"Fiery Birds", Part VIII

Chancellor Boldren sat, hands folded on his desk, as Dr. Trant entered into his office.

"How's our little visitor?" he asked.

"Guards? You escorted him with guards? He's half their size."

"We haven't had any problems, but already your tests seem to indicate there is something... special... about this Neander..."

"I prefer to call them New People, Chancellor. They are no closer to being Neanderthals than we are. Even further displaced, I imagine."

"As I was saying, Dr. Trant, this... person... is even more different than the others. I was being cautious."

"His musculature and bone structure would not allow physical conflict with a standard human. They all seem to be lightly built," she said. "They're unusual."

"Yet there is no denying that there is Neanderthal DNA present, plenty of it," he said, as he walked towards his cabinets, "have a seat, doctor. Tea? It's Utopian grown."

"Actually, yes, please. You are correct, though. Almost a complete Neanderthal genome. It's the odd bits that puzzle me," she said, "By the way, I take mine black."

The Chancellor walked back to his desk, holding two white teacups. He handed one to her, then walked around the desk back to his seat.

"What has your testing found so far?" he asked, as he sat back down.

"Physically, Zho is a typical New person. As far as mental capacity, he is almost completely human, like a child, really. I almost suspect that he might be able to read, except that the same deficits seem to exist in his genetics that exist in others of his kind."

"So, are they evolving?"

"Kalles, it is almost as if they were produced not to evolve past a certain point. On a genetic level, it is almost as if there are fail safes to keep evolution from occurring at all. We get the occasional generational mutation like Zho and his father, but that's about it. This is the first direct lineage mutation, and I wonder if we may have somehow invoked it."

"How could we have caused this?" the Chancellor asked, sipping his tea.

"By removing threats? Keeping their environment cleaner than it was? Introducing agents into their environment that were not there before? I don't know..."

"Now, doctor, you remember what we found when we came back here. No humans, a planet teetering on total ecological collapse, a missing Moon, and these creatures that look human, but are clearly different. We did what we did to stabilize the situation and made environments for the... New people. We taught them language through subterfuge. They don't even know we're here, yet we really aren't hiding. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

"The lack of curiosity is programmed into their genes," Trant said, lowering her teacup. "To be honest, I've never seen anything like that. They don't even have religion. It is almost as if it is on the cusp of beginning, and then the tales that they carried from even before we arrived come back, and they back away from it."

"So we're back at the possibility that in our million year absence from this system, whomever was left that qualified as completely human created this species for... what?"

"I don't know, Kalles. Certainly not workers in the traditional sense. But they would make excellent workers in the abstract. Their obedience is unfailing, aside from Zho and the others like him. They don't ask many questions, they accept things at face value, they don't believe in the supernatural, for the most part they are hard workers. But their physical builds... and there's more."

The Chancellor leaned back in his chair, "go on."

"There are other odd bits in their genome. We've found a nearly complete Neanderthal genome, portions of what looks like human, and then... odd sequences. Within the samples we've taken from Zho, they seem even more profound, and yet meaningless."

"What do you mean, odd, doctor?"

"They seem to serve no purpose at all. I have a theory," she said, raising the cup to her lips.

"Go on."

"This might sound far fetched, but I think that they might actually be... notes."

"Notes?" the Chancellor asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Annotations. The sequencing in these odd genes looks almost binary. I thought I saw a bit of it in previous samples, but in the stored samples from Kha, and in the new samples from Zho, they appear to be even more present. By themselves, though, they are not the cause of the mutation."

"Like notation in code," the Chancellor said. 

"Exactly. Not a message, just... notes."

"So, the New people are really a commodity, a product."

"I am really starting to believe that's the case, Kalles. And they would have perished had we not returned. They are simply not genetically able to exist without some form of assistance, even if hidden from them."