Those Who Dream by Night

 “Alexander, my dear,” Virginia called, “come here, my love, and sit with me a very little while.  They’re coming and we haven’t much time.”

A figure appeared, child-sized, who looked about ten, with medium brown hair, liquid brown eyes, and a mostly human face.  He approached the elderly woman he thought of as his mother with confused trepidation. 

While his lips and the musculature around his mouth were molded with a slightly strange cant that caused them to protrude faintly, it was his nose that was the real tell.  He was a marvel of genetic engineering that showcased Virginia’s mastery over the difficulties in combining the human and chimpanzee genomes, and his nose proclaimed vividly that at least some of his genome was ape in origin.  The nostrils flared broad and high, flattened, and possessed an unusual geometric-like indentation that began wide on the tip and thinned as it progressed up the dorsum.  Closer inspection also revealed subtle but curious folds about his eyes akin to wrinkles, but not quite.  His hands were almost indistinguishable from human except for a modest elongation of the palm.

Alexander couldn’t speak due to an undescended hyoid bone and the inability to regulate his lung pressure but he understood, very well.  He communicated primarily through the sign language that Virginia had patiently taught him.

He approached her hesitantly, made unsure by her sad yet determined look.  She held her arms open and he gratefully clamored up and allowed himself to be folded deep within her embrace.  There was a hardness to her that bespoke such a maternal gesture, as though she approached mothering and emotions with the same determined efficiency she had approached her research.

“Alexander, I have a story to tell you, but not the kind of story I usually tell.  This is my story and your story, our story really.  And I have to tell it quickly because there are some people coming, people who mean us no good.  No, no, don’t worry, I won’t let them hurt us.  It’s just that we’ll be leaving soon, you and I, but I need you to hear about us.  About where you came from, but to do that I need to tell you about myself first.  Will you sit quietly and listen?”  She waited for his careful nod before continuing.

“I was never a girl that was sentimental.  I always knew I was different from others.  I didn’t care about socializing or boys or being pretty.  I was fascinated with the way the world worked.  Why it was so terrible and so beautiful at the same time.  I wanted to understand it, and in understanding it, control it.

“I graduated from both high school and college early.  Then went on to earn my Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology by the age of 23.  I know you can’t understand what those things are, but suffice to say it was difficult and it was impressive.

“I then spent my post doc analyzing the differences between human and chimpanzee DNA.  What is DNA?  Well it’s the code of life.  It’s like an instruction book inside all the cells of our body.”

Alexander shook his head, not understanding.

“Suffice to say it’s a language, a strange one that not only instructs how any living thing is built and functions but also tells a fragmented tale of its ancestry.  There’s a secret code within this language and if you study it and are patient it can reveal the origins of living things.

“Alexander, you don’t need to understand everything, you merely need to listen while I tell it.  Can you do that for me?  Thank you, dear.

“As I was saying, I was studying the differences between human and chimpanzee DNA, two creatures both stunningly similar and remarkably different, separated by about 5 million years of evolution.  I mapped out these differences closely, building a timeline of speciation which occurred over several million years.  I wanted to understand how we went from a common ancestor to us.  On a molecular level we’re so similar, and yet, behaviorally we’re worlds apart.

“I was doing this while most other women I knew were beginning to get married, have children, slowing their career trajectories.  I felt so smug towards them, so superior.  What a waste of life, to do what the common man does.  To spew forth more children in a world already overcrowded and then spend your time chasing after them and cleaning up their messy fluids.  What idiocy.  I told myself I was of a higher caliber because I was adding to the wealth of human knowledge, which was far loftier than mere procreation.

“Then I met a man and everything changed, as it usually does.”  She chuckled wryly at this, paused a moment, her mouth drawing down briefly, before continuing.

“His name was Victor and we met at Vanguard Genomics where I was hired after I completed my post doc at Harvard in the Laboratory of Evolutionary Genomics.  He had also just completed his post doc at the NIH in the laboratory of Developmental Genomics, quite remarkable.  He wasn’t a handsome man, but he had an intensity that drew me.  And a sweet smile, very sweet. 

