Wilds Born

Bit of genetic material talk in the second chapter but it was kind of important. Nu, for being so smart, is a little silly at times.

And I'm surprised Yao didn't wake at the sound...

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He awoke to pain. All through his time in the darkness, he was certain that he could hear a beeping. It wasn’t like the tweep-tweep of the tree bird or the meep-weep of the root moles. The sound was annoying, like a child screaming to get attention and then stopping every second to check to see if anyone was paying attention them. Beep. Beep. Beep.

It was very difficult to fall into a peaceful death with that annoying sound. Beep. Beep.

Beeeeeeep.

His heart slammed to life and he realised what the beeping was. Taking in a quick breath, he pried his eyes open. White over head and fabric cutting him off from the rest of the world. Focusing, he brought himself to the present.

A blanket was over him and he hurt but none of it was that bone hurt, the agony of shattered bone. His stomach was empty and made him feel hollow but his body didn’t feel hungry. Just weary and weakened from sickness. He could breath but his lungs felt stuffy. There was something wrapped around his ears and to his nose. Air was leaking out of the thing and into his nose, annoying him as much as the beeping.

Heart monitor. Big word that meant that he was hooked up to a machine that made a sound every time his heart beat. That was what that beeping was and, annoying as it was, it was suddenly reassuring, it told him that he was alive. This big word also meant that he wasn’t in the wilds any longer. Being in civilization had an upside.

Medical advancements via genetic displacement technology.

He sat up slowly and winced at the pain down his back. His ribs were heavily bruised, his left hand bandaged but he was clean and alive. Shaking just a bit, he looked from one side of the bed to the other. On the right side of the bed was a young woman.

Brown hair, perfect skin and soft features. The shape of her jaw and her cheeks was soft but well sculpted, like the adults and elders. The youths and younger ones, the ones born in the wilds were not as fine. A few of them had too low cheek bones, one had a misaligned jaw. Most were alright, but there was something in the adults that made them so different from their children.

The woman was sleeping, arm curled under her head, a flat thing set in her lap. The flat thing was a word creator, a. A. Computer. Handheld, personal flat top computer. Flat screen, he corrected himself. Great-elder and mother had taught him about flat screen computers, how they were the newest thing in their childhood and thus, by now, everyone had one.

As he watched the woman, she awoke. Making a little gasp before she jerked upward and turned such curious brown eyes towards him. Slowly, she came back to herself and shot up, straight up, clattering the flat screen to the floor.

“You are awake!” she shouted shrilly, skittering back and away from him.

Words. They used actual words. How. Old. “Where in the civilization have you taken me?” he asked, cocking his head to the side to show that he was curious, “the three rivers, how far away are their conjoining? How long was I comatose? Which medical treatments did you deliver to my body and how did you proceed to mend my flesh?”

There was something he was forgetting, it was very important. Should one every encounter civilized people. Something was making him feel blurry, queasy even.

“Which medications am I on? No aprisitoliphine.”

Her eyes went wide, wide as could be. But father always said that that big word was a bad combination for his family. Or perhaps it was his speaking. What if they had taken him as a specimen? What if they thought that he couldn’t speak?

Oh, damned to hell, he recalled what he was supposed to say, “I decline via humanitarian rights of subclass fourteen, section sixty-six, paragraph A of the constitution of rightful genetic heritage.”

That was when she went a funny colour. Perhaps she wasn’t intelligent, or at least not as intelligent as he thought she was. Though he wasn’t certain how to communicate with someone who wasn’t intelligent. Most definitely not in the civilized world, the moderate idiots of the tribe talked about the things they picked out of their noses and he refused to participate in chasing others around with boogers on the tips of his fingers.

Wincing, he tried another route, “My given calling, er, name, my name is Nu. Who are you?”

