1 comments/ 37353 views/ 2 favorites A Genetically Engineered Race By: Samuelx The concept of genetic engineering is one that continues to unnecessarily frighten people. Personally, I don't know what the fuss is about. What kind of person in his or her right mind wouldn't actively strive for self-improvement? Only a total loser wouldn't. All of us try to do it in some way. We strive to achieve things. Make more money. Buy new cars. Move into nicer, pricier neighborhoods. Get that promotion at work. Exercise and diet in order to look better. To me, that's what genetic engineering means, the improvement of the human race. My name is Alexander Addams. I was born in Boston in 1987, the son of geneticist Luther Addams and MIT mathematics professor Eileen Brown. I'm of biracial origin. My father is an Irishman and my mother is African-American. A tall, caramel-skinned, black-haired and green-eyed Adonis, that's yours truly. I've always been a brilliant individual, but my father helped thrust my intellect into a bold new direction, the field of human genetics. I graduated from the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 with a Ph.D in Biological Engineering. I looked for work in the private sector, and one day, I was approached by a man named Lucas Albright. He was a billionaire well-known for his eccentricity, an attribute matched only by his business acumen. Billionaire Lucas Albright wanted me to work for him. He took me to an isolated, private island where I met the rest of his people. He had a hundred of the world's top geneticists, bio-engineers and other top notch scientists working for him in a top secret project. He wanted to pioneer the field of Human Enhancement. At first, I had my doubts. A lot of the world's wealthiest men and women have a tendency to play God. And they often try to use us scientists as their pawns. Or tools. Whatever. However, there was something different about Lucas Albright. The man was actually serious, if you could believe that. He wanted me to find ways to improve the human race at a genetic level. And he was willing to spend billions upon billions of dollars to do it. Oh, well. I always liked a challenge. Looks like I had my work cut out for me. When I came to the island, Mr. Albright showed me around. He had a mansion built just for me. A seven-bedroom, three-story mansion with three bathrooms, an indoor pool, a jacuzzi and two living rooms. This was a place fit for a king. I could never have afforded a place like this. The house also came with a library of twenty thousand books, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as three high-tech computers with high-speed Internet Access. I liked the place. Aside from my salary, which was considerable, Albright promised me unlimited freedom to experiment with the technology he had at his disposal. I had carte blanche. How could I say no? I met my fellow scientists, Dr. Joseph Royas, of the University of Stanford. He was a tall, good-looking man with light olive skin, curly black hair and pale brown eyes. A very famous man who brought new life to the field of biomedical engineering. I also met Dr. Rachel Thompson, a tall and square, blonde-haired and green-eyed geneticist from Oxford University. Dr. Kyle Randall, a tall and slender Englishman who taught Evolution at Boston University. Last but not least, there was Dr. Elisabeth Samson, a black woman from the University of California. We would be the leaders of the experiment. The Powers That Be. We had billions upon billions of dollars at our disposal and we had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted. The kind of power we wielded was not only dangerous but also quite addictive. I tried to shield myself from temptation and succeeded with various results. My friends and colleagues didn't fare so well. We worked tirelessly for years and we were able to create a potentially powerful new drug called the Meta-Transformer. We called it the MT for short. The MT had the potential to increase strength and stamina in ordinary human beings in good health by a factor of ten. The drug was ready. All we needed was some volunteers. Lucas Albright found us some volunteers. Using his contacts in the outside world, he somehow gained custody of tons of people. Who were these people? Five hundred men from prisons around the world. These men were condemned to death by the governments of their native countries. They were already dead to society. Lucas Albright saw this as offering them a shot at a new life. These men had been carefully chosen. They were all between the ages of nineteen and fifty, and in good health, physically speaking, of course. We needed to know what the effect of the drug would be on individuals of both sexes. To that end, we selected a few women from prison populations around the globe. We picked three hundred and seventy women from these prisons, and brought them to the island for the experiment. They were all condemned to death anyway and wouldn't be missed by the governments of the various countries which they hailed from. By the droves, we brought them to the island. We built special holding cells holding the inmates according to gender, race and national origin. We also classified them according to their psychological profiles. We couldn't put arsonists in the same cells as serial killers and so on. We thought we had them all under control. We began administering the drug to these men and women whom the world at large had forsaken. It was a dangerous game but one we really