“Well, we were hired to do the impossible: combine human and chimpanzee genomes to produce a hybrid, ostensibly to recreate an approximation of a living, protohuman ancestor, but the reality was we just wanted to see if it could be done.  It was very controversial and very secretive.

“This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to create a human/chimp hybrid, although those attempts were, let’s just say they took a rather basic approach while we were using a more refined methodology.  We were called the Ivanov project after the lone scientist who is publically known as having tried to create such hybrids back at the beginning of the 20^th century.  He ultimately failed, not surprisingly.  If one could have been produced by a natural phenomenon scientists wouldn’t have been required.

“Initially we focused on a productive cellular fusion that could survive in vitro, that is, in a petri dish, for at least a few days.  That alone took several years.  Those years were extraordinary. 

“Victor pursued me and for the first time in my life I felt like a woman and not just a brain in a female body.  I still can’t imagine what he saw in me.  Maybe he thought my passion for science was indicative of my passions elsewhere, and he wasn’t entirely mistaken.  But I’m not an emotional person.  Maybe he thought his regard would soften me.  It didn’t.

“We progressed to implantation into female chimpanzees and that’s when Victor began to have second thoughts about the ethics of what we were doing.  He kept wandering over to the rooms where they housed the various strains of laboratory mice, listening to them sing at night.  He told me that it gave him ‘philosophical musings’ about the nature of our research.  We used to have raving fights over it.  He would say, ‘But what if we succeed?  What will we have created?  A creature that is essentially human, being used as some sort of laboratory rat.  How is that any different then Ravensbrück?’

“‘Stop being so dramatic,’ I’d reply.  ‘A reconstructed protohuman isn’t actually human.  It will still be far more animal than human.  And if it’s too human we’ll terminate the experiment.  And we’re not Nazis for gods sake.’

“‘Terminate it, you mean,’ he’d shout back.  ‘Stop and think about what you’re saying.  If it’s too human, too much like us, we’ll kill it.  Virginia, can’t you see that that’s monstrous?’

“‘It’s not monstrous,’ I’d snap, ‘it’s science.  It’s not our job to moralize, that’s what the ethicists are for.’

“‘I think you’ve become so blinded by your need to prove your own brilliance you can’t see that this path we’re on is going to bleed us of our humanity.’  That’s how he phrased it, ‘bleed us of our humanity’.  He really was dramatic.

“Then I’d tell him to stop being so preachy, it was giving me a headache, and then he’d go and brood for a while, but he always seemed to come round.  Until one day, he didn’t.

“He sat me down and told me he was leaving Vanguard to do something that would actually benefit humanity, something less narcissistic.  He asked me to go with him, to do something truly useful with my gifts, but all I could hear was him calling me a narcissist who was wasting her time on worthless research.  That’s not what he said, but that’s what I heard.  So I let him go.  I let him slip through my fingers. 

“Do you know, the whole time we were together I never told him that I loved him?  Not once.  He would say it to me and I would laugh and roll my eyes and tell him that love was merely an evolutionary instinct to encourage procreation and successful rearing of the resultant progeny.  He would tell me I didn’t have to be a scientist all of the time and I could never understand what he meant by that.  Of course I have to be a scientist all of the time.  What else could I possibly be?

“Well, I continued on with my life uninterrupted and if sometimes I came to work with reddish, swollen eyes no one ever commented on it.  I was just starting to feel like I had reestablished my equilibrium when I received the letter.

“Victor was such an old-fashioned man that he sent a hand written letter instead of an email like a normal person.  He wrote to tell me,” she paused to clear her throat a little.  “Excuse me.  Yes.  He wrote to tell me that he was now working on shelf stable vaccinations for children in third world countries where there was limited access to refrigeration.  A noble endeavor.  He also wrote that he had found someone else, an epidemiologist, and they were getting married soon.

