Ned and Barry looked out over Ned’s backyard as the Fall leaves gradually twirled to the ground.
“Why are robots replacing humans?” Ned asked.
“Because they don’t get tired or sick, they don’t have kids or spouses, they don’t need insurance … the list goes on and on,” Barry replied.
“So, if you could make humans that had all those same attributes, would they replace robots?” Ned wondered.
“That can’t be done,” Barry said.
“That wasn’t the question. They didn’t used to make robots, and now they assist with surgery. What if I told you I’ve been working on a human hybrid that will make robots obsolete?” Ned offered.
“Anyone can say that they’re working on something. I’m working on my first million. What have you actually done?” Barry replied.
“Come take a look at what I’ve got in the basement,” Ned said.
The two men were sitting on Ned’s patio drinking beers after ordering some pizza. They had met at MIT. Barry had been part of several successful startups. Ned worked in biomedical research. They closed the lid on the pizza box and took their beers to the basement.
Ned’s house was mid-century ranch style, which had been sleeked up with dark wood, grey paint and buffed chrome hardware. One of the great features of the house was a huge basement which Ned had converted into his home workshop. As he led Barry down, he paused when he reached a closed door at the bottom of the stairs.
“This is strictly confidential by the way. This is my research and development, not the company’s, so mum’s the word, okay?”
“Sure,” Barry replied.
“Nobody else has seen this. You’re the first person, the only person, I’ve shared it with,” Ned emphasized.
“I got it. Top secret. If it leaks out, you know it’s from me. We’re good,” Barry said with some impatience.
Ned opened the door to reveal a shiny concrete floor lit up by bright overhead lights. There were some stainless-steel tables against the walls, three refrigerators lined up in the far corner and in the middle of the room was a table with lab equipment and what looked like several toaster ovens.
“Have you perfected toast? Is that your breakthrough?” chided Barry.
“Those are incubators, and in them my hybrids have been able to develop in ideal conditions. Once they get big enough and can maintain body temperature on their own, I move them to pens where they can develop to their normal size,” Ned pointed to a steel door on the far wall. “They live down there.”
“Your basement has a basement?” Barry asked.
“I needed a space which was secure and where the environmental conditions could be tightly controlled. That door is the only way in or out. It has a filtered air exchange system and the water supply is triple distilled.”
“How do we see it?”
“There are security cameras tied into hard drives to record everything, but I think it would be best if we go down and see them in person,” Ned said.
“Them? Them what? There’s more than one? What the hell do you have down there Ned?”
“Nothing dangerous, but I’ve had a little resistance from investors so far. I was hoping you could help,” Ned said, and waited for Barry’s response.
“No idea. Let me see it and I can give you some feedback about what a VC would want to know about your project. And why did you say that it’s not dangerous? Did something happen?” Ned asked.
“Let me show you and I’ll explain.” Ned reached for two shrink-wrapped packets with clean suits, gloves and face masks. “Put this on and we’ll take a look.”
Barry and Ned slipped into their suits and face masks, and Ned punched in the code to unlock the door to the sub-basement. The stairwell was bright white, with a strong breeze of negative air being sucked through the metal mesh steps. The stairwell was twice the length of the previous one, “to keep things cleaner” Ned explained. At the bottom, they again met a closed door made of steel. There was a garland hanging on a hook with a security card on it, which Ned put around his neck. He then input the code into another keypad, opened the door and an even stronger breeze of sterile air blew past them making their clean suits flap. The door made a loud sucking sound as Ned closed it. Once the breeze stopped Barry was able to hear a soft clicking sound almost like the crinkling of dozens of candy wrappers.
The space was much larger than the basement, maybe three times the size. Another shiny cement floor this time with drains and walls lined with stainless-steel cages. A solid panel covered the lower half of the pens, and at first they looked empty. A card reader was attached to a lock on the door of each pen. The very card Ned wore around his neck.
