Age of Monsters by John Schneider (a book to read txt) 📕

And that seemed to be true of all the good monsters.  All the good conspiracy stories too – where there wasn't deliberate fraud, there was the suspension of disbelief – 'the fact that there's no evidence is in itself suspicious'.

That last one was a particular favorite in the 'we are not alone'-crowd.

That had been Tom's crowd.  'We are not alone' had been where his first interest in space had come from.

In his tenure, he had seen precious little alien life.

At least, he hadn't until now.

It was ironic – that same scientific education that had dispelled all those childhood myths, stood in utter defiance of what he saw before him now.

He was belatedly reevaluating what he believed to be possible.

On his screen, was a complicated computer mock-up of cell reproduction.

The details of the formula were classified – even to him.

The file's code-name was “Food of the Gods'.

Chapter 9

Tom didn't pretend to understand all the details – even some of the abstracts were above his head – he was a glorified pilot, after all.

The 'Food of the Gods' – named after the Wells novel – because it was exactly that.

At its most basic, the summaries described a chemical-compound related, among other things, to the pituitary gland – the gist being that, rather than genetically engineering an animal for size, the chemical was simply introduced into the system of a living creature.

According to this simulation, that organism would grow.

It was rather like injected energy – a tiny little fusion reactor for DNA.

Theoretically, you could order DNA to produce any result you desired – in this case, growth – via the activation of any number of contributing systemic mechanisms – from pituitary and other hormones, to genetic predisposition, to cell-reproduction and regeneration.

It was, of course, easy to get wrong.

The chemical had two substantial flaws – the first being that it only seemed to work on genetically-engineered organisms.

Secondly, when it did work, there were a couple of pesky side-effects.

The first thing was that the infected organism's irises would actually begin to glow – perhaps a reaction to the sheer energy being forced through its system – and always emerald green.

More problematically, however, the chemical killed any organism it infected – but only after causing mental deterioration similar to rabies.  The rate of deterioration was related to both dosage intensity and volume.

Tom couldn't find it explicitly stated how long a subject might survive in this rage-infected state, but it was clearly long enough.

It certainly explained a lot of what he'd seen below.

As he followed the research down the rabbit-hole, Tom was discovering how limited his security clearance really was – him – literally, the Eye in the Sky – the files he was attempting to access laughed at his attempts to hack past.

What he could get, however, was telling.

Most of these reports seemed to have been compiled literally within the last six months – very much in catch-up fashion – a lot of them referencing files he could not access directly.

It was as if someone had kicked over the Lost Ark in the warehouse, and they were now reviewing old records.

Nor was there any direct indication of the 'why' of it.  Original funding was apparently outside government – initially stemming from humanitarian, and most particularly conservation groups – the idea of resurrecting extinct species dated back to the sixties.

But evidently something had happened – sometime before the turn of the century – Tom didn't know if it was accident or breakthrough – and the government had stepped in.

Tom sighed – that was always right about the time things went south.

If he remembered right, it was also right about the time that Daisy the cloned sheep had made the headlines – kind of an imperfect duplicate – among other defects, it had aged prematurely, as if its genes were responding to the actual age of its parent.

Sitting where he was now, the former conspiracy-theorist in him wondered if Daisy herself was the hoax – a sub-par, VHS copy of an organism – a sad, boring reality for the public to absorb – and thus not worry about.

Further tin-hats were raised when he discovered the scientist who was apparently the primary subject of the government-acquisition – a name Tom actually recognized from his AM-radio days – a geneticist named Nolan Hinkle.

That really took Tom back – Hinkle had been a fixture-subject on early-morning conspiracy AM since the days of the earliest modern genetics research.

This had been back in the day when the mainstream world hadn't even fully accepted the process of evolution.  Hinkle was considered more than a bit of a kook – or a bit of an Einstein, depending on what books you read.

Based on what he was looking at now, Tom couldn't call it.

At best, you were stepping into Frankenstein-level moral-ambiguity.

Hinkle's research boiled down to the chemical manipulation and mutation of DNA – based on the very simple principle that all life is a chemical reaction – from conception, to development, to growth, photosynthesis, to respiration – an exchange of energy, activating chemical responses – intake of air, the digestion of food.

There was a particular focus on gigantism, both in individuals and evolved species.  Many evolutionary branches produced giants – it was certainly heavily in evidence in dinosaurs, but achieved by almost every major group – fish, mammals, reptiles – particularly in the oceans.

In evolutionary terms, gigantism in species was limited by biomass – with the somewhat undersized flora today reflecting the modern Earth's rather arid environment.

But the Mesozoic through the Cenozoic routinely saw animals three and four times the mass of the largest animals today.

In simple terms, it came down to what the biosphere was prepared to feed.  The higher levels of CO2