I will have been working for over fifteen years in this project next month. And I feel so close to the answer.

Disease, decay and everything that goes with it has infected our race: humankind was not designed to overcome all the obstacles nature could throw at us. To our own demise, what have us now at the brink of extinction are our greed and arrogance. At some point medical researchers went too far while investigating about bacteria and virus nature, something went wrong and now we are all falling like flies driven into an electrical bug trap. We are now born without any kind of defenses; our immune systems are basically useless against anything that isn’t a flu which, if you think about it, is quite funny: finding the cure for the common flu (an achievement that many would have given their lives for two decades ago), has now costed our entire species’ future.

At first governments around the world were happy: perhaps this late discovery, this revolutionary technique for duplicating the nature of viruses could drive our current knowledge in medicine to the point where a cure for everything and anything could be possible. The greed that fits so well to mankind was, as history has taught us, what drove us to this point at the end. We were oblivious to the consequences of playing to be gods. Nature after all is a bitch, but a wise bitch if nothing else: we on the other hand are just children willing to make a tantrum if our attempt at copying what grown ups do doesn’t come out as we expected, and just like any children who behaves like that we panic and cry harder when we realize the consequences of our actions. After the first year nothing happened and everyone was relishing on the fact that diseases were being cured and most of the population were aiming to soon find the cure to cancer, diabetes, even HIV. During the deceases of the second year many people were doubtful that the vaccine was the culprit of what was happening all over the world. When the third year finished, 33% of the world population was gone. Panic and riots came, however, on a warm summer of the fifth year when children were being born like those who were vaccinated. As any science fiction novelist from the 20^th century could have pictured in any of their master works our entire civilization was falling to pieces and it was in that moment that politicians started looking for someone or something that could take us away from the graves we dug on our own behalf. Before this happened I had already started researching on my own.

I was born with no particular gifts whatsoever yet I managed to transform my obsessive personality into one. When I was little I lived secluded in a house near a forest, I grew up surrounded by nature and my parents were constantly scared I would some day die before them: they believed parents burying their children was nothing but unnatural. My interests were always inclined to observation and, at some point, experimentation. When I grew old enough as to learn the truth about the reality we were living in, I soon decided I wouldn’t die because of other people’s mistakes; if anything I would like to pass away as a direct result of my decisions. I had no idea what a simpleton as me could do to change our situation as a species. At first I learned everything I could about the “miraculous vaccine” that had doomed the so called world of men: that path led me to do further investigation in microbiology and cell biology as well, no answer was ever at sight though. Did I even have a question to begin with?

While in college my teachers were amazed at how meticulous I was as a scientist following each and every step as if it was the last, double and triple checking data before moving forward with whatever task they threw at me, and it was thanks to that that they invited me to be a part time jr. researcher. Everyone was running short on time and they could use any mind they perceived as useful after all. So I kept learning about what happened and how it seemed to be irreversible. We were so very few at the university’s lab. I took double ships just to be able to work alone. I loved, and still do, to work alone. During said time I started experimenting with stem cells inside petri dishes; I didn’t have much to work with so I had to be extra careful not to waste a single resource.

As the crisis grew, society started to cope with the idea of extinction. Many scientists were still looking for answers in the field of micro and xeno biology instead of looking for side options. As a child I noticed animals were not affected at all with what had become a genetic constant in our code: from there and what my work with isolated tissues and samples threw as a result, my mind wandered over the idea of how animals would react to the infamous original vaccine. Using one of the many rats from the lab I carried on with what I pondered about. Another year passed and many other animals, unbeknownst to my teachers, were my subjects of study and throughout my research something came up: animals were not affected as we were. It may now come as obvious that a vaccine created out of a virus that targeted only men would not be harmful to animals at all, yet actually having solid data about it was something else entirely. Canines, felines, rodents, marsupials, all of them seemed to be oblivious to the fact they were injected with a mashup of human serum, human antibodies and live attenuated virus hence making me think that perhaps an answer may have been lying there. If anything most mammals (since I had only experimented on those) to become illness resistant. After graduating I revealed part of my work to the professors I trusted the most. After explaining them my line of thought and what I had been doing for years behind their backs, I waited for their answer and insight on what I had done. To be honest I don’t know what I was expecting from them: the older ones were scandalized about the fact that I had been using valuable university resources in what to them was “a futile line of investigation”. The other two however kept quiet with serious looks on their faces. They said nothing nor helped defend my work; due to my faultless record they promised not to say a thing to the college or the bio ethics councils as long as I ended any attempt in keeping my experiments going on: that implied sacrificing my test subjects and destroying any trace of my research. I was bewildered by how they reacted: it was not too much but perhaps what I had going on could guide us to something monumental, yet they responded as if I was the devil himself. It baffled me but at that moment I was nearing my thirties and in this new world, that could be considered an achievement all by its own: I had no time to waste mourning over spilled milk, I’d rather begin a new project than losing the university support.