“He went on, once again trying to dissuade me from my work.  He called it dangerous, destructive.  He said it had the potential to remove all significance from what it means to be human, not just for these creatures we strove to create, but for ourselves as well.

“He closed by telling me that he hoped I would take a step back from my work, for myself, and try to find someone of my own.  He told me that he had always hoped he would be able to call me his wife, but he had finally realized that I was more in love with my work than I ever could be with anyone or anything.  He said he hoped I could see that there was more to life and that I wouldn’t end up alone.  Then he wished me well.

“Can you imagine his audacity?  To wish me well after a letter like that!  Well, I wasn’t about to leave things like that.  I dashed off a note of my own that read:  I hope you and your epidemiologist are happy together.  Let me know when you’ve established world peace and eradicated world hunger.  Sincerely, Virginia Walsh, Ph.D.

“Snarky, I know.  Mean-spirited, too.  He meant well.  Even then he still had some regard for me.  It’s funny, over the years, every now and then, I would picture what he was doing, what his life must be like.  I wondered how many children he had, then grandchildren.  I never actually stooped to snooping and looking him up until a few years ago.  I’d had too many glasses of sherry one night and couldn’t help myself.

“It turned out that only a few years after he sent me that letter he developed terminal brain cancer.  Glioblastoma multiforme.  An aggressive, nasty, cruel disease that usually robs the sufferer of their fundamental self.  All this time I’d been living this other life for him, never knowing.  And he died thinking badly of me.  Thinking I thought so little of him.”  She stopped a moment to wipe hard at her eyes.

“No, no, don’t worry, dear, I’m alright.  Really.”  She gathered Alexander even closer and bent her head to lay a gentle kiss on the silk of his hair and allowed herself a small moment to relax in his warmth.  Then she drew back, breathed deeply, and continued.

“I shoved the letter far back into my desk and promptly did my best to forget about it.  I immersed myself into the research as I never had before but further progress remained elusive.

“Almost six years went by and still nothing.  The company kept pouring money into the research because it was a pet project of the founder, but still, I was beginning to panic.  By this time I had my own, small lab and several research assistants but it all felt so ephemeral.  Then one of my research assistants left and was replaced by a young man fresh off his post doc from Cambridge where he’d worked on pre- and post-natal mammalian development in their Department of Genetics.

“His name was Ian but he went by his middle name of George and he thought he was quite handsome, though in reality he was only about average.  But he had this accent.  And he could be charming, in a superficial way, but he was serious about the work.  Very serious.  And I took to that.  I thought he had a lot of potential. I took him under my wing, showed him the ropes, mothered him a bit.  Being ten years older than him I had no illusions, but sometimes I thought, just maybe he fancied me, just a little, in a wistful sort of way.  Anyway, what I didn’t realize was how ambitious he was.  How cut throat he was behind that brilliant smile.

“After two more years, when I was beginning to despair I had a sudden flash of insight: what about the hybrid microRNA profile?  What if the hybrid embryo was secreting microRNAs that were somehow impairing their implantation?  I asked George to look in to it, knowing he would make a thorough effort.

“A few weeks later when I inquired into his progress he told me it was a dead end.  Looked right into my eyes and said that.  No qualms about lying. 

“It turns out that the hybrid embryos were secreting much higher levels of a particular microRNA that was suppressing the function of an important gene for uterine implantation, called integrin beta 3, not that you need to know all of that, but well, it does gratify me a bit to discuss these things again.  It’s been such a long time.”

She paused a moment to regard her former life and her place in it before continuing.

“George discovered that the chimpanzee version of the gene had an extra 1035 nucleotides that the human version lacked, and this was where the overexpressed microRNA was binding, preventing the gene’s expression, and ultimately embryonic attachment to the uterus.  Then he went behind my back and began correcting for the problem by injecting an inhibitor specific for the microRNA directly into a test chimpanzee’s uterus at the time of implantation.  It worked.  It was a like a miracle.  To see this embryo take hold and persist after years of failure.  That first ultrasound almost brought tears to my eyes.

