After Ethereal Pixie Rings Of Mercy I am now posting all ten chapters of my story Orussian Quarantine. This post is the first of the ten chapters of this speculative fiction scifi story.
Mixed feelings
"The ultimate challenge to bio-engineering lies in the realization that our ability to create new forms out of old equilibrium inevitably initiates an evolutionary movement away from both the new form and the old equilibrium."
—Ursang III, level 8 bio-guild master
After Inoatar had disappeared into the woods, Uriëlla had felt a mixture of loss and of relief. Inoatar had been so much more than a pet. After twelve standard years of solitude in her small Woldera-based science station, this ant-monkey had become an unlikely but true friend. His disappearance into the woods, after Uriëlla had explained to him the full impact of the Lilith incident, proved to her how deep their friendship was. After the reports about the incident reached the small southeast Woldera science station, Uriëlla's relationship with Inoatar had instantly become a cause for serious concern. Concern for her own survival and most of all concern for her family and clan. Ant-monkeys were bio-engineered using and combining the genetic material of Wolderian ants and Maarsolian apes. Ant-monkeys had been bred on Scayune by the bio-guild for the cheap labor they could provide. It all seemed like such a perfect match.
The Maarsolian apes, in stature almost Orussian childlike, were relatively intelligent and had sufficient intellectual and physical potential for performing non-trivial tasks. They lacked, though, any concept of hierarchy and any structural cooperative interaction beyond their base matriarchal family, pack-hunting cooperation patterns. Adult apes, however, violently rejected any type of authority.
Wolderian ants on the other hand, although lacking any level of intelligence, were amazingly organized to such an extent that a Wolderian ant nest, with its tens of thousands of worker ants, was not that much different in structure from the ancient patriarchally-organized city-states on Cirus-prime. Wolderian ants were like the cells in an Orussian's body. Every ant knew only how to play its part, but the whole nest functioned almost like a single semi-intelligent organism. When the bio-guild started selling ant-monkey workers to the cities on Uhm, but more importantly to the mining-guild, a golden age seemed to have arrived in the Orus system.
Inoatar was an ant-monkey male, not a worker, so just like all ant-monkey males, Inoatar's economic value for the guild ended after mating with a queen, usually at an age of somewhat more than one standard year. Males were given away by the guild as pets to highly regarded masters of other guilds and, as in Uriëlla's case, to relatives of Council members if these were sent on solitary missions. Uriëlla, by virtue of having an uncle on the guild’s top council, had received Inoatar as a pet to keep her company on Woldera. While the forest planet Woldera had rich and abundant fauna, the animals on Woldera were all but appealing to average Orussians. So having a companion with more agreeable features than the Wolderian insects, spiders, slugs, snakes and lizards was a prospect that would likely be welcomed by any guild member sent for a standard solitary 15-year mission to a place such as Woldera.
Uriëlla was privileged in this regard. Males were rare; a male, just like a queen that would produce about a thousand eggs each day for 5 consecutive standard years, mated only once. Ant-monkey mating was quite a spectacle. It involved a single queen and a handful of males. The spectacle would take a few hours and for the male ant-monkey it was not without peril. Inoatar had required quite a bit of medical care in the first few weeks that he was in Uriëlla's possession. Mating injuries could be bad. They were never fatal, but lasting injuries had been reported.
But now things had changed drastically. The golden age for the Orus system and the privileged position the guild had enjoyed as sole supplier of ant-monkey workers had come to an abrupt end. The Lilith incident changed everything. The Scayune ant-monkey breeding colonies had all been placed in quarantine after the Lilith colony ant-monkey uprising. The guild’s bioengineers had taken all the usual precautions for their ant-monkey genetic meta-architecture. The mythical guild master, Ursang III, the first Bio to ever secure a place in the senate, had been the intellectual father of what had become the power-base for the bio-guild. Regressive Evolution Life Inhibitor (RELI) technology allowed the guild to work around the four laws of equilibrium that would normally have well-designed life forms, within just four or five generations, devolve into a species with dangerously different properties than those initially designed. Ursang III had created the concept of a RELI-gene. A gene that effectively stopped new equilibrium from occurring by crudely stopping evolution itself.