For a very long moment she said nothing, then she giggled, “your rhymed! That’s adorable! Oh, shi-” she bent and snatched up her flat screen computer then skittered away from him again and put it to her ear, “auntie, we have a problem, we gave him aprisitoliphine and he can’t have it. Well. He told me. Yes. Yes he did, here don’t believe me?” she flicked a button and presented one of the sides of the computer to him. There, in the little box, was a tiny little woman, squinting at him, “go on, tell her.”

“No… aprisitoliphine and I decline via humanitarian rights of subclass fourteen, section sixty-six, paragraph A of the constitution of rightful genetic heritage.”

“Call the medic, administer four mills of zenoliphin. Call me back if he goes into cardiac arrest.” the little woman growled out before the screen went black.

What the… Nu reached out and snatched the flat screen from the woman as she turned and fled the closed off area. He shook the thing, he jabbed at it with his fingers, gnawed on the edge a little, but nothing seemed to work. These things had power buttons, little buttons that could turn the item on or off at the will of the user. Sort of like power, except. More control.

Oh, he snorted a laugh to himself. He finally got father’s grumbling comments about how women should have an on and an off button so he could turn them all on whenever he want-

Pain erupted in his arm, a searing thing that was accompanied by a hiss. Trapdoor. Spider.

He leapt from the bed, striking out at the creature and hissing his annoyance as he smacked the roof of the place and latched on with toes and fingers. Growling, spitting and hissing out he reached carefully and removed the fang, throwing it to the floor as he opened his mouth and tried to growl and hiss at the same time. Instead of doing either of those things, a clicking came from his mouth, catching hold at the back of his throat and bursting forth in an angry, vengeful sound.

“Come down from there,” the woman said promptly, “this instant, you come down and you apologise to him.” she jabbed a finger at the startled looking, older man who had a hand to his reddening cheek, “right. Now. Come down from there, he gave you zenoliphin to counteract the apristitoliphine so you won’t die. He’s a medic for crying out loud-”

“Healer,” the man offered up.

That was a term Nu understood and it knocked him right off his thoughts about beating the man about the head with the bed. He flopped off the ceiling and edged back to the bed, head hung low and looking bashful as could be.

“Medic part of medical, as in medical staff?” he whined out, shifting his weight away from the woman as she walked around the bed.

“Yes, a medic is part of a medical staff which would make him a doctor but also, I suppose, a healer. You know this term, healer?”

“Healers are good and one should always listen to healers because healers will keep us alive and when we break a bone healers are the ones who set the bone and care for us while we are ill,” Nu sighed out, “didn’t know.”

“Well, I suppose we should have told you,” she muttered.

“Why did medic bite me with a trap door spider fang?” he asked, not understanding at all, why he had been struck by such a thing. Father had never mentioned these things that hurt and delivered, “medical injection system should not hurt.”

“The government controls the patent for that technology.”

“So. Kill government, take patent, what is patent?” this was a word that he did not know.

“The right to own a specific idea or invention and to allow or disallow certain folk from using it. If used, lawful punishment is placed on those who breech the contract,” the medic offered up.

“Contractual agreement, no reneging on genetic material given,” Nu muttered, making the connection, “kill government, take patent,” he jabbed a finger at the medic, “no more stabbing Nu, that’s me, with trapdoor spider fangs.”

“It was a piece of medical equipment.”

“No more stabbing,” the woman said quickly, “go inform my aunt that he is alive and well and perhaps even a little spry.” she waited until the medic had rushed off before she turned her attention back to Nu, “my name is Yao. Your name is Nu?”

“My name is Nu,” he tapped his chest, “My tribe does not often use sound words, we speak much with our hands for fear of others finding us. Thus, my words may not be so good.”

“You are speaking fine.”

Speaking, that was a new word, one that he associated with verbal sound thanks to her use of its context. Nu considered Yao for a moment, then rubbed at his arm and settled on the edge of the bed, “which place of the civilization am I in?”