wanted to play. We injected each and every single one of them with the drug. Thirty percent of all these men and women died within twenty four hours of being injected. The remaining seventy percent were forever changed. The drug transformed them in ways which exceeded our wildest expectations. Not only did these previously ordinary men and women get stronger and faster, but they also became infinitely more aggressive than before. They made ordinary psychopaths look like Church Choir Singers. They were magnificent monsters. What have I done? Lucas Albright was very pleased with our work, as were the other scientists. One night, I shared with Dr. Joseph Royas and with Dr. Rachel Thompson my fear that what we had done would spell disaster for the world. Unfortunately, success had blinded them to caution. My fears and suspicions were dismissed. When Lucas Albright came to the island with representatives from various governments around the world and offered them a look at our supermen and superwomen like tourists at a zoo, I was pissed. I hated Lucas for doing that. These people were criminals, sure, but they weren't animals. He dismissed my comments, and continued to show them off. Basically, his plan was to sell them to the highest bidder. The world's wealthiest men and women, along with defense contractors from countries like the USA, Germany, Japan and China would bid for these super-strong menaces we had created. Lucas saw them as the army of the future. I reminded him that these people were psychopaths and couldn't be programmed to behave themselves. He told me not to worry, and brought in a team of behavior modification experts. When I inquired as to what they were doing there, I wished I hadn't asked. These experts were going to do nothing short of slicing our 'patients' open and rewire their brains, to make them lethally obedient. This was the last straw. I couldn't tolerate this. I felt ashamed of what I've done and what I've allowed myself to become. I was seduced by the money and the power. I was seduced by the ability to play God. I had ignored my conscience for too long. The men and women of the program were hardened criminals whose countries had decided to kill them. However, they were still human beings and I wouldn't allow a human being to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment anymore. This ends now. I waited till nightfall that fateful day in the Summer of 2008, and went to the control power which guarded the holding cells where the 'patients' were. Our bio-enhanced supermen and superwomen were usually restlessly pacing in their Titanium-enforced cages. We had to beef up the cages because of their superhuman strength and speed. I was certain they wouldn't stay there forever. Many of them had tried to escape. I went and freed the only one among them I ever felt was worth anything. Achilles Johnson. A tall, good-looking black man from Boston, my neck of the woods. He was sentenced to life in prison for shooting the man who killed his sister. Before that unfortunate incident, he was a policeman and a member of the National Guard. I always felt he got a raw deal out of life. I freed him. He was grateful, and helped me free the others. Someone rang the alarm, and dozens of Lucas Albright's heavily armed guards came out of nowhere and started shooting everyone. Even though these supermen and superwomen had superhuman strength and speed, they weren't bulletproof. Dozens of them died. Hundreds managed to make it to the boat which waited at the dock. Rapidly, they made their escape. I left on a smaller boat and made myself scarce. I knew that Lucas Albright would discover what I had done. He would organize a worldwide manhunt not only for me but for each and every single one of the supermen and superwomen I had unleashed upon the world. I didn't care. I had set them free. Over the next few years, the world became a very exciting place. The supermen and superwomen I had created set about to take over the world. I'll let you guess who was their leader. Yes, none other than Achilles Johnson, my old friend. He organized this rag-tag band of bio-enhanced supermen and superwomen into an elite fighting unit. They multiplied, and the superior strength and endurance they possessed was somehow passed down to their offspring at a genetic level. Succeeding generations of these super people kept growing stronger and more ambitious. Until one day, they numbered in the thousands and finally left the planet Earth onboard stolen spaceships from NASA. Where they went, no one knows. One thing for sure, they were a force for the entire universe to reckon with. A Genetically Engineered Race Ch. 02 Life is hard, folks. Mine is much harder than yours, no matter what you say. Things haven't changed in the future, I'm afraid. Even in the year 7899 A.D. it's still a fight for survival. My name is Arcanium Heracles, of the planet Barokh and I am the captain of the great spaceship Moctod. Who is speaking to you? The hero of this fascinating story. I'm a tall, good-looking black man in his late thirties. I'm actually much older than that. You see, I'm an Uberman and my kind age very slowly. I'm actually one hundred and eleven years old. Among my people, it's not uncommon for men and women to live well over two hundred years. Yeah, not bad, hey? For most of my life, I've been a military man. I have five thousand and eighty six men along with three thousand and seventeen women under my command on this very vessel. We have a truly mighty spaceship. The