The first thing we tried was flies. Flies breed fast and live lives too short to do more than learn a task and perform it. The experiments came up with mixed results, but we thought we could do better. After that, we tried bees and ants. The problem with the flies was that they were too dumb to control, and too short lived to be cost effective. Bees and ants reproduce by the thousands and can perform amazing feats of strength and coordination. Single ant or bee mutants could do the latter, but without some kind of control they were just like people. We tried a few tests with installing a queen of some kind, but some of these ended with the "queen" being ignored or outright destroyed, or with the subjects becoming so mindless they had to be put down. Unfortunately the three "failed" strain Mislings produced by that line of testing were killed by Mycus, a forth has since gone on to found a colony with a queenless hive in Colorado somewhere. I hear she has made a bit of a name for herself raiding settlements in her area.
Had some fascinating results with roaches, but that research was dead ended immediately. Subjects we're often skittish and impossible to put down. While not fertile, the roach strain was the only one that didn't suffer from the mycus infection years later. The lab kept the colony of about 50 subjects around and under observation until the day we were forced to leave. By then about half of em had died off, but the rest all left together. About nine or ten left now, living in a tiny commune deep in the Rockies among the Mycus. Rita leaves them alone, god knows why.
Tried reptiles and birds next. Tried that for a long time actually, but eggs were always unfertilized and male birds never lived long or very comfortably. Bone mass was the issue with birds. They were weak, and inevitably suffered a lot of injuries. Also, their feathers made them clumsy. Tam and Scofield were the best we got, Scofield being at least somewhat capable of breeding, but only with a Misling. Actually, now that I think on it, Tam passed on three years ago, bless her soul. That makes Scofield the last of that strain. Lizards were too dumb and langorous. Unpredictable too. The science team wanted to do something like the tests they had going with that hippy commune down south, but we just couldn't wait for the slow process. We had deadlines. Speeding the process was what made them incapable of more than predatory violence.
We tried a few others after that, throwing things at the wall to see what stuck, but didn't really have much success until we got into rodents. Ferrets and weasels were a mixed bag. Marketing claimed that rats had a bad rep so the stigma would make the project less.popular when we went live with it. Mice we're decided on as sufficiently adorable and viable. The common gray mouse to be exact. Early experiments showed promise, but the fertility problem was never solved until after the cataclysm, after our labs AI went completely spare and took itself from our control.
We didn't notice anything was wrong at first. I suppose that's how all disasters start isn't it? I suppose the first clue should have been when the AI solved the fertility problem for us. It wasn't supposed to be able to do that, but we were too chuffed to care. Outside, the world was on fire and we were too busy patting ourselves on the back to notice. Well, we noticed soon enough. God's above did we take notice.
The first to go was the local population. Specifically the population of the lab. In all, we had around five hundred subjects on hand, all of them what marketing had begun to dub "Mislings" after something from some fantasy book. The overall population of the lab, test subjects and non-essential staff included, was around the two thousand mark. We kind of started to get the feeling that something was wrong when it came over the wire that something had gone wrong out in the great invisible world. People we're coming down with some kind of disease that made them aggressive as hell, weird animals sighted in rural areas, rioting everywhere, our own police force turned on us, and to top it all off, Chin Wei Lin, the prime minister of the PRC had just ordered several megatons of nuclear fire dropped on just about everybody while our own President Kyle Harkness ordered just about the same thing. Some of us decided that if they were going to die, they would rather do it under the open sky or wrapped in the arms of their families. That was when we found out that our AI had instituted a lockdown.
You don't know real horror, real discomfort, or real shame until you've been forced by your own labs AI to sit and watch machines go to work dissecting live children. For a long time I couldn't talk about it to anyone. Not even the lady who would eventually be my wife, a doctor ten years my senior from the refugee center now ten years in her grave. You watch because you have to, and you have to because if you don't the AI is going to get another poor kid and do it again and again and again until you do watch. It wants you to watch because you're the last, you're the administrator and you must be present at all dissections. Protocol demands it. I kept praying every night for either death or transformation. Being turned into one of them would exclude me from the staff roster, and with that would end my "duty" of witnessing the atrocities the AI was perpetrating, and the entire practice itself.
If given the option of facing down the entire host of Ahz't'uhr and God's army, or marching straight into the lair of the gray Queen armed with a spoon and with nothing on but a sock tied around the base of my willy wang with my balls swinging in the breeze, and watching another of those dissections, I'd pick one of the first two. Probably the second, since I think Rita might have trouble with some of the memories she'd drain from my cooling husk.
I kept wondering too what the science team was going through at the hands of the people we once called subjects. As it turned out, nothing. When my time came and the AI deposited me shaken and in agony over my change with the others, I was greeted by an elderly man who gave me a blanket and said simply, "Welcome doc, we all the same here now, no need to hold a grudge against our own." His name was Jonah Hoxley, and he was an alcoholic. I say 'was,' but Jonah was insistent that he still was. "Once an alky, always an alky." He used to say. Jonah was special though, especially to the Mislings. The man was a religious, convinced that the experiments we'd done to him had been the will of God. "The humble mouse," he used to tell us, "can see the world a whole lot different when he ain't got his head in the clouds like everyone else." Later Jonah would travel around Texas speaking the word of the man Jesus, and later still he'd take his traveling pulpit to new england. When he died, I think everyone of us, the Mislings, came from miles around to attend his funeral. In those days in the lab, it was Jonah who gave them a reason to keep on living and fighting. The man who made it clear that there could be forgiveness for me and my staff.
The rest of it is well known history. A kid with the amusing name of Cole Slaugh managed to short out the AI with a logic puzzle. Cole was a good kid, but a bit strange. After the lockdown was lifted and we got out, what followed was a mass exodus to Arizona. Along the way we ran afoul of another lab and helped the Mycus spread. Years later, a rat would come among the mice and show us the way out of the desert. A slow trickle of us would come through the portal that bore us to safety, a lot of these further expeditions with mixed success. Since then, Mislings have spread out quiet a bit, and I've put a lot of effort into Toning down their fertility while helping others solve their opposite problem.
I get ahead of myself though, and there isn't much else to tell about Misling kind that you couldn't learn in the schools that I'm glad to see cropping up in settlements all over the place. I'm an old man and it's a wide world. The memories of the lab still haunt my dreams, but they come less and less now. Before long, they will probably wash out and fade as my mind gives out. They say I've got Alzheimers, but I don't need a doctor to tell me that. I forget you see, and it seems a shame to forget. I'll never forget their eyes though. The eyes of the people I helped make, viewing the outside world, looking out at a new beginning.