We didn’t think that we would be doing anything wrong. Surely, the question of ethics came up once or twice; we wouldn’t be called scientists if we hadn’t stopped to consider what we were doing. But we went ahead all the same, and though it didn’t happen straight away, the shit still hit the fan.

My name’s Gustave Rocke, and as the Project went, I’m just a laboratory technician. The Project took into account my PhD in theoretical chemical composition, recombination of DNA, and it spat me out as a lab tech. A let- down, I guess you could say, but there were plenty of people involved who were more ‘qualified’ than me – chemists, biologists, nanotechnicians, physicists, everybody got together to be part of The Initiative, as the super-secret group of scientific minds was first called.

I guess I had better explain what we all had in common, first. Of course we all had our doctorates, our PhD’s, our grand educations and more aptitude towards theorising and taking wild guesses than the average person to make a wild guess, but it didn’t all count for much, when you put it together. What we all had in common, even more than the pretty letters on the end of our names, is that we were animals – well, not animals in the traditional sense of four-legged beasts that run around drooling on shit, but that’s pretty close, I’d guess. We had a neat word for that, too. ‘Recoms’ – short for ‘recombined humanoid DNA’ – were developed shortly before the fall of the human establishment, then the planet, and eventually, the race. Luckily, recoms were put to work as slave labour in the lunar camps; there was nowhere to go, so nobody tried to escape, and there were no human guards. Two hundred or so years later, and we’ve developed a pretty nice place out of the Lunar colonies. Doesn’t much matter, I’ve said what I need to, and that’s the important stuff. Keep that in mind for later: we’re animals.

My recombined DNA comes from a long line, dated back before the Apocalypse War, from a family of wolves, and I guess that’s why they chose me instead of the otter-guy who was probably more qualified for the position – if you can be said to be a ‘qualified’ lab tech – because I had that ‘killer instinct’, or whatever the hell reason that I was chosen over him. Most of the scientists invited to the Initiative were male, and the most of them were carnivorous species – wolves, jackals, foxes, lions, tigers and just about anything with a reputation for being fairly intimidating, and that’s exactly how things were when we first met: twenty of us, sitting around a table, trying to see who would blink first. The five female scientists weren’t bothering to play that game, preferring instead to know us by reputation.

We all had reputations. Not to boast, but we were the smartest minds in the Solar sector.

Nobody had heard a reason why we had to come to this meeting of minds, just a letter with a cordial invitation from some private investor type with more money than sense. That much was certain once you looked at the end of the letter and saw there were more zeroes on the end of the potential pay packet than on the annual Lunar budget deficit. And by God, that’s a lot of zeroes. We weren’t all that bothered why we were at the meeting.

So, anyway, the question of ethics. We knew something a little bit weird would be going on; nobody just flashes money at you if the operation is sound, but like I said, that was a shitload of money.

Beside me was Istas Blaque, a chemist of fox extraction who was made famous by his theories on the use of germanium to power nuclear reactors instead of uranium, and on my right was some scientist I only recognised through reputation, a mongrel canine of some kind, whose surly glances were beginning to unsettle me. Every now and then he’d make a sharp comment about money, grunt, and glower at me with his beetled brows pushed together. I didn’t like him much, and it turned out I didn’t have to work with him. I would be working with – correction, working for – Doctor Blaque, and I was happy with that. He was kind of timid, and I guess he was chosen because he’d go along with whatever was laid out in front of him.

DeValera made his entrance amidst a flurry of whispers and speculation. None of us knew who he was, but he seemed to know who we were. Gracious smiles and polite inquiries as to our health aside, the guy just wasn’t right. When he looked at you it was like it was looking past you, as if the wall behind you were more interesting. One thing we did know was that this was obviously the private investor who had written to us all.

He started simply enough: his idea was to ‘improve’ on the recom project that the humans had achieved. I didn’t really see the point, after all, we were all alive, so what was wrong with recoms?

Some wit pointed out that the humans who had started that project were extinct. That comment was quickly brushed aside with the words, ‘You will be well compensated for your time, and resources...’ Obviously the money. I didn’t really give a shit what we were doing, so long as I got some of the zeroes attached to the bottom of that letter – with a really big number before them, of course.

Then came that ethics word, voiced by one of the female scientists. She was a nervous-looking wreck who jumped whenever you so much as whispered her name, but I knew who she was. Adele Eyrie was a well-known experimenter in the field of nanotechnology, and most of her research was geared towards medical application of ‘her tiny helpers’, as she liked to refer to nanobots. Why were we doing this? What was the expected result? Who would benefit, and most of all, what would the cost be – and she didn’t just mean money.

The old weasel, DeValera, listened politely while she went on, but it was clear to us that he wasn’t listening, or just wasn’t hearing. He had his project in mind, and he was going to pay through his arse to get the end result he wanted. We were creating a ‘better’ recom, he told us, that we would be helping to enhance certain features of the project that could be implemented to eradicate things like disease, genetic diseases, certain mental disorders. The very galaxy would benefit, and the cost was nothing more than our time and research. She seemed quietened by the answer, as any hippie researcher would.

Three weeks passed, and we were moved from our homes into a dank, cramped little office underneath the Lunar surface; Istas and I, that is. To call it an office was a game of semantics we would renew each day, because it just didn’t qualify. The paint was curling near the ceiling and the floor, a bilious cream colour that went well with the carpet, which was a shade of brown just lighter than calf shit and about as attractive. The room stank of mildew, and old, if ‘old’ has a smell. You just had to keep reminding yourself that the smell was nothing compared to all that money at the end, that you could probably buy the old facility if you felt like it, afterwards. None of us would have, though, it was old, dilapidated, falling apart in some places where the structural designers had underestimated tonnes of lunar rock overhead. Some days, pushing samples through the corridors on a steel trolley, I would have to dodge pieces of ceiling stone that had broken, or look up in time to sidestep a chunk that was just coming loose.

The chips of rock on the carpet were usually grey. We weren’t allowed out of the facility, and when I caught sight of a shipment of something coming in, the security was so tight, the guards so jittery, they likely would have shot the courier if he sneezed.

Even though the facility was fairly shitty, to put it in layman’s terms, the equipment we were using was absolutely state of the art. Simply, there was none better. The greatest minds in the sector all given access to amazing technology. After a while we forgot what it was we were looking at under our electron microscopes, poking into petri dishes and the like. Istas and I worked on clearing the DNA samples of genetic defects inherent from some of the sample subjects; we didn’t ask where they came from, but the names on the plates all seemed familiar in their own way. There were scientists – a couple I recognised from our little band of researches – and there were politicians. There were sports stars, and actors, and journalists, and then there came the samples whose names I didn’t recognise, but sure as hell knew what the letters meant. These ones read ‘SSgt’, ‘Cpt’, ‘Gen’.

These were military samples were dealing with.

I took my suspicions to Istas, and he came to the same conclusion. Together we decided that it was best not to ask – we had a small piece of the puzzle, and each other two-man team around the labs had their own piece to mull over, each bringing us a step closer to the truth of the Initiative. Istas got it right first time, though. He said it straight away when he saw a sample labelled ‘Cpl. Jason Slake’. “We’re creating soldiers,â€