Vanguard Of The Mutants

1: Pirene Station

The next day, Doctor Moreau flew to the moon on a shuttle. Looking out the window to see the blue planet with her shining cities covering the continents like a string of glowing pearls. He marveled at the atmosphere covering Earth like a thin, fragile eggshell, shielding her against the darkness of space and its deadly vacuum.

The man with the sunglasses sat next to him. It turned out, Mister Hatsokovy was more than a messenger. Time and again, he interrupted the Doctor's thoughts with unintelligent questions.

"I've heard you refer to your creations as your children. Isn't this rather unprofessional? Especially for a man as accomplished as you."

What an unintelligent question indeed. This man was a failure of the imagination, shambling around in roughly human form.

"Have you ever written a novel, composed a piece of music or made a painting, Mister Hatsokovy?"

The man with the sunglasses shook his head. No surprise for Maximillian. "Creating art is not like factory work," he tried to explain, "You don't just slap something together in order to sell it, hoping it breaks soon, so the customer will come back to buy a replacement. Creating art is pouring pieces of your very soul into your creation. Not so you can sell it, but to allow it to become more than you could have ever imagined. Editing genetic codes is like composing, painting or writing a story. You always need to consider the whole picture. That's why I succeeded where all my colleagues failed."

"But you are an engineer, Doctor, not an artist."

"You are wrong to assume those have to be two different things."

Silence followed. Mister Hatsokovy's mind seemed too deficient in understanding to comprehend any of what Doctor Moreau told him. The next unintelligent question did not surprise Maximillian at all, "But your children aren't actually siblings, right?"

What an amazingly unintelligent question indeed. Clearly, this man had no understanding of how to build a healthy population of any species. Doctor Moreau knew. "Of course not," he scoffed, "They may not look like it at first glance, but my creations are orders of magnitude more genetically diverse than the rest of humanity."

"Of course they are!" Mister Hatsokovy scoffed back.

Maximillian kept silent. He did not brag, simply stated a demonstrable fact. Making his creations more genetically diverse than the rest of humanity was very easy, since all human beings share 99.9% of their DNA. Every other primate species is more genetically diverse.

"Let's go over the Vellamun's mission again, Doctor."

"After launch the ship will slingshot first around the sun, then around Jupiter to gain speed. In ten years it will arrive at the wormhole beyond Pluto." Doctor Moreau sighed.

"Officially, the object which caused the orbital anomalies of Pluto and Sedna is a gas giant."

"That's probably what it used to be."

"Not my problem and the World Government doesn't care either."

Stable Wormholes do not occur naturally. How someone could be this numb to one of, if not the greatest discovery in human history exceeded Maximillian's vivid imagination. Merely looking at the diagram of Nod, the star system beyond the wormhole, filled him with awe.

A binary system, consisting of two individual star systems orbiting each other. The smaller star, Nod-B, was a red dwarf with only 9% as much mass as the sun. Its system would have fit entirely inside the orbit of Mercury with lots of room to spare. Nod-B contained several rocky planets, represented as gray dots on the diagram, as well as the other end of this curious wormhole, represented by a purple dot.