“You see; now did you have a car, before the blackout? Well I did. I had horrible a commute made no easier mind you by those metallic coffins. Actually a colleague of mine, my meta-friend, he has this whole philosophy about how cars were the extension of a woman’s womb, that a vehicle; aside from a bath tub, were the closest to safe most humans felt in the old city. They could lock their doors and keep intruders out. They could turn up the sound and make themselves warm, just like those nine glorious months in the womb. Of course this theory didn’t take into account seventy thirty peak traffic on Nove de Julho watching the windows of the car in front of you being smashed in and waiting, like grazing cattle, for gun wielding junkies to slowly cross the plain and milk you dry. In theory, it’s a sound philosophy. He has one for water and drowning as well which I find just dandy” said The Elderly Scientist.

  Marcos continued looking on confused, trying to follow the scientist’s teaching but finding himself completely lost.

  “What was I saying?” asked The Elderly Scientist.

  “You asked me if I drove a car and before that you were talking about, well, oh the drug and…” said Marcos being cut off.

  “The drug yes, oh the car, yes now I remember. Well, countless times I found myself in the position where my engine just wouldn’t start, especially on cold mornings. Now I would tie up some cables from the battery in my car to another and use the other vehicle to charge mine and jump start it. What we’re doing with the Oxytocin is no different. The problem here is that the car we’re jump starting, doesn’t have a battery. Without the empathy gene, there is nothing to charge. Think of it like having no fuel tank and to get your car going your just pouring ethanol all over the engine. We’re just washing her brain with Oxytocin. We started mixing with oestrogen as well and some other compounds like mdma and amphetamine. We inject The Mother and The Infant and try to recreate a birth moment. I read in a journal once, the mystic Parteiras, they called it the moment of love; when The Mother and Infant overdose on Oxytocin after birth, creating the self-preserving bond and more importantly, starting the lactating process. Obviously empathy was the key factor but so far we haven’t been able to recreate this moment. Instead, The Infants and Mothers just seize, convulse and stop breathing. Very disappointing” he said.

  “Anyway, trial and error brought us no closer to understanding our error. You see, a century of behavioural disassociation separated humans from the empathy gene; a century of repetitive thought and action; digital technologies, sciences, games, stimuli, music, fashion, you name it. Eventually, the human was conditioned to not need this gene and as such, nature has always had its ways of adapting, so to speak. Take language for example, another organic feature of nature and like empathy, one learned through repetition of emotional cycles; one that; If you don’t practice it, eventually you sweat it out. Like language, one can absorb and learn empathy by being surrounded by empathy, in that one can assimilate a language by being immersed in it and eventually their subconscious will acquire some emotional context. Like standing in the rain, eventually you will get wet. Now if that is your outcome then congratulations but if the heavens dry and you’re not in the company of water any more then you will dry. That can be said for the occurrence or rather lack of, empathy” he said.

  “We evolved, as you know and nature spliced this empathy gene from the reel. Undoing this natural evolution is proving more arduous than we first thought. We believed that the gene remained, but was hidden and that all we would need to do would be to try to make instinctual its necessity; for example, leaving a screaming crying baby; so hungry it will die if it doesn’t have a drop of milk, in the lap of say a young woman in what would be a prime breeding age; firm supple breasts, emotionally responsive. The idea initially would be that nature would call the gene into function, the woman would start to lactate and she would nurse The Infant. We have seen it in cats and dogs but humans just don’t learn. So many times we had to watch the infant die. It was upsetting you must understand, watching that Infant close its eyes and edging further from the solution you know is just beyond your reach. We never like to lose an infant, we simply don’t have the resources currently to lose samples willy nilly. Nature really made humans incapable of survival. I mean you compare to any other animal. Now dogs, that’s a superior species. Humans, they just lie there, crying, whereas the dog is born crawling to its mother’s breast or failing that, to a crevice or rock face, out of reach of circling predators.

  “You’re doing it again” said Marcos frustratingly; cutting him off before he went on another universal plain.

  “Sorry I do get excited some times. Anyway from our initial research, we found that re-learning the gene would take as much time as it took to unlearn it. This is why we have other departments now working at a more quantum level to find a solution. What we did realise though from our early tests was the influence on the other half of the equation; zero, one; love, fear; good, evil; up, down; etc, etc. We thought; what if we amplified the gap in the genes? How could we use this to an advantage? And so, our experiments have led us now where we focus on zero as opposed to one. When life hands you lemons, make a caipirinha. What if we could fill the genetic gap with something else? Empathy has the potential to influence so much subconscious interplay with ability and natural connection. The gene alone, or at least that space in genetics which is now void is a link between the sub and conscious states as well as the direct link with nature, universality; at least one of my colleagues is adamant on this, and more arguably, god. This void, this part of the human genome, this missing splice is the ethernet of the universe, the connector for the subconscious umbilical cord feeding directly to the cosmos and mankind. Imagine then, with that universal link, if in that gap we inserted for example the paternalism of a penguin, the awareness of a mountain goat, the decisiveness of a wild boar or the rationale of a cruel dictator; or a little bit of each” said The Elderly Scientist.