I stayed after hours in the lab that night in order to start gathering all of my data and my test subjects in order to follow the given instructions. The sound of the pneumatic doors opening made my head turn: who could be at this ungodly hour? No one, after all, ever stayed as late as I did. My overly active imagination thought that perhaps my teachers had turned me in to the council; biological experiments with the infamous vaccine or any similar line of work were a major felony after all. To my surprise standing behind me, watching my rats with a lot more interest than before, were the other two scholars that kept silent earlier on that day. They were contemplating my test subjects with a hungry look on their faces then one of them turned his head in my direction and with a voice devoid of any emotion he asked me for my opinion on the human situation as a species. I looked at him with a befuddled expression and without thinking much I replied: “perhaps genetic manipulation is a possibility”. In answer to my comment the one that was still observing my test subjects straightened, then turned his attention towards me and with a cryptic smile on his face he told me: “we may have something to offer to you”. Everything was out of the blue, unexpected and unbelievable and I knew whatever proposition they made to me, if it meant keeping my research going, I would accept it.

They turned out to be working with several organizations whose sole interest laid in finding a way for our species to survive by any means necessary. As it turned out both of them had their own ideas on how we could solve our current problem. One of them, Julius, was specialized in cell biology trying to develop a way to fasten cell maturation without mitosis mistakes or neoplasias happening; the other one, Marco, worked in what seemed to me pure science fiction: body modifications, biological engineering and accelerated tissue regeneration in living organisms. The latter was the one that offered me a place in their project: they told me they needed someone like me who wasn’t afraid of trying whatever was necessary to break the scientific impasse into which we had fallen and our patrons shared our enthusiasm for that providing anything our team could need. When I first visited the facilities where they were working (and where I would be living for years), I couldn’t believe I had called their attention: a giant complex on the outskirts of the city, a very conspicuous place if you’ve ever seen one. Inside of it there were multiple computer labs as well as detention cells. Every single piece of equipment was a state of the art, some of the machines I didn’t know what they were for. I had hit the jackpot; I felt I was home.

The following year I kept on working and made astounding discoveries. Now that I had no boundaries whatsoever I started experimentation with other mammals, larger mammals: wolves, bears, horses, cows; and with all the omnivores or carnivores the results were the same: they didn’t only preserved their immune system but given enough time it was boosted to unimaginable limits. If I had been looking for a way to make other species basically illness proof then maybe I could have felt proud, but there was a long way to go. Non of my trials had had positive results on human cells. Julius and Marco encouraged me to delve further into looking for other possibilities: “you have to take this onto a different scenario”, they said. I couldn’t have, not even in my wildest dreams, imagined what would befall in the next couple of years.

Marco and Julius worked with an entire team of interns at their disposal while I usually worked alone and commonly with no assistants. I basically lived in the facilities. They, however, in less than three years were capable of discovering what we until that point saw as fiction. Julius’s line of research led his team to discovering a way of altering the human body with just enough time: bigger muscles and no workout? Got it. Bigger cock and balls? You had it. A new pair of working kidneys and an additional pair of boobs? Well, why the hell not! He could make anything grow in the lab if given enough prime matter and time to work with and then attach it to a living body. The fact he had unraveled the secrets on how to make the body endure said procedures without driving cells to apoptosis was close to a miracle. To get there, however, many human “volunteers” had to be tested on beforehand. Our morgue (since we had one from the beginning, I just never felt the necessity to ask about it), grew in residents week by week. As our patrons had made clear when I started, “no price was high enough for ensuring the survival of the species”.

Cloning seemed just out of reach at that moment: the brains were always the problem. Creating cloned bodies was nothing more than a simple sneeze yet said bodies were empty husks and nothing more. We moved forward nevertheless. However constantly renewing bone marrow and spleens of our “meat for experiments” (as we labeled them), turned out to be a futile action against what was encrypted within our genetic code. Our immune system couldn’t fight any kind of infection without leading to a septic shock within hours so, if we had to deal with any source of biological hazard we simply asked an intern to do it. We couldn’t afford losing scientists or researchers. While Julius’s work gave birth to a scientific miracle, Marco’s team discovered a way for replacing entire body parts and systems improving them in the process. He was more than half the reason why creating clones became a possibility but he couldn’t decipher how to transform mindless sculptures into functioning human beings: they created tissues, not sentient life. Not yet.

