It was a slow day at the lab as there wasn’t much to do. All samples the Splerions had brought a year ago had been analyzed, categorized and filed away. They hadn’t brought much. Only the fungi they had promised, those had arrived and flourished on earth, just as promised. Several teams were already working on the best ways to integrate them into the food supply without the normal population noticing.
Recently, they had been able to make a steak out of the stuff …
Rick winced. A steak made of mushroom. They had told him that nobody would notice, but the thought was making him sick. A steak made of space mushrooms …@suesa
The ground vibrated slightly.
… the ground vibrated slightly? Rick looked around in confusion. His area wasn’t known to have many earthquakes. None at all in the past few centuries, if he remembered right. So what was this?
His phone chimed, notifying him that he had just received a message. He pulled it out and looked at the short text which had been sent from his superior.
Code Blue.
The Splerions had finally shot some Mystacinidans out of orbit.
Another messaged arrived, which contained coordinates. Rick rushed to his car and drove to the specified location. What he saw there left him speechless for a moment.
A spaceship had crashed into the dried out ground. Smoke was rising from many locations and he could see a severed wing which probably belonged to one of the Mystacinidans.
The designated emergency teams had already arrived and were slowly pulling apart the spaceship.
”I have two living ones!”, someone shouted. Rick moved toward the voice and saw a man pulling two tiny bat-like creatures out of the ship. They seemed unconscious.
”How many more are there?”, Rick asked.
”Three”, said the man. ”Five in total but the other three seem to be dead.”
Rick sighed. He had hoped for more living ones.
”Alright, bring them back to the lab. Put the living ones in the cubes, we don’t want them to die the moment their personal air supply empties.”
The man and some others followed his order. Everyone was moving around swiftly and efficiently. That’s what Rick liked about this whole institution. Everybody was so professional all the time.
He went over to his car to drive to the lab too.
Not much later he was standing over the dead body of one of the dead Mystacinidans, holding a scalpel.
”Everyone ready to start this dissection?”, he asked. The two women who were with him in the room nodded. He was glad to have them here. One of them was a particularly great zoologist, the other one a not less great geneticist. Both should have outranked him by a lot, but he had seniority. Not long and he would retire, making room for them …
”Okay, I’m starting my cut ventral right where the sternum seems to end.” He did as he said. To his surprise, there were a lot of muscles. With the wings located on the back, he didn’t expect that so much muscle mass would be needed around the chest, like with birds.
He continued cutting the alien open.
”It’s a real shame”, he suddenly remarked, ”that this species already has a name.” The zoologist looked up from the alien and in his face.
”Why so?”, she asked. ”Did you want to name it yourself?”
”I always wanted to name something after myself. Or my wife.”
”You don’t have a wife.”
”I know, but how romantic would that have been?” He chuckled.
”There aren’t that many rules when it comes to naming a species. I can be sure nobody else discovered and identified this species so I could have been the one naming it. But no, they just have to be named already.”
”You would need to publish a paper about it anyway”, the zoologist reminded him. ”And we can’t do that.”
”Not yet, yes. But maybe someday.” He gave her a crooked smile and she laughed.
It took a few hours but then they had finally finished the dissection.
”Tomorrow, same time?”, Rick asked the zoologist and she nodded.
”I’m curious to see how the other one looks from the inside and if there are any significant differences to this one”, she said and then left.
Rick looked over to the geneticist.
”Do you have everything you need?”
”Yes, I think so. I just need to purify everything, isolate mRNA, write it into DNA, label it with a fluorescent dye and then I can finally do my microarray!”
”You seem a bit annoyed”, Rick remarked. She shook her head. Then nodded.
”Almost everyone in my team is sick. I’ll have to do everything myself. I forgot how annoying it is to not be able to delegate most of the work.”
”I can come help you”, Rick offered. ”I’m done for the day anyway.” She seemed relieved.
”That would be nice.”
Together they walked over to her lab and started the procedure.
It was important that they analyzed the alien on a genetic level and one of the methods they needed to use was a microarray analysis. This analysis allowed them to check which genes were active in which part of the body. This could give them even more information than just the DNA itself.
”Did you hear of project Nina?”, the geneticist suddenly asked Rick. He raised his eyebrows.
”This is the first time. Why?”
”I’m not comfortable with it. They … They are … They want …”, she swallowed hard and bit her lip. ”They want to create hybrids”, she finally blurted out.
Rick didn’t understand. ”Hybrids of what?”
” Mystacinidans and humans.”
”What? How? Why?”
”Well, sexual reproduction isn’t possible, for obvious reasons. Even on earth, it’s often impossible for similar species to produce offspring and if they can do it, it’s usually sterile. So they want to genetically engineer a chimera.”