“But George wasn’t just ambitious, he was devious.  He told the Chief Scientific Officer that not only was he the one who thought to scan the hybrid microRNA profile, but that I actively discouraged him from pursuing that line of inquiry.  That I had actually told him it was a dead end and to stop wasting time!  The sheer nerve of the man still fires me to this day.

“Only my years of service and my seniority saved me from losing my job.  But the very fact that I had spent so many years without any real results was also proof against me.  George had no way to prove his accusations, but I also had no way to prove my innocence . . . or that the hybrid microRNAs had been my idea, not his.

“It was a very bitter time for me.  George was set up with his own lab and, if you can imagine his gall, he requested my research assistants be assigned to him, which they were.  I was left with no one, and none of my assistants were replaced.  I was reduced in significance and I saw that unless I chanced upon another breakthrough my whole life’s work was going to come to naught.

“I was no longer a precocious scientific ingénue.  I was a bitter, middle-aged woman with no research of import.  I had wasted my youth on what I was beginning to see was a frivolous pursuit, just like Victor had warned me, and just when I should finally have been lauded I was handed an agony of defeat.

“Well, seeing as ninety percent of science is failure, I determined to go on.  I would not bow my head and surrender and if that’s what George had expected he was sorely mistaken.

“Luckily for me, despite the breakthrough with implantation, the hybrid embryos developed poorly, especially their brains.  They had a decreased number of neurites and defective synapatic formations throughout the brain, most especially in the forebrain, and didn’t survive past mid-gestation.

“There were several more fruitless years of research, for both myself and George.  I heard through one of my former research assistants, Shui, that he was doing an entire genome expression profile for the length of the pregnancy and comparing it to normal chimpanzee and human fetal profiles.  An enormous undertaking that, even with today’s advances, is still a blunt and obsessive method.

“Shui hated George.  It turns out he was something of a petty tyrant, always yelling at his assistants and changing the direction of the research in midstream, sometimes without even waiting for all the results of his current approach.  He had become haphazard in his scientific application.  I think the stress of being the principal investigator was taking its toll on him.  It’s easy to manage your own research; it’s a lot harder to manage others’.

“Anyway, I decided to take a more refined and focused approach than George.  We had both assayed brain-specific genes to see if there were any significant changes in their expression that would impact the ability of the brain to grow properly.  There weren’t.  We were missing something, but what?

“I kept reviewing the results over and over again, trying to tease out the significance.  Then one day it occurred to me that some of the results were similar to a paper I had read in Nature Cell Biology about 15 years or so back.  Something about mice and how lacking a key mitochondrial factor led to abnormal brain development, especially in the forebrain.  And I knew that’s what we’d been missing, that link to the mitochondria.

“You see, we were using chimpanzee eggs, and subsequently the mitochondria that were in them, because using human eggs was far too controversial and getting our hands on some would be difficult, fraught with legal pitfalls and such.  But there are key differences between chimpanzee and human mitochondria, and those differences effect brain development.  That whole time, it was so obvious.  I can’t believe George and I hadn’t seen it, but there it was.  So simple.  The solution was to use enucleated human female eggs. 

“I typed up my thoughts in my lab journal on my computer and started thinking about how I could surreptitiously put in a request for human eggs without George finding out about it.  I knew that once he saw that request he would put all the pieces together.

“I heard about it the next day.  Shui came in on her lunch break, polite as always, and informed me that George had made something of a breakthrough.  He was convinced that the fault lay in the chimpanzee mitochondria and had put in an order for human eggs!  It couldn’t have been a coincidence, I knew it couldn’t.

“I rushed over to my computer and did a diagnostic and sure enough George had secretly loaded spyware on my hard drive.  He was privy to all of my data, all of my notes.  For the first time in my entire career I began to cry at work.  I detest women who do that, but that day, after the first betrayal had brought me so low, and now, just when I was about to win back my good name, that conniving little bastard!”

Virginia paused a moment, collected herself, then continued in a softer, calmer voice.