  Marcos felt lost for word, trying to comprehend exactly what The Elderly Scientist had even told him and how and why it came to be. An emotion swept through his conscious state willing him to question everything he was seeing and leading him to question everything that he believed.

  It felt wrong; this sensation and what he was seeing before his eyes; the antipode to his north, the centre of his philosophy; in his mind, the right he was doing to save mankind.

  “There is no waste in science. The more we help one the more we help the other. In this case, by focusing on the zero Infant; heightening its fear and compounding its abandon, we in turn heighten the other Infant’s sense of need and belonging. Equality. We also, make better use of the once abandoned Infant or Child. We make them into something beneficial. We can’t make the Mother love, but if we make the other one frightened enough then maybe nature will kick start its self-preservation again. It would be a shame, like my tea, for the zero Infant to serve no greater purpose than being a parallax to its opposite, trying to awaken a genetic response to its human disconnection. You’ll see what I mean, through here” said The Elderly Scientist.

  The two came to the end of the shrinking tunnel; the backs of their necks scraping against the cold concrete roof that was so low it almost kissed the earth.

  They entered through a crevice in the wall which took them to an unexpectedly large opening. Marcos was taken aback, The Elderly Scientist swelled with pride.

  “If you think this is impressive, you really should have tried the tea” he said.

  0011001000110111

  The figure in grey sat idle on the side of the road with his hesham bag in his hand and a cruel hook sitting by his feet, dried blood on his fingers and specked upon his face. He was out of The Nest; finally after years of torturous repetition and servant desperation from those about him, smiling wondrously but inside he knew they were all hollow, he could feel it.

  He had helped his sister escape their clutches and he sat waiting to meet her, a place their father had told them of, that at the end of the coldest day, when the grey sheath pulled back over the fawning city, they would meet, before the new dawn, and they would go together to New Utopia, as one.

  It had been many years since he had heard his father’s voice; since he had said good bye and been traded to The Collective. The whole deal of their trade and of The Child Market was for this; to get close enough to The Collective, to enter their business, garner their trust and to take back what was rightfully theirs; a father’s daughter and a brother’s twin.

  He had to train his voice to be not like his father’s so as to to be able to pass as just another Child, ripe for the picking without any suspicion. His goal was to infiltrate the impervious Nest, find his sister, no matter how long it took and get her out, no matter what that meant.

  He entered The Nest as a young boy and he escaped a young man and though he gave himself to their teachings - to their strangled will - he never once cleaned himself of his father’s face or of the sound of his assuring voice and what hurt more, was spending so many years inside that prison and feeling his twin so close yet not knowing where they kept her and what insanity they were administering to her.

  When he found her, he only had time to quickly hug her before he took her out of the laboratories and to the end of the field where she escaped through a small hole in a wire fence probably dug by the animals that made passage in and out of the field scavenging the crops. His escape would require much more in the art of lie; walking out with The Collective as one of their own, slipping into the night and waking to meet his twin and his father; waiting, where he waited now.

  Donal waited for so long that he fell in and out of dream, his head dropping to his lap as his consciousness crept away from the cold that pestered his skin. In his subconscious dreaming theatre, he stood alone in a pit of blackness.

  He could sense hungry wolves snarling and salivating somewhere in the distance. His senses told him that he was surrounded and the slightest movement would invite them to murder so he stayed completely still, trying in vain to calm his beating heart and shallow his breath.

  With his hands pinned to his side, the tremor wanting to build in his legs suppressed in the caverns of his mind; willing upon himself, absolute paralysis. A bead of sweat formed, just above his brow and it trickled down his nose to his inner eye, flooding it and blurring his vision.

  His every sense focused on ignoring the desire to move his hand and wipe away the water from his eyes. His every desire wanted to see what wasn’t coming.

  An itch started in his foot, in the arch and he told his brain it wasn’t real. The itch then ran up his leg and at the base of his spine, the fine hairs on his back started to tickle. He felt a million bugs crawling all over his body and as much as he wanted to squirm and shake of the sensation that he knew wasn’t real, he couldn’t, for the beasts that he knew were not really out there, would eat him alive.

  The snarling grew louder as the itch turned to burning at the nape of his neck and his focus compounded blocking all signals to and from his thalamus until his rising temperature brought another bead above the other eye and the bead ran slow and thick down the length of his nose and down to his lip. He tasted sweetness on his tongue.

  That made no sense.

  He licked his lips and fell to the ground under the incredible force of the charging wolves.

  He screamed; “father” but the weight pushed harder forcing his face into the cold ground. He screamed again, this time clinging to the tail of his desperation and following it back out of his subconscious state into wake where before him and hanging over his head sat a matted little dog, its tongue hanging from its mouth dripping saliva onto his face, his maniacal panting, stealing the empty silence from the cold grey August morning and his tail wagging haplessly as it did throughout most of his life.

