"Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful" Will Send Shivers Down Your Spine

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful began with a revelation. After reading dozens of articles about gene editing, methods of growing human organs outside the body, and all manner of coming wonders, I thought, “This is it. Soon we’ll be able to eradicate disease, extend our lifespans, turn humans into superhumans!” But a few minutes later, I had a very different thought: “We will definitely find some way of messing this up in spectacular fashion.”

This novel was born in the space between my first thought and my second thought.

The part of the story you're about to read explores one of the trickier aspects of "improving" humans — the fact that it's hard to pin down the underlying causes of intelligence. Alexios is a boy whose parents thought they were giving him every advantage. By modifying his brain when he was just an embryo, they hoped to a gift him with a vastly superior life.

Things didn't work out in quite the way they expected...

1. THE INTRUDER

Eight waded.

Hag died wet. Headed twig. Dig wethead.

These are the words in my head when I wake up. Do you see the pattern? Each of these phrases uses the same letters; each one is an anagram of the real phrase that is posted in my mind today, neon letters across my frontal lobe: Dead weight.

I am speaking in metaphor. There are not real neon letters.

Dead weight. Ten letters in an unpleasant order. But rearranged, they are not so bad: Had wit edge. Better.

The world is perfectly clear this morning. I emerge from my sleeping habitat wearing the rebreather, and when I blink my eyes to see in the water, I have a view past the kelp forest, past the sunken arc of the old Ferris wheel with its fringe of seaweed, to the encircling net and even to the small island beyond. That is a distance of seventy-five yards from where I’m floating. Seventy-five yards, you may be interested to know, is nearly the limit of how far one can see underwater, even with the eyes I have been given.

My given eyes.

Envy my siege.

Anagrams again. Am I explaining too much? I never know how much I should explain about puzzles. To me they are breath and blood. (Metaphor.) To others I have noticed they are less important.

The dolphins are patrolling the perimeter of the sea paddock, too far away for me to make out anything more than their silhouettes through the kelp, but my ears know them individually by the sounds of rusty door hinges, squeaking balloons, fishing reels unwinding — their signature speech patterns, which travel to me easily through the water.

I will check in with the dolphins later, but the first order of business every morning is to survey the flock of chimeras. They are huddled close to my habitat, as they usually are, because they prefer the shallows, where the finest, tastiest sea grasses grow in the sandy sea bottom and where the sun heats the water. This morning, sunlight kisses the chimeras’ mottled backs, winking and flashing because of ripples along the ocean’s surface.

Sunlight kisses. This, too, is a figure of speech. Sunlight is merely visible radiation with no awareness of what or how it touches.

As I float toward the chimeras, I stretch my arms, which I have been instructed to do frequently after reentering the sea each morning, in order to keep up my new skin’s elasticity. I am a rubber boy in a world with no bounce.

Hello, Alexios! the chimeras say as I get closer, though their words are only grunts and clicks. Several of them turn in my direction as I approach, their whiskered faces and small, sunken eyes curious for a moment, before turning back to the seaweed.

The chimeras are manatees, by the way. You can think of them as underwater pandas, if you are one of those people who love all sorts of creatures and like to consider them in the most charming terms possible. To me, however, they are sufficient as themselves without such comparisons.

That last one feels almost appropriate, though the manatees aren’t deadpan—in fact, they are quite expressive. Here comes Bluebear to make this point for me, doing a barrel roll and greeting me with enthusiastic morningtime chirps and grunts. I switch the translator on my chest to “Manatee” — not because I need its help to understand, but because it is my job to teach the translator what I have already learned. The language of the manatees is rudimentary, easy to grasp once you get used to listening. Bluebear is saying hello and asking me to scratch him. When I check the readout on the translator, it says hello hello hello touch scratch. Excellent.

Scratch, scratch, Bluebear says, his whiskery jaw snuffling toward my face and his flippers almost pulling me into an underwater panda hug.