“Shui was quite taken aback at the whole situation: my tears, George’s treachery.  I think she’d been suspecting for a while that George might have been the one lying before, but now she knew for sure.  She was the one who told me not to clear the spyware, to use it against George if I could.  She’s also the one who reminded me of something I had forgotten: I had my own eggs in storage at the Vanguard facility.

“After things had ended between Victor and me, I began questioning my decision to not have children.  I decided to freeze some of my eggs, just in case, and rather than pay the storage fees to the doctor who had removed them for me, I figured I would store them in my own cryogenic freezer.

“As Shui was reminding me of this I suddenly had hope that I might actually be able to beat George at his own game.  To humiliate him and prove myself.

“Shui was immensely helpful that day.  In some ways, I regard her as my closest and best friend.  She agreed to help me by doing what she could to delay George’s request for human eggs and in the meantime I needed to prepare a fresh batch of hybrid DNA.  I still had enough chimpanzee genome left, but no human.  I was already using my own eggs and felt uncomfortable about also using my own genome.  Shui hated needles and she was already being so helpful I didn’t want to press, but I also didn’t want George to find out what I was up to.  For all I knew he’d try to steal some of my eggs I had preserved.  In fact, I ended up hiding the ones left over in his own freezer, way in the back, with Shui’s help, of course.  I figured that was the last place he’d think of if it ever occurred to him to look for them.

“But in the meantime, I was stuck, needing a person willing to donate their genome without George finding out.  And then I remembered Victor’s hand written letter, tucked far back in my desk drawer.

“I rescued it from the darkness where it had been sitting for the past ten years and with shaking hands I lifted the envelope flap, sure that Victor had used one that self-sealed.  But he hadn’t.  Dear, sweet Victor.  He had used a good, old-fashioned envelope that you had to lick to close.  I trembled with relief and within a week I had amplified enough of his genome to combine with my remaining chimpanzee DNA.

“I took the hybrid DNA and inserted it into one of my enucleated eggs and implanted my last female chimp along with the crucial microRNA inhibitor.

“In the meantime I had started a handwritten lab journal and put in a request for female human eggs, just like George.  I updated my computer journal with trivial fluff and held my breath.

“Despite Shui’s efforts George had managed to obtain his eggs and implant several of his chimps just a couple weeks after mine.  Still, I had beaten him to the punch, and if my chimp managed to stay pregnant I’d spring my results before he even knew I had already gone ahead with the research.

“The first big hurdle was around nineteen weeks gestation.  This was the point where all the other chimps had miscarried.  While I was waiting, counting the days, I learned that George was actively suppressing my fake request for human eggs.”  Virginia shook her head at the memory, smirked a little, then continued.

“As I waited I began to visit the same rooms of laboratory mice that Victor once had.  I found listening to them sing at night was soothing for my nerves.  I called them the night singers and attending to their vocalizations I began to think over all the arguments Victor and I had had over the nature of our research. 

“I began to feel foolish, thinking I had spent my life and my intelligence on such a ridiculous endeavor.  Still, I was committed now.  I had to at least try to outdo George and then maybe, finally I could walk away, find Victor and perhaps make myself respectable in his eyes.

“Nineteen weeks came and went without a single problem.  Now I felt like I was holding my breath all the time.  I would find myself releasing great gusts of air I hadn’t even known I was holding.  My hands began to shake.  I thought I was getting Bell’s palsy.  I wasn’t.  It was nerves.  My doctor ended up prescribing me three separate medications for anxiety.

“I realized that part of what was making me anxious was this thought I kept having over and over again.  That this hybrid was probably the closest thing I’d ever have to a child.  My mitochondria, part of Victor’s genome.  I was beginning to understand the point Victor had been trying to make.  Our genetic material changed the nature of the research.  I began to feel that experimentation on the hybrid would be experimentation on myself, on us.  I knew I had crossed a forbidden line, made the experiment too personal, but there was no going back. 