I felt like I had been left behind: although I now knew how to make several other species immune to any pathogen or toxin in this planet, I was way too far from bumping against what I wanted. So I proceeded to human experiments.

As time kept passing and the world population decreased from billions to a few hundred millions I lost any remorse I could have developed from experimenting with humans. Some rooms in our facilities could very well be considered a horror movie set with lots of budget. Corpses piled like dirty napkins on the morgue’s slabs reminded us that we would soon need to learn how to create real clones; in the meantime artificial insemination and parents-less babies would do. Every single serum I tried, every single counter vaccine I could think of drove my test subjects to any point between instant death to a long and unbeknownst world of agony. And then, it hit me: we were running out of time, we were running out of resources and test subjects. We had been wrong from the beginning. The answer to survival may have not been in fixing a species. No. Evolution, that had to be the answer.

I asked Marco if it was possible to replace one species anatomical elements for other ones and I asked Julius if we could try and modify human physiology beyond what he had already done and push it outside from the species barrier. Neither of them said no. They just replied with a pensive tone: “we can try”. After many attempts I became a fleshformer playing to be God, Julius and Marco helped me become that. Another year passed away and finally we were able to accelerate the growth of a human fetus so as to harvest the first sentient human clone. We now had access to an infinite amount of willing test subjects. We could start trying to merge our DNA structure with that of the animals I had made almost invincible. My idea was to create a new species from animals and then transpose a cure from them to us. It seemed over complicated, yes, but we tried it anyway.

We used every single species from rats to rhinos. Formless bodies and lifeless flesh mounts became something normal inside the morgue. There were too many variants we were not taking into account. Their femurs had to be shorter so that they could run onto four legs but not short enough as to not let them stand; their rib cage and spine had to be modified in order to let them withstand more muscle and less fat; liver, spleen, kidneys, bowels, they were all wrong for our purposes; adrenal, pituitary, thyroid glands, all had to be restructured; and those were only the anatomical aspects of it. We were able to create semi sentient animals from scratch but their skulls were not prepared to hold a human sized brain. They weren’t much more than beasts able to suppress their most basic desires in order to… well, give into more complex desires. A beast with a pleasure button was a dangerous thing to let be. We returned once more to the beginning.

So, trying to create a new form of life was… unwise once I looked back into it. So, why not modify what we did have? Work with what we had at hand, mold it into something we needed. I had to become a true fleshformer. I kind of grew fond to that nickname.

Anyway, at first I worked with Marco to try to modify human adult bodies; we did it first in empty husks, then we moved onto the clones. Many failed attempts went on before we got to make a human look more… animal like. I chose wolves as a model since they were the first predators that threw results in my early research: adapting an already grown human body proved to be quite the task. In time, we were successful as always. The sight of the first digitigrade human was… unexpected. Without fur they sure seemed like nightmares teared from a survival horror game from the 2000’s. They looked taller, most of them reached the 6’4” when fully standing so they got used to crouching a little while doing it. We were making progress. After another year and a half Marco’s team and I managed to achieve what could only be described as a “furless” or “smooth skinned werewolf”. They looked ugly as hell and many developed severe self-image dysphoria but we could not care less: we were moving forward. On those subjects I tried the antivaccine and, to my surprise, their blood tests showed promising results. Within months, however, said experiments backfired when 50% of the subjects died victims of a spontaneous heart arrest and the others started to develop signs of multiorganic failure thus demonstrating that modifying their bodies was not enough. We needed to go further. After all, putting on a costume, even if it was the best science could create was just that: a costume.

Julius’s team proved to be proactive when dealing with merging different species DNA. It looked like most of them were what society would call deviants. How fun it was to be surrounded by people who gave nothing more than a flying fuck for what our decaying society thought about unorthodox inclinations. It was thanks to that proactiveness that we were able to divide the experiments into three small groups: hervibores, omnivores and carnivores. From there we split into other subgroups according to the species we dealt more with: some stayed with lapins and rodents, others with ungulates and swine and so on. I decided to stick with canines of course.