Moctod is triangular in shape, and spans exactly three dozen miles across. It packs enough firepower to destroy an entire star system. It's the first Galaxy-Class Cruiser ever produced by the Universal Military Force or U.M.F. I am a proud member of the Universal Military Force. It employs men and women from over three hundred planets and we patrol the entire galaxy, maintaining peace and protecting all of our member worlds and peoples. The Moctod is the flagship of the Universal Military Force. We are soaring through the Dark Beyond, the uncharted territory outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. It's our mission to stop a horde of terrifying enemies before they can invade our universe and destroy all that we hold dear. We're on a rogue mission. It's not one sanctioned by the U.M.F. In fact, we'll probably all face court-martials when we return. Actually, if we return. Friends, I have some dire news. Vampires are real. They're not weird-looking white guys in tacky black suits speaking in bad accents. They're real-life monsters from beyond the stars. There are trillions of them, and they're coming for us. Vampires travel in massive spaceships and they move from world to world, transforming the local life-forms into half-breeds by infusing them with Vampire DNA and devouring the rest. They invaded the Milky Way Galaxy in 7600 A.D. They slaughtered billions of human beings. They destroyed dozens of planets. We managed to drive them off, but that was not a victory, only a temporary respite. And now, they're coming back to finish us off. When the Vampires came along for the first time, humanity was unprepared. We had been doing what we did best, fighting one another for all the wrong reasons. For the past six thousand years, genetic engineering has been extremely popular in human society. So much that there have been many wars between the Ubermen, those who found genetic engineering to be a shortcut to the peak of evolution, and the Mundanes, the ordinary humans who refused to use genetic engineering to improve themselves. The funny thing is that our ancestors were bio-enhanced human criminals whom fate and science changed and set apart from the rest of humanity in the early twenty first century. The Ubermen later left ordinary human society and formed an alliance, the Uberman Conclave, established to grant them their own colony worlds. The members of the Conclave were men and women from all races and backgrounds : Black, White, Asian, Latin and Middle-Eastern. They felt that ordinary humanity was stagnant and used genetic engineering to achieve evolution. The first world colonized by the genetically enhanced supermen and superwomen of the Uberman Conclave was the planet Barokh. It would become the sacred homeworld of all Ubermen and Uberwomen and the source of moral authority for our entire species for millennia to come. The supermen and superwomen multiplied and reached billions. Then, we set out to colonize more worlds. We colonized the planet Shaor, then the planet Hawth, followed by the planet Kharzull. The numbers of our people continued to grow. We colonized world after world. Ordinary humans numbered one trillion. We were a minority in the cosmos, numbering only five hundred billion. But what we lacked in number, we made up for in intelligence and resilience. All we wanted was to multiply and make our mark in the universe. Unfortunately, the humans got in our way. That's why we went to war with them. It was a terrible war. Billions died on both sides. Entire worlds were vaporized. The humans were on the verge of losing. A massive Uberman fleet left the planet Barokh and traveled to the planet Earth, capital of the Human Worlds Association or H.W.A. We unleashed a weapon called the Planet Shatterer, and it was supposed to have torn the planet Earth apart. The destruction of the planet Earth appeared certain, but somehow, Earth's scientists managed to repeal the effects of the P.S. Forty percent of the planet Earth's human population perished, but they still saved their world. That was a devastating blow to the humans. Earth was the birthplace of humanity. It was the most heavily defended of all human worlds. This royally pissed off all humans in the universe. We couldn't be happier. We continued to attack human world after human world. They had superior numbers. We had superior intelligence and weaponry. They were going to lose. Then, the Vampires came in the year 7600 A.D. They attacked both human and Uberman worlds. Millions of people, both Mundane humans and genetically engineered superhumans, were slaughtered. The Vampires didn't care about our foolish wars over genetic superiority. They wanted to destroy us. They wanted our worlds. They wanted our galaxy. They wanted us dead. Still, how do you kill an army of half-dead aliens who have taken over the bodies of millions of men and women you once considered friends and family? Desperate times have been known to make strange bedfellows, as you might already know. We were forced to form an alliance, in the hope of mutual survival. Thus, the Universal Military Force, made up of both humans and superhumans, was formed. The Universal Military Force was created to protect both human and superhuman worlds from this unprecedented threat posed by the Vampires. We patrolled the galaxy, fighting the Vampires. They outnumbered us. There was one trillion humans and five hundred billion superhumans in the galaxy. The Vampires numbered in the trillions. They were a force to