self-destruct sequence. He was hoping that in the ensuing chaos, his assistant, Dr. Yagamuchi and her research team would be able to get away with the specimens. Specimens? He still thought of them in that clinical, detached way, but be honest, he thought, the specim… the babies, he firmly told himself, were of the utmost importance. His job now was to make sure this distraction kept all eyes on him. If he failed and they were both captured, then it was all for nothing. His betrayal to the Company would not go unpunished. In fact, he was sure he would not be able to avoid the detonation that would destroy all 15 levels of the underground facility where he had spent the last 12 years of his life engaging in fantastic experiments in enhancing different life forms.
As a scientist in the employ of the Company, he enjoyed the latest state-of-the-art equipment, unlimited funding, a large staff who answered to his every whim, and every researcher’ dream: free reign to research and experiment on whatever he wanted without any fear of government sanctions or ethical morals getting in the way. The only caveat was that anything he discovered or created was the property of the Company, for them to do with or further develop as they saw fit.
For years, Dr. Rao did not mind that stipulation. His particular interest was in animal cell and then gravitated to gene manipulation. As a child, he always imagined common animals with physical attributes of other animals, and with the unlimited resources of the Company and the deep underground labs hidden away from prying eyes, Dr. Rao was indeed able to bring his childhood curiosities to life. He began by splicing the genes of animals together, to create new and interesting forms of life. He created butterflies with scorpion tails, wingless birds with frog legs, cats with wings, and rats with porcupine quills. He developed hamsters with forked tongues, squirrels with beaks, and turtles with octopus tentacles. He gave eagle eyes to blind mole rats, the kangaroos’ jumping ability to hippopotami and gills to lions and tigers. He enlarged hummingbirds to the size of elephants (of course they couldn’t fly) and he reduced elephants to the size of hummingbirds (and delighted in amazement as those could fly!). He gave a cheetah’s legs and speed to a tiger shark with a mammal’s lungs and watched as it hunted wildebeests with turtle shells on the Serengeti.
His research soon branched off into cell manipulation, and he attempted to increase the intelligence of the most intelligent animals on the planet: dogs, dolphins, and primates. This was where he had the biggest breakthrough in his career. For years he only had marginal success while manipulating the area of the brain believed to harbor intelligence. Compared to his earlier work, it was no big deal to develop chimpanzees that could read and write, or dolphins that could perform basic arithmetic. Dogs that could tell time and recognize letters were cool, but had no practical application for the Company and before long, Dr. Rao began to feel the pressure of coming up with the next big breakthrough. He began to work longer hours, and sleep less, and perform longer experiments on his subjects. His nerves began to fray from the lack of sleep, and one fateful day, while electrically stimulating the fully exposed brain of his favorite chimpanzee, Gilligan, his eyes closed briefly and his probe slipped a little too far to the left of the unused (or so believed!) portion of the brain.
Unexplainably, although heavily sedated, Gilligan sprang awake, screeching at the top of his lungs and jarring Dr. Rao from his daze. Jerking the probe out and pushing back from the operating table in a panic, Dr. Rao watched as all of Gilligan’s vitals momentarily flat-lined and then resumed on their own. The earsplitting shrieking stopped instantly. Shaken, Dr. Rao and his team closed up the cranial cavity and monitored Gilligan’s vitals for the next several days. Everything seemed fine, and although he viewed his error again and again on the recording automatically taken of all his experiments, he began to believe Gilligan suffered no ill effects.
“Warning! Warning! Self-destruct sequence initiated. Total facility annihilation in 5 minutes and counting. All personnel: please evacuate!” The mechanical voice briefly interrupted his musings of that fateful discovery all those years ago.
He ran to every computer workstation in the lab and uploaded the virus he specifically designed to erase all of his work. He could not let the Company further distort his work! He had to be sure the horror he discovered earlier that night would not be repeated!
“It’s all my fault!” he thought, as he pulled out every flash drive and encrypted disc and threw them in the metal trash can right before setting them afire.
He thought back again to that fateful day, sitting in his lab finalizing notes as Gilligan sat in his cage finishing a banana he had given him. He rattled his cage, indicating he wanted the one Dr. Rao was eating as well.
“Oh, no, Gilligan,” Dr. Rao said as he put the half-eaten banana down, reaching for another file. “That’s enough for you.” He turned his back to Gilligan and resumed his work, listening to the rattling of the cage.
This was normal behavior for Gilligan lately, becoming more demanding, and eventually Dr. Rao would give in, if nothing else to just quiet him down so he could finish his work. But on this day, the rattling stopped before Rao could give him the half-eaten banana, and when he absently reached for it to give to Gilligan, he discovered it wasn’t beside him where he left it. He looked under the desk and moved his files around but couldn’t locate it. When he turned around, he saw Gilligan calmly eating the banana! He looked to his lunch, and then back to Gilligan in amazement, still locked in his cage on the other side of the lab, over 30 feet away from where the half-eaten banana had once lay! Dr. Rao took another banana out of his drawer and placed it beside him. He watched Gilligan intently. At first nothing happened. He watched Gilligan and Gilligan watched him. Gilligan’s eyes slowly travelled to the banana and turned red. He stretched his arm out of the cage toward the banana. He looked at the banana, never blinking for long minutes. Dr. Rao watched, and a small gasp escaped him when the banana slowly lifted up off the table and drifted over to Gilligan’s outstretched palm! It was unbelievable! Dr. Rao was amazed, and knew right away that his mistake, his unintentional electrical stimulating of the unused portion of Gilligan’s brain had awaken some sort of… hidden potential, some sort of telekinesis!
The research moved at a blinding pace after that. He developed a serum that would mimic the effects of the electrical brain manipulation, and from that point on, it was discovery after discovery. By replicating his mistake, this time with purposeful intent, he was able to awaken a specific amazing ability in his animal lab specimens. He was unable to explain why each species seemed to have their own unique ability, but discovering what they were and developing uses for it catapulted him quickly back into favor with the Company. That lasted only as long as it took him to discover that as great as this discovery was, it was minimized by the discovery of an insurmountable weakness along with the ability.
His chimpanzees developed limited telekinesis, although it only seemed to work on retrieving something they wanted desperately. They could only do this several times a day before intense headaches set in. Using the power also greatly diminished the chimp’s life span; Gilligan expired three months after first demonstrating his ability and dozens of other chimps didn’t last one week as Dr. Rao did experiment after experiment to determine the depth of their abilities. His dolphin specimens gained the ability to levitate, but they were only able to do this when they initiated a jump out of the water. This made them able to jump much higher out of the water than before and perform an insane number of somersaults before hitting the water again. They too suffered a greatly reduced life span; the more they used their new-found ability the sooner they lost their ability to swim, slowly sinking to the bottom of the pool, and unable to get the oxygen they desperately needed, they drowned.
He had the most success with dogs. They developed varying levels of teleportation. Depending on the size, breed, and disposition of the dog, these dogs (dubbed blink! dogs because of their ability to blink in and out of existence) could teleport varying distances. Dr. Rao ran an innumerable number of tests on almost every breed of dog imaginable, with varying results. Miniature designer dogs, like teacup Yorkies and miniature schnauzers could teleport from one end of a couch to another, while small breeds, such as terriers, could teleport from