Changing the bodies was a simple task at this point, dealing with unexpected behavior however proved to be the biggest problem. It seemed that human psyque and natural instincts could deal more easily with the genetic information animals provided when it came from hervibores or omnivores, specifically with porcines and lapins. Canines weren’t yet a success however and I couldn’t let the others beat me to it. Time passed away as we continued to deal with the effects of genetic data from animals and the repercussions it had on human psyche: although canines were still a long way to go we encountered with another unwanted side effect of the transition between one species to a new one. Some of our patients suffered a regression as what seemed to be a data overwhelming made the reptilian brain grow in mass thus opaquing the already developed prefrontal lobe mass. So now we had mindless anthropomorphic beasts that had opposable thumbs. Hurray.

I promptly started working with Julius on this issue and we racked our brains in order to find a suitable solution. While doing that, I kept working with predators. At first results suggested the instincts slightly clashed with human behavior; be that as it may in no time they became violent and rash just before suffering brain hernias and dying shortly after. Again I was missing something and I felt time would soon become an issue as the world population waned. We didn’t had as many interns as we used to when we started and we knew soon we wouldn’t have many more. Time was eating us alive. I worked with ferals so much some of them grew accustomed to me. I was the only researcher that spent time with them in the artificial habitat there was in the woods near the facility: learning about them, watching them interact with each other felt like the right way for suffering a sudden rush of inspiration or perhaps having an idea sprung into my mind. During one of my outings I watched a pack of timber wolves stroll by and I tried to imagine what was inside of their genetical code that made whole organs crash. We had already shortened the bowels, modified the livers, altered the pancreas, built and inserted the scent glans and at some point we discovered how to change their skins (that was a real pain in the bum), in order to make true coats grow from their skin. The mind was the problem: the same part that developed what would be the doom of humans was proving to be an obstacle to find a path that could ensure our survival. We needed to evolve, we had to if we didn’t want to meet extinction. I wouldn’t stop until results pleased my goals.

Day after day, night after night, badge after badge of test subjects I worked with Julius and Marco in order to find a way to make a grown human’s mind adapt to the behemothical impact of having another species history and evolutionary record suddenly inserted into it. Many failures came but at last some light was casted over our sad situation. It was I who came with the idea: dossing the mind genetic yuxtapositon. I came with the theory of slowing down the process of genetical modification by isolating the human data from the feral one and matching it at common points so that the clash became a more subtle merge instead of what it already was. They didn’t believe it at first so we did what we did best: learn from making mistakes. We tried it with many subjects and all of them failed. There was just too much additional information from the predators side: conduits, body language, scent processing. To make things worse we were told by our patrons that funds were going to be cut out in less than a year in order to support one last desperate attempt at microbiology and nano technology: they told us a multinational group from the WHO was close to finding a working meta vaccine that wouldn’t restore our immune system but could substitute it. Death was not as grim an outcome as our lives’ work ending suddenly would be.

So serendipity came to our rescue as it usually did with historical discoveries. Trying to find an answer to our predicament, Julius discovered that our data proved accurately that non clone subjects had far better results in comparison to, well, clones. So an idea struck him as hard as a cryptococosis. We were running out of time, we were running out of living non clone test subjects and we were getting frustrated at our own stupidity and powerlessness to move forward. We needed motivation. “And what better motivation was there than survival? None”, he told us. We had to work as if our lives, our own lives and not a whole species that we cared so little for when we thought about it, were at risk. We had stopped caring about mankind years ago. If we were honest to ourselves we kept looking for this only to satisfy our own selfish scientific needs and desires. He offered himself as a test subject right then and there. Our last experiment. It would be all or nothing. Sweet satisfaction or sour extinction. The bet was on the table and none of us would settle for nothing less than triumph.

At first Marco was against the idea, he tried to convince Julius that it was something stupid. After one single night Julius made him change his mind about it if a bit reluctantly. Perhaps there was something between those two that I hadn’t noticed in years but I didn’t care if my suspicions were true or not. Whatever they did in private was their business and in the last decade, they had become the closest thing I had to a family. Dicks weren’t that bad after all.

We began the process of body modification the day after Julius convinced his partner to work willingly. We took our time and he decided he would go for a Wolf: predator were the toughest nut to crack but it would be our last attempt. Failure was not an option. Three days were inverted on his body alterations and at the end the time spent on it proved to be worth it. Luscious black fur covered his whole body; shorter legs with paws at the end instead of feet were a reality by this point; hands had opposable thumbs obviously without discarding paw pads and claws; his genitals now matched those of a feral with a proper sheath, form and baculum if anything with a little more addment to size, it seemed as if Marco wanted Julius to be the envy or the standard of what soon would be a new species; his eyes were yellow and yet they lacked that spark that ferals had, we weren’t done, not yet, and his gaze was a witness to that.

