Second Nature

Chapter 63

Workers scrambled into far corners, trying to claw their way out of the sealed room. But there was only a single airlock exit, blocked by a bellowing dragon out of a medieval knight's worst nightmare. 

Gen raked her scythe-like talons and whipped her heavy tail, splintering tables, crushing equipment, smashing holes in the walls, sending up showers of electric sparks as she ripped through wiring conduits. 

Eberhard screamed and pissed his pants. A couple technicians raced to a ladder on the far wall that reached up to a maintenance hatch in the air filtration ducts. Eberhard saw their escape plan and dashed to the ladder, yanked one man away from its base by the back of his collar, then scrabbled up over the back of a second man who had already started climbing. 

Gen roared and kicked a microscope workstation, shearing off its floor bolts; she kicked it again and it went airborne like a half-ton soccer ball and embedded in the far wall, just above Eberhard's head. The impact jolted Eberhard and the other men off the ladder and they thudded on the floor in a squirming heap. Gen chomped on the ladder with ten-inch fangs, ripped it off the wall and flung it sideways, knocking down a dozen men like bowling pins. 

The ceiling was too cramped for the rampaging gigantosaurus, so Gen lay down on her side and kicked with all her strength and fury. Her first kick caved in the wall by Air Lock One, and she kicked and kicked at the air lock itself until the unit tore loose from its concrete foundation. Then she punted the air lock like a tumbling automobile, through the heavy glass walls of her old isolation chamber. The thick glass pulverized with a white noise like a booming waterfall. Gen roared thunderously and a final, wobbling glass panel crashed to the floor in the blast of sound from her lungs. 

Then the gigantosaurus scrabbled back to its clawed feet and stood, shoving with immense leg muscles to burst through the ceiling and bite and tear out some headroom, shredding aluminum air ducts like strips of tinsel. Now Gen stood at her full height, showered by cascades of electric sparks that spit and snapped from tangles of torn wiring. She could feel the triumph blazing in her purple eyes, and she trumpeted explosively.  

Then she sent forth a swarm of trillions of dissemblers, and the scales of the multi-ton reptile smoked with fog and sizzled loudly, like water on a red hot skillet. The deconstruction mitobots spread everywhere as a self-propagating cloud. 

Security forces leaped out of Air Lock Two and glanced around, thunderstruck, at the gaping hole where Air Lock Three had stood, and at the ruin that had been the isolation unit, and at the two-story tall monster that glared down at them. 

Five soldiers crouched with automatic rifles and began blasting away at the dinosaur. Gen squealed like colliding trains-one man dropped his weapon and clapped hands over his ears from the deafening volume-the gigantosaur's version of laughter. Seconds later, the security team's rifles had dissolved, along with helmets and boots and combat clothing, leaving five naked men huddling in terror. 

Then the room and all its inorganic objects shimmered and began to vanish. Concrete and steel walls puffed to the floor as ultra-fine, soft powder. Floors opened to the raw earth beneath. Ceilings gaped to the blue sky. Mitobots disassembled everything in their path. Furniture, lab equipment, computers and monitors, video cameras, telephones, and all records of Project Second Nature broke down to atomic smithereens. 

No longer trapped by walls, the naked technicians and soldiers ran screaming from the avenging dragon and the rectangular dirt field where the laboratory buildings had stood. Rabbits escaped into the rugged hills in every direction. 

A fog smothered the three cargo trucks packed with lab equipment for transportation to a new bioweapons lab site. The trucks collapsed to the ground like talcum powder. The fog spread through the compound with a speed that generated its own breeze, leaving dust piles puffing up in soft clouds behind it. When it had disassembled the outer, razor-wire capped fence, the fog settled to the bald ground like a blanket. Slowly, the blanket faded and grew tattered as the fog dissipated to nothing.  

The men's memories of the last half-hour also paled to nothing, as mitobots erased the short-term neural traces. Naked men moaned and sobbed, then grew quiet-too dazed to remember what they had been sobbing about. They ran, walked or hobbled beyond the perimeter of the obliterated military compound and kept going. 

Only Col. Eberhard remained behind, trapped inside a cage of glass that had crystallized around him in the bare dirt. 

He cried out from the scorching heat as the gigantosaurus shed tons of extra mass and reverted to human Gen. The jelly-like mountain of excess matter deconstructed itself to dust.  

Gen stepped toward Eberhard, dressed in a sparkling robe of woven diamond threads. Eberhard hunkered naked in the cage. She touched the glass and it poofed into glittering powder. 

Eberhard ducked his head and whimpered. "Don't hurt me. Don't kill me." 

"Not like you killed my mother." 

"I...no...your mother was mad. She went crazy. She committed-" 

"That's a lie. I met her. She's a wonderful, beautiful person. She's immortal now." 

"Yes, she's in a better place, no more suffering. She's with God." 

"Something like that." Gen took another step toward him.  

He cringed, unable to look at her. "What are you going to do to me? I can't hurt you. You're invincible. I'm no threat to you." 

"Maybe I'll share my mitobots with you. Then you'll be invincible, too, even if I tear off your head." She frowned. "At least I think so. You never tried that experiment. Let's do it-fill you up with mitobots and rip off your head, see if it grows back." 

He held up trembling hands, still staring at the ground. "No, please...please. Why are you tormenting me?" 

"Is that what it's called? I thought it was military science." 

"All the information is lost. I can never repeat the project. Why can't you just let me go?" 

"I'm thinking about it." 

He looked up at her for the first time. Tears of fright wet his cheeks.  

"But first I've got to devise a way to keep the world safe from you," she said. 

He licked his lips. "Listen, we can work that out, Gen." His eyes darted back and forth. "I...I promise to...resign. Okay? I'll retire. I won't design weapons anymore." 

"You still would be a dangerous man. At least to defenseless creatures. You don't know how it feels to be little and powerless."  

"I can learn. Okay? Give me a chance to learn." 

She half-smiled. "That's not a bad idea." She reached out her hands and billows of shiny fog puffed from her palms and fingertips and streamed into his pores. 

The whites of Eberhard's eyes bulged and he opened his mouth to scream. It came out a high-pitched squeal as he rapidly morphed, shedding extra matter in a steaming, wet blob.  

In seconds, on the ground at Gen's feet, hunched a white rabbit with pink eyes. 

Gen gazed out over tuffs of brushwood and sunburnt grass mottling the rugged hills. "Not exactly fluffy bunny territory. But the local jackrabbits can show you how to survive." 

The rabbit stared up at her with shock and confusion in its beady eyes.  

"I know you understand what I'm saying, Colonel. Your mind is in a new body now. You'll figure it out. So off with you. Scoot, little bunny. Or some devil might catch you and use you for lab experiments." 

The rabbit backed up, then spun and dashed off, scampering as fast as its blurring legs would carry it, until it disappeared into a mesquite thicket. 

Gen heard the warbling drone of helicopters approaching from the mountains. She transformed herself into a golden eagle, beat her dark brown wings and leaped into the sky. 

She soared eastward, toward home.