“I began to think about what life might be like for the hybrid.  What things it might be subjected too.  And of my earlier assertions to Victor about terminating the experiment if the hybrid seemed too human.  Terminating the hybrid now raised thoughts that it was murder.

“One day I ran into George in the hall, with that smug look of triumph on his face.  He barely acknowledged me and I saw just how puerile he was.  And then I saw how puerile I was.  This whole pursuit to showcase my own brilliance had carved out a wasteland in which I had been wandering for years.  It was really a manifestation of insecurity.  George was beneath me, intellectually, that was clear.  But we were equals in morality, or rather, our lack of it.  Were we so different?  He seemed like a mirror to me in that moment; one that reflected all of my worst qualities back at me and I realized I hated myself almost as much as I hated him.

“Without even being aware of it I was beginning to plan.  I had decided, whether or not I was successful, that I was going to resign from my position at Vanguard.  I composed a letter, all but ready to be sent off the moment the hybrid was born.  I began putting my affairs at the institute in order, tying up loose ends and so forth.  Even then I wasn’t really conscious that I was designing a strange, new life for myself.

“As my chimp awkwardly shuffled her way to full term I started spending both days and nights in my lab, not even daring to rush home to shower.  I made an effort in the ladies’ room, but really, it wasn’t as if I had anyone to preen for.

“Then, late one Friday night she began to go into labor.  I was terrified, actually terrified, that there might be complications, and there I was, on my own, playing midwife to her.  I could lose the hybrid if a single thing went wrong.  But it didn’t.

“The hybrid was born after what seemed an eternity of struggle, thrust out onto the hay, still enclosed in a membrane that burst when it landed fully.  It reached for the chimpanzee instinctively and I saw how hairless and how close to human it was.  As the chimp reached for it and brought it to her I saw its face.  That tiny wrinkled face.  Why it reminded me so much of Victor, I don’t know.  I only know that once I saw the resemblance I couldn’t unsee it and that’s when I knew.  I knew there was no way I could allow the hybrid infant to be subjected to experimentation.  Legally speaking, it belonged to Vanguard, but ethically, morally, and genetically, it also belonged to me and I had an obligation to step in as its guardian and protect it.

“Thankfully, you were born over the weekend so I had some time to plan.   Yes dear.  By now I’m sure you’ve figured out that the hybrid infant was, in fact, you.

“Alexander dear, my sweet, don’t be upset.  You’re still my son; you will always be my son.  Nothing can change that.”

The boy’s high pitched wails gradually trailed into faint wisps of sound but his body still shook at the terrible revelations.  He stilled under Virginia’s patient ministrations and turned his large, sad eyes to her.

“You do know that I love you, don’t you?”  She waited for him to nod.  “None of this changes who we are to each other.  And don’t you see, don’t you understand, that I gave up everything for you?  If you’ll keep listening you’ll see that.  We only have a little time left.  Do you want to hear the rest?  Alright then.”  She sighed, picked up the frayed edge of her story and continued.

“I drugged the chimpanzee with a tranquilizer in her food.  While I waited for it to take effect I finished and sent off my resignation letter, knowing it wouldn’t reach anyone until Tuesday at least.”  Here Virginia paused again, deciding not to tell Alexander how she then injected the chimp with potassium chloride after she had fallen asleep, then dispatched her body to the incinerator.  It would only upset him more and she needed him focused for the rest of the conversation.

“Then I wrapped you in some soft blankets and smuggled you out in my bag.  It was the middle of the night but still I worried that you would begin to cry and somehow, someway, I’d be found out.

“But we made it out of the facility safely.  I stopped at a convenience store on the way home, hiding you in the back seat, and picked up some formula and diapers.  When we got home you were bawling so loudly I was sure a neighbor was going to poke their head out and demand to know what was going on.”  She laughed at the memory, wistful. 

“You sounded like a deranged cat in heat.  Well, you were hungry like hell so I fed you and held you as you fell asleep and for the first time in my life I knew what unconditional love felt like.  It was quite overwhelming.  You were so small and I knew that I had to protect you.

