Director Achaikos shuffled the papers he was struggling to hold. The first sheet had gone adrift when Dr. Williams began her introduction and he had no hope of finding it again, or of finding his way to the meaning of it all.
"Can I be of assistance?" Dr. Wulfram said quietly. The Director shook his head. What he really wanted was for the whole conference to begin again. He had found it difficult to get his head around Dr. Williams’ account, which had been full of equations, formulae and what-ifs.
"So," Dr. Williams said, "to recap. We have successfully created three groups of infant specimens, six in each group."
"But you’ve lost others," a woman said. Who was she again? Achaikos remembered being introduced to her at some point. Ah, that was it, she was a reporter.
"Of course," Dr. Williams said dryly. "One always expects some collateral reduction in every experiment."
"But we are talking about human infants," the reporter said. "Not petri dishes of anonymous cells, or insects, or plants."
"Of course, human infants. I’m sorry, do you not understand the nature of our experiments Miss M’Benga?"
The other delegates to the conference were muttering. Some obviously shared Miss M’Benga’s misgivings. A man stood up and banged the table.
"Let’s just cut right through this nonsense," he said, "or we’ll never get to the meat of this, for the gods sake, some of us have homes to go to eventually."
Achaikos also stood up, a broad grin on his face. "Thank you Bill," he said. "Dr. Williams, perhaps it would be helpful if you outlined the aims of this experiment. Which, may I remind everyone, we all signed off on the proposal as the best way to fix the problems in our society."
The sun shone brightly through the windows. Most of the delegates took advantage of the break in the talk to drain their water jugs. A posse of young people, technicians from the human research laboratories, refilled them. Dr. Williams rubbed her forehead. She had a headache coming on and she despaired of ever getting to the point where she could show them all what had been done, in their name. She suddenly looked up and smiled. Of course, show them. If talking was getting her nowhere, showing them the children might do the trick.
"Delegates," she said brightly, "might I suggest we all go for a little walk, as far as the nurseries. Then I can show you what we’ve been doing."
No one demurred. There was a mass exodus towards the doors of the conference room. The technicians all knew what to do: attach themselves to a group of three or four of the eminent delegates, and escort them. It was like a school outing, so many smiles and so much chatter as the delegates sauntered across the lawn to the research labs. Really, the more important the delegate, the more child-like they were. Dr. Williams smiled, as she found herself walking next to Director Achaikos.
"How are you coping?" she said quietly. "You were thrown into this at the deep end without any time to prepare."
"I admit to being all at sea," he said, with a smile. "I had only just been told about the concept of creating three genders where we were content with two"
"Were we content though?" Dr. Williams said. "You know how it’s been lately. Too many people fighting over the same things. Not enough mates, no one wants to do the menial tasks, country fighting against country. Something had to be done."
"Yes, but this? Tinkering with what we already have and creating new people. Do we have the right? Just because something’s broken, doesn’t mean it has to be fixed, or so my mother always told me."
Dr. Williams smiled, thinly. "But if it is broken, there is nothing wrong in trying to fix it. At least if we’ve tried and it still cannot be fixed, well, at least we’ve tried."
Achaikos nodded and sighed. What did he know? He was only shoved into the position of director of scientific research at the last moment when his predecessor committed suicide. One theory was that she couldn’t cope with the results of the first experiments.
"Tell me Doctor," he said, "was it really so bad? The first efforts I mean."
"Worse than bad," Dr. Williams said sadly. "We lost so many of the first infants we implanted. Most died before birth, which was a mercy. The ones who were successfully born were the stuff of nightmares. We had to euthanise them. The women who bore them suffered dreadfully."
"So, was it worth it?"
"You tell me," Dr Williams said, with an impish smile. "Just come and see."
By now the entire conference had reached the special research labs.
"I must ask you all to be as quiet as you can from here," Dr Williams said. Her voice carried without her having to shout. Two technicians opened the doors and the delegates, quietly, surged through. There was a long corridor with a glass roof, allowing for natural light. On the left side of the corridor there were three rooms, and another three empty rooms on the right. The rooms they saw resembled the nurseries at any maternity hospital, with large viewing windows. In the first one, six babies lay in cribs. They were fine, strong-looking infants, some sleeping and some gazing around themselves.
"The three at the back are the females," one of the technicians said, "and the three in the front are males."
