Midtown Manhattan—September 10, 1951. Six months since the rainforest ordeal in Uganda.
In my jacket pocket, the folded telegram crackles against my knuckles. ‘Professor Fioretti. We know what you lost. We believe we can help. A car will be waiting. Novus Genetics.’
It arrived three days ago, a lifeline I was too desperate to refuse. Now I’m walking into a building that already knows what I lost, clinging to the insane hope that they actually know something about Kibo.
Steam boils up from sidewalk grates, buses grind and taxis blare, neon martini glasses wink above the Copa. Coal exhaust and roasted chestnuts replace Uganda’s rot, but my jacket still stinks of jungle mildew.
A lazy jazz tune drifts from a basement bar, mingling with the city’s hopeful pulse.
Across the street a limestone tower rises into low cloud, its narrow steel-framed windows severe against the older brick façades. Brass letters spell NOVUS GENETICS CORPORATION above revolving doors.
I step inside; the street roar dies under marble vaults. A faint electrical hum needles my teeth. The art-deco directory shows only six tenants. The last reads Steven D’Addario, President—37th Floor.
A white-gloved attendant works the elevator—thirty-seven buttons, only one lit.
The corridor beyond is lined with frosted glass; ozone and floor-wax sting the air. Mid-corridor, a framed TIME cover—THE WARRIOR GENE? My own face glares back, captioned: FROM RAINFOREST CAGES TO THE FRONTIERS OF BEHAVIOR.
I hold the look a beat too long.
That’s how I got their attention. I’m not a fellow scientist to them; I’m a commodity. But when did I agree to be their poster child?
I clear my throat and rap once on a mahogany door stamped STEVEN D’ADDARIO—PRESIDENT.
“Enter.”
Steven D’Addario rises—tall, silver at the temples, eyes sharp as a scalpel. “Professor Benjamin Fioretti.” He offers a hand. “I’ve waited a long time to meet the man every journal keeps quoting.”
“Mr. D’Addario. The honor is mine. I have to admit, I’m curious why you asked me here.”
“Two reasons. First, to congratulate a future Nobel laureate.” He gives a dry chuckle. The word sits in the room like an object he has placed there on purpose. I don’t touch it. “Second, to ask how in heaven’s name you found that gene. Let me show you why your work matters.”
On his desk lies a sixteen-millimeter reel with an optical soundtrack. He threads it into a sound projector with the ease of a newsreel operator and closes the blinds. A chimpanzee appears on-screen, muscle-knotted, hurling a wooden log against the cage bars; shards fly like shrapnel. I know him before the second frame. You don’t forget a face you spent four months waiting to be allowed to look at.
“That’s Gladiator,” I say. “Alpha male. Took us months to get close enough for a blood sample.”
Next frame: the same brute gently parts an infant’s hair, picking thorns with almost maternal focus; the infant squeaks, unafraid.
I nod at the frozen frame. “We isolated the sequence—four bases,” I say. “One snip with a tailored phage, and Gladiator went from tyrant to teddy bear. Cortisol halved; raids stopped. But put that same sequence into a subordinate, and he’d tear the cage apart inside a week.”
“And when that insertion appeared—rarely—in men convicted of murder,” D’Addario murmurs, pausing the reel, “your lab built an inhibitor.”
“Exactly. The behavior tracked with four bases in our assay. Calmadrin is still an experimental inhibitor under restricted hospital protocol. We do not yet know whether it treats a pathway or merely pushes the damage somewhere harder to measure.”
He holds my gaze, silent, the faint ticking of the mantel clock suddenly loud in the room. “How many sleepless nights before you trusted the change wouldn’t unravel the animal?”
“Too many,” I admit, nudging my glasses. “Mendel had peas; I had two-hundred-pound primates and a prayer. Every protein and chromosome we compare reveals another echo between them and us. And unlike peas, they remember who stuck them with the needles.”
A low whistle. “That caution is precisely why I want you.” He opens a leather folio.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He lifts a pen-length metal cylinder; a braided cord leads to a shoebox-sized valve-analyzer. The device looks like something from a science fiction pulp, all chrome and blinking lights. With a swift jab he pricks his own thumb, lets one drop fall, and the miniature gauge flares green.
“This prototype alone cost more than your entire Uganda expedition,” he says. He taps the glass. “Your universities are still arguing whether genes are even made of DNA. Here at Novus? We mapped the structure of the double helix five years ago. We are doing things that the universities won’t discover until the 1970s.” He offers me the cylinder. I take it before I can think better of it—too light, too precise. I prick my own thumb; the gauge flares green in under a second. My centrifuges at Anthropoid take three days to say less than this just said in a heartbeat. I set it down slowly. “You’re not reading the genome,” I say. “You’re editing it.” He only smiles. “Now you understand why I need you.”
“What am I looking at, Mr. D’Addario?”
