A Genetically Engineered Race

The concept of genetic engineering is one that continues to unnecessarily frighten people. Personally, I don't know what the fuss is about. What kind of person in his or her right mind wouldn't actively strive for self-improvement? Only a total loser wouldn't. All of us try to do it in some way. We strive to achieve things. Make more money. Buy new cars. Move into nicer, pricier neighborhoods. Get that promotion at work. Exercise and diet in order to look better. To me, that's what genetic engineering means, the improvement of the human race.

My name is Alexander Addams. I was born in Boston in 1987, the son of geneticist Luther Addams and MIT mathematics professor Eileen Brown. I'm of biracial origin. My father is an Irishman and my mother is African-American. A tall, caramel-skinned, black-haired and green-eyed Adonis, that's yours truly. I've always been a brilliant individual, but my father helped thrust my intellect into a bold new direction, the field of human genetics. I graduated from the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 with a Ph.D in Biological Engineering. I looked for work in the private sector, and one day, I was approached by a man named Lucas Albright. He was a billionaire well-known for his eccentricity, an attribute matched only by his business acumen.

Billionaire Lucas Albright wanted me to work for him. He took me to an isolated, private island where I met the rest of his people. He had a hundred of the world's top geneticists, bio-engineers and other top notch scientists working for him in a top secret project. He wanted to pioneer the field of Human Enhancement. At first, I had my doubts. A lot of the world's wealthiest men and women have a tendency to play God. And they often try to use us scientists as their pawns. Or tools. Whatever. However, there was something different about Lucas Albright. The man was actually serious, if you could believe that. He wanted me to find ways to improve the human race at a genetic level. And he was willing to spend billions upon billions of dollars to do it. Oh, well. I always liked a challenge. Looks like I had my work cut out for me.

When I came to the island, Mr. Albright showed me around. He had a mansion built just for me. A seven-bedroom, three-story mansion with three bathrooms, an indoor pool, a jacuzzi and two living rooms. This was a place fit for a king. I could never have afforded a place like this. The house also came with a library of twenty thousand books, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as three high-tech computers with high-speed Internet Access. I liked the place. Aside from my salary, which was considerable, Albright promised me unlimited freedom to experiment with the technology he had at his disposal. I had carte blanche. How could I say no?

I met my fellow scientists, Dr. Joseph Royas, of the University of Stanford. He was a tall, good-looking man with light olive skin, curly black hair and pale brown eyes. A very famous man who brought new life to the field of biomedical engineering. I also met Dr. Rachel Thompson, a tall and square, blonde-haired and green-eyed geneticist from Oxford University. Dr. Kyle Randall, a tall and slender Englishman who taught Evolution at Boston University. Last but not least, there was Dr. Elisabeth Samson, a black woman from the University of California. We would be the leaders of the experiment. The Powers That Be. We had billions upon billions of dollars at our disposal and we had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted. The kind of power we wielded was not only dangerous but also quite addictive. I tried to shield myself from temptation and succeeded with various results. My friends and colleagues didn't fare so well.

We worked tirelessly for years and we were able to create a potentially powerful new drug called the Meta-Transformer. We called it the MT for short. The MT had the potential to increase strength and stamina in ordinary human beings in good health by a factor of ten. The drug was ready. All we needed was some volunteers. Lucas Albright found us some volunteers. Using his contacts in the outside world, he somehow gained custody of tons of people. Who were these people? Five hundred men from prisons around the world. These men were condemned to death by the governments of their native countries. They were already dead to society. Lucas Albright saw this as offering them a shot at a new life. These men had been carefully chosen. They were all between the ages of nineteen and fifty, and in good health, physically speaking, of course.

We needed to know what the effect of the drug would be on individuals of both sexes. To that end, we selected a few women from prison populations around the globe. We picked three hundred and seventy women from these prisons, and brought them to the island for the experiment. They were all condemned to death anyway and wouldn't be missed by the governments of the various countries which they hailed from. By the droves, we brought them to the island. We built special holding cells holding the inmates according to gender, race and national origin. We also classified them according to their psychological profiles. We couldn't put arsonists in the same cells as serial killers and so on. We thought we had them all under control.

