Kuri U.S. Research
For Open-Minded Men of Science
Sixteen Months Ago
Okay, Cardy, you’re quiting. You’re quitting.
Screw Kuri U.S. Research! I relocated from Los Angeles to London to investigate occult biology, not slides. I’m a sucker, O’Doyle showed me samples he says were taken from monsters, actual monsters!
I couldn’t argue that what he showed me was unheard of. Animal cells—human animal cells—with central vacuoles, a plant cell feature.
But all he’s given me to work with is diseased blood. Studying an extreme metabolic disorder I’ve never seen fascinates me, but that’s not what I moved halfway across the world to do. I’ve had enough of his stalling, I’m about to march into his office and give him a piece of my—
“Ompf!”
I crash to the floor, bouncing off a bronze statue I’ve never noticed in the lobby.
Then I look up, and there is no statue, just…
“I’m so sorry,” a sweet little English voice says, “Forgive me, I was texting, and…”
Her words fade as I stare at her cornsilk hair hanging just below her shoulders, and bright aquamarine eyes that shine, light and clear as the tranquil clear shallows of Porthcurno Beach.
We bumped into each other, fell, and I’m not mad anymore. I don’t want to quit, I want to talk to her.
“Are you quite alright?” she asks, snapping me out my daze,
I close my gaping jaw. “Yea… yes. I’m so sorry,” I say, standing up and offering her a hand. “It was my fault. I’m on my way to quit my job.” She takes it, and the warm softness of her hand, pure feminine warmth, fires through me at the speed of light.
I struggle to help her to her feet. This is embarrassing, she can’t weigh more than one-hundred and ten pounds. But I’ve skipped the gym a just few too many times lately, the past sixteen years or so.
“No, I engaged in the rather precarious activity of texting whilst walking. So, naturally, the fault is all mine,” she giggles.
We both share a small laugh, the air between us crackling, as if lightning threatens to strike at any moment, my awkward silence only thickening the tension. She will have to leave, because I can’t stand the idea of averting my eyes from her.
It would be like turning my back to the Almighty himself.
Wow, she is hot. Atheists like me don’t think things like that.
“Allow me to apologize properly,” she says, her voice melodically humming like a gently plucked harp. “I’ll buy you a coffee, and you can tell me about that job you want to quit.”
“I can’t really, or I’d have to kill you,” I joke.
I wince as the words leave my lips. Why would I, as a man with a million university and now government HR sensitivity trainings under my belt, say something that stupid to a woman I’ve never met before?
“Oh really?” she leans in, flashing me a naughty smile.
I try not to gulp. “I guess… I can tell you why my boss makes me want to quit.”
“There’s a good boy. I’m Maela Ellerkonge,” she grins, extending her hand to me, looking far too young and—wow, bouncy—to be in such an expensive-looking navy blue power suit. Her perfume smells bright. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was made from deadly Lily of the Valley flowers.
“Dr. S. Carthage Katt, but my friends call me Cardy.” I take her hand again and shake softly, her business grip crushing my hand.
***
Now
“Wha…” I open my eyes, my vision blurred. I’m slouched against something hard. I go to pinch the bridge of my nose, when something hard stops my wrist, a tink of metal against metal.
What the hell is this? I open my eyes, and my mind blanks.
And what is Mae doing here?!
She’s laying unconscious in her black pinstripe power suit and white blouse, the ones I got her for her birthday last April, on a metal bench across from mine in the glass and steel-lined box.
My eyes dart around. There’s a toilet/sink between us. Bright lights from all directions blind us to everything outside. The glass ceiling has two ducted vents, air-conditioning by the feel of the frigid air pumping into the small eight by eight foot cell, and the other must be a vent. Hermetically sealed.
Not good. No one would hear us yell for help.
From the looks of it, the glass the room is clean, sterilized, but the floor paints a different picture.
Blood of various shades, stained into unfinished concrete.