He leans forward, his eyes gleaming. “It’s for the cradles, not the convicts. In every newborn we find the flaws your research identified, and we correct them. We eradicate the disease before it begins.”
The sanitized rhetoric of the Third Reich suddenly feels chillingly close. “You’re talking about assembly-line eugenics,” I say.
“I’m talking about the end of violence,” he counters softly. “And that’s a task that requires a man of conscience. It requires you.” He places the prototype on the desk between us and fixes me with an unwavering gaze.
“With refinement—and your guidance—why treat the mind after violence erupts, when we can guide the very genes before it begins?”
“Chromosome therapy is still new—one mis-splice and we make a catastrophe,” I warn. “And if you tag every newborn—who draws that line, Steven?”
“I have… connections that can expedite approvals,” he says carefully. “The right people understand the urgency of this work.”
He drops his voice instead of raising it, which is worse.
“Remember the Spanish Flu cordons, Benjamin? My mother died nursing Brooklyn’s sick. Quarantine felt brutal—yet it saved cities. Genes are no different: fence the carriers, spare the crowd.”
He turns a photo toward me: a toothless boy mid-giggle, frozen forever. His knuckle taps the silver edge—once, twice. “He was six,” he says, to the photo, not to me. “Old enough to ride a bike. Not old enough for anything else.”
“Some losses,” he says quietly, almost to himself, “you spend the rest of your life trying to outrun.”
Is this D’Addario’s boy? Could it be that he too… that he lost his son? And I don’t… I simply don’t dare ask.
“Nature’s plague killed fifty million, a force we can’t control. But the dead of this last war—soldiers and children both, more than seventy million? That wasn’t nature. That was a human choice. And a choice, Professor,” he says, “is simply a flaw in the design. A design we can correct.”
“And if a charismatic leader waves those numbers like a flag?” I ask.
“With Washington and the Agency behind us, we police the misuse. Your chimp protocol, scaled to human blood—same principle, broader canvas.”
“And those already wired for violence?” I ask. “Psychopaths don’t vanish because a graph says so.”
“Exactly—habit is harder than heredity. Our gene apparatus is primarily for the next generation—guide the young before biology hardens into destiny. For the adults? We’re funding behavioral conditioning. The best psychologists money can buy. Two tools, one objective: fewer Hitlers, more humanity.”
I open my mouth to object again, to insist on more checks, but he leans back, steepling his fingers, as if the eradication of violence were a simple logistical problem.
“You don’t understand the scale of what you’re proposing,” I say, my voice low. “Think about the logistics. The ‘warrior gene’ is a one-in-a-million needle in the haystack of the general population. If you want to find the needles, you have to go to the one place they all pile up: the penitentiary system. Your subjects wouldn’t be volunteers; they’d be psychopaths. Do you really think they’ll just… volunteer?”
“Do we give a virus a choice before we eradicate it?” he says.
“They’re not a virus, they’re men! This is still a democracy, Mr. D’Addario. We can’t just engineer an entire generation to your specifications.”
“People always scream about ‘freedom’ when they are terrified of the cure,” he replies coldly. “A plague we couldn’t choose, and a war we did. One was fate. The other was freedom—and freedom bought the larger pile of corpses.”
He looks past me, at a ghost in the room. “It’s always a question of which price you are willing to pay, Benjamin. The price of freedom, which brings chaos and random cruelty? Or the price of order, which demands sacrifice?”
He turns from me and glides to the window, pushing it open another inch. The sharp blare of a taxi horn and the distant clang of a trolley suddenly flood the room. He lets the noise hang in the air for a beat, one hand resting on the sash, as if he has just proved something.
“The last war, Benjamin… didn’t it teach you anything? The evil of man isn’t some romantic notion.” He leans forward. “It’s a flaw in the code. And I intend to fix it.”
He keeps his back to me, watching the city below. “But do not make the mistake of thinking the flaw is only in the gutter, Benjamin. The thug in the alley is at least honest; he wants your wallet. The true rot? It wears a tuxedo. It shakes your hand at the gala while hiding a knife in the other hand. It flies to private islands where the laws of God do not apply. That is the true darkness. And you cannot arrest that kind of rot with a badge.”
I stare at his reflection in the glass. A millionaire railing against the very circles he moves in. It should sound delusional. It doesn’t, quite.
But then he turns back to me, and the light hits his face. There is no irony there. Nothing in it is display, nothing aimed at anyone. God help us, he truly believes he is the cure.
“No,” I say. “Not for the cradles.”
D’Addario doesn’t wait for me to finish. He just watches me, a flicker of something unreadable in his sharp eyes. “I see,” he says softly. He walks back to the film projector, not with disappointment, but with a new purpose.
“Perhaps your priorities lie elsewhere.” He clicks a small switch on the machine, and a new film begins to play. The footage is sharp, intimate.
It’s from two Christmases ago, at the reserve. I’m sitting by a small, crackling fire as Kibo, now a powerful young adult, gently fumbles with the brightly colored paper on a small gift I’d wrapped for him. My breath catches.
