Doctor Lea Calder was an accident-about-to-happen. She was a large woman who moved rigorously through the crowds at Shanghai Pudong Airport like a tight-end footballer bursting through an under-sized defense. Bewildered business travelers and frightened parents scurried aside as she charged down the concourse towards Gate 17 where her flight to New York City was scheduled to depart, but waiting for one last passenger. Aboard the waiting Boeing 777 Lea was greeted by endless rows of scowling faces. A 20-minute delay did not seem such a big deal given the sixteen-hour flight, and the airlines were notorious for padding their schedules with excess time. People have short memories, she thought, collapsing into the first available seat, still clutching her hand luggage. The flight attendant closed the door of the plane. There was a palpable sigh of relief, except from her window-seat neighbor, a man in a windbreaker with a golf logo, was went full-on passive aggressive, expanding like a pufferfish to minimize the spill-over room for this large woman with the excess carry-on baggage.
“Madam,” said the flight attendant, leaning over Lea. “You are in the wrong seat.”
More sighs, palpable and audible. More scowls. More passive-aggressive opposition from her fellow-passengers as the stewardess directed Lea through a gamut of sharp elbows and stockinged feet. There was an ironic cheer as she left economy, only for her to be greeted with sighs and scowls by the rubber-necking business class passengers. There were no seats available.
“Madam,” said the flight attendant, waving her onward to the first-class cabin, where Lea was greeted in the exact-same manner as the prior two sections of the plane; that is, with universal disapproval albeit disguised by a snobbish disregard of her large and awkward person. Lea might have felt like an impostor, if she hadn’t felt first and foremost like a drink.
“Do you have any milk?”
Sixteen hours aboard an airplane – first class – with nothing to do but sleep, eat, read and sleep again. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, her late arrival and excess baggage became a thing of the past. Sixteen hours is a long time to harbor a grudge, especially if the slate is wiped clean by the international dateline. Lea calculated that they would arrive in NYC the same day but four hours later. She could relax and take things really slow. Lea flipped open the spiral-bound notebook, and eased into her happy place, a matrix of genotypes.
“Not so fast!” said the man in the seat across the aisle. Lea expected to see the debonair older gentleman with the toothbrush mustache that gave her a disapproving stare when she occupied the seat, but it was a mop-haired teen in a lavender hoodie, and he was insistent that she put down the notepad and talk to him. Lea ignored him because she knew he was about to start meddling. “So, what are you going to do when you get to the Kleister-Fuchs lab in Maine?” said Justin Bieber, reading her thoughts, as he always did. “Are you simply gonna walk into Mordor?” A small cross hung from a delicate gold chain around the Biebster’s youthful neck. Lea put the book down and turned to the teenage heart-throb.
“If you must know, I intend to continue where I left off with Doctor Fuchs”
“With the Furby?”
“You can call it a Furby if you like but I think of it as a clade; a cross between an owl, a parrot, a bushbaby, an Angora Rabbit and a fox.”
“With happy hands,” said the Biebster, doing a hand dance with his elbows tucked into his chest, laughing at the pantomime.
“With human hands,” Lea conceded, looking around to check that nobody in first class was eavesdropping.
“Sounds like a monster.”
“Let me do my work.”
“Work, work, work. Ever since you were a teenage nerd, it’s been the same. All work and no play makes Jane a dull girl.” The Biebster and Lea went back a long way, to when he hung, surly and pouty, as a poster on the wall of her childhood bedroom.
“Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should!”
It was an old man wearing thick tortoise-shell glasses, dressed in a black turtle-neck sweater worn beneath a tweedy jacket. He stood in the aisle, steadying his elderly frame by placing an arthritic hand on the seat head-rest, and leaned over Lea, introducing into the cabin sickly sweet odor of French tobacco, as familiar and comforting to Lea – over the years – as the Biebster’s gold cross.
“Jean-Paul! What the heck!” said the Biebster, annoyed by the old man’s wall-eyed omniscience. “She’s working! Leave her alone.”
“Leave me alone, both of you,” said Lea. “Non! I will not!” said Sartre defiantly. “You cannot simply sleep-walk into this and not consider the implications of the choice that each footstep makes.”
“She cannot simply walk into Mordor!” said the Biebster, merrily, looking to Sartre’s wall-eye for confirmation.
The first class cabin was dark, the other passengers were asleep. Sartre, Biebster and Lea were bathed in a warm-cone of soft yellow light that fell from the reading-light above Lea’s seat. It was going to be a long and querulous flight.
The flight attendant came by. “More milk, Madam?”
“No, thank you, it’s giving me nightmares,” said Lea.
The Boeing 777 advanced over the coast of Alaska, and finished drafting the matrix, which she laid flat on the desk so that the Biebster, Jean-Paul and any other uninvited guests could read it. She half expected her mentor – Felix Fuchs – to drop into the clutch. Sartre grabbed the pad and studied it.