I enter “scratch” into the translator and it grunts the word out into the water. That is the translator’s real use to me, as a means of vocalizing to my colleagues. The Blessed Cures Consortium has changed many things about me, but they haven’t given me the power of underwater speech. At least, not yet.

While I scratch Bluebear’s back, I examine my own arms and skin. I don’t like to look, but I am supposed to make this examination at least twice a day — once in the habitat and once in the water — to see if I am healthy. My skin is grayer than the natural skin I was born with, and it is rubbery, as I mentioned, because they made it for me out of dolphin skin cells cultured in a mixture with my own. I note that my fingernails continue to disappear as the new skin takes over, but there is still enough of them left to allow me to scratch Bluebear to his satisfaction. Fingernails are useful for some things, but they are an unnecessary luxury here. What is important is that my fingers retain their nimble human agility, which they do. Really, when was the last time fingernails were essential to humans? Probably before we learned to walk upright, and even then, they were weak claws at best — a kind of dead weight.

There it is again: dead weight.

The neon letters across my brain flicker when I am distracted, but they never quite go out. Metaphor.

Bluebear has turned over so that I may address his stomach. I have named him Bluebear because this name sounds like the word blubber with the word bear mixed in. I know about blubber and bears, and human evolution and algebra and world events, and so many other things from my learning sessions in the Genetic Radiance clinic when I was younger and from my ongoing lessons here at the Blessed Cures Consortium’s clinic, but I have always been told that the key to true learning is being able to connect facts with the real world. These connections are especially important for someone like me — or so I’ve been repeatedly informed. Naming a manatee Bluebear is an example of me trying. I have named everyone here in the sea paddock, and in each case I have made a connection to the world.

Bluebear’s chirp changes. Play? he is suggesting. I check the translator, to ensure that it has correctly interpreted this sound. Fun, it says. That is close enough for manatee work. A joke.

I type in “follow” and the translator squawks out the correct sounds. Bluebear brightens and when I swim toward the center of the flock, he follows right behind me. The large calf I have called Splotch, due to the single splotch of moss on his back, gets in line behind Bluebear. Follow-the-leader is a favorite manatee game. Through a blue world of filtered sunlight, they are zeppelins gracefully trailing me.

Metaphor.

After I have circled the whole flock twice, with Bluebear and Splotch as my shadows, I settle to the ocean floor next to a manatee called Mountains. I have named him after the pattern on his back, made of algae and small barnacles, which looks very much like a mountain range. In point of fact, it is a near replica of a section of the Ural Mountains that you can plainly find on a satellite map of the world. I have even managed to move one of the barnacles into a slightly more accurate position.

Mountains sees me, but he does not stop the careful progress of his mouth through the sea grass. I scratch his hide, which causes Bluebear to float between me and Mountains, in order to divert my scratches back to himself.

“Go,” I say through the translator.

Bluebear tosses his head and chirps, but he is too friendly to argue, and in a moment, he and Splotch are lumbering to a free patch of seaweed on the other side of the flock.

“See,” I tell Mountains, who slowly, at blimp speed, rotates so that his stomach is toward me. I have told him I wish to “see,” and he has correctly understood that I wish to see his cuts. They lie on either side of his abdomen, each about nine inches in length, discolored, but healing. The sutures are disappearing as they are meant to do within days.

Mountains patiently regards me with his tiny eyes. It occurs to me that he is studying my Frankenstein limbs while I study him. He has seen many humans in his life, but does he recognize that my head is too large and the wrong shape? Can he distinguish that my legs are not human at all, but separate long, powerful limbs, ending in flippers, almost as though a dolphin had been cut in half? Does the rebreather that covers my back, recycles my air, and lets out a constant stream of pinpoint bubbles appear to him a part of my body? Am I, to him, an unusual human or a different creature entirely?

Frankenstein.

Ten knifes ran.