But the worst are the steel cables hanging from the wall. The realization chills me further through my thin-lab coat and bargain oxford shirt. This cell isn’t meant for experiments or observation, but interrogation.
Or worse.
My breaths quicken, shallow and fast.
Why am I here—why Mae too?! Why are the steel cables leading to her… holy shit! There’s three cables leading to her upper body, one to a metal collar around her neck, another to each wrist. The other two cables from opposing corners of her side run to manacles around each of her ankles.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey, Dr. Katt,” comes the jovial lilt of my Irish boss, Seamus O’Doyle, the man who hired me almost two years ago. The man, despite his always-cheery attitude, is insufferable.
“O’Doyle, what are you doing?! This isn’t going to change the results,” I croak out, massaging my dry throat. “Let Maela—let us out of here!”
I look for O’Doyle, but the lights.
“Over here, Dr. Katt,” O’Doyle’s disembodied voice almost sings. I find the speaker on the door. “I may not be a man of science, but I know yeh report is full of lies, Dr. Katt. I saw it in yer eyes.”
“I’m not lying!” I stumble to the floor. The bloodstains, they’re differing shades of browns and deep cranberry, faded like statues smoothed by sand.
“Yeh better start telling the truth, the whole truth, Dr. Katt. Otherwise yeh, and the lovely Ms. Ellerkonge there, well… do I have to explain it to you?”
Sweat beads on my forehead. My head spins.
This can’t be real!
“I ran the final tests twice—take the results and the samples to another biologist. Now let us go—I quit!” I quiver. What a ridiculous notion, quitting now. I should have quit a year ago, for Mae’s sake, if no one else’s.
“Cardy, where are we, what’s going on?” Mae asks as she wakes, her voice groggy.
“Maela. I can’t… I’m so sorry! This is my fault.”
She rubs her eyes, my heart shattering in two. She’s about to find out how cutthroat my job is, that the signs were there, how I ignored my instincts. And that I did it just to stay close to her.
“I’ll give you an hour, Dr. Katt. Tick tock,” O’Doyle squawks.
“An hour?”
“Oi, an hour, or else,” the grin in his voice chills the back of my neck.
“Or else what?”
Electric motors whir to life.
“Owww! Owww! What the bleddy hell is this?!” Mae cries, the cable leading to the middle of the ceiling pulling her up by the neck, her panicked eyes looking to me for help.
“STOP!”
The motors thunk to a stop. “Don’t make me repeat myself, Dr. Katt,” O’Doyle glees sadistically. “Or we’ll string her up, then get the tools. You remember the tools, don’t yeh now?”
Is he serious?!
“You monster!”
***
Twenty-four Months Ago
“Monsters, are you serious?” I ask the man who’s flown from London to Los Angeles to meet me. We’re in my humble but dignified white office with dark wood trim in Hershey Hall, he reclines comfortably across from my desk in the visitor’s leather highback chair.
He’s a cheap substitute for the memorable, brilliant scientific minds I’ve mentored throughout the years, minds that are increasingly becoming memories these days as they migrate to AI and biomedical departments.
“As a heart attack, and I’m offering the job because we know yer a believer, in addition to being a crack biologist and geneticist, Occult_O_Mania1971.”
My mouth goes dry. I’ve used that screen name since the late 90s on internet forums.
Since I want to be taken seriously as a scientist, I’ve hid that from the first moment I saw Ghostbusters as a kid, I knew scientists should investigate the paranormal if presented with the opportunity.
There are too many sightings of things that go bump in the night throughout history: vampires, werewolves, elves—they had to have a scientific explanation beyond mass delusions, paranoia, and superstitiousness.
But those forums are supposed to be anonymous.
“How did you… why should I trust you when you’ve done something so creepy, just to violate my privacy?” I ask.
“Violate yer privacy? No, it’s our way of letting yeh know how vast Kuri U.S. Research’s resources are, and how hard we work to recruit men such as yourself.”
“Men such as myself?”