Before messing with the genetic merging Marco and I decided to put Julius into an induced comma while we tried to figure how to start the genetic dripping as I had named it. After some debate we decided 12 hours would be all the time we had to do it since doing it in less had proven to be ineffective and taking more than that suggested to be not only expensive but also exhausting to both the ones doing it and the subject.

We started working on the matter at hand and as time passed we got more and more nervous: of course on paper everything seemed to be going well but it could backfire as soon as Julius was awoken thus why we double and triple checked everything in a quarter of the time we would have normally spent on it. By the sixth hour we had finished 75% of the process and entered into the trickiest part of it which was not turning Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas into a pulp. After all, spoken language was a defining feature in humans therefore it couldn’t be left out yet we couldn’t just try and integrate it with the body and olfactive language of wolves neither. For them, actions and scents said more than a million words could ever transmit. By the eleventh hour of consecutive work Marco and I were exhausted: no intern or researcher had come close to us since we began working on Julius and we didn’t want them near. This would be our achievement, our Opus Magnus and no one else’s.

We finished with some minutes to spare and withdrew from Marco’s body. We would let it rest for 72 hours while sedated but not too deeply drugged in order to mimic normal dream cycles. What my experiments had demonstrated was that changes either consolidated or failed even from the first day after the procedure so we had to be extra careful in order not to accidentally kill Julius; if it came to that I doubt Marco could or even would have wanted to keep living inasmuch as since we started working he had worn a worried look on his face. We would not, could not, fail.

The waiting was worse than the actual procedure. Marco had nearly no rest and I on the other hand was reduced to a skein of anxiety. Julius’s body seemed fine and his monitor readings, electroencephalographic and cardiac, showed no sign of malfunction. We drew blood samples after 48 hours and they appeared to be stable, but still looked human. When the 72 hours term was due we checked and double checked every single test we had run to make sure Julius was alive, conscious and well. To my and mostly Marco’s relief nothing seemed abnormal. If the experiment was a success or not we couldn’t know for there was still one step missing: giving him the vaccine. We had argued for months before we were cornered to this desperate scenario if it would be wise to give the shot to a test subject if we ever managed to surpass the first and most complicated step of intermingling one genetic info with another and at the end of it all we three agreed that there was no reason to pursue evolution if we couldn’t grow stronger and immune to the mistakes our predecessors had made. So we decided to carry on and I myself administered the vaccine to Julius’s unconscious new body, hoping for the best.

We couldn’t have predicted what followed afterwards. First the monitors’ lectures started raising: his heart rate increased to over 120 bpm; paradoxically his breathing became deeper and slower; his electrocardiogram had a curious PQR segment shortening and showed an elongated QRS complex with an also shorter yet more accurate ST segments; his body temperature raised to almost 42°C and then dropped to a stable 37.3°C; his electroencephalogram showed Alpha waves bigger than expected for being unconscious and his Beta waves were way off the charts for any non convulsing organism, Theta and Delta waves were more than abnormal as well, like he was coming and going into unstable REM cycles; and at the end of twelve eternal minutes, everything stopped. His heart was beating, although the changes in his cardiac cycle seemed to be permanent but his electroencephalogram was flat. Marco howled in horror and deception at this: it seemed like Julius had had a brain death. His vital organs were all working perfectly except for the most important one which seemed to have shut off completely.

Julius was gone and with him, our motivation. We had spat to the sky and now it fell back onto our faces.

We laid there for half an hour in an emotionless stupor that neither of us wanted to shake off. Julius had trusted us with his life and we had failed him, betrayed him even: all the years we had worked to get to this point only to have this fiasco happen. All of a sudden Marco started crying his soul out and his bawling filled my heart and soul with misery. How could we have failed? Had the procedure been wrong from the beginning? Were we mistaken into trying to break the species barrier? Was nature lecturing us as a result of what the tantrum of our survival wish seemed to it? This and many other questions swarmed my mind like a meteor shower does to the night sky of the countryside. I came closer to Marco and hugged him while I started crying myself. Defeat was a sour and acrid taste on my mouth.

Ten or twenty minutes after being there like mulch bags we decided we had to give Julius’s body a proper burial. As scientist we didn’t believe in miracles and neither would he had if he were alive. He was gone and we’d have to deal with the consequences of it. We stood up from the floor of the adjoining room where we had secluded to wallow in pity and decided it was time to face reality.