My name is Alexios, as I think I have mentioned. This is a traditional Greek name, which means defender, though you have perhaps guessed that I am not a traditional Greek boy. And yet, are you filled with admiration? Behold in awe Alexios, defender of manatees!

I gently clear off the algae that has begun to grow over Mountain’s healing surgical scars. Then I tell him “Good” through the translator. He was taken to the surgery pod a week ago, where the clinicians removed a liver and a heart, which by now must be residing in their intended human recipient in some distant corner of the world. Mountains knows nothing about this human, and he never will. And he doesn’t know that he still has a bellyful of other organs waiting to be harvested.

Living organ tank.

Vagrant king lion.

That one pleases me, even though a manatee is nearly as far from a lion as you can get.

Chimera. It means a living thing that contains tissue from two or more distinct organisms. Humans have used pigs and sheep and even rats to grow human organs cheaply and safely. But manatees are so much larger, and their lumbering ways and gentle attitudes so ideal to peacefully cultivating alien tissue, that my employer, the Blessed Cures Consortium, chose them as far more perfect chimeras than lowly pigs. Also, they can hide manatees underwater and leave their competitors guessing.

I pat Mountains before allowing him to move off and wiggle his way back to the seabed between other members of the flock. Half of the manatees in the flock are full of human organs. The other half are the mothers, the ones who carry the chimera embryos and give birth to these living organ farms. The magic is done at the embryo stage, you see. Heart cells, liver cells, pancreas cells, even breast cells are grafted into the manatee embryo, where they grow alongside all the normal manatee parts.

Metaphor again. There is no magic, only science.

Chimera.

Or, switched around:

Ah, crime.

I survey the flock, looking for Handsome, who had surgery the day before Mountains, but — Enemy! Human!

The water erupts in urgent whistles and squeals and the entire pod of dolphins has materialized around me. Their flukes kick up silt and they are pairing off and doing intertwined barrel rolls, which is their way of saying that they are ready for action. They have spotted an intruder.

I switch the translator to “Dolphin” and have it squeak and click the signature whistle for Loud Mike, the biggest (and loudest) member of the pod. Loud Mike peels away from the others and swims so close that he brushes against my chest, which allows me to grasp his dorsal fin. I type in “all go,” and the translator chirps this at them. (There is no point in asking a dolphin “where?” because she can only show you anyway.) A moment later, we are off at full speed. The whole pod — seven dolphins in all — moves as one, because that is the way to approach an enemy. I hug Loud Mike’s back and position my body along his so that I am easier to carry.

The water gets deeper as soon as we leave the manatees’ grass beds. We whip through the kelp forest, where the leafy tentacles of green-brown, thirty feet tall, float on the current in a slow, dignified dance and silver flashes of fish dart from shadow to shadow. Then we are above the sunken amusement park that once stood on the Greek shore before the earthquake that calved off part of the coastline. The buildings of the amusement park have all but disappeared beneath coral and kelp in the deepest recesses of our paddock, but the Ferris wheel reaches up into the brighter water. The arc of its upper half, bearded with fantastic varieties of red and green algae that scintillate in the sunlight, provides mathematical entertainment for the part of my mind not consumed with the urgent situation: the circumference of the Ferris wheel’s “wheel,” the area of the “pie slices” formed by its radial struts, the amount of centrifugal force that would be produced at different rotation speeds.

I unhook my stunning weapon from the rebreather when we have gone past the amusement park. Here the sea floor falls steeply away into the deepest blue. And there is the net, that mesh wall from surface to seabed that keeps the chimeras and my dolphin guards corralled in the safety of the vast sea cage. I hold my weapon at the ready as we sweep up to the net. I have practiced this many times, and this is not the first intruder to come here on my watch. The Blessed Cures Consortium is a frequent target of industrial espionage.

