Lower CoSMOS-Life of Lance Vier #3

“Before Granny left the earth for good, she began her project: Basic Molasses.”

           

As I said, CRISPRX opened the door to a world we should never have entered. It was the appetizer to molecular manipulation. We can be broken down like the molecules we are, ashes to ashes and dust to dust as they say. When you tear apart the structure there is a threshold of pain. For humans, the margin is narrow. Without alien life to test their resilience, we had only animals to compare. Elga went on to explain the exploding mice of the early twenty-one hundreds(2101-2122), moving up to the bipedal cats, overtly flatulent dogs of Cleveland, etc. They were vicious experiments and dogs in my day were spared no compassion in a world where there wasn’t any. Elga’s love for my existence gave me an inkling of hope.

            “Mein Gott!” she said as if remembering important details while entrance in her memory.

            You needed an additive to stop the exploding mammals. Enter Project WHIMSAL. The program allowed for molecular composition to stay bonded but expand the boundaries of breaking apart. Normally there is a chemical or biological change, WHIMSAL slows the process or stops it. I know it sounds like a fountain of youth thing, but it didn’t pause aging. It allowed for a transfer from one point to another. Not travel, just a change from one to another. I hope this makes a lick of sense. The real key is, if they were intending to stop people from breeding, which Granny Sometimes later found out her true function as part of the government was, they wanted to stop the “bad genes” from the ability to transfer from parents to their children. Babies born away from the elite class of citizens would then come out as pure as possible. Making them relatively flawless. Granny’s job was to take the undesirable children out of the populace, using undesirable bounty hunters raised to bring them in and secure the bad genes for all time. Isolating them once and for all. My father had human skin-on-skin contact as did most of the hunters, but to my knowledge no children. No human Mother matched me.

            Elga cried. Elga was top-ranked geneticist and genetic material. Pure female alpha. Why cry over us, genetic misfits?

            “No, not you my sweet boy,” she must have found something in that brilliant brain.

            According to Elga. Granny’s last moments here on earth ended by Pibb and Bastard’s hands, the two unaware that she knew nothing of WHIMSAL and another project I will mention later. The government’s effort to use the captured babies as zombie soldiers when needed and not raise a traditional army but rather consider them disposable when dispersed to an unruly population was a triumph. They die in combat. No more bad genes. If killed outright, what is the use of that? It proved poor survival skills and made for good canon fodder. For future generations, the children had any sense of gender or the ability to reproduce removed. This would be a later test for people like me and my wife, for Elga and her lucky partner, and for anyone wanting offspring. Before Granny left the earth for good, she began her project: Basic Molasses.

            “That’s the name?” I said, playing off her discovery.

            “Ja. Ja.” Elga said, raising her hands as confused as I was.

            Cars have engines and need oil. But with Granny’s oil, old number seventeen high mileage ultra high viscosity oil, she used her extensive genetic knowledge to add the biological elements of humans into the oil. The slow process of this concoction inside the engine separated the human molecules. Her mechanics checked daily for leaks. The oil, ‘Basic Molasses’ was a precision precious ointment to the car’s insides. My mother’s engine held part of her and part of my father; from each of the fifty bounty hunters on earth. With each of their specialized vehicles, there was a part of them inside, hiding from the eyes of a watchful government. Clever. When the time came, the oil was collected in a separate compartment. On decommissioning of the vessel, the bounty hunters used to carry out their craft with the oil collected, forming a child.

            “I am sorry,” Elga stopped and stood up from where we sat on her couch and stepped away. The door to her bathroom shut and her whimpering echoed through the empty house.

            The cars were not living, but attached to their owners. Loyal, faithful, and true to the calling. They were special. They flew and they manipulated certain attributes depending on what song played on their radio; rumored to be another ointment squeezed out of alien skin. Only certain sounds initiated a change in their modes. There was always a great worry in AI that eventually the mind given by people to AI developed its own direction. So it was with these vehicles. So it was with my mother. She wanted no part of the experiment having known of the ones Pibb and Bastard experienced causing their trademark allegiance to stoicism. Bastard’s death and I am assuming Pibb’s demise, created that bitterness and rift between myself and her. It was one I needed to bridge.

            Thankfully, the government was slow depending on the severity and the nearness of the effect it had on their lives. People maintained a general complacency but outside of this new normative way of living, small groups existed. Bigger ones flourished away from the cities, living without global government rule. Every society has the non-conformists. Some of them long for the old days and want to bring the past back to life and others are genuinely unable to live to the new societal standard of the way things should be. They held a lot of curiosity to me, because I knew nothing of them, only as my life working on watching myself. Getting paid to live.

            After Elga’s, I came back to the yard where my mother’s shed remained untouched since my last visit. No one was around, so I stood outside. One of the hinges kept the door hung by one screw, the other leaned up against it.

            “I am sorry. I didn’t know. There was no way for me to know you were here,” I said.

            “Temperamental. The lady knows a friend from a foe. A loved one from an enemy,” someone said from behind. He put a firm hand on my shoulder and my head turned to watch him stand beside me. Thick sunglasses covered his eyes and his ample gray head of hair slicked back into a ponytail.

            “Regulations around here changed some haven’t they?” he said and removed his hand from my shoulder. He strode up to the front of the shed. His brown leather jacket with a thick collar hid his shrinking frame and gave him the illusion of muscular shoulders.

            “That mandate to bring the old girls in pushed around here years ago and here she still is. Lazy. Lazy. The Gov is lazy. But thank god she’s still safe,” he said. He raised his hand and placed it in the gap between the doors, pulling one of them. The front end of the old Acura hid behind the remaining door, out of view. The back end of it was covered with a tarp.

            “Excuse me,” he said, turning his wrinkled face to me with a blank stare. He lifted the tarp and tucked himself underneath it. Behind me, I wanted to see if anyone watched from the residence. Muffled speech from inside the car contained a conversation between the man and what I surmised was himself. The car cranked. It cranked again. The ignition attempted a turnover but did not engage the engine to start. Again, nondescript words persisted. I kept my head straight, my eyes on the last door screwed into the shed. My feet started toward it. A song began, one I did not know. Heavy bass and guitars with the sounds of a groaning woman. The vehicle started. It began to rise from the ground, the back tired flipped inward, carrying the shed upward until pieces of it started to fall apart. The vocals from the song blared:

            “More Human, than Human.”

            “More Human, than Human”

            The car shed the rest of the…shed. Each part came crashing to the ground. Some of the residents left their homes to hear the commotion and I was surprised to see that Pac had not. A screen door squeaked open and then slammed. Pac’s official government custodian ran up to me with his eyes toward the rising car.

            When the song hit a blaring guitar, it was gone; blasting past ghetto suburbia.

            “A good car never dies,” he said, “I’ll have to report it.”

            “I am still here,” I said.

            “Not you. Did you happen to see anyone close? You didn’t piss her off did you?”

            “No. No one was here.”

            “Just how do you know Pac anyway, I meant to ask,” he said.

            “Did you ask him?”

            He stared at me and harrumphed his way back into the house. It bothered me I didn’t see the old bounty hunter Pac come out. With one last glance at the shed, I started back to the sidewalk near the house to make my way back to my lovely understanding, and treasured wife. I hope she did not leave. A few steps later, the old man walked behind me.

            “She’s asking for you and you need to get in.”

            How I did not hear him approach me, I do not know. I turned around and the same man who rode the car into the sky had his arms open to me.

            “Nephew.”