Fear Nothing

to the precipice on which we now stand.
        As Orson moved to make room for him, Manuel came to the window. He stared in at his son, and with his face more brightly lit, I could see not a wild light in his eyes but only overwhelming love.
        “Enhancing the intelligence of animals,” I said. “How would that have military applications?”
        “For one thing, what better spy than a dog as smart as a human being, sent behind enemy lines? An impenetrable disguise. And they don't check dogs' passports. What better scout on a battlefield?”
        Maybe you engineer an exceptionally powerful dog that's smart but also savagely vicious when it needs to be. You have a new kind of soldier: a biologically designed killing machine ith the capacity for strategizing.
        “I thought intelligence depended on brain size.”
        He shrugged. “I'm just a cop.”
        “Or on the number of folds in the brain surface.”
        “Evidently they discovered different. Anyway,” Manuel said, “there was a previous success. Something called the Francis Project, several years ago. An amazingly smart golden retriever. The Wyvern operation was launched to capitalize on what they learned from that. And at Wyvern it wasn't just about animal intelligence. It was about enhancing human intelligence, about lots of things, many things.”
        In the studio, hands covered with Kevlar gloves, Toby placed the hot vase into a bucket half filled with vermiculite. This was the next stage of the annealing process.
        Standing at Manuel's side, I said, “Many things? What else?”
        “They wanted to enhance human agility, speed, longevity-by finding ways not just to transfer genetic material from one person to another but from species to species.”
        Species to species.
        I heard myself say, “Oh, my God.”
        Toby poured more of the granular vermiculite over the vase, until it was covered. Vermiculite is a superb insulator that allows the glass to continue cooling very slowly and at a constant rate.
        I remembered something Roosevelt Frost had said: that the dogs, cats, and monkeys were not the only experimental subjects in the labs at Wyvern, that there was something worse.
        “People,” I said numbly. “They experimented on people?”
        “Soldiers court-martialed and found guilty of murder, condemned to life sentences in military prisons. They could rot there… or take part in the project and maybe win their freedom as a reward.
        “But experimenting on people
        “I doubt your mother knew anything about that. They didn't always share with her all the ways they applied her ideas.”
        Toby must have heard our voices at the window, because he took off the insulated gloves and raised the big goggles from his eyes to squint at us. He waved.
        “It all went wrong,” Manuel said. “I'm no scientist. Don't ask me how.
        But it went wrong not just in one way. Many ways. It blew up in their faces. Suddenly things happened they weren't expecting. Changes they didn't contemplate. The experimental animals and the prisoners - their genetic makeup underwent changes that weren't desired and couldn't be controlled.
        I waited a moment, but he apparently wasn't prepared to tell me more. I pressed him: “A monkey escaped. A rhesus. They found it in Angela Ferryman's kitchen.”
        The searching look that Manuel turned on me was so T penetrating that I was sure he had seen my heart, knew the contents of my every pocket, and had an accurate count of the number of bullets left in the Glock.
        “They recaptured the rhesus,” he said, “but made the mistake of attributing its escape to human error. They didn't realize it had been let go, released . They didn't realize there were a few scientists in the project who were… becoming.
        “Becoming what?”
        Just… becoming. Something new. Changing.”
        Toby switched off the natural gas. The Fisher burner swallowed its own flames.
        “Changing how?” I asked Manuel.
        “Whatever delivery system they developed to insert new genetic material in a research animal or prisoner… that system just took on a life of its own.”
        Toby turned off all but one panel of fluorescents, so I could go inside for a visit.
        Manuel said, “Genetic material from other species was being carried into the bodies of the project scientists without their being aware of