Dragon Horse

Date: Mono-3, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Stockade Theta

Z: My creators at Cepheus called me Zeta. At sixteen, I can conduct a needle aspiration on a Thylacoleo carnifex.

Z: There were six before me: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Vau. Alpha couldn't breathe after twenty-four hours. Beta left the artificial womb with no pulse. Delta didn't even get to leave the womb, because Gamma ate it.

Z: Cepheus counted this as progress.

Z: Gamma died after three hundred and sixty-five days. Epsilon left the womb with a pulse, breathed for more than twenty-four hours. It breathed for twenty-five hours.

Z: Cepheus counted this as a setback.

Z: Vau got to twelve years before it broke out of the biodome. Again, progress that hypothermia cut short in about three hours.

Z: They– my parents, not Cepheus– had to cut me out of the artificial womb because I had almost strangled myself with my umbilical cord.

Z: They don’t call me Zeta.

Date: Dodeca-31, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Emergency Wing

Dr. Sonzwaphi: You are Xolani, not Zeta!

[Xolani squeezes his eyes shut. He tells himself that he’s lying in the grass, his fingers threaded through the warm wool of my Elasmotherium sibiricum, or Siberian unicorn calf, that he should have fed to Felix, but that he named Uni instead. They gaze at the painted sky, which is then shielded by the silhouette of a young archaeopteryx, and the branched shadows of the solar-paneled trees.]

Dr. Nomkhubulwane: Why did you do it?

[His mother sobs, every shudder of her shoulders slicing and slashing into his thoracic cavity. He would try to turn away from her, but his cervical collar prevents back-and-forth movement, as well as more injury on top of his fractured trachea, hyoid bone, and thyroid and cricoid cartilages.]

Dr. Nomkhubulwane: Why did you do this to yourself?

[His father sits at his side, slumped over in his seat. Xolani doesn’t know if he’s sleeping or not, but if he is, he doesn't mind. He needs it. He stood in one spot for three hours stabilizing his son’s spine with several small screws. He's stayed up for the last thirty-six hours to force-feed his son powdered painkillers and nano medicinal pills that would trigger regeneration of his bone cells through the tubes in his nostrils. Now and then, he would tighten the soft, vinyl restraints around his son’s wrists and ankles.]

Dr. Nomkhubulwane: How could you do this to yourself?

[How does Xolani even begin to answer that? He swallows slowly, then he whispers it. From the ferocity with which she flinches, one would think he hissed it at her.]

Z: I read the reports.

[His father’s shoulders stiffen, and his baggy, bloodshot stare sends another sting shooting through the scabs on his neck.]

Dr. Sonzwaphi: I told you not to go on my computer.

[Now it’s a hiss.]

Z: Why didn't you tell me that I'm a failed experiment?

Date: Mono-3, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Stockade Theta

Z: I guess I should talk to you about what Thylacoleo carnifex are. They’re similar to Smilodon, but not the same. Smilodon are saber tooth tigers and Thylacoleo carnifex are marsupial lions. Their upper and lower shearing teeth slide against each other like scissors when they open and close their mouths. They’ve got these broad, bearish heads and beautiful brown fur with white stripes and spots, and long, pointed tails that stay level with their spines.

Z: My marsupial lion, Felix, I can tell how he feels just from the way his tail moves. When it’s loosely positioned down, he’s happy. When it curls forward, he’s happy to see me. If he’s holding his tail lower and it's swishing back and forth, he’s asking if we can play. And if it’s tucked under his body, he’s afraid.

Z: I’ve only seen him tuck his tail under his body once, and I…I’m not going to talk about it.

Date: Dodeca-31, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Emergency Wing

Dr. Sonzwaphi: You are not a failed experiment.

[Six Smilodons surround Uni and Xolani, saliva shining on the edges of their sabers. He didn't know they hunted in packs. Now he did. He cradles her to his chest as they close in. Uni snuffles into his ear, the stubby horn on her snout sliding against his cheek. When he looks into the pupils of the saber tooth tigers, they’re not slitted. They’re round. They’re human. They’re not the same as his, but they’re similar.]