The image on the screen is so sharp it steals the air from my lungs. The sound of Kibo’s breathing, amplified by the projector, feels obscene in this sterile room. A single tear escapes. “Kibo… How do you have all of this?”
D’Addario turns the projector off, the sudden darkness making the room feel smaller.
“The ‘how’ is less important than the ‘why,’ Professor,” he says softly. “We make it our business to understand the assets we believe in.”
“What are you saying? I don’t follow,” I ask.
“I have intelligence suggesting Russian syndicates, possibly with ties to the Red Army, are behind this. What happened to your troop wasn’t an isolated incident. We’re tracking something much larger. Join us, and finding Kibo becomes our top priority.”
I look from his face to the blank projection screen where a ghost of my past life still lingers. He’s offering me the one thing in the world I want.
The Russian words from the jungle—Быстро, быстрее!—flash in my mind. “Those things…” I murmur to myself, “they weren’t just men. The way they moved, the speed… it was wrong.” D’Addario places a calming hand on my shoulder.
“The chaos of an attack can play tricks on the mind, Professor. What matters is the result.” He looks me straight in the eye. “Let’s bring Kibo home.”
“Mr. D’Addario, I… I…”
“Is everything okay, Professor? You look a little pale,” he says.
“I’m fine, it’s just…” I say, trailing off. “There’s a… a low hum. Can you hear it? It’s making my head feel…”
Blinding light erupts from a crystal prism. Ozone burns. I glance politely at my watch to excuse myself—but freeze. The room tilts—and then a gap, the same hole the jungle dropped me through. One breath I’m reaching for the chair; the next I’m already gripping it, with no memory of the moment between. My watch reads the same minute it read before. My body swears otherwise.
“What in—?”
D’Addario stands half-smiling, half-worried; the glare swallows him, as if he’s part of the light.
“Are you okay, Professor?”
“What was that?”
“A fluctuation from Ackerman’s coil. We’re running high-energy tests upstairs,” he says. He doesn’t dismiss the flash; he simply observes me. “Eyes on the real work, Professor.”
The lamp steadies. I check my father’s watch again: steady, correct, as if nothing happened at all. Somehow, that is worse. My collar is unbuttoned. I did not unbutton it. And there is a smell on my own sleeve that belongs in a theater and not in an office—the sweetish, rubbery smell of a mask held over a face—and I find that I am very thirsty.
“Let me call my assistant,” he says, pressing a single button on the heavy, black intercom on his desk. “Henry will bring you some water.” The door glides open almost instantly. An immaculate man in a vest—Henry—silently offers me a glass.
My hands tremble as I put down the water glass. The room still feels wrong, like reality hasn’t quite snapped back into place.
Twice now. Once under a jungle canopy, once in a Manhattan office—the world skipping a stitch. In the jungle I came out of it alone, half-drowned, grateful. This time, when it steadied, a calm man was watching me come out of it. I don’t have the physics for what that light does to a minute. But I have the pattern, and to a scientist a pattern is a debt: sooner or later, it collects. I wind my father’s watch anyway, badly. Some part of me wants one instrument in this room that answers only to me.
I need to ask him—demand answers about that coil, about this… distortion. But his eyes are on me, so steady, and the words just… die in my throat.
He’s perfectly still. His expression is one of calm, professional concern, yet there’s a tension in his shoulders, a rigid control. It’s too precise.
The water in the glass is visibly shaking. He watches the tremor for a beat, then smoothly changes the subject.
“They say we’re all made of the same material,” he says, trying the words on like a borrowed coat.
“That’s my Times headline,” I say.
“Was,” he says softly. “Now it’s ours.”
He doesn’t look away. “Shared instincts can drown civilizations. Jung called it the collective unconscious and thought it a curiosity. I think it is a set of strings, and I think somebody is going to hold them. Help me edit those instincts.”
“If I’m in… We’ll need independent review,” I say. “Protocols. Full access.”
“You’ll have whatever you ask for. Numbers don’t lie. And total discretion—tell colleagues only that Novus offered you a post. No details. You have forty-eight hours, Professor. I trust you’ll make the wise decision.”
I nod. Anthropoid Labs is home, yet Novus is every geneticist’s dream—and a secret I must guard. I rise. Out in the corridor the TIME cover is still there, my own face glaring back. If four bases can silence a killer instinct, what else can they do? Somewhere between a Ugandan cage and a Manhattan high-rise I may have opened a door no man can close—and Novus is waving me through. Outside, I pause on the curb, my pulse out of step with the easy jazz behind me, still keeping time to everything he’s laid out.
If flesh is clay and we hold the wheel, who decides which shapes are ‘fit’? Tyranny in a lab coat is tyranny still.
And somewhere, in a place I can’t yet imagine, those masked figures might be doing things to Kibo that make my research look like child’s play.
