“…in layman’s terms,” said Karen, adjusting her glasses, “it instills traits from one organism in another.”
Eileen leaned back against one of the tables on the side of the stables where she’d let Karen set up some experiments. Well — *funded* some “off the books” experiments, to be exact. Company policy had rules around certain kinds of research, and Karen had wanted to explore more “unorthodox” corners of biology, and surely whatever she was doing would eventually earn her that Nobel Prize, so Eileen was happy to support it.
“It whats the what?” said Eileen, brushing a lock of blond hair out of her face.
Karen shook her head. “I don’t know how I can explain it any simpler than that, but I’ll try. It — it copies parts of one creature into another. Cleanly. No vivisection, or complex rules. Well,” she added, adjusting her glasses, “there *are* complex rules, but SPLICR handles all of them. All you have to do is program its RNA with what you want, and it’ll analyze the existing patterns and adapt any parts that don’t match up.” She brushed the horse’s mane a few more times, and then stood back, admiring the pretty mare.
She grinned. “I’ve applied it to plenty of smaller creatures, and it works flawlessly. My plan is to turn Becky here into a unicorn. Something simple, but recognizable, you know? She’ll be the most amazing creature on the planet. I have some proto-SPLICR prepped with RNA abstracts of the non-random parts of her DNA, and all I need to do is add the recombinant — ”
Karen paused, turning around and staring at Eileen. The redhead’s eyes nearly bulged past her glasses. “What are you doing!?” she cried.
Eileen paused. “Uh — nothing?” she said.
“You’re drinking the SPLICR I had prepped!”
Eileen stared down at the glass in her hand, and her face grew pale. “It’s — a Coca-Cola glass from my kitchen! It even tastes like Coke!”
“I ran out of regular vials!” cried Karen. “That’s your drink right there!” She pointed at the table, where another glass was sitting on the corner, and sure enough, it had the distinct arched shape of a soda glass with bubbling brown liquid inside. And unlike the glass in Eileen’s hands, it had ice cubes in it.
Eileen shakily lowered the glass back to the table. “What — but — this was — I didn’t — ”
Karen swallowed hard. “Are you — all right?”
Eileen slipped beside the table to brace herself against the stable wall. “I’m — I feel okay, but — Karen, what the hell is that stuff going to do to me?”
The redhead stepped closer. “I can’t really tell you what’s going to happen,” she said. “That was designed as the baseline for Becky, not even as a baseline for a human. And it’s incomplete, only proto-SPLICR, not the full formula. I haven’t yet added the narwhal sample that I was going to use for her horn. I honestly don’t know. If you want, I’ll have the computer run some simulations.”
Eileen’s hands were shaking. “Geez, Karen, just — just do whatever you have to!”