Page 36 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Archaeontogeny

big-city media pressing hard on a suburban law enforcement agency,
the nature of the graduate students’ work came under closer scrutiny.
The technicalities were beyond a layman’s comprehension; so
experts in Professor Cutter’s field were called in to review his theory
and methodology. His protests in the name of academic freedom and
the sacrosanctity of unpublished research were in vain. Then the
truth, or as much of it as was likely ever to come out, came out.
Cutter’s peers compared the original proposal, as circulated by the
professor prior to my involvement, to the actual functioning of the
project. They detected what might politely be called “scope creep.”
What I—and Al Magnus, although I could not ask him—had
believed to be the entirety of Eugene Cutter’s plan was really just its
first phase. Yes, he had fooled us. Having determined mathematically
the specific genes whose expression was manipulated in the final
embryonic stages to produce Homo sapiens, he intended to prove it
by temporarily reversing that expression and invoking Homo
primitivus characteristics. To do this required some novel techniques
in the emerging science of RNA interference. The professor never
hesitated. To his credit the test subjects were volunteers; in another
time and place they would have been involuntarily participating
prisoners.
Cutter’s notes for the first two days after the injections were a
revelation. To his surprise the intellectual capacities of modern man
did not diminish in his human guinea pigs; rather, they became
sharpened or augmented by an increase in sensory perception and
synesthesia. He had puzzled over this development: his expectation
was the emergence of Homo fatuus, at least intellectually. But that
was not how the interfering designer molecule, a “locked nucleic
acid,” behaved. He was beginning to surmise that our increase in
mental ability had occurred evolutionarily at the expense of earlier
modes of animal cunning and intuition not by eliminating them but
by simply inhibiting their expression: always conservative, the
genome had kept Homo primitivus intact in the background, a
phenotype inappropriate to the Homo sapiens social environment
but too recent to be discarded entirely. But his belated realization
came too late to stop the trial: the next day its subjects were gone, the
duration of the LNA’s effects totally unknowable.
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