Confessions...Part 4

As a former cop who has done his fair share of interrogations, I have seen plenty of broken men. Despite all of the bravado that most men carry around with them, every man has a breaking point, a point at which the pain, the humiliation, the stress, the anger, or the fear they are feeling reduces them to a state of hopelessness that leaves them completely open and vulnerable. It is not a pretty sight.

I had Dr. Geek pegged all too well. He didn’t last more than an hour after the final glimmer from his last glowstick. He was curled up in a fetal position sobbing uncontrollably when I appeared next to him, pulling a small flashlight from my pocket and shining on it his pale, sweaty face.

“Get up.”

It took a moment for him to come out of that place of abject terror that his mind had retreated to. His eyes blinked reflexively as the light hit his eyes. “R..r...ru..rusty?”

“You know who it is. Get up on your feet.”

He scrambled clumsily to his knees at first, then haltingly to his feet. “Please help m...m...me.”

“This is your one chance to help yourself. I really don’t give a shit about what happens to you Dr. Bernstein, but you can earn a way back to the world you are familiar with, and a chance at life again.”

His eyes grew wide, sensing a glimmer of hope, a vital feature of this kind of questioning.

“However, if you fail to give me truthful answers to the questions I have, I will leave you here to die.”

The hope in eyes dimmed, just a little. Good, that was important too, that the hope was there, but in doubt.

“So, tell me, did you really take sperm from my body and use it to impregnate a woman?”

He looked away from the light in his eyes, briefly, glancing down at his feet, before looking back into the light, “Yes.”

“Did you create more than one using my sperm?”

“Yes, but only one woman carried the child to term. The others either miscarried or aborted once the funding dried up.”

“Why did you do this in the first place, wasn’t my Spirit and my dead fucking body enough for you bastards?”

He visibly winced at my tone, looked away briefly again, then haltingly answered. “It wasn’t my idea. Drake was convinced that you carried certain genetic traits that could be enhanced and developed, that certain of your genetic markers were on the verge of reaching the next level in human development, he believed...believes...that humanity is on the cusp of becoming a new species, and he wanted to see if he had identified those genes that would make that transition happen sooner. Since your markers were so clear, it was relatively easy to make a few alterations in the sperm we pulled from you to see if we could trigger the change....”

“That is some seriously sick logic. Did you do this to any of the other officers in the Omega Project?”

“It was tried, but the others before you didn’t have the best possible candidates for alteration, one other child survived to birth, but died shortly afterwards. The changes proved fatal.”

“How did you find women who agreed to this shit?”

“It wasn’t hard. Offer enough money to most people and they will do what you want them to. We advertised on certain websites and in certain newspapers, offering to do free genetic testing for certain hereditary diseases in women of childbearing age, and then used that to recruit potential mothers who had the right markers themselves. Then we merely had to offer to pay all of their living expenses and to pay a healthy stipend. We had more candidates than we could ever possibly use.”

“Why not do the same thing for male candidates? You’d get plenty of sperm donors, especially if you paid for it!”

“Oh, we did some testing on random male donors as well, but the program was becoming very expensive, so we had to select our subjects carefully. We had narrowed down the traits we needed to tweak to a few dozen possibilities, and you just happened to have more of them in the right places than any other subject we tested. You had the four sets of markers we wanted to test more than any others, and they matched up perfectly with four of our female subjects. That’s when the decision to...uh...obtain...the ...uh...necessary supply of sperm--”

“You son of a bitch!” I raised my arm as I was about to strike him, but something in the way he stood there, resigned to being hit, that stopped me, for the moment anyway. “You had me fucking killed for my goddamn sperm!?”

“Well, Drake made that decision. But, yes, part of the reason you were killed when you were was to harvest your sperm and begin the rather tedious process of preparing the sperm for implantation in each of the selected fem...”

I couldn’t hold back any more. The word ‘harvest’ being associated with my death and the extraction of my sperm was just too damned much. I struck him hard with my fist on the side of his face. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes at my feet. I cursed as I realized that I could have easily killed his ass. I put the flashlight down and rolled him onto his back, wiping away the blood seeping from inside his mouth and the quite possibly broken jaw. He was out cold, but he was still alive.

But, I was going to have to revive him in order to continue the questioning, I still needed to learn where this child was, and what danger she was supposedly in.

I did resolve though, for the thousandth time, to kill the bastard Drake...