I peered through the glass window, all three fingers pressed firmly against it. My free hand clutched the ceremonial staff that all adolescents were required to carry. The tiny psionic crystal hovering within the circular tip pulsed in time with my heartbeat, just a little slower than a hummingbird's wings. All my research, all the grants, all the money and the funding had gone into this singular moment. Pity there was no one else to watch with me.

It was a lab. There wasn't really much else to say. A surgical table, some counters, a microscope or two. A box of tools here and there. I had worked here for the past year or so, staining my fingers with DNA, cell components, stains, and, once or twice, blood. There was no one in the room - the robotics looked over the process that unfolded on the table.

The bird-shaped bipeds with their spindly limbs were reaching over a soft, marshmallowing being, if it could even be called that. This creature was the sixth specimen of the sixth egg batch - a supposed failure, yet it was alive, breathing, and thinking, in the most basic way, of course. It shouldn't even be alive, not without the extensive amount of tubing, cybernetics, and equipment that was attached to it. I couldn't even see its rounded, babyish face.

Someone out there might find the creature cute. But all I wanted was to be revealed in the next fews moments. This creature would be our salvation.

One of the bipeds reached over with its limb and drove a blade through the stomach of the beast. It twitched, only slightly, and a calm spray of its reddish-green blood came out of the new wound. I silently willed the machine to cut the incision, cleanly, of course. The other biped, with its padded arms, waited for the catch. I could not hear the screams as the walls reflected sound, but the psionic reverbations shook the room with a violence that only a newborn could produce.

The padded biped pulled the infant Nebulon out of the open wound. The quadrupedal creature gave a final few twitches, then went limp. Even as I entered the room, staff in hand, I could no longer sense the faint psionic pulses that the creature had made. It should have been there, pecking at the side of the newborn's scream, but it wasn't. The thing was dead, like its brothers and sisters. Little more than another creature to be biomassed. I flicked a hand at the bladed biped and it began disconnecting the fresh corpse from the tubing, each unleashing a jet of air, or a spout of oxygen solution. It mattered little.

What mattered was that the baby in the padded biped's arms was alive. It would take time to uncover if any changes to his DNA had occurred while in the womb, but that hardly mattered. The important thing was, unlike all the other babies that were born dead, unlike all the other children that were biomassed before they were out of the womb, this, this child was alive, blinking, and filling the room with psionic noise.

And she? She would be mass-produced, as soon as I could figure out how to keep its partially blank genetic code stable. Perhaps, if the 89th chromosome was extended with three hundred and twenty-one more tri-pairings. Perhaps, if I added some coding for sexual organs. Perhaps, if I gave it a little more brainpower...

No. If it gave it that it would be the end of us all. Next Chapter: Animus Estimated time remaining: 10 Minutes