1.2.3. Capsule
Richard liked the twitching of his prisoner under the latex sheeting. She seemed to like the vibrator. He was sure that she had just reached her first orgasm and was already on her way to her second. It took him some effort, but he took his eyes off her and turned to the small cube of Selene's skull.
The cube with an edge length of one centimeter seemed to be a package made of some kind of plastic. The cube was almost entirely black, but had seven small white dots distributed irregularly on its surface. He tried to see a pattern in the dots, but there was none.
Finally he found a lid on one side without a dot, which he could open with tweezers. Who had put that thing in her? Inside, he found a small computer chip, some differently coloured tablets and a white granular powder. Looked a little like fine salt, but seemed to be biological. He first packed the tablets and the powder and decided to start with the computer chip.
The chip looked a bit like a shortened version of a micro-SD card. Only the contacts were gold-plated. He connected it to his computer and tried to find out what kind of data was on the chip. At first his computer didn't react to the small chip at all, but a few moments later his screen went black.
Was there a virus on it? Fortunately, he hadn't connected it to a computer with important data, but to one that had no connection to the outside world. Standard routine, which he also used if he took a hard disk with trade secrets from one of his competitors.
He stared at the black screen for a few seconds and wanted to stop the attempt when writing appeared on it.
"Hello, Richard.
Congratulations on taking possession of Selene.
The chip contains instructions on how to control
Selene and some other useful information.
Please handle Selene with care.
There's no way to exchange her if she's damaged."
Richard was confused. How did the chip know his name? And how did it manage to control the computer? And most importantly, what was the chip doing in Selene? Very odd. The writing stopped for a few seconds and gave way to a window with various files and subfolders.
He found her genes in a file. A folder with other genetic data, but it wasn't hers. And a folder with technical drawings. He found simple constructions, like the one of a jet engine, but also the instructions for the construction of powerful lasers that could be used as a weapon. And an instruction manual for building a deuterium-based fusion reactor.
There were thousands of folders with instructions for building very different things. Some of the technologies were hopelessly outdated, others like the fusion reactor or the quantum computer had been conceivable but were still decades away from realization. He skimmed over which technologies had already been developed and considered when they had been developed.
The oldest thing he could find was the Haber-Bosch process, which could be used to fix atmospheric nitrogen and process it into fertilizer or explosives. 1908, if he could remember correctly. What was a hundred and twenty-five years old technology doing in this collection?
He skimmed the construction manual for the fusion reactor. Supposedly, it worked so it wouldn't produce radioactive waste. And it would not simply produce heat which would then be used to generate electricity with a generator, but would generate the electricity directly. With the currently proposed design, the generator had as much in common as a steam engine with a fuel cell. Of course it also needed cooling, but it was much more compact than power plants of comparable capacity. The small version with one gigawatt of electrical power was only ten meters in size, the version with a hundred gigawatts was thirty.
If that really worked, it would make him damn rich. He could make billions. He looked at the list of materials and estimated the cost. The small reactor would cost about one billion, the big one about fifty billion. Pretty expensive, but still a good deal. The investment costs would be slightly lower than for combustion power plants, and the fuel costs would be practically zero. For practical purposes, deuterium was available in seawater in almost inexhaustible quantities. But before he devoted himself to getting richer, he looked at the files on Selene.
* * *
Apparently, she was a human being who became stronger, faster and more intelligent through five additional pairs of chromosomes. As he had suspected, her bones were not made of calcium compounds but were actually riddled with carbon nanotubes. Her cell repair was optimized in such a way that she was able to heal even severe injuries very quickly and thus did not age. The file speculated that she could probably live forever, but certainly thousands of years. At least as long as it was not killed, which would be difficult, since it was said that it could regrow entire limbs.
The reason why Selene could not reproduce was very simple. She had to mate with others of her kind. That didn't exist yet. Instead of the variant with which all animals and plants known to him reproduced sexually, namely the combination of two specialized cells, vampires needed four. Two cells from different vampire women and two sperm cells from different human men.
The egg cell of the first vampire woman would first have to be fertilized by a sperm cell. At the same time, a white blood cell, or more precisely a specialized phagocyte, would have to take a sperm from a man. In order for the sperm to enter the bloodstream of the second vampire, the sperm had to be introduced orally or anally, where it would be sucked up and carried into the bloodstream. Richard remembered that Selene had small teeth in both her cleft and anus that could drink blood and sperm. The channels for transporting fluids behind the teeth were alarmingly complex. Selene could direct any fluid either into her uterus, into her own bloodstream or alternatively into her stomach. Depending on what she intended to do with it. Even the teeth in her mouth could either direct the sucked fluid into her stomach or directly into her own bloodstream.
This is why the specialized white blood cells had only half a set of chromosomes. Half a set of chromosomes each from the two mothers and the two fathers. Richard found it quite complicated and wondered how the fourfold set of chromosomes at the end of the union could be reduced to a double set.
Richard continued to read the reproductive instructions, hoping to find answers. Apparently both women had to join forces after being activated by sperm. The vampire who had fertilised the egg now had to take vaginal or anal blood from the second vampire and wait for one of the macrophages, which had already taken in a sperm, to find the egg and fuse with it.
Richard tried to imagine another vampire woman pampering Selene with her tongue, letting the vaginal spines bite her, while at the same time a man took Selene from behind and provided the necessary sperm.
The instructions also mentioned two safety mechanisms: Each of the three connections between the cells would only work if the vampire women had orgasms while doing so. The scavenger cells digested sperm, unless in the last few minutes this ability would have been switched off by an orgasm. A maximum of half an hour was allowed to elapse between the injection of sperm into the bloodstream and the donation of blood to the second vampire woman. Also the egg cell was only able to take up a sperm in itself after an orgasm and needed a second orgasm for the fusion with the eating cell.
The egg itself was theoretically always ready to receive, but the channel leading from the vagina into the uterus only conducted sperm during orgasms and was otherwise practically closed.
Richard believed that this complexity was just a way for the fathers to fulfill their dream of a threesome, but the instructions gave other reasonable reasons. The complexity was to ensure that the vampires, despite their strength, would never try to exterminate humanity. Without human fathers and also without cooperation among themselves there would be no children.
And there were four parents, so that the genetic variance would increase and at least some children of the first vampire generation would have enough differences on a genetic level to bring another generation into the world. By human standards, cousins would mate, not sisters. Of course their children would only be inbred like between second cousins. Confusing. Hopefully he found another suggestion how to describe relationships when each person had four parents.
When the actual fertilization of the egg cell was complete and four chromosomes of each type were in the egg cell, a mechanism began to take effect in the cell which removed excess chromosomes. The exact mechanism was not further explained, but the instructions said that none of the four parents would be preferred in one of the chromosomes and thus should expect to have contributed about a quarter of the child's genes on average.