Two years ago
It was a slow day at the lab as there wasn’t much to do. All samples the Splerions had brought a year ago had been analyzed, categorized and filed away. They hadn’t brought much. Only the fungi they had promised, those had arrived and flourished on earth, just as promised. Several teams were already working on the best ways to integrate them into the food supply without the normal population noticing.
Recently, they had been able to make a steak out of the stuff …
Rick winced. A steak made of mushroom. They had told him that nobody would notice, but the thought was making him sick. A steak made of space mushrooms …
The ground vibrated slightly.
… the ground vibrated slightly? Rick looked around in confusion. His area wasn’t known to have many earthquakes. None at all in the past few centuries, if he remembered right. So what was this?
His phone chimed, notifying him that he had just received a message. He pulled it out and looked at the short text which had been sent from his superior.
Code Blue.
The Splerions had finally shot some Mystacinidans out of orbit.
Another messaged arrived, which contained coordinates. Rick rushed to his car and drove to the specified location. What he saw there left him speechless for a moment.
A spaceship had crashed into the dried out ground. Smoke was rising from many locations and he could see a severed wing which probably belonged to one of the Mystacinidans.
The designated emergency teams had already arrived and were slowly pulling apart the spaceship.
”I have two living ones!”, someone shouted. Rick moved toward the voice and saw a man pulling two tiny bat-like creatures out of the ship. They seemed unconscious.
”How many more are there?”, Rick asked.
”Three”, said the man. ”Five in total but the other three seem to be dead.”
Rick sighed. He had hoped for more living ones.
”Alright, bring them back to the lab. Put the living ones in the cubes, we don’t want them to die the moment their personal air supply empties.”
The man and some others followed his order. Everyone was moving around swiftly and efficiently. That’s what Rick liked about this whole institution. Everybody was so professional all the time.
He went over to his car to drive to the lab too.
Not much later he was standing over the dead body of one of the dead Mystacinidans, holding a scalpel.
”Everyone ready to start this dissection?”, he asked. The two women who were with him in the room nodded. He was glad to have them here. One of them was a particularly great zoologist, the other one a not less great geneticist. Both should have outranked him by a lot, but he had seniority. Not long and he would retire, making room for them …
”Okay, I’m starting my cut ventral right where the sternum seems to end.” He did as he said. To his surprise, there were a lot of muscles. With the wings located on the back, he didn’t expect that so much muscle mass would be needed around the chest, like with birds.
He continued cutting the alien open.
”It’s a real shame”, he suddenly remarked, ”that this species already has a name.” The zoologist looked up from the alien and in his face.
”Why so?”, she asked. ”Did you want to name it yourself?”
”I always wanted to name something after myself. Or my wife.”
”You don’t have a wife.”
”I know, but how romantic would that have been?” He chuckled.
”There aren’t that many rules when it comes to naming a species. I can be sure nobody else discovered and identified this species so I could have been the one naming it. But no, they just have to be named already.”
”You would need to publish a paper about it anyway”, the zoologist reminded him. ”And we can’t do that.”
”Not yet, yes. But maybe someday.” He gave her a crooked smile and she laughed.
It took a few hours but then they had finally finished the dissection.
”Tomorrow, same time?”, Rick asked the zoologist and she nodded.
”I’m curious to see how the other one looks from the inside and if there are any significant differences to this one”, she said and then left.
Rick looked over to the geneticist.
”Do you have everything you need?”
”Yes, I think so. I just need to purify everything, isolate mRNA, write it into DNA, label it with a fluorescent dye and then I can finally do my microarray!”
”You seem a bit annoyed”, Rick remarked. She shook her head. Then nodded.
”Almost everyone in my team is sick. I’ll have to do everything myself. I forgot how annoying it is to not be able to delegate most of the work.”
”I can come help you”, Rick offered. ”I’m done for the day anyway.” She seemed relieved.
”That would be nice.”
Together they walked over to her lab and started the procedure.
It was important that they analyzed the alien on a genetic level and one of the methods they needed to use was a microarray analysis. This analysis allowed them to check which genes were active in which part of the body. This could give them even more information than just the DNA itself.
”Did you hear of project Nina?”, the geneticist suddenly asked Rick. He raised his eyebrows.
”This is the first time. Why?”
”I’m not comfortable with it. They … They are … They want …”, she swallowed hard and bit her lip. ”They want to create hybrids”, she finally blurted out.
Rick didn’t understand. ”Hybrids of what?”
” Mystacinidans and humans.”
”What? How? Why?”
”Well, sexual reproduction isn’t possible, for obvious reasons. Even on earth, it’s often impossible for similar species to produce offspring and if they can do it, it’s usually sterile. So they want to genetically engineer a chimera.”
”That’s … that’s so wrong”, Rick said. She just nodded.
”It’s the real reason I asked you to come here today. I sent my team home. You’re the only one I can trust with this because I knew you’d be repulsed by it too. We need to do something!”
”I will think of a solution”, Rick said.
Sources:
How Newly Discovered Species Get Their Weird Names
Scientists Can Study an Organism's Entire Genome with Microarray Analysis
Baffling Genetic Barrier Prevents Similar Animals from Interbreeding
Origin and evolution of animal hybrid species
The uneasy Truth about human-animal hybrids
Animal Hybrids: Ligers and Tigons and Pizzly Bears, Oh My!
Picture taken from pixabay.com
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