We entered the experiment room to find the slab empty: Julius’s body was gone. We didn’t have time to panic since we soon heard a not so distant howl that made the hair from our necks stand on point. I grew up used to listening the howling of wolves and that certainly was no familiar sound to me; although it seemed similar to that of the wolves it carried something never heard of before. Marcos and I ran to the outer rooms and looked into the woods in order to try and find the source of the sound. At first we couldn’t see shit since it was getting dark and the facility’s lights were usually turned off in order not to scare the animals in captivity. Then we saw it. An enormous silhouette standing on two legs looking calmly in direction of the woods. We lost no time and went outside as fast as our legs could carry us. When we reached the door our entire bodies were shaking. Was it possible? Could it be? A delayed reaction perhaps? There was no data that we could refer to so the possibilities were infinite. As we got outside the once standing figure looked back at us with yellow eyes and both of us froze where we stood. The eyes that looked back to us were the ones of a wolf, a true wild wolf and I nearly pissed my pants from that glare. Marco dropped to his knees and a smile as wide as the horizon infected him. Slowly what seemed to be a successful experiment walked towards us and as it came step by step I thought that perhaps we were wrong; for all we knew this was no longer the Julius we knew and loved. What if it went savage? Maybe this was another failed attempt at trying to play God and we would die as a consequence of our sins against life. I was shaking like a leaf as it drew closer and I swear of God I would have shitted my pants if I hadn’t been on fastening for more than 14 hours due to our work. Then, this creation of ours stopped just a few steps away from us: a rather lulling heat emanated from his body and a creeping animal musk started seeping into our nostrils. Marco had an almost beatific expression on his face while I had a contrite one on mine. Then, just before I fainted from the fright, this creature spoke to us in a deep guttural yet clearly sentient voice and the only words that came out of it were: “we did it”.

Marco and I were taken aback by this. This creature was towering over us, wild eyes glaring deeply into our own eyes, tail wagging as crazy. I looked up to him and recognized something on his face… wait, no, that’s not correct: on his muzzle. He was grinning or the closest thing you could get to a grin on that peculiar skull. “Julius?”, asked Marco with a meek voice. The creature nodded. Marco sprang up as a rocket as soon as he saw this and went directly to hug this hulk of what used to be a man. Julius returned the hug, his tail wagging even faster if it was possible. A few minutes before I felt my soul and will to live abandoned me and now there where many emotions flooding my brain and body. Somehow it had worked, all of it. Decades of hard labor, so many hours invested, so many sacrifices done and, at the end, it seemed like we had finally achieved it. We three stayed there for a minute or so before I regained control on my thoughts. “We have to have you tested. Now”. They both turned their heads in my direction trying to understand why I would want to ruin this moment for them and then it hit them: I was right.

We drew blood samples and ran every test we could think of on Julius’s new body; all of them were… surprising to say the least. Everything seemed off for human standards making even more evident he was not a human anymore: his temperature was higher than usual, his brain waves made no sense at all, his heart was working in whole new ways. And the best were his serological results: platelets were up to the roof, hemoglobin was unbelievable, oxygen saturation was up to 100% but what made us cringe and hold our breaths was his white cell count: unlike what would be expected from a defective specimen like me or Marco, Julius’s white cells were stupidly high, higher even than what we expected; if the results were correct, and we did run them three times that night, his body should be tearing itself up. He should have been in big pain and his organs should have been withering as well as his blood should’ve been hemolizing. Yet here he was, standing side to side with us. We ran in vitro tests in order to see if he could withstand infections and to our surprise no bacteria nor virus that we threw at it seemed to be able to surpass his NK cells. This was the epitome of evolution, the ultimate organism. And it was our research that had led to it.

On the following days Julius and Marcus worked in summarizing the process condensing our data to present it to our patrons. It looked like we had saved humankind by forcing evolution on it. And we all were damned proud about it.

We did it, we had made it. We played with what nature gave us and improved it beyond any expectation. We had laughed about the species barrier and surpassed it, broke it, molded it to our desires. We had made the impossible happen. Now we could focus on transposing this procedure to other species and gaining total dominion over animal genome: whatever we wanted to become we could do it for sure. Pride, joy, excitement, anxiety; all of these emotions and more invaded our minds and hearts. At the end of it all we persevered, victory was ours. Extinction was not a fear anymore.

Survival was finally within our grasp.