“Aye, men of science who believe in investigating the legendary. Especially when we have samples on hand.”
“Don’t see many Irishmen representing Japanese-sounding U.S. research companies with labs in London,” I remark, the uncanny Mr. O’Doyle making me wonder if my friends set up an elaborate prank. “Especially when they say they have live monster samples.”
“I’m more a recruiter than anything else, and I never said the word ‘live.’”
“Show me.”
He flashes a grin, one that promises answers, answers of which my gut tells me to beware. “Yeh’ll have to come to London, first class with a fine hotel and a handsome per diem, after you sign some confidentiality paperwork, of course,” says O’Doyle, standing and extending his hand.
He’s right that I’m a man of science, but my gut-instinct alerts me that’s not a hand, it’s a predator’s claw.
I shake off that nonsense. O’Doyle is a skinny blond dandy in a tweed sportjacket. It has to be his flawless pale skin. Evolution favored ruddy skin in Ireland, but his has an almost ethereal grayish-white sheen to it. The combination with his bright blue eyes reminds me of an elf.
I keep the internal laugh to myself. Why would an elf come and alert a biologist to his existence with the promise of studying his kind?
“Of course,” I accept, standing and shaking his hand.
Ouch, O’Doyle’s got an iron grip.
***
Now
“Monsters, you taking the piss right now?” Mae asks, her tone as incredulous as her eyes are disappointed. She leans with her back against the glass, forced to sit as the metal collar hasn’t slacked from O’Doyle’s sick demonstration. At least her arms aren’t splayed out.
A buzzer sounds, and one O’Doyle’s two henchmen open the glass door while the other one holds two cardboard file boxes that make my stomach drop. They’re dressed as always, like the Men in Black.
“Go on, show her. She’s in the bads with yeh now,” O’Doyle says through the squawk box as the beaten cardboard file boxes hit on the floor and the door shuts with another loud buzz.
The content of those boxes, I’ve worked so hard to impress Mae, but two innocuously named boxes will erase everything:
History, and Data.
“No.”
The motors whir again. “Owww! Just open the bleedy box, Cardy!” Mae cries.
“Okay—OKAY!” I shout.
The motors stop, Mae has to kneel on the bench now.
I let out a deep breath and reach for History, the pungent stench of bleach digging and searing my throat, the opposite of our first date.
***
The First Date
Sixteen Months Ago
Maela’s perfume must have cost a fortune to tame that poisonous flower.
Angel’s Trumpet. I know because my Ph.D. advisor was a botany fanatic, so I remember how to distinguish it from the similar smell of Jasmine. They both carry the same floral smell, but it’s Angel’s Trumpet that has the signature musk.
“I don’t require wining and dining. Naturally, I’m quite capable of doing that myself.” Maela Ellerkonge, heiress and board member of VolekFlen international, smiles, taking my hand as we walk to a restaurant near her flat I hope is fancy enough for her tastes.
“I know, but you kept me from making a decision when I was upset. So let me thank you,” I say, surprised at the flowers and greenery surrounding the arch of the entrance.
“I’m not quite sure what you mean—can you explain? And here? You’ve managed to secure a reservation, or you already had one?”
“I can’t really explain without getting into boring details,” I slide past her second question. Sweating bullets in my off-the-rack jacket, I’ve forgotten reservations exist.
I’m not used to places like this, but Maela doesn’t exactly seem like the girl that will grab some fries, or chips as the English call them, at a chippy on the way home with me.
We walk through the dark hallway, neon infinity signs to one side unsettling me. I hope this is a restaurant and not a nightclub. I’m not cool enough for nightclubs.
But I look at Maela, smiling at me, and my organs melt like lukewarm ice cream in the Spring sun.
We walk up to the host stand, where a stern face, an unyielding sentry meant to keep slobs like myself out, awaits. A woman hasn’t accepted a date from me in years, and never one as beautiful as Maela, so I hope there’s an open table.
