A Change (of heart)

The Tour Talk

(A/N): Warning, this chapter is a bit longer than my normal chapters, so, yeah, sorry about that. But please don't let that put you of reading this because this is a very key chapter so please read, please enjoy, and I'll try to keep them shorter next time!

Once I reached the location that Dr Wever gave me I saw that it was a toilet block, male toilets and female toilets. Great, I'd have to get washed up in some crummy little toilet shower. But when I entered it was completely the opposite, all the walls were pristine white, the wall separating male and female had been knocked down and it was now one huge, like, pampering place almost. I'm not sure how to describe it. And I wasn't the only one there, there were about five people, all in their mid to late thirties, who I assumed worked there. Especially considering the fact that one male, as soon as he saw me, quickly said something to the others and then came up to me.
"Hurry along James, you don't want to be late!"
Wever must have pre-organized this.
I was lead to a huge bath, about the size of a regular spa, which is big for a bath, and there they took off my watch and practically pushed me in.
Now I won't go through all the details of what happened, mainly because I can't remember half of it, they were so fact and efficient that I lost track quite easily, but after that wash up I put my watch back on and checked the time, 9:30, wow, I had a wash, a dry, and comb all in one hour, I did have five people doing it for me though. With half an hour to go I dawdled my way to the next meeting location, taking my time to actually look at my new watch. It was one of those new fancy touch screen ones, measuring my heart rate, telling me the time, receiving notifications, all that stuff. It looked nice, the black and orange contrasting well against my blue fur. After playing around and walking I arrived at the meeting place and found that the watch seemed to be programmed to this location, whatever Dr Wever is doing here, my watch was transmitting all the data about me that it had to some form of data bank, what for? Who knows.
"James!"
That overly exaggerated voice broke me from my thoughts and made me snap my head up with a bit of shock, but nothing more. He had startled me.
"Hey James!"
He ran over to me, across the long distance of the place I assume used to be used to hold all the patients with nothing but curtains separating them. The thing was, I was early, he was on time, and on the completely opposite side of the barren stretch.
"James, I, wo!, I'm puffed!"
Yeah, he's not the lightest fellow.
"Anyway, I, see you, ah, have had a, wash, good"
"Yes thanks, your workers are very efficient"
"That's why they get paid the big bucks. Anyway, the tour, yes, well, since we're early by about five minutes, I'm happy to chat a little"
"Um, yeah, I um..."
"Yes?"
"I've been trying to get, Google Maps working on my watch but it's not working"
"Oh, yes. We've blocked all GPS from reaching past the outside walls"
"Okay, why's that?"
"As you'll see later, this is actually a secret government run organisation and we have to keep our location secret"
"Oh, ok..."
"Why did you have Google Maps on anyway James?"
"If it's not a security problem, I'd like to know where we are"
"As I told you James, I can't let you know our location"
"ok"
"I could tell you what country though"
"Wait! You mean I'm not in Australia?"
"No dear James! You're a far way from Australia, you're in Russia!"
"Russia! What? Why did you take me so far away?"
"Calm down James, you will go back to Australia, but for now you're here. And all will be explained during the tour, which starts now. Follow me"
I did as he said, but I didn't pay much attention to where we were going, I was more distracted on the fact that I was in Russia. Russia. Of all places why Russia? It's almost double the distance away from home I've ever been. Away from my family, my friends, from Chelsea.
"Here we are!"
We had reached our destination, a dead end. All I could see past the run down walls and loose wires hanging from the ceiling was a blank wall with a single power socket on it.
"I don't get it, there's nothing here"
"First thing you must know James, is that not everything is as it seems, you must always look for the secrets that everyone contains. Or in this case, everyone"
As he said this he grabbed the plastic covering of the power socket (which should have been tightly screwed into the wall) and twisted it sideways to a perfect ninety degree angle. Then the wall disappeared and what was a dead end was now a passage to a whole nother section of this place, but it looked a whole lot new and cleaner.
"Welcome, James, to the Human Genetic Crossover Project, or Project Crossover for short"
"Wow"
It's about all I could manage. This place, it was hard to comprehend that it was in the same building as the crummy rooms I was staying in, it was just, awesome.
"Here we take a deeper look into what our cells are able to do, and so on"
"Basically a science lab?"
"Yeah, sort of. To truly understand what we do here I must teach you this projects history. In 1975, here in Russia, our leading embryo scientists found a way to derive stem cells from human embryos"