We began administering the drug to these men and women whom the world at large had forsaken. It was a dangerous game but one we really wanted to play. We injected each and every single one of them with the drug. Thirty percent of all these men and women died within twenty four hours of being injected. The remaining seventy percent were forever changed. The drug transformed them in ways which exceeded our wildest expectations. Not only did these previously ordinary men and women get stronger and faster, but they also became infinitely more aggressive than before. They made ordinary psychopaths look like Church Choir Singers. They were magnificent monsters. What have I done?

Lucas Albright was very pleased with our work, as were the other scientists. One night, I shared with Dr. Joseph Royas and with Dr. Rachel Thompson my fear that what we had done would spell disaster for the world. Unfortunately, success had blinded them to caution. My fears and suspicions were dismissed. When Lucas Albright came to the island with representatives from various governments around the world and offered them a look at our supermen and superwomen like tourists at a zoo, I was pissed. I hated Lucas for doing that. These people were criminals, sure, but they weren't animals. He dismissed my comments, and continued to show them off.

Basically, his plan was to sell them to the highest bidder. The world's wealthiest men and women, along with defense contractors from countries like the USA, Germany, Japan and China would bid for these super-strong menaces we had created. Lucas saw them as the army of the future. I reminded him that these people were psychopaths and couldn't be programmed to behave themselves. He told me not to worry, and brought in a team of behavior modification experts. When I inquired as to what they were doing there, I wished I hadn't asked.

These experts were going to do nothing short of slicing our 'patients' open and rewire their brains, to make them lethally obedient. This was the last straw. I couldn't tolerate this. I felt ashamed of what I've done and what I've allowed myself to become. I was seduced by the money and the power. I was seduced by the ability to play God. I had ignored my conscience for too long. The men and women of the program were hardened criminals whose countries had decided to kill them. However, they were still human beings and I wouldn't allow a human being to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment anymore. This ends now.

I waited till nightfall that fateful day in the Summer of 2008, and went to the control power which guarded the holding cells where the 'patients' were. Our bio-enhanced supermen and superwomen were usually restlessly pacing in their Titanium-enforced cages. We had to beef up the cages because of their superhuman strength and speed. I was certain they wouldn't stay there forever. Many of them had tried to escape. I went and freed the only one among them I ever felt was worth anything. Achilles Johnson. A tall, good-looking black man from Boston, my neck of the woods. He was sentenced to life in prison for shooting the man who killed his sister. Before that unfortunate incident, he was a policeman and a member of the National Guard. I always felt he got a raw deal out of life. I freed him. He was grateful, and helped me free the others.

Someone rang the alarm, and dozens of Lucas Albright's heavily armed guards came out of nowhere and started shooting everyone. Even though these supermen and superwomen had superhuman strength and speed, they weren't bulletproof. Dozens of them died. Hundreds managed to make it to the boat which waited at the dock. Rapidly, they made their escape. I left on a smaller boat and made myself scarce. I knew that Lucas Albright would discover what I had done. He would organize a worldwide manhunt not only for me but for each and every single one of the supermen and superwomen I had unleashed upon the world. I didn't care. I had set them free.

Over the next few years, the world became a very exciting place. The supermen and superwomen I had created set about to take over the world. I'll let you guess who was their leader. Yes, none other than Achilles Johnson, my old friend. He organized this rag-tag band of bio-enhanced supermen and superwomen into an elite fighting unit. They multiplied, and the superior strength and endurance they possessed was somehow passed down to their offspring at a genetic level. Succeeding generations of these super people kept growing stronger and more ambitious. Until one day, they numbered in the thousands and finally left the planet Earth onboard stolen spaceships from NASA. Where they went, no one knows. One thing for sure, they were a force for the entire universe to reckon with.