be reckoned with. A deadly foe which possessed an invincible army, as well as massive fleets of spaceships and technologies from a myriad worlds across the cosmos. Somehow, we managed to drive them out of our galaxy. They left, but they would come back. We knew they would be back. Centuries later, the Universal Military Force was still around, enforcing peace in both human and superhuman worlds. Humans and superhumans still didn't like each other, especially since they had drastically different views. We superhumans are militaristic for the most part. To serve in the military is the highest calling for any man or woman. We have scientists, artists, entertainers and all that but warriors are revered in an almost religious manner in our society. We believe in a system of hereditary monarchy. The Supreme Emperor is the head of the Uberman society, and shares power with his Reigning Empress, and the Holy Assembly, made up of delegates from various worlds. Our society is organized into many different Castes. Which Caste one belongs to is determined through genetic and psychological testing and of course, personal trials. There is the Red Caste, which is the Warrior Caste. The Silver Caste is the science and technology Caste. The Blue Caste is the academic Caste. The Purple Caste is the worker Caste, and they are bred to perform virtually any purpose. They're the most numerous Caste, next to the men and women of the Warrior Caste. Members of all Castes are required to take military training at some point in their lives. Men and women from all Castes are loyal to the Emperor and the Empress. The Emperor's City is on the planet Barokh, the sacred throneworld of all Ubermen, which all supermen and and superwomen revere. As you can see, superhuman society is well-organized and quite different from the chaos of human society. I was born on the planet Barokh. My father, Antonin Heracles was a scientist of great reputation. He built the Planet Shatterer, the doomsday weapon which nearly brought the humans to their knees. My mother, Theresa Scalia Heracles was a warrior. She was a lieutenant in the fleet of warships which nearly destroyed the planet Earth. Our family is among the wealthiest and most influential on all of Barokh. My maternal grandfather, the esteemed warrior Salukar Scalia, was once the Supreme Commander of the Barokhian Imperial Fleet, answering only to the Emperor and the Empress themselves. My decision to serve in the military was hailed by both sides of my family. However, the fact that I harbored no special hatred toward humans often put me at odds with my fellow genetically enhanced superhumans. The ordinary humans had no lost love for us either. They called us super freaks, behind our backs, of course. Many of my people called them genetically regressive losers. If you ask me, that's really not necessary. The way I see it, in times of war, people are capable of evil things. We're all wrong in times of war, in one way or another. In times of peace, we should remember what we're capable of and try not to make the same mistakes. An odd thought pattern for a warrior, I know. I will serve my people and the Universal Military Force as best as I can. However, I don't feel any special hatred for anyone. That being said, I'm no pacifist. Any person, human or superhuman, male or female, who tries to kill me will have his or her neck snapped. In the interests of self-preservation, I will do anything. That's just who I am. Which explains why I'm onboard the spaceship Moctod, leading hundreds of men and women, both ordinary humans and genetically enhanced superhumans, into what seems to be a suicide mission. We've been traveling in deep space, at a hundred times the speed of light, for twenty six months now. Life onboard was kind of boring. I mean, we're all aching for some action right now. The last time we got any action was six months ago, when we destroyed a Vampire Cruiser. Vampire Cruisers are massive spaceships, carrying close to a hundred thousand of these wretched things. We caught them by surprise, just as they were exiting a portal. Usually, these types of ships were the death of any vessel they came across. But we had superior weaponry for once, and the element of surprise. We blew them to a million pieces. That was fun. That was right before we left the Milky Way Galaxy. We had gone where no human, genetically engineered or otherwise, had ever been. This a great moment for the entire crew. Too bad what we saw within the next few weeks proved to be a shocker. We knew the Vampires had superior technology and numbers. We knew that if every man and woman, both human and superhuman, in the entire Milky Way Galaxy suited up and joined the fight, we'd still be outnumbered by the Vampires. Yet this knowledge still didn't prepare us for what we saw, right outside the Milky Way Galaxy. We gasped collectively when we saw a massive fleet of Vampire spaceships. There were billions of them. So many of them that the Moctod's sensors burned themselves out counting them. Billions of Vampire spacecraft, containing untold trillions of these nightmarish creatures. Ready to invade the Milky Way Galaxy and destroy every living thing in it. Our spaceship was hidden by a stealth device, so they couldn't sense us. I summoned my best officers, and we had a meeting. What do we do now? In the space all around us, the stars were blotted out by the enemy ships. I stood at the head of the table, and the men and women who sat around it stared at me as I began. We