  As Donal opened his eyes, Ruff barked appreciatively prancing forward and back, throwing his front paws forward and inviting Donal to play. The boy screamed and jumped back rushing for the claw that lay on the kerb just out of his reach.

  “Get back beast” he screamed waving the hook with his right hand far from his body and leaning to the left away from the dog trying to get his leverage to run.

  As he swang to the left, Ruff dove to the right and so on; the young boy in a sinister grey cloak brandishing a cruel instrument of torture trying in desperate vain to protect himself from an agile forceful beast whose only increment was to cause him pain or at least in his moments of panic, so he thought.

  As he waved the hook back and forth trying to fend off the savage beast, trying to hide the fear perpetuating through his defensive screams, what the matted dog heard from his action was “Yes, I would like to play” and thus Ruff sought no threat in his demeanour and no danger in his dialogue.

  Instead, he took upon the young boy’s invitation to play and wove and dove about, dodging his grasp, coming a little closer to tease the boy into chase, then running away exhilarated when his body just came out of reach.

  Eventually Donal stopped swinging the hook and stood upright, screaming at Ruff to stop. Immediately Ruff’s ears fell flat and his bum hanged low to the ground. He lowered his body to the wet earth and crawled slowly over to Donal, his big eyes looking up to the boy remorseful and obedient. His little paws pulled the earth that separated them under his cowering body until his snout touched upon the boy’s shoe.

  Ruff lowered his bum to the ground and sat upright, slowly lifting his head but the entire time, never taking his eyes of Donal’s, the dog, who had never for such a long time, sensed himself lower than a human and of the human, deserving of respect and of his wilful obedience. His ears stayed flat and his head moved forward to where the young boy now sat on the floor.

  The boy shook nervously, and as he should. Dogs were never kind to humans, not in a very long time. Ruff pushed his head forward until it lay on the boy’s lap and the heat from his body filtered through the boy’s clothes and warmed his body. He felt a shiver run up his spine as he and the dog sat completely still, seated by the kerb once again, waiting for Safrine and his father.

  Donal rested his hand on Ruff’s head and ran his fingers through his matted hair. The sensation brought him to ease. He let go of his conscious panic and just stared out into the distance, waiting, with the dog.

  He had spent the previous night hiding in the stairwell of the building behind. He didn’t remember much, everything had happened so fast, it was a blur. His heart had been racing and adrenaline had rushed through his every sense. He had only thought of one thing; escape and he would have done whatever he had to, to be back with his sister and his father; and if that meant lying, then so be it; if that meant living as a monster within a den of monsters, then so be it and if the effect of this had made him a monster, then so be it.

  He stared at the splotches of blood on his hands. He remembered walking from The Behemoth under the acuminate eye of two White Hearts wondering if they could sense his lie and whether the architecture of that night was just for his elaborate execution.

  Everything up to that point had seemed so simple; the infiltration, the learning, the studying, the pretending and the building of trust. But as he walked off into the night dragging the hesham bag behind his body, every beat of his heart seemed to scream of his treason dissentingly. Every breath seemed to carry with it, the breach of his trust and every step, in his own paranoid ears, seemed to spell of his exact direction, even though he crept off into a different part of the night.

  Inside the building, his memories fragmented, the heightened nor adrenaline rushing through his body scattered his immediate perception making it more difficult to form solid memories, images with emotional reference; smells, sounds, sights, senses on a canvas of conscious conception.

  All he could remember was swinging wildly into the dark with the cruel instrument in his hand, catching on something, what he thought was some cloth, maybe the bark of a tree. Feared by the sound of whispering in the blackness, thinking that The Behemoth had caught wind of his treachery and was waiting like heavy sleep; to sneak upon him, he swang that hook to and fro, his eyes pinned shut even though they were already painted closed by the darkness, his mouth clenched, gritting his teeth, thinking only of one; his sister and his father; family.

  He had heard screams but assumed they were what would come from the collection, keeping completely lifeless, clinging to the steel railing and at times ducking as he heard the rampant rush of feet pounding the steps, clearing his tiny body as they leapt into the darkness and away from something obviously more frightening than he. What came after that could have been anything and could have happened to anyone. His mind offered him little support and maybe for the better.

  Maybe he shouldn’t know what lived in the dark of his mind, in the recess of his memories. Maybe a boy should only feel that kind of fear once in their life. Whatever the reason, when it was he found himself clinging to the metal railing on what he knew must have been a stairwell because of the cool draft running through the centre of the room, his mind failed to make a back-up.

  But finally after what felt like an eternity, he was free and he despised that hornet’s nest so much. The Collective and especially those White Hearts were viscous savages.

  Under the guise of well-being, they committed daily torture on the innocent and weak Famined. They would speak of love, while they tore out your heart, they would speak of liberation, while you were bandaged in their binary bondage, they would speak of peace while they whispered sweet insanity into your dreams and they would speak of war while they cowered behind great walls, feverishly domesticating their enemy but never fighting for anything greater than the keeping of their own specific delusion.