Demicore

Chapter 12

Elizabeth smiled softly over her coffee cup. It was a good way to give back to the communities around him. People really do need to work for what they have. It gives a sense of pride and accomplishment. She was still enjoying the thoughts of how he was trying to make the world around him a better place to be when Katlin excused herself for a few minutes and she picked back up the book she had fallen asleep reading. She was startled out of her reading several hours later by a voice.

"Erik would like you to report to the lab, please. They are almost ready to start the experiment." The voice came from what looked to be a cellular phone that had been placed on the chair near her. She looked at it very carefully, trying to assess if the message was for her or for Katlin. She knew that voice...

"Please report to the lab." Could it be the computer?

"Elizabeth, you are not moving yet and the experiment runs on a tight schedule. If you do not report to the lab, you will be locked out of the room for the duration of the event." The voice had inflection to it but there was a hint of automation. It had to be the computer... .which meant that there was constant surveillance in all areas of the 'castle'... She got up and started toward the door to the library, carrying the phone.

"I don't know the way," she said to the air around her.

"I will lead you, tell you each turn as you get to it. It is important to him that you are present for this." It had to be the computer. She thought she remembered Katlin saying something about motion and heat sensors all throughout the place. The computer's voice lead her to the lab in a matter of a few minutes. All in all, it gave very good directions. Of course, being able to track the person you're directing every step of the way had to help.

As she arrived, she was given an operating mask, gown and gloves to put on over top of everything else she was wearing. It seemed silly to her, but she did it without complaint. She watched in awe as Sonya scrapped a layer of skin off of Erik's arm with a scalpel and put it into the glass sphere that she had been inspecting earlier. She hooked a small IV up to him and the other end to a tube that was in the machine. Elizabeth watched in silence and awe as they drew some of his blood into the machine itself, pushed a series of buttons and pulled a few knobs.

What happened next was shocking - at least to Elizabeth who was not expecting it. The one drop of red blood landed on the skin. The machine began to hum. The skin began to grow. First it just started to look more alive, less like dead skin. Slowly there was more to it. Flesh. Bone. Tendons and muscles. And fur. It was growing a beautiful, smooth coat of black fur. Erik swore like a sailor in three languages, then turned red as a beet when he saw Elizabeth standing there. He stopped them, though, when they were getting ready to shut it down. He wanted to see just how much of the great cat it would produce, as it had now finished the paw. When it got to the first elbow of the thing, he thought about shutting it down. At the shoulder, he turned off the machine. When it started to recreate the body, he cut the power. Slowly, it lost its momentum.

Erik was confused, torn between the feeling of familiarity and longing and irritation that the experiment had gone awry. Katlin and Sonya began again to examine the machine with the computer. Steve stood staring at the feline arm that had been created... with an opposable thumb and talons like a bird and an elbow.

"Run a diagnostic on the DNA structure of the arm," Steve said quietly, thoughtfully. The computer began to run the diagnostic and display the results on the screens along side the blood that was still in the tube, freshly drawn from Erik's arm. Every cell in the strand was identified, down to the position of each atom and gene.

"These are identical," Sonya narrated to the room, having a talent for reading as fast as the computer could print, "that's not possible."

"Dad?" Katlin asked, concerned that he hadn't moved from staring at the sphere where the replicator had produced this strange item. Her words fell on deaf ears. He was lost in his own mind.

"Steve, see if you can identify the separate parts of this composite," Sonya was working furiously to try to figure out what happened, "This looks like much more than anything we have seen... and see if we can compare them to Erik's DNA."

Elizabeth just stood and stared, unsure of how she could even be useful. She felt like she was in the way but would be more so if she moved or started asking questions. Erik stood still. He was never that still for that long. There was something so very ...mine. He flexed his hand as though the talons on the end of the cat-like arm were at the ends of the fingers on his own hand. The room could have been exploding around him or time completely still and he would not have known. It wouldn't have made a difference in his thoughts either way.

He examined his entire life as though it was going through playback on super fast forward. He even saw his birth and early childhood and took a split second to wonder why he had memories at all of these things that no person should know of themselves. He barely remembered to breathe as he looked at his life this way, it almost seemed that he was looking through another's eyes, like someone had taken a movie of everything him and stored it in his head. He experienced every emotion he had had in his life over again and the magnitude made him feel as though he would burst.

He recognized in himself some connection between him and the cats his mother had owned when he was little as well as a greater understanding of the workings of birds as he studied them. He had passed it off as fascination... could it have been more?

There was a pull from somewhere deep inside him, visions of an African jungle flashed for a split second in front of his eyes. Soft fur, every spot of blacker fur as familiar to him as the hair on his arm. He could taste the dirt and blood being cleaned off of it after a hunt during a well deserved bath. The smells were like sweet perfumes, fragrances of exotic flowers. His head spun like he had turned around and around too many times and made himself dizzy. When his eyes tried to focus, he was staring at the arm with the sphere still around it and the lab started to solidify around him.

"Steve, what kind of perfume are you wearing?" his words slurred, but were discernable. Then he passed out, caught just before his head hit the floor by Sonya and Katlin.

"Perfume?" Stephanie questioned the room as though Erik were still conscious, "That has the possibility of interfering with some of our experiments. Why on earth would I want to do that?"

"Steve! Seriously. He can't hear you. It's rather obvious that there is something wrong with him right now," Katlin chided gently as she and Sonya dragged their father to a gurney, "I'm sure he didn't really mean that he thought you would do something that would be detrimental. Would you just keep running the diagnostics on those arms and Erik while we figure out what happened?" Steve nodded. Katlin turned to Sonya and said under her breath, "Seriously, she's enough like him that it's a wonder anything ever gets done in here!"

Katlin's words took any of the insult away from Erik's question. Stephanie turned back to the computers and isolated several strands of DNA that should not ever bond - most especially in one host. She started running test after test trying to make sure there was not an error.