He is there on the other side of the net. Full wetsuit with hood and scuba gear. In his hands is a large device that cannot be anything other than a high-resolution camera made to see long distances underwater. He is filming the manatees, of course, but as we approach, he turns to film us. When we are only yards from him, he releases the camera and puts his hands up, as if to say

His eyes grow wide in his goggles when he sees what I am, that I wear no goggles of my own, that my legs have been turned into something else, that I am as gray as my dolphin escorts.

I lift my stunner and he holds up his hands more urgently, asking for patience. He gestures to the surface as if to say Let’s discuss this, brother! Then he touches his heart and points upward again. What does this mean? I love you, fellow human? I feel a connection with you? My heart aches?

Unfortunately for him, the Blessed Cures Consortium has a shoot-first-and-ask-your-questions-later (if the intruder survives) policy. I have already pulled the trigger, releasing the dual torpedoes, each the size of my smallest finger. There is recognition in his expression that something has gone terribly wrong. Our intruder dives to one side, but the torpedoes have sighted him and they will find him. In the blink of an eye, the bullets are past the mesh and they pierce his wetsuit and embed themselves in his chest. A few drops of blood escape out into the water, and the smell of it sets off a storm of commentary among the dolphins.

The intruder flails, jitters, and then he convulses as the torpedoes unload tightly focused electrical currents through his torso.

Yes yes yes! Excitement! Happy! the dolphins are chittering all around me. Win!

The intruder goes limp. His mouthpiece has fallen out, and bubbles are pouring from his mouth, causing him to float downward.

I unsheathe the special knife at my waist, which is designed to handle the mesh of our perimeter net. Its black blade severs the elastic fibers of the mesh effortlessly, and with three quick slices, I have cut out a panel that drapes toward me, creating a doorway.

“Loud Mike! Quiet Mike! Constantine!” I say through the translator, which pipes out their signature whistles.

These three echo their whistles back to me: Roger, boss, we’re listening!

“Go take,” I tell them.

They are off through the opening I have made. Quiet Mike pulls the camera strap off the man and swims it back to me. Loud Mike and Constantine nose the limp body to the surface, then push it toward the tiny island that lies a short distance from our perimeter.

I myself surface for the first time today, feeling as always that I am a misshapen monster emerging from the deep. (Metaphor?) I allow my large head to peek above the water, where I blink to switch my eyes to air-sight. I am supposed to make sure that the intruder’s face is out of the ocean, so he has every chance of surviving. I can see the tip of Loud Mike’s nose above the water, poking the limp man repeatedly until half of his body lies above the water line, on the dry sand of the island. It is enough. If the man is alive, he will be able to breathe.

I look to my left, where, on the far side of the sea paddock, the low, long roof of Blessed Cures’ ocean clinic rises above the sand, and I let off a flare.

With another blink, I switch back to underwater vision as I dive down. In moments, the whole pod is reunited in the paddock. With a flick of the knife handle, I reverse its function, and I use it to heal the elastic of the net and seal the flap back into place.

Soon the vibration of a small boat motor reaches our ears. Someone is launching from the clinic to pick up the intruder, who will have to answer for his trespassing. Already, this feels very distant. A human problem for the world above. All traces of the man have been wiped from the ocean.

Except for the camera, which I am now holding.

Toy? asks Quiet Mike.

Toy toy toy?! echo the others. They set off in barrel rolls again, but these are playful and not menacing.

Play! someone says.

Play play play! is echoed throughout the pod.

I throw the camera at Shark Girl (named for her tendency to bite and her gender), who catches the strap with her flipper, then lets it fall so she can catch it with her fluke. The others crowd around, looking at the glass lens, the strap. It is passed back and forth between different dolphins, but they soon tire of it. The camera is heavy and sinks quickly — not an ideal dolphin toy. Shark Girl lets it fall when it next comes to her, and she picks up a piece of kelp instead, which she swims away with, the other six in pursuit.

I dive to the bottom and retrieve the camera.

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful is out on December 4 and can be pre-ordered now.

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