“We are very far north from where we found you. You were quite a ways down river, I mean. You were in the river for quite some time. Fish had nibbled at your fingers,” as soon as she said it, he raised his hands and studied the pads of his fingers. They were whole and healthy, “regeneration is not genetic cloning because of the technical fact that all we did was tell your cells to heal at an accelerated rate. We administered some fourteen antibiotics and six growth hormones but nothing beyond the healing necessities.

“By the time the healing was done you were low on many nutrients, thus we fed you intravenously for three days but once your levels went back to normal, we removed the tube. The oxygen tube is because your lungs are… broken.”

“Hard to breath, like breathing through a fur coat,” Nu muttered, rubbing at his chest and wincing. He had forgotten about the bruising up and down his sides.

“That’s a temporary thing, but it was beyond your body’s capability to heal. You need time to recover and for your body to fix itself naturally. Time will help more than any medicine we have. Not even surgery is an option at this point.”

“Surgery. To cut into one to remove bad parts and replace them, or to fix broken parts. It involves digging into a person as one guts an animal only more humanely and involving less death. More blood though. Mother once did surgery on father’s brother. He had a shattered arm and mother had to cut a piece of bone out of him before she applied healing powers to the area to knit the bone together and mend torn flesh. There was a lot of blood…” Nu trailed off as he shuddered at the memory of Mei screaming. It had been necessary, but it didn’t make it easier on any of the tribe.

“What I’m saying is-”

“Nu is fragile like new child,” he shrugged, “not to break bones or bruise any more. Easy work. But you have to keep me from hurting myself. Yes?”

Yao opened her mouth, then closed it. She was quiet a long moment before she sighed, “in reality, no, it would be left up to you to make arrangements or somehow pay others to do this work for you. I will do it, yes, as well as my aunt. We want you back up and in physical shape so that we can return you to your… tribe? As soon as possible.”

“Ah,” was all he could say. He knew he had to get back, but mother and father could already be dead and Syano could be ruling the tree as the new leader. What kind of future could he have in a place like that?

“You don’t have to go back, if you don’t want to. But your life there is better than the life you would have here. You could be free there and you don’t have to work a menial job at a desk, hitting the same key for the rest of your life. Plus you’d have to learn how to read and do math.”

“I can read,” Nu said defensively, then wilted, “not very well, though. Math is stupid. But six fish plus ten fish is sixteen and if one has ten piles of six fish each one has sixty fish. All children know how to count. Six dried fish and two big animals to one person per winter along with four times one’s weight in vegetables and fruits. After they’re dried.”

Yao just blinked at him, “what else did they teach you out there?”

“That one should not reveal all of one’s genetic manipulations on the first greeting, least one not have the upper hand.”

“Uh-huh,” Yao rocked back on her heels and studied him. She was young. Younger than he was at the very least. Which made him wonder what a girl her age was doing sitting alone beside a strange male. “That’s a fancy piece of jewellery you’ve got there.”

“Yes, do you want it? You can have it. It’s a useless piece of tin. An heirloom, that’s a big word,” he informed her excitedly before he got control of himself, “but it’s brought me nothing but trouble.”

“Like that dunk in the river that you took?” Yao asked quietly.

Nu shifted his weight away from her, he didn’t want to talk about it. Syano had beaten him and won and now he was humiliated and his family was in danger because he wasn’t strong enough to win. He was just a stupid, broken male and it would make everyone’s lives easier if he just stayed in civilization and away from them.

“Nu,” Yao came around the bed and he turned further away from her, “oh, Nu. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. You don’t have to talk about it if you want. Here.” she fumbled with something and there was a pinging sound, a cheerful little thing like the birds greeting the rising sun, “you want to play with my FSPC? Flat screen personal computer, access to the internet? Would that cheer you up?”

***

Male, twenty years old. Mother and father both tenth generation Ishteshtin, father programmed as an alpha and not just any alpha. The alpha. A little searching and El managed to find an image of the tenth generation elder, the original one. One Mysh Ishteshtin, went mad at the age of ten and was quietly shuttled off and away from public eye. Mysh later escaped on a family outing in the wilds.

