Oona: A Flash Fiction Sci-Fi Short
 |
| The Soup Tank |
Oona
It was the first run of our CGAT compiler program.
CGAT: a nitrogenous-base operating system built on the very building blocks of DNA.
Marty and I were nervous as hell to start it up, but there was no turning back. No second thoughts. No should we or shouldn’t we. It was too late for that.
“Bring the mainframe online, Lola,” Marty said.
“Starting the boot sequence.”
Both our monitors flashed and hummed to life. CGAT was live, glowing, and waiting for commands.
“She’s up, Marty. What do you want to test first?”
“Let’s try something simple, but useful right from the start,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Skin. If we can create viable, rejection-free skin, we’ll have every burn ward in the country beating down our door.”
“Skin. Okay. Skin it is.”
The human genome had been mapped for decades, but no one had tried to program cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine directly. With the help of CAGEE, our AI assistant, we had discovered that specific light wavelengths, fired at fluctuating intensities, could alter amino acids.
To test it, we built the Soup Tank: a heavy glass vat filled with a rich, opaque amino acid slurry. Using micro-laser technology, we could manipulate the amino acids at a molecular level. In simple terms, we were creating nitrogenous bases inside the tank, stepping up from simple DNA sequences to full, complex chromosomes.
This was not synthesizing a random DNA strand.
This was laser-printing human flesh in a primordial pool of goop.
Just like it was in the beginning.
I prompted CAGEE to extract the exact formulation of skin from the genome database and fork it to CGAT.
There was no hum. No thunder. No lightning.
But there was a glow.
Dim at first, buried deep within the thick, milky sludge of the tank, a subtle light began to pulse.
CAGEE’s synthesized voice broke the silence.
“Data from genome database extracted successfully. Forked to CGAT. Formulating a ten-by-ten-centimeter skin segment will take thirty-six hours to complete. Should I alert you upon completion?”
That was almost twenty-seven years ago.
We didn’t stop at skin.
We grew organs for transplants. Hearts. Kidneys. Livers. Pancreases. Flawless appendages for amputees. All of them entirely rejection-free.
But we couldn’t stop there.
We didn’t know how to.
Though we should have.
Eventually, we grew a brain.
For months, we held it in suspension in the Soup Tank. Marty couldn’t leave it like that. To him, it was inert. A biological computer without a terminal.
So he waited for the right moment.
It didn’t take long.
He caught wind of a seven-year-old boy on life support. The child was brain-dead. His grieving parents, already signed up for organ donation, had agreed to donate his body to science.
Marty pulled strings. Bypassed ethics committees. Buried forms. Whispered into phones. Signed names where names should never have been signed.
He secured the boy before the machines were unplugged.
When he told me how, laying it out like a shopping list — the calls, the forms, the favors called in — I didn't say anything for a long moment. Then, quiet enough that I wasn't sure he heard it, or maybe not caring if he did:
"You're not a scientist anymore, Marty. You're Victor."
He didn't ask what I meant. He just smiled like I'd complimented him.
The next three days were a blur of adrenaline and sterile steel.
When the body arrived, we prepped him for surgery and removed his dead brain. After that, the procedure became less medical and more like programming.
We kept the boy in stasis and submerged him in the tank on a specialized gurney, strapping his body into position beneath the milky surface. The newly grown brain was nestled into his skull. The skull cap was replaced and secured with a few simple sutures.
I watched the boy's small shape settle beneath the milky surface, tethered and still, and thought: this is nothing but Frankentech. I didn't say it loud. I'm not sure I said it at all — maybe it just moved behind my teeth.
From there, CGAT did the heavy lifting.
Guided by CAGEE’s inputs from the genome database, the lasers fired, knitting neural pathways, grafting tissue, welding bone, stitching one impossible thing to another.
Seventy-two hours later, we pulled him from the soup.
Six hours after that, we took him off the ventilators.
Three hours later, he opened his eyes.
He didn’t speak. He couldn’t.
He was a seven-year-old newborn.
Wild. Silent. Entirely feral.
Looking into those unfocused, terrified eyes, empty of memory and full of fear, I didn’t see Frankentech anymore.
I saw a child.
Then his hand twitched against the sheet. Not much. Just enough for his fingers to curl around mine.
I knew then he was mine.
Later that night, after Marty finally left the lab to sleep, I took the boy. I packed a single bag, wiped the local servers, and walked out.
I never returned.
Marty never found us.
I named him Oona, after no one.
He is twenty-four now, and today he is getting married.
My boy, the experiment that never should have been done, is walking down the aisle toward his future.
 |
| Oona walking the Aisle |
He doesn’t know his origins.
He doesn’t know about CGAT. Or CAGEE. Or the brain death of a child leaving a body to become his.
He doesn’t know he was brewed in a tank of lasers and goop.
I tell myself that is mercy.
And he never will.
Comments