A white room. The soft beeping of machines. An artificial life-form gestating in a tank. Tubes and wires connecting it to the outside world, the only things it knew. Its vitals climb prematurely. It’s sick, emaciated, shivering, and they have done this. Abused before it could even open its eyes— they found it fascinating. They would have to note down the long-term effects. They have done this, and merely look on as it coughs and splutters, bony limbs tangling in their monitors, not once thinking to help. If it went wrong, well, they were retired; he had called them onto the project, and so he would take the fall for them. No small feat for one of the heads of the division, who had crawled and scraped his way up the ladder.
He sat in a pool of printouts and medication vials, rubbing his hairless brow. Exhausted. What had they done— what had he done? Well, he supposed, just what they’d done to him. The irony made him pop an anti-nausea pill below his tongue, sucking on it instead of the rim of a bottle. Because he couldn’t. Not in front of them. He wouldn’t sink even lower than the unforgiving floor.
“Come on, project 5a82,” he whispered under his breath. It couldn’t hear him. Even if it could, what was it to do? They were the ones to mess up the chemical ratios with out-of-date tools, used only to prove to himself his own creators could have done better. Should have done better. It had just been their own faults that had held them back, he’d wanted to believe. Why else would something like him be created? And there he was, staring at an iteration of his own genome, and he knew why. It wasn’t wholly their tools or wholly their personalities, and there he sat, with— in his eyes— the worst of both.
“This isn’t working. It’s about to wake up. There’s nothing we can do after that.”
“I know,” he said.
“Was it worth it?” someone else spoke.
He wanted to lay his head in his hands. He wanted a drink. He wanted a pill. By some divine mercy, the vitals monitor began to wail, and he dashed out of the room in search of a nurse, the only one doing so. And by the time they had pulled the thing out, stabilised it, and gotten its body covered, his creators had all dispersed, unwilling to clean up the mess that came with life, just like the bad old days.