Challenge #00067: Exploitation

In the middle of a celebration,

With a new species,

While history repeats itself.

It had taken far too much work to get this far. Not the least of which was buying the right politicians so that the Storyland project could go ahead.

Genetic engineering had that kind of effect on people. Old stories like Frankenstein never truly go away. They just mutate in the subconscious and return in a new guise.

The Elves had been a hit. But then, they were hardly that different from the original human stock. Longer-lived, tongue-clottingly beautiful, tall and whippy. The trademark elf. The Fauns, having goat-like bottom halves, and small horns on their heads raised some ire amongst the fundamentalists, but that was expected. It didn’t matter that biblical descriptions of the devil differed vastly to the Fauns. Those sorts never did their homework anyway.

The cause for the party was that their first Centaurs were walking. The pinnacle of achievement for Mythos. If they could make a Centaur, they could make anything.

These Centaurs, the first batch, were going to be the work-horses of the planned theme park. Storyland. Their horse portions were Clydesdale, and they would be pulling hay rides and running the farms necessary to feed such things as, say, Clydesdale Centaurs.

Mythos had great plans for Storyland. A self-sufficient theme park. Everything on the property would be grown or made there. Except some of the more… advanced rides. But the live entertainment… nobody else had the patents to do live entertainment like Mythos did.

The press were lapping it up. Elves and Fauns played music and danced for the cameras. Fairies, gengineered singing butterflies, added to the experience by flitting through the arena and chirping vaguely in time with the music.

Then Tracy, co-ordinator for the party, noticed that someone had let the baby Centaurs out of their petting enclosure. Security would not let anyone take them home. They were trademarked, copyrighted material. And insured for millions. Nobody should have let them out of her sight.

She pulled up a rentagoon and politely, discreetly, and most important - urgently ordered him to find out where the hell the Centaurs had gone and get them back.

Which was when a dippy hippy type informed her with a smile that the Centaurs had let themselves out to go to the toilet.

What?

Tracy thanked the old bat and found her boss. Urgently asking if he knew anything about Centaur potty training. He told her to ask the boffins. Three boffins later, Tracy found out that yes, the Centaurs were potty trained for the sake of both expediency and hygiene. Nobody wanted to clean up Centaur poop in the lab.

Someone would have to draft a memo about relative portions of animal parts versus paper training. But that wasn’t important.

“So who taught them to get out of their pen?” Tracy hissed.

The boffins conferred. “Um,” said the spokesboffin. “Nobody?”

Crap. There they were. And helping themselves to the buffet. Tracy, the three boffins in charge of training and behavior, and four rentagoons rounded them up and herded them towards their petting enclosure.

Too late. The eldest decided to protest. Loud and clear, so that the media could pick it up.

“But I wanna join the par-tyyyy!”

He sounded like any other kid who was tired of having to stay in his room.

And everyone heard it. All the way around the world.

Suddenly, Mythos wasn’t a bold venture-business gengineering the future. It was a rotten pack of gene-slavers. Suddenly, owning patented, gengineered critters was a bad thing. Especially intelligent, gengineered critters.

Suddenly, the Storyland project tanked.

Suddenly, she was her boss’ least favourite person, persona non grata and the human scapegoat all at once.

Tracy hadn’t even had time to put a spin on it. Or put her champagne down. She should have known. The same thing happened with the Enlisted Man project.

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