The host looks up, and her stony face breaks into a bright smile.
For me?
“Ms. Ellerkonge! Welcome back, would you like to sit in the Fairy Room for our last evening of ‘sketch in Bloom, A Floral Chapter?’” the hostess grovels.
That makes more sense.
“You know, I’ve meant to join you for this year’s in celebration of two-hundred and fifty years of Jane Austen, naturally, but I’d forgotten. You should thank Dr. Katt here for the reminder,” Maela beams, fixing her stare on me.
“Thank you, Dr. Katt, would you and Ms. Ellerkonge come right this way,” the host says more than asks, taking us through beautiful flower arrangements and decor I’d expect in Las Vegas. It’s the scrolls floating up the walls above a writing desk that tell me a truth I know deep in my heart.
I’m just a lab rat, I don’t belong here.
Unlike Maela in her bright blue dress, the room seems whimsically crafted just for her.
Maela takes my arm. “Being on the board of one of London’s most prestigious firms has its advantages,” she whispers in my ear. “Just look about the place, unimpressed, and you’ll fit right in.”
“Ms. Ellerkonge, is that the Arctic Monarch gown from Teuta Matoshi?” Maela ignores the brown-nosing host as we’re seated. I don’t know designers, but I do know Maela looks like a fairytale princess with all that ruffly blue gauzy material and the butterflies stitched to her dress.
“Thank you for noticing, but if you don’t mind, Dr. Katt and I are eager for some privacy.”
“Thank you,” I whisper once the host is out of sight. “Etiquette isn’t exactly my area of expertise.”
Maela smiles, melting every bad date, every disgusted stare, every bad reaction I’ve ever received from the fairer sex into a bad dream from long ago.
“Then tell me, Cardy, what do you think about the decor?” Maela asks.
“It’s amazing, I’m a fan.”
“A fellow fan of Ms. Austen, are you? Let me guess your favorite. Mansfield Park, Emma? No… you strike me as a man modeled after Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice.”
I blush a bit. “I’m sorry to say, I stopped reading literature, outside of school that is, when I became a teenager.”
“Really? I cannot imagine a world where I stop reading fiction, especially literary fiction. As you may know, it’s been proven to engage one’s theory of mind better than nonfiction,” Maela jokes.
Something about that claim makes me wince. I know what literary fiction is from my friends in the English department, but they’d only laughed at my boyhood reading list, sticking their noses up at it as they despairingly called it “genre fiction.”
“Now, wait a second. I used to read Hardy Boys mysteries, and Ender’s Game changed my life. Ender Wiggin, the book’s hero, is the ultimate product of a selective breeding program. Genre fiction is the reason I’m a biologist,” I push back.
Shit, Maela is quiet. Her eyes drop to her phone. I shouldn’t have talked to her like that. I get defensive about Science Fiction, even if I only watch it on TV nowadays.
“Ahh, thank you for waiting,” she says, offering me her phone. “Here, Mr. Scientist. Kidd and Castano, 2013.”
I look. It’s an academic journal article. She did say she went to Oxford.
“Do you mind if I read the whole thing before I say anything?”
Maela grins. “Not if you don’t mind that I order for the both of us?”
I breathe out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
Ten minutes later drinks arrive. I hand her phone back, as well as mine.
“What’s this, then?” she looks at the journal article on my phone.
“Proof those guys are hacks, I mean, P-Curve hackers. Their theory of mind test lacks internal consistency, and most outside labs couldn’t replicate their results. The one that found that their alleged increase in theory of mind was statistically insignificant. The original researchers seem like they cherry pick their test subjects and are driven by confirmation bias. It’s a common problem, only about half of social science studies can successfully replicate results.”
She hands me my phone back. Oh shit, I just did it again.
“Sorry, I’m a stickler when it comes to rigor in research.”
Hot girls hate being called disagreed with.
