*Warning: This story is a stylized near-term science-fiction piece containing some violence, social commentary, semicolons and exclamation points.

Blue-green eyes shining, he peered out of the alley.  Through the rising mist he squinted, vertically, to see the shape approaching.  Overcoat and fedora made a distinctly 1950s New York profile, but he knew that didn't belong in this day and age.  Leather soles clicked on the pavement, a spang on a manhole cover, and he watched.  When the man was about five meters away, he lunged.  A yelp and a gurgle, his claw slit the man's throat.  The man fell, gushing blood, and he lapped at this warm river with the thirst of a dying man.  Tenderly he laid the body down.  As an afterthought he reached down and retrieved the wallet folded into the man's back pocket.  Loping off through the night, he whistled softly to himself, joyous at the bounty presented in his new home.

Late that evening, in the stinking hovel where he slept in tattered filth, he looked into the wallet.  So, what chance!  What luck!  Here he had been after a treat and some cash and now who would be on the news tomorrow but his creator!  Run out of England, no doubt, for his unorthodoxy in the otherwise-liberal world of genetics.  He licked around his mouth, finding a splash of flavor here or there.  His brothers, scores of them, had been murdered to cure leukemia in thirty percent of the pathetic patients who received their stem cells.  A wail escaped his thin lips; the loss hurt so, every night.

Hybridization had taken the avant garde of cancer therapy by storm in the early teens, and now, eighteen years later, he did not know if there lived another creature quite like him.  He had been the product of reckless experiment, an incubated egg, left for too long.  Not useful for stem cells (he had branched), he was kept around as a curio.  The blackout, the failed generators, the woman who found him, all freak accidents.  He had killed her; she was a fool, cooing over her freak-baby.  The scientists must have made quite a fuss over their missing experiment, he often thought with glee.  

Ecuador had been good to him.  The people here were so superstitious, willing to call him the Chupacabra for no established reason, although he hated goats.  Thankfully, he had free reign of darkened streets once the sun fell, and he made good use of this.  Careful to never be too repetitive, he had moved about from town to village to city, and tonight he had killed his maker.  What a rush!  Only a hundred dollars US?


Authorial Note:   For those who are unfamiliar with the term, hybridization refers to the process whereby an animal egg is evacuated and filled with human DNA.  This produces a non-human embryo from which stem cells may be harvested.  Britain is the current world leader in this technology.  The advantages of the technique include an avoidance of the ethical issues that come with destroying a human embryo for stem cells, the relative abundance of animal eggs versus human, and the possibility of choosing animals with particularly desirable genetic characteristics for the treatment in mind.  The above piece fancifully explores a potential downside.

 

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