Potentially dangerous animals like the ant monkey were genetically imprinted to not harm their Orussian masters in any way and to protect them if they perceived any danger. For ant-monkey workers, the natural reverence of Wolderian ants towards their queen had been used as a basis for their Orussian imprints. The designs were created with multiple major vital functions tied to their RELI-gene. So with their imprinted RELI-gene ensuring unquestioning reverence of all their Orussian masters, and with multiple vital functions bound to this RELI-gene ensuring an early death for larvae with a RELI-gene that was in any way mutated, the Scayune incident, where ant-monkeys slaughtered more than two thousand guild members, defied all logic.
Before the incident, Uriëlla's use of a geno-virus on Inoatar would at worst have gotten her assigned to a level 4 post in South Uhm City Central as next post, rather than the assistant post in the north Uhm city of Ga that her uncle had worked so hard to secure for her. Inoatar was after all just a single and now infertile male on a planet without queens or settlements, and relatives of council members always received the benefit of the doubt in such cases. But after the Scayune incident, the guild council was no doubt frantically looking for a way out of the current quarantine. A level 3 bioengineer that was caught messing with a breeder’s RELI-gene would make Uriëlla a more than perfect scapegoat.
Seven standard years ago—by that time already having grown extremely fond of Inoatar—Uriëlla had taken a rather bold action that could very well get her into deep trouble if it were now discovered.
Uriëlla had been around ant-monkeys before during her time on Scayune, but never had she developed any emotional ties to them. When her feelings of friendship towards Inoatar had unexpectedly deepened, Inoatar, like any ant-monkey, could only answer Uriëlla's show of friendship with the unquestioning loyalty and reverence that came from the guild’s patented RELI-gene technology. Ant-monkeys, in order to be able to follow non-trivial work orders, were bioengineered to gain a reasonable understanding of the Orussian language, although most ant-monkeys only possessed conversational skills not much better than that of a toddler.
Inoatar, in contrast, had shown amazing conversational skills approximating those of an Orussian adolescent. Next to his language skills, Inoatar had also shown an understanding of engineering that could probably have rivaled that of some of Uriëlla’s less-gifted classmates back in pre-guild who, even though they didn't make it to an apprentice position, included some of Uriëlla's best friends outside the guild. Inoatar was mentally gifted way beyond the basic level of his bioengineered heritage. It was this that made it difficult for Uriëlla to accept Inoatar's bioengineered reverence of her. Inoatar wasn't just a pet, he was a person like her. Not Orussian, no, but still a person. A person, though, as his RELI-gene ensured, without a trace of free will. Uriëlla struggled with the moral implications of this realization for quite some time. Could she allow a person to live a sub-Orussian existence while being held hostage by his RELI-gene in a reality of pseudo-religious slavery? On the other hand, she could not just blatantly ignore the stringent guidelines regarding RELI-safety of bio-engineered animals.
Inoatar was now sterile, but the four laws of equilibrium left no doubt about the guild’s deeply rooted fear of the dangers of a new natural equilibrium. Her training and logic went directly against her deep feelings of friendship for this extraordinary creature that was more like a son to her than a pet. In the end emotion overcame logic and duty, and Uriëlla engineered a simple, yet effective targeted geno-virus. The virus didn't change the RELI-gene in any way, but simply changed a second gene in such a way that the blind reverence induced by the RELI-gene was effectively removed. Uriëlla was delighted to find that Inoatar, with his new free-will gene activated, accepted her friendship, and after a few years he turned into an almost Orussian companion.
But now, after the reports of the Lilith incident had reached her, delight had turned into despair. If the free-will gene was discovered, Uriëlla would probably face the most severe punishment known to the guild. Not only would Uriëlla herself face the most lengthy and gruesome death conceivable— her entire clan, even her uncle on the Council, would be expelled from the guild and reduced to the lowest social standing in Orussian society. They would be reduced to non-citizens: dam-dwellers most probably, a fate Uriëlla did not wish upon anyone. So now that Inoatar had disappeared into the endless Woldera woods, while she felt the loss of never seeing her dear friend again, Uriëlla felt relieved. She knew he was skilled enough to survive the Woldera forest, and its vastness combined with its often hostile wildlife made it very unlikely that his free-will gene would ever be discovered by the guild.
Continue to Chapter 2