Z: You're right. It succeeded at engineering me into another one of their war animals, and that's even worse.

Dr. Nomkhubulwane: You wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for one of those war animals. If Felix hadn’t cut the rope and brought your body to me –

Date: Mono-3, Triakosia

Location: Biodome - Stockade Theta

Z: My mother is the creator of the Kerberos project. She named it after the three-headed dog for the three different divisions: the sky, the soil, and the sea, or aerial, terrestrial, and nautical. She extracted DNA from well-preserved permafrost in the Arctic Circle, and then she engineered and modified the embryos through hundreds of generations of hybridization, selective breeding, and gene splicing.

Z: My DNA has some variations from that of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Vau, but we all share a single gene. It’s the enzyme monoamine oxidase A. It’s why Gamma ate Delta and it's how Vau, um, got past security during its biodome breakout.

Date: Dodeca-31, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Emergency Wing

Z: Do you know what the first thought that runs through my head is when I see you two? It’s not that you're my mama and ubaba. It's how to break your necks.

[Xolani digs his nails into his palms, his arms and legs shivering. Not with weakness, but with the shaking strength of a Titanoboa squeezing the oxygen out of its prey. The restraints seem as thin as the fabric of his hospital gown. He could rip through them as easily as Felix’s teeth could have torn through Uni’s throat.]

Dr. Nomkhubulwane: You didn’t have to break your own!

[The painted sky is patched with red and blue from the skull-splitting sirens of his parents’ ambulance, and the shrieking of the animals around him. Felix sits at his side, the severed rope between his shearing teeth, his tail tucked under his body. Xolani lays in the grass, gazing up at that one branch on the solar paneled tree.]

Z: I wouldn’t have had to break it if you hadn’t cut me out.

[The crooked chair screeches across the tiles as his father leaps to his feet and jabs a finger at him, the stabbing incisor of the hand.]

Dr. Sonzwaphi: Don’t talk to your mother that way!

[The Titanoboa slithers up his spine, its scales scraping at his skin.]

Z: She’s not my mother, you’re not my father, and I’m not your child!

[The Titanoboa wraps around his windpipe. It squeezes, squeezes, and squeezes. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Vau speak through the gene, speak through him, speak for him.]

Z: Did it never occur to you that we wouldn’t find out what you made us for after you made us? After what you programmed us to think?

Dr. Sonzwaphi: That thought is not you.

Z: Then what am I?

[He snaps through his restraints, leaping off his cot and lunging at his father as he stands between his mother and him –]

Date: Mono-31, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Stockade Theta

Z: Monoamine oxidase-A, it makes us more aggressive. If I were with them - Cepheus, not my parents – they would tell me that aggression is necessary for evolution because it eliminates weakness in the strong and eliminates the weak. They would train me until they could put me onto any battlefield, pit me against any opponent, and I would win. And whoever I went up against would lose…their life. And they could make more and more of me with that artificial womb.

Z: This biodome is a magazine. The Kerberos, Felix, Uni, me, the six before me, we’re ammunition. We’re the same soldier, the same bullet with slight variations, being loaded into Cepheus’ gun and being fired again and again.

Z: But the problem with monoamine oxidase-A is that it creates a new weakness. It feeds on catecholamines, particularly dopamine and serotonin.

Z: Vau knew what would happen when it broke out of the biodome and ran out into that blizzard. It cut off its own progress on purpose.

Date: Dodeca-31, Triakosia

Location: Biodome, Emergency Wing

[– and he wraps his arms around his son, cradling him close to his chest. Xolani digs his nails into the back of his father’s shirt at first, but his grip loosens when his mother’s fingers thread through his coiled hair. Her wet cheek slides against the sliver of skin not covered by his cervical collar. The biodome he’s built around myself breaks. His shoulders shake, and the Titanoboa’s strength wanes with every soft, vinyl word.]

Dr. Nomkhubulwane: Indodana yethu.

[Our son.]