“I named you after my father and swore I would do all I could to keep you safe.  My family fortune allowed me to procure another residence before I sold my current one and I went about the business of changing my last name to throw some dust on the tracks, so to speak.

“I finally moved us across the country, far from prying eyes, and settled into this new existence.  I went from doing cutting edge research to changing diapers and mixing bottles.  Me!  I never would have thought it possible.

“And yet I had to grieve for my old life.  For the realization that I was never going to achieve the recognition I knew I deserved.  It was a loss but one that I never regretted.  I was free in a way that I’d never been before.  Free from my own expectations, I suppose.

“I raised you, taught you sign language, how to use the toilet, dress yourself.  Being your mother has been my biggest success and I wish we could continue on as we always have.”

She stopped to gather the words up that he needed to hear, that she had to say.  Time was slipping by while they were sitting here, talking, and soon the glass would shatter and the sands would spill and their lives would be changed, forever.

“Before I left Vanguard I did something foolish.  My written lab journal, the secret one, I hid it.  There was a small vent behind the tissue culture hood that had never blown any air, so, well, I hid the journal inside thinking it would be so many years before it was ever found, probably long after I was dead, that it wouldn’t matter.

“I did it because of my pride, my damnable pride.  I figured, once it was found, the world would realize that I was the first to create a human/chimp hybrid, not George.  In death I would steal his borrowed feathers and if I could not have my accomplishments lauded in life than at least I could die knowing that someday George would be disgraced, hopefully while still living.

“It was so stupid of me, the one truly stupid thing I’ve ever done, other than push Victor away.  I didn’t think it would be found so soon.”  She laughed, her bitterness curling tight fingers around the sound.

“I say that as if thirty years were nothing.  Thankfully, Shui still has connections to Vanguard and heard they were trying to track me down.  It’s only a matter of time.  It won’t be long at all.

“I’m sorry Alexander, I’m so terribly sorry.  You’re going to have to be brave now, braver than you’ve ever been.  You are going to have to go out into the world and hide in it.

“I’m sorry, but no, I’m too old.  I can’t go with you.  I know I said we’d be leaving, but I didn’t mean together.  We have separate roads to travel.  I’d never make it out there and you’d still end up alone.  This way I can make sure that they’ll never follow you or try to find you.  I know you’re scared, but you’re also smart, my clever boy.  And now human/animal hybrids are becoming common.  They say there are even groups of them that wander the cities, scavenging.  You will have to do the same, hiding in the shadows, hiding during the day, only coming out at night.  You will have to find your food in refuse bins, I’m sorry about that, but if you only come out at night you’ll be all right.

“You must understand that you can never come out in the day or go where places are brightly lit.  You must understand this about the world:  that there are those who dream by night, safe in their beds, because the world holds no troubles and no cares for them.

“And then there are those like us, those who dream by day because for us, the world is such a sharp, treacherous place that we cannot exist safely in its natural light.  We must hide from it in its own shadows and only when we are safe in those shadows may we then dream, and in dreaming become free.”

Virginia tenderly set Alexander down who was crying like a human child and shaking with unfocused terror.  She took him by the hand and led him to the sliding glass door pausing only to pick up a shabby stuffed bear, worn with years of love.  They stood before the door, the darkness turning the glass into a parallel universe where their own murky reflections hovered, translucent and pure.

Virginia faced Alexander and offered him the bear and with gentle hands pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head.

“Whenever you go out, whenever you aren’t hiding, make sure your hood is up and your head is down.  Always. Promise me.”

His hands gestured the motions of a shaky assurance and she smiled softly at him.

“You’re going to be just fine.  I know it.  And though we can’t be together I’ll be thinking of you.  I love you.  More than you know.”  Her voice caught on the delicate sentiment and she brushed it aside.  There was no time for that.

“Go on now.  You’ll be fine.”  When he hesitated she added, “Please don’t make me shout and be ugly to you.  I want this last moment of ours to be sweet.  So please, if you really love me, than go.”