“Now try to keep an open mind. Don’t draw any conclusions until I have a chance to explain things,” Ned warned.
“What do you have in there? Some kind of crickets? And if it’s so clean in here why does it smell like a shithouse?” Barry asked.
“That’s normal. They pee and shit out the same hole, and the mix is pretty ripe. Come take a look at pen thirteen.” As they approached, Barry could see inside the enclosure. The floor was covered with sawdust about a foot deep. There was a steel pole running the length of the pen about two feet off the ground. On it Ned’s creation was perched.
“What is that? Is that real?” Barry asked, unable to look away from the creature.
“Yes, it is, and it took years to make it that way.” The human-sized creature looked at both the men, and slowly blinked. Then it looked away, smoothed its feathers and sipped some water from bottle hanging nearby.
“Why the hell did you make a giant chicken?” Barry asked.
“Not a chicken, a chicken-human hybrid. See how it has arms and hands instead of wings, and the eyes are on the front of the face instead of the sides?” Ned asked proudly.
“It still has a beak!” Barry exclaimed.
“Well sure, that makes feeding them very inexpensive. Chickenfeed in fact. That and some water and they’re good to go.”
“Good to go where?” Barry asked.
“Excellent question. My plan is to have these animals replace all the manufacturing currently being done by robots and cheap overseas labor. These guys are way cheaper, they’re easy to produce, easy to train, work all day then sleep and do it all over again. Part of the reason they’re cheaper is that you can breed more of them for your manufacturing. The down side of robots is the capital expenditure involved in buying and maintaining them. And if one breaks down, everything stops. With these babies, if one gets sick or dies you can just replace it with another.”
Barry was silent. He kept watching the giant chicken-thing in the pen, looking like a Warner Brother’s cartoon come to life. The bottom half was basically all chicken, and the top half was a terrible mix of feather-covered human with a beak.
“You didn’t actually do this, right? This is some weird joke. Am I being filmed?” Barry asked.
“We’re both being filmed, every pen is, but it’s no joke. Don’t you see, this is going to bring manufacturing back to the US! No longer will American companies export misery to developing countries to make iPhones and cars and Barbie dream homes … we can do all that here. And these animals are no different from pigs or sheep or any other agricultural animals. But these have been bred for factory work.” Ned said.
“But they’re not animals, they’re a chicken-human hybrid.” Barry said.
“There’s barely any human in them, less than a fingernail’s worth,” Ned said.
“But there’s some!” Barry yelled.
“Look, I know they are a surprise at first. But think of them like a mule. That’s a combination between a horse and a donkey. Nobody has any trouble with that. This is the same thing, but just a different application,” Ned said.
Barry was again silent. He tried to collect his thoughts. He had known Ned since college and knew he was a good guy. He thought maybe he wasn’t understanding some part of the story.
“You told me on the way down that they aren’t dangerous. But that implies that they could be or that they were. What’s the deal with that?” Barry asked.
“Good question. So initially I kept them all in the same pen, like with chickens. It turned out that once they become adults, they can be pretty aggressive,” Ned said.
“Aggressive how?” Barry asked.
“They ate each other,” Ned said.
“They what? You said they eat chickenfeed!” Barry exclaimed.
“Yeah, I don’t know why. But at some point, something clicks in their heads and they just go for it. And those beaks can bite your hand clean off. Eventually only one was left, and I had to put it down because it was way too good at killing and eating things,” Ned observed. “Since then I’ve kept them in separate pens and have been breeding the most docile ones to get rid of that trait. Like they did with those foxes in Russia, when they bred them to be just like dogs. This one in pen thirteen is the most docile yet. I’ve tried to feed it meat, put a few cats in there with it, and it just eats its seed and is happy as can be. And it also seems a little smarter than the others. So as the aggression goes down, the intelligence may go up, which is a great result!”
“No, it isn’t you maniac!” Barry said. “If they’re smart and being treated like slaves that makes their life worse. They have to be dumb or –“ Barry stopped himself. He realized Ned had gone off the rails. He started to step back from the pen, but Ned grabbed Barry’s arm to keep him close.