"That's not possible! Human embryo stem cell tech wasn't discovered until 1998!"
"Yes, that what is recorded isn't it? Remember that this project is secret, so was our stem cell tech, until one of our own sold the information to a foreign country and when they used that information to figure it out for themselves, that would have been about 1998"
"Oh"
"Now let me continue, any questions you have please save for the end so we can remain on schedule, thank you"
"OK"
"Anyway, when your government found that we were able to do this, he wanted to keep it a secret, incase it because really useful for the next war, if there was a next war"
"But there won't be, hopefully"
"Yes, hopefully not. When our leader in 1977 initiated the project, it was named the Isklovark (IS Killing LOVe And/Or Krazy)"
"What?"
"He had a different approach to words than most other leaders, plus it was war focused at the time"
"Okay..."
"Anyway, we'll speed up to 1986. A lot had changed by then, we were heading into the tenth year of the project, which had gone through five name changes, and even more location changes. But the biggest change was our development of our technologies, we were now able to grow whole brand new spines from scratch, grow a new pair of legs for someone who had unfortunately lost theirs, or even grow a new brain!"
"Really?"
"No, that last one was a joke, wish we could though. Anyway, heading towards our tenth year, we wanted to do something to celebrate our success. So we decided that every scientists we had would automatically be entered into a competition, to win a prize, a friendly comp. We gave them a task we knew would be impossible, therefore it would be fun to watch. We ordered them to genetically modify the sample rat embryos (it's what we used for testing) to have the embryos develop into an adult rat as normal, but without whiskers and a tail. And you wouldn't believe what happened"
"Someone did it?"
"Yes, someone did it, but not just anyone, it was me"
"Your not that old!"
"No, I just aged well. I was twenty seven when I achieved that result, it's been my lucky number ever since"
"If I'm ever placing bets, I'll use that number then"
"Don't gamble kid, unless you want to be broke for the rest of your life. After my success our leader made me the the overseer of the project, and made me work harder than I've ever worked before, but I enjoyed every day of it. Let's mover further forward to 2000"
I'm not sure that I like where this is going, he's two years off my birth year.
"This was the pinicle of our success, by now we had found what parts of a single stem cell determine its role once grown, and how to manipulate those single parts to change a feature of the animal once developed, and going into the second era for this project, another celebration was due, another competition. This time it was to find a way to create a new species"
"And let me guess, you won?"
"No, no one won. This challenge was truly impossible."
That's a relief
"But I wasn't one too give up. Even after the comp ended I wanted to succeed. Worked heard, and I manged to generate my final project in 2002"
That's my birth year
"Wait, you're saying I was, I'm not, I-"
"Questions at the end. When I had modified the embryos the way I decided was best, I began to grow them, and they developed successfuly, but when they were completed, I was just left with a bunch of babies. Human babies"
"You created human babies from scratch?"
"No, I had started off with human embryos, my modifications had just made no difference, which I was slightly surprised by, but even more dissapointed. I personally had organized some people to adopt these children and after that I retired, and the project slowly died until it was shut down in 2015, four years ago"
"Why is it running now then?"
"Come on James, I'm sure you have figured that out by now!"
"I may have, but I didn't want it to be true"
"Well you won't know unless you tell me and I confirm or not"
"I, I was the missing piece of the puzzle, I was one of those children, weren't I? This project would still be shut down if what happened to me didn't happen"
"Yes James, and I owe you thanks, because of you, we can bring our studies another step further"
"So it's true, I'm just a regular human who had his genes played around with and d-"
No
"What is it James?"
No!
"James?"
"I don't even know my real parents. Do I?"
"Hey, you'll be glad to hear that, out of all the people who donated their embryos to this cause, your parents where the only ones who accepted the result back into their family. The parents you know, are your genetic parents"
That's a relief!
"Thanks"
"Anyway, let's get going"
I hadn't even realized we had stopped walking. I wanted to move my mind to a different place, so to change topic I asked him where we were going, and as he slid his key code pass thing-a-mibob he answered me:
"To see your mother"
"She's here?"
"Yes, it's about time you met her"
"What? I thought-"
"No, I mean your other mother!"
Now I'm really confused.
"Your third parent. You know, it's about time I told you what I did exactly, in those years I was trying to solve the riddle of the new species"