Fresh tears clung to his face but he pulled her to him in a brief, tight grip than abruptly pushed her away, flung open the glass door, and ran off into the night.  Virginia watched him go, his small form disappearing in the darkness and only twice glancing back to look at her.  Her calm smile never wavered while he was still visible.  Once she was sure he wasn’t going to lose his nerve and come back she allowed the despair to finally weight her face, sagging into the grief with relief. 

But she couldn’t keep standing about when there was still work to do.  Even now agents from Vanguard might be speeding down the road towards her and they mustn’t ever think her beautiful boy was still alive, not even for one second.

She knew, secondhand from Shui, that George’s first hybrid hadn’t even lasted ten years.  She’d bashed her head repeatedly against the walls of her enclosure, waiting until the middle of the night so no one would stop her.  She’d lain there, the swelling slowly killing off her higher brain functions until consciousness was blissfully no longer an option.

Shui had told her that the researchers had kept the body going for years, hooked to machines, still experimenting on it before it finally succumbed to infection.  To think of Alexander enduring some similar fate was unbearable.  She hadn’t bothered to burden him with provisions; there really wasn’t a point.  With the age of a man but the mind of a child, she was fairly certain he’d be dead within a week, dependent on her as he was.  But at least this way he’d die free.  At least this way his suffering would be short.

She’d been planning for this moment for a long time.  It had taken her years to procure the right mix of chimpanzee and child-sized human bones for her plan to be believable.  The fact that the pieces had come from separate times and individuals shouldn’t be evident if the fire burned long enough.  And that was only supposing that anyone looked past the charred body and wondered about how cunning she might have been.

She went down into the basement and pulled out the bones, laying them in careful order on the floor.  She regarded them for a brief pulse before retrieving a large brown-glass container of acetone.  Her arms shook but she was careful to avoid splashing any on herself.  Once the container was lighter she was able to control it more easily and slowly walked backwards to produce a thin, dark line on the concrete.

She then placed the container off to the side, extracted a small box of matches from her sweater pocket, lit one, and with no hesitation, dropped it at the beginning of the moist trail.

The fire burst into existence, traveling quickly, and Virginia turned her back and moved upstairs.  She tossed the box of matches on the couch and hoped it would take some time for the fire to be noticed. 

She made her way up another flight of stairs, down the hall, and finally to her bedroom.  She walked into her closet, reached up to a shelf and pulled down a small, locked box.

She then went to her nightstand and writhed her hand around until it closed on the key.  She opened the box and withdrew a Smith & Wesson J-frame with a practiced hand.  She flicked it open, rechecking that all five chambers were loaded and wandered over to the windows.

In the darkness of her room she could easily make out the line of trees Alexander had run towards.  Her eyes strained for movement, anxious to know if he might return after all.  But there was only the shifting of the trees as they stretched and reached in the night wind.

In these final moments she felt the shape of real fear pressing its form on her and her hands quelled from her last task.  She was a pragmatist and had never entertained any adult notions of an afterlife.  There were no souls and no continuation of existence after death.  There was only oblivion, where Victor now resided, and where Alexander would almost certainly soon follow her.  To completely end herself, the ultimate act against self-interest, and yet, the ultimate act of control.

They could never know that Alexander was out there, that he wasn’t burnt beyond recognition in the fire, because maybe, just maybe he would make it after all.  For a little while at least.  She tried not to think about what such a life might entail.

The silence that stretched around her was stiff and inflexible and she opened the window a little so she could hear the wind and the lovely way it saturated the leaves.  If she closed her eyes it sounded like the waves of the sea crashing upon the shore.  Cresting then receding.  Over and over.

In her last moments she still couldn’t bring herself to say to Victor that she had loved him.  Such an act was overly wrought and pointless now.  So too was the regret she expressed but it felt more natural to her.  She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply the scent of all free and wild things, and made her way into that night which is endless and where there are no more dreams, neither by day nor by night.  The dreaming was now in others’ hands; for them to hold onto for as long as they were able.