“What am I looking at?”
“Think of it like a recipe.”
“It’s a monster,” said the Biebster, gleefully.
Sartre ran his finger down the first column. “Bushbaby, parrot, owl, rabbit, dog…”
“Each has a key trait we can use. We simply carve out the trait we want – an owl can move its head 360 like gimbal – and drop into the finished product,”
“Drop what?
“A proprietary Kleister-Fuchs genotype module. For instance, the Canid-Bond, introduces OXTR; AVPRIA and SLC6A4 gene families into the model.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Sartre.
“It’s the building blocks of a Furby.” Lea produced a photo of a toy-store Furby: cute, cuddly. “Children love them,” she explained.
| Donor | Key Trait | KF Genotype Module | Origins | KF Design Note |
| Bushbaby | Huge forward eyes; leaping; nocturnal | Galago-Ocu / Saltator | Pax6; CRX; RHO; tendon/elasticity | Large eyes, night vision, spring-loaded locomotion |
| Parrot | Vocal mimicry, bright coloration, beak dexterity | Psitta / Chromo | FOXP2; EGR1; pigment pattern, beak development loci | Advanced vocal learning, display traits |
| Owl | Silent movement; low-light stealth; head mobility | Strigi-Silent / Auris | Feather microstructure; vestibular genes; auditory processing loci | Stealth locomotion, precises head-ear orientation. |
| Rabbit | Plush, long fur; rounded body | Leporid-Pluma | FGF5; KRT Family; EDAR | Long, soft, curly fur, compact cuddly morphology |
| Domestic dog | Social-bonding, trainability, affectionate behavior | Canid-Bond | OXTR; AVPR1A; SLC6A4 | Strong social attachment, trainability, emotional responsiveness |
| Human | Opposable thumbs, fine manipulation; tool use | Homo-Manus | HOX distal limb regulators (e.g. HOX A13, HOXD13) | Opposable thumb morphology, refined motor cortex wiring and precision grip |
“Sacre blue, You Yankees! You are fools,” said Jean-Paul, removing a cigarette from the blue box of Gauloises tucked into his breast pocket. “It is an abomination.”
“Let me see,” said the Biebster, snatching the notepad from Sartre.
“Give it back!” said Lea, but the Biebster, quick as a flash, tucked up in a ball on the other side of the cabin, chewing on his fingernails as he scrutinized the matrix. He seemed amused at first, but coming to the last line of the table, he sucked in his breath and paled.
“Human Hands!” said the Biebster. “I thought it was a joke!”
“It’s in the product specifications. The Kleister-Fuchs marketing team were very clear. With hands the Furby has a wider range of applications, and therefore we can sell more units into a larger addressable market.” Lea surprised her own self with the glib MBA-speak. Ever since Orin Kleister gave her the phone call and implored her to stay with the company but relocate to the Bairstow Lab, she’d been boning up on business books, including a book called “Winning” by someone called Jack Welch; a business hotshot from what Kleister said was the golden age of capitalism.
“And it is your intention to manifest this abomination at Kleister-Fuchs?” said Sartre.
“They are going to give me my own team,” said Lea, huffily.
“No constraints?” said the Biebster.
“None, I can even use Professor Fuchs’ genotypes and perpetuate his legacy”.
Lea had in her possession more than a petabyte of genomic models that Doctor Felix Fuchs had worked on before his death.
Orin Kleister told her that she was honoring Fuchs’ memory, and he would give her all the resources she could possibly need, including access to a Department of Defense DARPA database of advanced genomic applications. It was all very seductive for a super-nerd like Lea, especially the military angle, lots of possibilities
“Have you told us everything?” said the Biebster.
He was able to read her mind, but the DARPA reference meant nothing to him.
“As I said before, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” said Sartre, “this thing… this Furby…” he dismissed Lea’s work with a wave of disgust, “does not need to exist.”
Lea was exhausted; the Biebster and Jean-Paul had interrupted her sleep-eat-read-sleep strategy. The airplane was somewhere over Canada, she still had two hours before touch-down in JFK. Lea dismissed the Biebster and Jean-Paul, closed her eyes and settled back in the plush first-class seat. The cabin lights engaged, the pilot advised the passengers that they would be starting their descent into JFK soon.
“Breakfast?” said the stewardess, startling Lea from a brief slumber, which caused her to throw out her arms and bat a bowl of cornflakes across the aisle into the lap of the smartly-dressed elderly man with the tooth-brush mustache, who’d apparently evicted the Biebster.
“It was an accident,” said Lea.
Sighs, scowls, the other first-class passengers gave her the evil eye as she lumbered down the aisle to the bathroom.
It was like walking into Mordor.
Luca King GreeK 
Leave a comment