“No, by all means, thank you for speaking up. For the life of me, I cannot understand why no one ever gives me a straight answer. As if my ego is so fragile that I cannot handle being challenged,” Maela says, taking a big swig of her drink when it arrives. “Mmmm, try that, it will change your life.”
I have no idea what the drink is, but it’s fruity, lemony… something I never would have ordered in front of the guys back in L.A.
Maela smiles. “Now, about that boss that makes you want to quit your job… you might be quite the scientist, but I specialize in getting people to do what I want.”
***
The Day After The First Date
16 Months Ago
“Alright then, Dr. Katt, don’t know what’s got you up to ninety this morning, but don’t say yeh weren’t warned,” O’Doyle says, lifting the pitch black hood.
It’s cold. The room is small, a singular lightbulb lights from the ceiling center. A walk-refrigerator where dead bodies are stored. My eyes adjust, and my steaming breath, full of a million dreams, nightmares, and healthy skepticism from decades studying evolutionary biology, lays eyes on the samples.
At last.
Four human bodies lay on metal tables attached to the wall in front of me, and four more on a perpendicular wall. The one on the perpendicular wall’s lowest shelf, is severely deformed. I step closer and ask for a light, taking a knee. One of the two men in black suits hands me a flashlight.
Holy shit, it’s a werewolf! A real, live, werewolf. Well, it’s dead, but it’s a werewolf!
Calm down, Cardy. You’ve had a Ph.D. for decades. Get samples, there are tests to run. Prove these aren’t elaborate hoaxes.
“I need gloves, and an exam table,” I say, firm, suppressing the urge to yell holy shit. “I’m taking samples from every organ, bone, marrow, teeth.”
“Why, haven’t yeh read the files?” O’Doyle asks. His henchmen don’t talk. They never say anything.
“Of course I have. That doesn’t change that I have far better scientific tools to process samples than they did in the 1940s. How long have these bodies been dead?”
“These five have all died in the last few weeks,” O’Doyle says, pointing to the most humanoid-looking cadavers, including two bodies I didn’t notice before on a wall slightly behind me. “These five mutants have been on ice since we recovered them in 1945.”
Wow, no degradation. I open a kit from my bag, ready to get started. I glove up, grab a scapel, press it into the skin…
It doesn’t cut.
I try again, and again, each time the blade fails to cut. Finally, I look at the blade. Dull.
“Cute, Mr. O’Doyle. You switched out my scalpels with toys.”
“Look again, Dr. Katt,” he sings, annoying me, as though I’m not in on the joke.
No. I flick the light to where I tried to cut. Silvery, as if the steel itself flaked off.
“That’s... impossible.”
I pull out another scalpel, heading for one of the human-looking ones.
“Boys, give him the tools he needs,” O’Doyle chuckles. “We’ve had our laugh.”
I’m handed a scalpel-sized toothed blade that sparkles as I shine the light on it.
“A diamond mini-saw? This is going hack up the samples, do I really need these to cut into their bodies?”
“Yes.”
***
Twelve Months Ago
“Yes!” Maela squeals, the fireplace light glimmering in her crystal blue eyes. “Of course I want to move in together!”
“Wait—really?” I reply, the anger I felt a moment ago breaking as my brain blanks out.
I was half-joking when I told Maela the only way I’d move closer was if I moved into her flat. I was dying inside as I put my foot down, but a man has his limits. Kuri U.S. Research might pay well, but I wasn’t about to start paying rent in Mayfair, or anything close to it, now that my lease was up.
Maela rushes in, almost knocking me over as she kisses me. Outside of the occasional moment, the past four months have been nothing but bliss.
Turns out she loves getting dinner from the chippy.
Being socially clueless, I lean on Maela, and her formal upbringing, to get me through the fancy dinners, which are down to once a month, and corporate parties, which happen weekly.
“I do have one condition,” she holds up a finger, leaning forward, her hair hanging over her shoulder and part of her face.
Whatever she wants. I work to live, but I live to make her as happy as she makes me.
