Don D'Ammassa - Thoracic Park

Illustration by Kelly Freas

Chirr was polishing a freshly uncovered human skull when the ornithopter landed just outside the encampment, causing great consternation among the broodlings who were methodically clearing away soil from their latest find. Kachinka, his mate, clashed her mandibles angrily and made an obscene gesture with her antennae.

“Attend to the site,” Chirr instructed. “I will deal with this.”

He sank into haste posture and used all six legs to cover the intervening space, but even so the newcomer had already disembarked. “Professor Chirr? It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” Chirr rose to his full height and assumed the posture of outrage-verging-on-attack.

With a hasty, and rather superficial, adjustment to the stance of admission-of-error, the new arrival plunged on. “My name is Nakrok. I believe you’ve heard of me, though we’ve never met.”

Indeed he had. Chirr slowly adjusted to reflect acceptance-of-apology while he considered the situation. Nakrok was the chief sponsor of this expedition, and had donated fully half of the broodlings currently scouring the area for artifacts.

“What can I do for you, Broodmaster Nakrok?” His body curled into mild-but-respectful deference.

“I know how important this project is to you, Professor, but I need your assistance urgently.”

“My assistance?” Chirr switched to wary-cooperation.

“It will only be for a few days, I promise you, and your mate is welcome to come as well. I’ve made all the necessary arrangements, spared no expense.”

The ornithopter dropped so suddenly into the wilderness preserve that Chirr and Kachinka immediately assumed preparedness-for-sudden-flight, even though there was no place to run to. Their wings were vestigial, ornamental rather than practical, the power of flight long since sacrificed in return for increased body weight and nerve tissue.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Nakrok reassured them. “We’re just avoiding local turbulence.”

Chirr’s abdomen throbbed nervously and he picked up the conversation to take his mind off the plummeting ornithopter.

“You say you’ve built some kind of theme park based on the ancient human culture?”

“Some kind of theme park, yes.” Nakrok tried to suppress the tremor of triumph in his ventral lobes, but without much success. “But I’d much rather you wait to see it for yourself.” They were on the ground within moments, to Chirr’s considerable relief, and disembarked into a waiting centivan. The driver fed his vehicle brush while they climbed aboard, and the two rows of articulated feet tapped restlessly against the ground.

“Rather remote, isn’t it?” remarked Kachinka, who still resented being torn from her studies at the archaeological site.

“It’s an unusual location, but worth the trouble.” This time Nakrok’s tremor was much more pronounced.

They rode in silence, Chirr and Kachinka enjoying the vivid scenery despite their mystification about the purpose of the trip. The steady beat of the centivan’s legs was reassuring and Chirr was settling into a mini-estivation when he spotted something moving just beyond the trees to his right.

“Stop the van!”

The driver swiveled an eye stalk toward Nakrok, who signaled immediate-acquiescence. Kachinka glanced at her mate curiously but made no effort to follow when he stepped out of the vehicle. He moved only a few steps, fully upright, before catching sight of something so amazing that he momentarily lost control of his posture and sent a series of contradictory signals to his companions.

“That’s a human being!” he said at last. “A living human being!”

Kachinka’s head swiveled abruptly as she switched to suspicion-of-levity. Then she, too, spotted the pink creature picking berries from a clump of bushes just a few meters to one side of their route.

“Is it real or a construct?” Her voice betrayed the strain she felt.

“Oh, they’re all quite real, I assure you. There are no illusions here.”

“They?” Chirr turned to his host, slowly overcoming his confusion to assume respect-mixed-with-skeptical-reserve. “You have more than one of them?”

“Of course. Over a hundred in fact. So far.”

“But… but how?”

“Let me tell you.”

And tell them he did. DNA was fairly easy to come by because of the inexplicable human tendency to preserve their dead in sealed containers. There had even been some success cloning them, although without exception the living bodies that resulted were devoid of self-awareness.

“You’ve heard of motigen, I assume?”

Chirr nodded. “It’s the dynamic fluid manufactured by brain cells that determines which caste we join when we leave broodling stage.”

“Well, we theorized that the same mechanism was present in the human species, that it quietly directed each individual into an appropriate cultural role, but that its ephemeral nature made the substance impossible to find under normal circumstances.” Nakrok moved into imminent-revelation.

“But you found some anyway?” Kachinka prompted him, displaying curiosity-with-growing-impatience.

“That we did. Quite by accident, actually. One of my construction crews uncovered a buried installation that was still functional. It appears to have been some sort of nuclear powered cryogenic vault, and there were several hundred intact human bodies preserved inside. We think it was either a museum or some kind of strange religious cult. In any case, the important thing is that we found traces of motigen in most of the braincases.”

“But surely it would have deteriorated with the passage of so much time. The human species has been extinct for thousands of brood cycles.”

“None of the samples were undamaged, but by comparing what survived from one to another, we were able to run computer simulations that allowed us to extrapolate the missing data. We used surgical viruses to fill in the gaps and then began experimenting with bodies cloned from human DNA. Two years ago, we had our first success, and using accelerated growth techniques, we quickly populated the park. These,” he gestured toward two browsing humans, “are primitive experiments whose motigen was flawed. They can do little more than forage. But our recent arrivals are much more advanced. The insurance salesman even seems to understand simple body postures and spoken language.”

Chirr felt suddenly faint. “Insurance salesman? You have an insurance salesman?”

“Why, yes. We bred him right after the real estate agents. We plan a full range of attractions.”

Chirr and Kachinka were lost in their own thoughts as their journey resumed, and they became aware of their surroundings again only when the centivan paused before the towering gates to the main park. Above them, the silhouette of a bare-chested human figure had been painted onto the rightmost gate, both fists poised to pound a challenge on its obscenely hairy chest. On the opposite gate, a sign read simply: THORACIC PARK.

Chirr and Kachinka recovered some of their wits while being introduced to Grackl, whom Nakrok introduced as his game warden. “Grackl tells me when I’m taking foolish chances, you see. I have a tendency to get so involved with my work that I forget how dangerous these creatures are.”

“They don’t seem to move very quickly.”

“No, the fastest ones are the lawyers, and then only when we give them an ambulance to chase.”

Chirr was shocked. “Lawyers? You’ve bred lawyers?”