they said. “The protobacterium I’m offering you now can change everything.”

“Are you blackmailing me?” he asked in exasperation. “What’s your price?”

“To keep your company.”

“What? Are you crazy?“

“Certainly not. I designed the protobacterium to be incompatible with your drug. The simultaneous presence of genes from both disrupts the hormonal balance of the cells so that they can no longer control cell division and form tumors. You must already be noticing this in your body.“

He looked at them in terror. He realized they had touched. Something strange and virulent was happening inside his organism. He stared at his hands in fright. Small uncontrolled spasms were beginning to occur. Pus-filled ulcers and boils were developing incipiently but uncontrollably all over his body.

“You still don’t know who I am, doctor?”

Two crab-eyed antennae emerged from between their hair. Then they undid their bun revealing the horn of their skull.

“Jo… Jones?” he asked in astonishment.

“I call this new phenotype Weirdo Jones,” Miss Oddball kindly corrected him. “You used me as a guinea pig,” they said, threateningly. “You injected me with all sorts of variants of your useless synthetic genome made from the alien genome. You wanted to get your damn serum and get rich,” they rebuked him. “There were effects, don’t lie to me. Andrew Jones’ phenotype went completely out of control, both in his physiology and his behavior. And that scared you. So, you tried to get rid of me by abandoning me on the frozen plains of Callisto. What you did not foresee was how resilient that genome was, nor that there were other geneticists much more qualified than you nearby who could fix the mess you had organized, nor that the correctly encoded genome could endow me with the ability to transform my morphological and biochemical characteristics, thus allowing me to survive.”

“You had many more secrets than I was able to discover,” he said, seething with grief. “You have even become a hermaphrodite. You should be grateful to me.”

“I was not your experiment, but theirs,” said Miss Oddball bitterly.

“You should be dead. The HOPE base was destroyed shortly after I left.”

“You thought you were very clever, doctor. My new senses allowed me to detect that you had left a self-destruct plan in place. You killed those men because of your ambition.”

“There was no other way out,” he justified himself with a face broken by pain.

“Now, doctor, I have done to you what you did to me,” the ulcers on Evershed’s skin began to explode painfully. “You will suffer a continuous and uncontrolled tumorous transformation throughout your body, but in your case, it will be degenerative and irreversible. A painful dose of your own medicine. Finally, you will die,” they assured.

“This is… murder,” he could hardly speak anymore.

“Callisto modified my body. Becoming a fugitive for more than ten years has completely changed my spirit.”

Deya Oddball also began to transform gradually, as they watched the doctor in agony. Then, the resulting shape-shifter switched on the intercom.

“Miss Fulford,” they said to Dr. Evershed’s feline-featured personal assistant, faithfully imitating the doctor’s voice, “I will no longer be needing your services today, you may go home, thank you very much.”

They had all night to complete the transformation process. The alien genome allowed them to modify, not only their appearance, but also their personality, feelings, and behavior. They would have time to meditate on what or who they were; Andrew, Weirdo, Deya or many others. In a world obsessed with transforming their phenotypes, they just wished they could maintain some stable identity.

“It seems that in the near future,” they spoke to the geneticist’s corpse, “we will wonder more and more about our identity, to the point of not knowing what or who we are. You will be to blame for that, doctor,” they pointed their finger at him. “We may even come to wish fervently that we had a stable identity again. At least,” they consoled themself, “tomorrow I will be you, and the world you have created at my expense will also be mine.”

David Verdugo is a Spanish writer trying to make his way into the English language market under the pseudonym Dave Hangman. In English, he has already published stories in the anthology “Superstition” by Redwood Press, and in the magazines “The Sprawl Mag,” “History Through Fiction,” “Tales from the Moonlit Path” and “Bright Flash Literary Review” and has received three honorable mentions in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contests for 4Q2021, 1Q2022 and 3Q2022. In Spanish, he has collected four books of short stories that intermingle very different genres: magical realism, crime, horror, historical fiction, epic fantasy, and science fiction.