Thanks to the genetic material, he quickly found out which Ishteshtin was the male’s mother. Taya, young for a tenth generation, mild programming that might have been useful for a nanny. At first glance, these two didn’t seem to mesh cleanly, but they made it work.

The male was projected as having a natural lifespan of two hundred years and he was not fertile yet. Second growth was right there in his programming. If Gomesh Genetics was a bit more underhanded that it actually was, El might have snipped the code and used it for the Toleran family. Some of them had second growth, some didn’t. The company tried to give second growth to everyone but only the Ishteshtin had ever found a way to successfully couple it with specific codes that locked it onto anyone’s genetic sample.

Meaning that all the male’s children and all their children and all their children would likely have the second growth.

Basic genetic standards were there, genetic imperatives. Given the fact that the male wasn’t genetically altered, his material was damned good looking. The male would end up growing a few inches in the second growth and filling out in the shoulders. He was built with his father’s muscle mass and his mothers.

His mothers.

El’s head cocked to the side as his own mother walked into the room.

“What have you got that look on your face for?” she muttered, flicking the back of his computer and thusly displaying the page on the flat screen against the wall. Mother turned and looked over the rolling genetic sequence, “I don’t get it. It’s random fluff.”

“Fluff? That’s not fluff,” he snapped up from his seat at the desk and walked around, to the screen. He selected a sequence and pulled it out, “this is the key activation that we’ve used, as a company, to flick the switch on. This,” he pulled out another one, “is the sequence used to flick the switch off. The code in between-”

“Those switches aren’t technically on or off, they are either present or not present. He’s not supposed to have both at the same time.”

“How many people have both at the same time?”

“No one. You either have one or the other.”

“Even in power users?”

“There’s no way to definitively say that all power users have both the on and off switch present in them. If there was a way and word got out, the government would use it against the people themselves, whether it was true or not. Children could be tested before implantation and discarded. It would mean the destruction of what many have claimed are the chosen people of God. That’s territory we don’t like treading in.”

“His mother had the same statuses.”

“So?”

“So did the younger Mally.”

“Younger Mally is his mother.”

“Taya Ishteshtin is his mother.”

“Taya. Taya,” Mother frowned and looked down, “oh, yes, I recall little Taya. She died. I looked right at him and asked him and he said that she was dead, not gone, dead. Why would he say that if she was still alive?”

“Uhm…”

“I wanted a breeding contract with her and a cousin of mine,” mother muttered in an annoyed tone, “so Taya Ishteshtin has these switches and she passed them on to her son. You aren’t the first person to think that you’ve found the genetic code that controls power. Each power user controls their powers in different way. Upbringing and physical factors activate specific parts of the genetic code and allow some powers to be used while others cannot be accessed.”

“Physical factors activate power, since when have we known that?”

“It’s a hypothesis, like. How if you don’t get enough sodium, you can’t grow as tall. Which reminds me-”

“I took my tablet,” he said quickly, flicking the screen away from the code, “but if this were nothing, I wouldn’t find it in both his genetic material and be able to trace it back to his mother. What is the fluff in between for, if not to control the two switches. What if the fluff in between is the kill switch? If the two sides meet-”

“Genetic code doesn’t work like that.”

“And genetic code also, for some reason, doesn’t determine sexuality or power even though if you nurture two males the same way one of them could still end up being homosexual. What does that mean then, that who you want to fuck has nothing to do with upbringing or blood and. And. What, God just goes, ‘here have some flaming homosexuality, that sounds like fun’? Everything is in the genetic code somewhere. We’re just dismissing something as fluff. How much fluff do you honestly think he has, he’s a second generation with the programming to alter his own genetic code and only pass on the good stuff.”

“Where’s that part of the code? You’re not of the Ishteshtin line, El, you’re from a tweaker family who got that code in a random dole out from their genetic family.”

