Seize the Night

abutment just south of town. But my mother was not a quitter. And she would never have abandoned me to face alone the nightmare world that may be coming. I believe she intended to go public, spill the truth to the media, in hope of building a consensus for a crash research program, bigger than what's buried under Wyvern, bigger than the Manhattan Project, commandeering the best genetic scientists in the world. So they pushed her through the big door and slammed it behind her. This is what I believe. I have no proof.
    She was my mom, however, and about some of these issues, I'll believe what I want, what I must.
    Meanwhile, the contagion is spreading faster than the monkeys, and it's unlikely that the damage can be undone or even contained. Infected Wyvern personnel relocated all over the country, carrying the retrovirus with them, before anyone knew there was a problem, before a quarantine could have been effectively imposed. Genetic mutation will probably occur in all species. Perhaps the only thing in doubt is whether this will be a slow process that requires decades or centuries to unfold—or whether the terror will rapidly escalate. Thus far, the effects have been, with rare exception, subtle and not widespread, but this may be the calm before the holocaust. Those responsible are, I believe, frantically seeking a remedy but they are also expending a lot of energy in an effort to conceal the source of the oncoming catastrophe, so no one will know who's to blame.
    No one at the top of the government wants to face the public's wrath.
    They're not afraid of being booted out of office. Far worse than job loss might await them if the truth gets out. They might be tried for crimes against humanity. They probably justify the ongoing cover-up as necessary to avoid panic in the streets, civil disorder, and perhaps even an international quarantine of the entire North American continent, but what really concerns them is the possibility that they will be torn to pieces by angry mobs.
    Perhaps a few of the creatures now milling in the street outside the bungalow were among the twelve who had escaped from the labs on that historic and macabre night of violence. Most were descendants of the escapees, bred in freedom but as intelligent as their parents.
    Ordinary monkeys are chatterboxes, but I heard no sound from these thirty. They roiled together with what seemed to be increasing agitation, arms flailing, tails lashing, but if they raised their voices, the gabble wasn't audible either through the window glass or through the open front door, only a few feet away.
    They were plotting something worse than monkeyshines.
    Although the rhesuses are not as smart as human beings, the advantage we have isn't great enough to make me feel comfortable about playing a high-stakes game of poker with any three of them. Unless I could first get them drunk.
    These precocious primates aren't the primary threat born in the laboratories at Wyvern. That honor must go, of course, to the gene-swapping retrovirus that might remake every living thing. But as villains go, the monkeys constitute a damn fine backup team.
    To fully appreciate the long-term threat of these redesigned rhesuses, consider that rats are dreadful pests even though they are a tiny fraction as intelligent as we are. Scientists estimate that rodents destroy twenty percent of the food supply worldwide, in spite of the fact that we are relatively effective at exterminating colonies of them and keeping their numbers manageable. Imagine what might happen if rats were even half as smart as we are, and were able to compete on fairer footing than they now enjoy. We'd be engaged in a desperate war with them to prevent massive starvation.
    Watching the monkeys in the street, I wondered if I was seeing our adversaries in some future Armageddon.
    Aside from their high level of intelligence, they have another quality that makes them more formidable enemies than any rodents could be.
    Though rats operate entirely on instinct and have insufficient brain power to take anything personally, these monkeys hate us with a black, bitter passion.
    I believe they are hostile toward humanity because we created them but did a half-assed job. We robbed them of their simple animal innocence, in which they were content. We raised their intelligence until they became aware of the wider world and of their true place in it, but we didn't give them enough intelligence to make it possible for them to improve