”That’s … that’s so wrong”, Rick said. She just nodded.
”It’s the real reason I asked you to come here today. I sent my team home. You’re the only one I can trust with this because I knew you’d be repulsed by it too. We need to do something!”
”I will think of a solution”, Rick said.
Sources:
How Newly Discovered Species Get Their Weird Names
Scientists Can Study an Organism's Entire Genome with Microarray Analysis
Baffling Genetic Barrier Prevents Similar Animals from Interbreeding
Origin and evolution of animal hybrid species
The uneasy Truth about human-animal hybrids
Animal Hybrids: Ligers and Tigons and Pizzly Bears, Oh My!
Picture taken from pixabay.com
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Hybrid of Mystacinidans and humans? Omg!! fiction's got weird :)
Nice piece
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Everybody (many people I chatted with) wanted to have sex with the alien so I guess I had to make it possible
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Sex with alien could be a weird fantasy, you know. For me, I like experimentations
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I have seen enough of
hentaidocumentaries to know what sex with an alien looks like.No but really, this brings a lot of depth in the story. Not the chimera but handling Rick "in the past" like this.
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That's the goal :)
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The crash nice
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Upvoting your own spam comments is bad behavior
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Seems like Rick may be a player. He kind of seemed to be flirting with the zoologist, and the geneticist seems to have a past with him, since she "Knew" he would agree with her. Fine story still.
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Rick just likes working with great professionals and appreciates his colleagues for their skills, male or female :P
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Awosome science biology.
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Instereting story but i have a question which is ,Are alien truly exist ?
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No idea. Probably not in form I described
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Muy interesante
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A beautiful and inspiring story, at least when reading this story will arise the motivation for an increasingly visible illustration of the future, that aliens and other extraterrestrials are real, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future he will interact with us, as a creature oldest in the world, I like and want to spend time reading this story.
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amazing meng
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PC server?" In 2017? Truly? Before you know it, they'll have the screen make blip commotions each time a key is pushed on the keyboard.
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.... What?
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Wow! Interesting to see that the mystacinidans actually have/might have DNA, mRNA, etc…, basically using the same mechanisms as life on Earth.
I always wondered if life in other planetary systems would have the same building blocks as in our biodiversity.
I've read your previous series on this story and you mentioned that mystacinidans use D-aminoacids, instead of L-aminoacids.
I wonder how complex developing a chimera between two very distinct species, at a molecular level, would be. Two proteins, with the exact same aminoacids, but one carrying D-aminoacids and the other L-aminoacids, would probably be different structurally (I'm not completely sure though). So, converting one of the species molecular structure to hybridize with the other seems almost impossible. At the least with the current tech, so I bet this project Nina won't be successful and Rick can relax :)
We'll see what happens next!
Thanks for sharing.
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Why? Why would they want that? Just to see if it was possible?
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Cause humans suck (and @artlover made great concept art)
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wow..this is funny post and also weird ..but it's make my day.
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I see that you flagged several of my posts, probably as a reaction to me flagging your spam. Are you sure that you want that? Are you sure you want a flag war with me?
I saw that you got a steemSTEM upvote recently. If you keep spamming and flagging me out of spite I'll make sure you'll never receive one again.
Think hard :)
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It is probably because of your rough behavior on the way you welcome new comers and the way you guide them. I was new in steemit and when i saw some of the person sharing their link I also did the same thinking that we need to do it just like blogging. But I was unaware of the term spamming here since my content was original. But though without explaining it to me how this system works you simply flagged me and that for what? Through my first article only I earned a good reputation of 46 at the same time a good amount of earning but because of your flagging my reputation point downgraded to 33 and earning turned to $3.33 from $38.5. I didn't wanted to raise any war because it's not my way. I just wanted to make you realize how it feels when you are being flagged for a reason of which you are not aware of!! So that from next time onward you could notice who is new and who is old and probably how to guide them. Moreover, earning is not my concern, I just like writing so I do write!
I hope you have got what I wanted to explain!! Earning of reputation point is not a matter, if my article will be rewarding definitely I will receive it...
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You didn't lose any rep or money because of me. I flagged you with so little that it didn't impact your reputation at all.
You probably spammed so much that many people flagged you.
And sorry but no the "I'm new" argument doesn't work for me. It should be obvious that it's incredibly rude to just drop a link to your post under someone else's content without even saying a word.
There is so much spam every day under my posts. I'm not willing to explain to everyone why they shouldn't spam.
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I don't appreciate spam being posted below my posts
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This post made my day
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