He flicked through the code and back to a highlighted portion, “there’s a reason why you pay me so well for the job I do. You know that right? You aren’t just paying for the pretty face and the nice ass.”

“I don’t care what your ass looks like, I am your mother.”

“I meant. More. For the other women who work here. And a few of the men,” he shrugged and pulled up a more detailed section of the code, “here.”

Mother frowned, “that’s. Odd. They don’t have access to that gene. I mean. We want access to that gene, everyone does and they’ve been sitting on it, refusing to give it out. And there it is. Damn it.”

“We just need his permission, what could he possibly know about genetic modification?”

“He’s already declined, told us, basically, that he’s Ishteshtin and he’s currently with your cousin, exploring the internet. He knows a lot of big words and that is frightening in and of itself. There, back it up. There. What is that, exactly? The sample must have been contaminated, that can’t come from an Ishteshtin.”

“… but mother and father are both Ishteshtin, through and through. Maybe it’s animalistic genetic material presenting itself in a free range, uncontrolled environment,” he studied the genetic material, “or it’s a mutation, Mysh and Taya weren’t exactly created to have perfect children, if you know what I mean.”

“How closely related are they and could this be his genetic material breaking down?”

“No to the second and as to the first, that would require more in depth study. From what I can tell Taya and Mysh were only nominally related. They both had the same last name but,” he looked at the mapping that the computer had done of the mother’s and father’s genetic material, “I can tell you what my birth parents looked like, their approximate age at my conception, hell, I could tell you their diet. But I cannot trace the mother and father of the female donor or of the male donor. I can only trace the mother and father.

“They have moderate genetic material in common. Like. Two cats of the same breed meeting one another. They made another cat. Except this one has more refined details. The breed is presenting itself in an uncontrolled and mutated manner that is being tested by nature.

“Personally, I’m not concerned about the male. I’m more concerned about his siblings. If these two didn’t mesh perfectly and he was the offspring. What would happen if the genetic scarring from recombinant material was over point zero-zero-zero-zero-one percent?”

Mother was quiet a long moment, “he’s mentioned an uncle, father’s brother.”

“Mei, I looked into the line. Mysh only had one sibling. Their mother insisted on birthing naturally and died. Their father went on a tour and died. Mei was put up for adoption, was adopted by one Shin Ishteshtin but Shin was labelled as dead so control over the orphan reverted to Layaent. Why do I know that name, by the way, it’s been bugging the hell out of me?”

“Later. Mei, I’ve seen his genetic profile. He was a donor for the current Mally. Gorgeous that one is, bit off but gorgeous. Thus Mei is still alive. Father’s brother means father’s blood relation, we will assume for the moment.

“A possible uncle, his mother and his father were mentioned in passing, we will work from there and assume these three relations are safe topics. He refuses to speak about the attack, shuts right down. Upon mentioning returning to his tribe, he was reluctant.”

“But. Mysh is the elder for the tenth generation. Barring the fact that he’s. I mean. He’s a hundred and twenty years old, how could Mysh still be alive and let’s say he’s not. This was recent work and a one time thing.”

“Let’s say he recently died.”

“New leader gets pissed at the old one’s kid? You really think that Mysh only had one kid? They aren’t under population control like we are. It’s all for, all the time and no birth control besides no sex.”

Mother considered the information for a long moment, “say Mysh is injured. Male gunning for leader takes out the opposition.”

“The male is half my size.”

“But he wears the star ring,” mother sighed, “of course, Yao mentioned the ring and the male started to get aggravated and shut down. He was beat because of the ring.”

“Purely hypothetical of course.”

“Hypothetical or not, it’s the ring. If Mysh is hurt and his son was worried about the leader, say. The ring would react to that. Poor bastard doesn’t even realise that he did it to himself. Not that we’re going to mention it. He’s looking for something and until he finds it, until he’s ready to go home.

“We let him stay here.”


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