"They are all in good condition," Dr. Williams said. "In effect, they are our control group. We have not given them any of the serum that Dr. Harper created, nor have we made any adjustments to their DNA. They are as any child would be, born into this world. Now this next one is very interesting."
The group moved to the next room. Again, six babies in cribs, three and three. But they were smaller than the first group, quietly lying where they were placed.
"Because the first group was the first created," Dr. Williams said, "we named them the alpha group. This batch was named the beta group. We gave them some of Harper’s serum and their DNA was manipulated. We envisage these children growing into the world’s thinkers and doers, if I might state it in the most basic terms. While the alpha children will grow to rule, the betas will enforce the rule. Do you understand?"
There was much nodding and even Miss M’Benga was silent, while she frantically scribbled her notes. The technicians led the crowd to the third room, in which there were six babies in cribs, all markedly smaller than the other two groups. Two of them were whimpering, two of them were on the verge of tears, and any moment now there was going to be a mass outburst of crying.
"These are the omegas," Dr. Williams said. She crowded closer to the window and gazed down at the frightened babies with something approaching a predatory glee in her eyes. "These, ladies and gentlemen, are the mates of our first group. They have scent glands and each has their own individual scent, as do the alphas. When an alpha choses a mate, they will respond to each other’s scent. The omegas were created to be completely submissive and obedient to the alphas. You can see that they are smaller and frailer than both the other groups."
The omega babies all began to cry.
"Watch," Dr. Williams said as a young nurse entered the omega nursery.
"Quiet," she said. Not shouting, no anger in her voice. But all six babies immediately stopped crying, though one or two hiccuped. They all stared at the nurse.
"She is essentially an alpha, as are we all," Dr. Williams said quietly. "The omegas are programmed, for what of a better word, to obey the voice of an alpha. This was a quite unwarranted side effect, but an exciting one."
She nodded to a young technician who stood at the side of the window.
"We had another interesting outcome," he said. "Two of the omegas, one male and one female, presented with both sets of genitalia each, and the male also developed with an intact uterus. In effect, without intending to, we created a fourth gender."
"You can see the possibilities, I’m sure," Dr. Williams said. "Greater choice of mates for the alphas, leading to a more diverse combination. We did wonder if we should sterilise or euthanise these two. But after discussion, we decided to wait and see how they develop."
She led the way back to the conference room, where busy people had laid out coffee and biscuits. The delegates fell on these refreshments like starving locusts on a field of wheat. Achaikos made sure he sat beside Dr. Williams, in a quiet part of the room.
"So what’s the next step?" he said, passing her a plate of shortbread.
"Next, we let the babies grow," she said. "Each group will have their own living quarters and two nurses to look after them. When they’re at school age, we will educate them appropriately."
"And what will be appropriate for the omegas?"
"A more basic education than that given to the betas, that’s for sure. We don’t intend them to be the world’s great academics, though we may encourage them to be more creative. They will need to develop nurturing skills as future parents, so that will be a part of their education. When they all reach the age of 18 we will decant the betas to universities. There are several who have expressed an interest in taking them on. We will also be gently introducing the alphas and omegas to each other. We expect them to have paired off and hopefully begun procreating by the age of 21."
"Such a long time," Achaikos said.
"This is important Director," Dr Williams said firmly. "We need to know how successful the experiment is likely to be before we begin creating more. There’d be no point if none of them could breed."
Achaikos shuddered. The very thought of these 18 innocent babies eventually birthing babies of their own was distasteful, but he understood why Dr. Williams had to consider it.
"Think of it," Dr Williams said excitedly, "where we were a world divided into male and female, we are now divided into four genders. A world where your gender code is more important than your skin colour or your nationality. That will determine where you live and how you live. We could end world conflict at a stroke. That makes it worth it," she added, striking the table with a fist. "In the beginning was the word evolution, and the word became flesh."
Achaikos smiled. "Here is the root of the root, and the bud of the bud, and the sky of the sky, of a tree called life," he countered with a line from his favourite poem.
"The tree now has more branches than it began with," Dr Williams said.
Achaikos munched a piece of shortbread and considered the future. The sky above Atlantis was blue and cloudless. But in his imagination he saw storm clouds gathering, and a great deal of conflict and chaos, until the new developments were old enough to rule. And to serve. And to breed. With hope, not until he was too old, or too dead, to care.