were in a hopeless situation. A few thousand men and women versus a countless horde of war-like, highly intelligent and heavily armed super predators from beyond the stars. I looked at them all. Michael Sharkhi, a fellow Uberman and my chief of security. This big and tall, red-haired, taciturn man had served with me since the U.M.F. Academy. Douglas Schrovski, a rather jovial, stocky and openly gay human. Odd attributes for a tactician. Uh, I mean his jovial disposition, not his sexual orientation. Tacticians are usually grim. Amanda Stein, a large, square black woman. A human who was the ship's fire control officer. Donald Des Moines, a tall and lean blond soldier and fellow Uberman who was the ship's engineer and his wife, a tall Uberwoman named Majel Chang, who was our chief medical officer. Rhonda Stone, a large, blonde-haired and battle-scarred Uberwoman served as my security detail. George Talkuth, a short and bald, black-skinned human male, was the communications officer. They formed my inner circle. All of these people had families and friends waiting for them back on their homeworlds. When I asked for volunteers to join me on this dangerous mission over two years ago, they all agreed without hesitation. Now, I was about to ask them even more. Do we turn back and return to our galaxy to warn our people? Or do we make a stand here against the Vampires? I asked the question, and waited for an answer. One by one, they answered me. To a person, they wanted to fight the blood-sucking alien monsters and blast them out of the sky. I smiled, and told the rest of the crew to prepare for battle. Every man and woman onboard suited up and went to their designated positions. The spaceship Moctod is the largest and mightiest spacecraft ever built, but a crew is only as strong as its weakest member. We had to be ready. And I knew we would be. Hidden by state-of-the-art stealth technology, we soared to the very heart of the Vampire fleet. They were about to enter a Cluster. That Cluster was an extremely rare but amazingly stable, natural wormhole. Essentially, it's a portal allowing instantaneous travel between galaxies. The Vampire Fleet were about to leap from this unnamed galaxy into the Milky Way Galaxy. From then on, it would only be a matter of months before they made it to our cherished worlds. They had trillions of warriors and billions of spaceships. The Universal Military Force wouldn't be enough to stop them. No force in the universe could stop them. But maybe we could slow them down. Buy our people enough time to find some way to save themselves. I had a plan. It was probably going to cost us our lives, but it just might be crazy enough to work. We went to the Cluster, and there, we unleashed hell. The thing about a wormhole is that its event horizon is somewhat similar to that of a Black Hole. It pulls you in. It's also the place where the most unstable energies in the universe are gathered. Wormholes are rare for a reason. They're literally a tear in the fabric of space, and the amount of energy needed for them to be maintained for any extended length of time naturally is incalculable. The thing about energy is that it cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be absorbed, transformed and channeled in many ways. We waited until the bulk of the Vampire fleet was in sight, and that's when I gave the order. I ordered my weapons control officer to deploy the Absorber. The Absorber is a device I personally stole from the top-secret laboratories of the Universal Military Force, guaranteeing myself a court-martial and an execution if I were ever to return to the Milky Way Galaxy. The Absorber is essentially a device which sucks energy from all sources in order to artificially create a Black Hole. It was theoretically supposed to be able to do this at unprecedented speed. I closed my eyes, and unleashed Hell. The Absorber was deployed, and fulfilled its purpose to absolute scientific perfection. It absorbed energy from all available sources. The most powerful ambient source of energy it could find was the Cluster, the wormhole itself. It swallowed up every last ounce of that energy, thus destroying the wormhole, then exploded. In doing so, it tore a hole in the very fabric of space. The surprised Vampire fleet sought to flee, but it was too late. Nothing escapes from a Black Hole. Not light, not energy, and certainly not a massive fleet of billions of spaceships. It sucked them in. Before our amazed eyes, two-thirds of the enemy fleet were lost. Trillions of Vampires met a gruesome end inside our artificially created Black Hole. The remainder of them noticed us. We had exhausted an amazing amount of energy in deploying the Absorber, and our stealth device was no longer working. Fire came upon us from all angles. We were hopelessly outnumbered. All around me, I could feel the ship breaking up. I could hear the screams of my crew. Brave men and women whom I was proud to have served. I sat in the captain's chair, and contemplated what I've done. A smile crept into my face even as the flames consumed the command deck, and roared toward my body. I wish I could have seen the faces of my enemies as they drifted to their deaths inside the Black Hole, the nightmare I had unleashed upon them. As the flames leapt over me, I shouted defiantly. As it is with all of my kind, victory was mine in the end. I hope those blood drinking alien freaks suffered inside the Black Hole. Those were my last thoughts as I surrendered to blissful oblivion.