Seize the Night

laboratories. Her workplace was inside her skull, and her mind was as elaborately equipped as the combined research facilities of all the universities in the country. She kept to her office at Ashdon College, only occasionally venturing into a lab, supported by government grants, doing the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting.
    She set out not to destroy humanity but to save it, and I am convinced that for a long time she didn't know the reckless and malevolent purposes to which those at Wyvern were applying her theories.
    Transferring genetic material from one species into another. In the hope of creating a super race. In an insane quest for the perfect, unstoppable soldier. Smart beasts of myriad design bred for future battlefields. Weird biological weapons as tiny as a virus or as large as a grizzly bear.
    Dear God.
    Personally, all this makes me nostalgic for the good old days when the most ambitious big-brain types were content with dreaming up city-busting nuclear bombs, satellite-mounted particle-beam death rays, and nerve gas that causes its victims to turn inside out the way caterpillars do when cruel little boys sprinkle salt on them.
    For these experiments, animals were easily obtained, because they generally can't afford to hire first-rate attorneys to prevent themselves from being exploited, but, surprisingly, human subjects were readily available, as well. Soldiers courts-martialed for particularly savage murders and condemned to life sentences were offered the choice of rotting in maximum-security military prisons or earning a measure of freedom by participating in this secret enterprise.
    Then something went wrong.
    Big time.
    In all human endeavors, something inevitably goes woefully wrong.
    Some say this is because the universe is inherently chaotic. Others say this is because we are a species that has fallen from the grace of God.
    Whatever the reason, among humankind, for every Moe there are thousands of Curlys and Larrys.
    The delivery system used to ferry new genetic material into the cells of research subjects—to insert it in their DNA chains—was a retrovirus brilliantly conceived by my mom, Wisteria Jane Snow, who somehow still had time to make terrific chocolate-chip cookies. This engineered retrovirus was designed to be fragile, crippled—that is, sterile—and benign, merely a living tool that would do exactly what was wanted of it.
    Once having done its job, it was supposed to die. But it soon mutated into a hardy, rapidly reproducing, infectious bug that could be passed in bodily fluids through simple skin contact, causing genetic change instead of disease. These microorganisms captured random sequences of DNA from numerous species in the lab, transporting them into the bodies of the project scientists, who for a while remained unaware that they were being slowly but profoundly altered. Physically, mentally, emotionally altered. Before they understood what was happening to them and why, some Wyvern scientists began to change … to have a lot in common with the research animals in their cages.
    A couple years ago, this process suddenly became obvious when a violent episode occurred in the labs. No one has explained to me exactly what happened. People killed one another in a bizarre, savage confrontation.
    The experimental animals either escaped or were purposefully released by people who felt a strange kinship with them.
    Among those animals were rhesus monkeys whose intelligence had been substantially enhanced. Although I'd thought intelligence was related to brain size and to the number of folds in the surface of the brain, these rhesuses didn't have enlarged craniums, except for a few telltale characteristics, they resembled ordinary members of their species.
    The monkeys have been on the run ever since. They are hiding from the federal and military authorities who are quietly trying to eradicate them and all other evidence of what happened at Wyvern before the public learns that its elected officials have ensured the end of the world as we know it. Other than those involved in the conspiracy, only a handful of us know anything about these events, and if we attempt to go public, even though we possess no hard proof, they will kill us as righteously as they would waste the rhesuses.
    They killed my mom. They claim that she was despondent over the way in which her work was misused, that she committed suicide by driving her car at high speed into a bridge