“Just let me show you something,” Ned pulled out an iPad out of a box hanging on the pen. “You’re not going to believe what they’re able to do, but I’ll bet that once you see it you’ll understand everything.” Ned held the iPad up to the bars of the pen, waving it to get the creature’s attention. It noticed, cocked its head side to side and quietly clucked “See, it’s just a big chicken, but better!” He kept waving the iPad as the creature hoped off its perch and waddled toward Ned. It took cautious steps but kept moving its head like a chicken after a worm.
“That’s right, come on. Take the iPad. Show Barry what you can do,” Ned said, as he put the computer halfway through the bars.
The creature jumped at the bars, grabbing Ned’s hand and pulling his arm in up to the shoulder. It bit off Ned’s thumb, then dislocated his shoulder trapping him between the bars.
“Bad chicken! Bad! Barry, do something!” But before Barry could even think, the creature had taken the security card, swiped it and unlocked the pen. It clacked its beak at Barry as it moved to the other pens to unlock them. Ned was screaming for Barry to help him, but when he’d move to do so the creature would lunge.
“I can’t get to you! What’s the code for the door? I’ll get help!” Barry yelled.
“You can’t leave me down here! That fucker ate my thumb!”
“I’ll go upstairs and get a weapon! Give me the Goddamn code! We’re outnumbered!” As the creature opened the pens, the other creatures slowly waddled toward Ned and continued to snap at Barry if he tried to get close.
“You have to promise you’ll come right back!” Ned cried.
“I will! What’s the code?” Barry yelled.
“Five, nine, three, five, seven, two, star!” Ned yelled and cried at the same time. Barry punched in the code and the door opened, the creatures tilted their heads side to side as he stepped through.
“I’m coming right back! Hang in there!” Barry, closed the door ran up the stairs, punched in the other code and was in the basement. He looked around for a weapon, but saw nothing. He ran up to the house and in the garage found an axe. He ran back through the basement, down the long stairwell and took a deep breath before opening the final door. He stepped through holding the axe high, but Ned was already gone. A dozen of the creatures were taking fist-sized bites out of him as he hung limply from the bars of the pen. He dropped the axe, and went back upstairs to the house and as he called 911 he felt light-headed, and blacked out.
***
The hissing of oxygen in a nose tube woke him. He was on the Ned’s couch, under a blanket, with an IV of saline in his arm and paramedic watching him.
“Barry? I’m June, I’m a paramedic. You’re going to be fine. You’re in shock and you fainted but you ok now.” Barry’s head slowly cleared and he noticed police milling around the house.
“Ned! The basement! You have to go in there! The chickens!” Barry yelled.
“We’ve been down there,” one of the police officers said, “hell of a mess. Maybe you can tell us what happened.” Barry told the story and learned that the police broke through the doors to the sub-basement. “That squares with what we found. Your friend Ned was just bloody skeleton and all the creatures were dead. Most of them had defensive wounds on their arms, or whatever they have instead of wings, and all their heads were chopped off.”
“What about the axe?” Barry asked, sitting up.
“Didn’t find any axe. We saw your footprints on the stairs but for some reason there’s no blood left on your shoes. Did you wash them or something?”
“There’s video. You guys better watch it,” Barry said as he blacked out again.
***
Barry went back to his usual life, but missed Ned. The police asked him not to share the details of what was in the basement so nobody else would get the same idea. As for the axe wielding chicken man, the police never tracked it down.
“It probably froze to death in the woods. It’s not like anyone’s going to miss a man-sized chicken with an axe wandering across their lawn,” the office told Barry.
Barry recovered but remained haunted by what happened in the sub-basement. Every Fall when a leaf would go skittering across his driveway, the clicking sound put him into a cold sweat as he would turn to see if a feather-covered killer was coming at him with an axe.