“Name it,” I answer without hesitation.
“Tell me about the project you’re working on.”
My throat drops into my stomach as death claws wrap around our relationship. I can’t tell her about the monsters. Not only will it sound crazy, I have a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and a Top-Secret Clearance from the United States government for this job. Telling her, a board member of a foreign corporation, could be considered an act of espionage against the United States government.
And I can’t even tell her I’m not allowed to say anything that indicates I’m working on a classified project. It was part of the paperwork, and the briefing I received when I got the job, not to mention the supplemental briefing I received once I realized Maela and I were actually dating.
“Maela, I can’t.”
“Oh, bleddy hell, Cardy! That is the most pathetic answer. I’ve let you into me life and taken you about the town, introduced you to Lords and Ladies, heads of biogenetic research firms, firms that would write you a blank cheque to get close to me, and you can’t even tell me what it is you’re doing in the leased space of my building?!”
I would give anything to tell her, but I’m so close. The transformed monsters all died in battle. According to the samples collected, they were functionally immortal. And I have a contract.
But Mae’s scowl nearly breaks me. All of those insults, those moments of rejection accumulated across a lifetime of being short and pudgy come flying back. She sounds like them now. I open my mouth to speak, but I bite my lip back down. As much as the threat of being alone again turns my stomach black, filled with oil and filth and despair, I have to be a man of my word.
And if she can’t respect that, I can’t be with her.
“Mae, I am a biologist and a geneticist. I have a contract, and that’s going to have to be good enough for you,” I say, summoning all of the steel I can into my spine, faking character that should have been built on decades of confidence in my skills, my tenure, and my positions on scientific ethics board.
“Mae?” she grins. “I like the sound of that.”
Later that night, Mae proves she likes when I stand up for myself.
“That’s it, Cardy, give it to me—put me in my place!” she coos between cries of ecstasy.
She really likes when I stand up for myself!
“Harder, Cardy, harder!” she beckons, her feet against the headboard, coaxing me towards the death of my dreams, the living embodiment of all my boyhood fantasies, a sweet and coaxing smile as she licks her teeth. “That’s it, Cardy! Take me, take me… take me!”
As usual, I do what Mae tells me. Outside of the lab, I’m all hers.
“That’s right… yes… yes… yes! I love you, Cardy!” she belts out, as her eyes rolls back, her feet and hands curling.
Heaven may not be real, but I’m in heaven on earth.
“I love you, too, Mae,” I whisper minutes later as she falls asleep.
But I hate myself. Hate keeping things secret from Mae.
The secret of what I’m really chasing at work.
Immortality.
In a sense, the monsters achieved the impossible, two words that are the apex of biology, and taboo to speak aloud.
Genetic perfection.
***
Now
“You mean to tell me this is the secret you’ve been keeping from me? That I’ve been dating a man for over a year, a year, Cardy, and you’re just now telling me you’re continuing Nazi eugenics research? That’s what you get up to during the day before you come inside my flat at night, in my bed, in me?!” Mae cries, squinting her eyes as the manacles don’t allow her to cover her face, everything in her voice begging me to tell her it isn’t true.
Despite the file I hold with the giant swastika on the front.
“Mae… I—”
“I’m going to be sick!” she cries.
I swallow Mae’s words like oil, my stomach rumbling.
She turns her head to the side, closing her eyes. “Just tell them what they want to know, Cardy. If you can prove you’re not a Nazi in the process… I’d… well, I’d rather appreciate it, naturally,” Mae says, her lip trembling as she reaches to let her hand and face meet so she can wipe her eyes.
Damn that History box. Damn the data, as invaluable to science as it is tainted by the blood of its victims and the sins of the unethical doctors. Damn that it had to be their files in that History box.
“Mae, I mean, the Nazi’s did the original research, but we can’t just get rid of the data and set medical science back, can we? O’Doyle came to me with proof monsters exist! He showed me the bodies. How could I say no?”