"An Empty Mug"

[Guest Fiona Weber]

Fiona Weber reached for her just-oversized mug, not looking away from the scrolling lines of genetic data on the screen. Then she frowned, concentration finally broken, and sighed. Out of raktajino again. The cup was always empty. She started to head towards the replicator for another dose of her fix like the addict she was before stopping herself. No. She wasn't even sure how many cups she'd had in the past few hours, but she wouldn't have been surprised if the number was quickly approaching double-digits. As much of an uproar as the thought caused her sleep-deprived brain, she was not having another over-caffeinated coffee.

 

At this point, the doctor wasn't having much more success anyway. Most of her revelatory breakthroughs had happened several hours prior (before her exhausted brain had thrown in the towel -- not that she would have admitted it). And in spite of her growling in the direction of the android science officer, what they had managed to provide her with had turned out to be very useful.

 

The first thing that she had determined was the deviation of the genetic profiles between the "rural" population and the "urban" one. Where she had assumed a simple viral infection -- in other words, that the city-dwellers were still carrying a disease of some kind that had affected their mental faculties, the truth seemed much more complex. As it always was.

 

Instead of simply "occupying" the host bodies for multiple generations, the virus had gone a step further, actually altering the humanoids' DNA makeup and altering the course of the infectees' descendents' physiology. Fiona couldn't help but admire the effects. It had all but created a subspecies in a matter of generations, and the virus -- and its hosts -- were still evolving.

 

Her first thought had honestly jumped to some sort of genetic or bio-warfare by one group or another, but something wasn't quite... sophisticated enough for it. The virus wasn't artifically coded. Not exactly, and certainly not towards one species. But it had traces that indicated that some elements of the virus had at some point been engineered in some manner. Whether or not the creators had intended to actually create a virus, though, the doctor questioned.

 

Whatever the original intent was behind the virus -- or the virus' predecessor, it had ended up "improving" upon the original genetic makeup of the humanoids. The "urban" samples, in spite of their feral nature and overt hostility, were "improved" on many levels -- even if Fiona had determined that they had no special ability to "cloak" or go invisible (a characteristic of their environments moreso than their virus). They were now perfectly suited towards a nocturnal lifestyle, with enhanced dark-vision and more capacity to digest an omnivorous-tending-carnivorous diet.

 

... which made it exceedingly difficult to actually recommend outright that the Republic actively work to "cure" the virus. Prime Directive and questions of morality aside, what they were seeing was a physically "better" subspecies arising on the planet.Their cultural understanding of the infected specimens was limited, and Fiona strongly suspected that they had "regressed" to some sort of tribal or band-like state (if not farther), but given their viral-aided advances, the creatures were in a unique position to occupy a well-centered niche. Fiona did have a good idea on how they could "program out" the viral DNA modifications, but... whether or not they would be doing the "right thing" by curing the urban-dwellers was a quandary and a half to contemplate, and Weber knew far better than to make moral decisions on an empty coffee mug.

[Heather Jamieson 0]

Very nice read. Used a bit of this for my short log. :P :: puts down rusty pen ::