30 December 3038
HIGHLY-CLASSIFIED INFORMATION
ITP-CID REPORT: TRINOMA FINDINGS
During a recent demolition conducted by the Federation government of the abandoned Trinoma, a body was excavated at the site.
The remains, purportedly female, still intact and with hardly any signs of decomposition, was immediately shipped to the city’s forensic pathologist and leading expert on evolution and genetics, Dr. John Michael V. Williams of the University of the Philippines, for further study.
They seek to explain not only the brutal deaths of Dr. Williams of the UP Department of Evolution and Genetics, together with Drs. Tomás de la Vega and Manuel A. Barameda, and members of the laboratory staff, but to make sense of the existence of a creature that was both human and beast.
ITP graphology expert Renee M. Marinduque confirms in his initial findings that the text and voice signatures of collected digital log entries belong initially to Dr. John Michael V. Williams, and then later, to Dr. Evelyn Bautista, both leading figures in the study of Genetics and Evolution.
Based on initial police reports, Dr. Williams’ body and the rest of his colleagues and staff, save for Dr. Bautista, were found in an advanced state of decomposition, all decapitated, with signs of what seemed like gorging by an animal resembling a predatory reptile.
Dr. Bautista reportedly survived the incident.
As of this hour, no suspect has been arrested.
All documents relating to this brutal episode have been kept under lock and key in Malacañang, with official copies sent to the National Security Adviser, Chief of the National Bureau of Investigations, the Secretary of the Department of National Defense, and Chief of “Project Black Book” under the Office of the President, United Federation of Philippine Free States.
All investigations and studies into the matter of the creature had failed in all attempts to form any definitive conclusion as to its actual nature and purpose in nature.
Case is closed.
Dr. J.M. Williams Log: 27 January 3039
Specimen: Partly human
Gender: Female
Age: Middle thirties
Eyes: dark hazel-green
Hair: Straight, plum red
Height: 5’9”
Weight: Approx. 135 lbs.
Distinguishing marks: Slightly faded rose tattoo on the left arm / mole on the lower side of the left eye
Unusual features: Partial growth of exoskeleton along the torso, upper arms, upper chest, wrist, knees / long claw-like hands and fingernails / phalanges, tarsals and metatarsals stretching two inches longer than what is normal for humans / thick armor-like scales forming at the wrist to the base of the elbow, both arms / forehead covered by armor-like scales resembling that of a Pholidota / teeth chiselled to fang-like perfection / eyes and pupils hazy grey, and shaped like a snake’s.
Identifying marks: No fingerprints / No visible eye prints
Discovery: Found by a couple along an empty lot two kilometers east of the old, abandoned Trinoma two days into the demolition. They reported the find to two officers of the Integrated Transnational Police-Asia Criminal Investigations Division (ITP-CID) on the same day.
Cause of death: Unknown
*Note: Initial tests have shown that the specimen exhibits features of being cold-blooded as would a regular species of reptiles.
Analysis: I have not seen anything like it: a human being that is not a human being. The subject is beast-like, more reptilian than homo sapiens.
Since her discovery on 30 December 3038, the scientists and doctors of the University of the Philippines have been closely studying and monitoring this unusual specimen.
No identification was found on the subject, neither was she in any of the government’s database.
We refer to her as Jane Doe.
I, Dr. John Michael V. Williams, have taken the liberty to contact a fellow doctor and scientist based in the Central Canadian Republic, the leading Filipino-Canadian expert on Evolution, Genetic Engineering, and Linguistic and Social Anthropology—Dr. Tomás de la Vega and his colleagues—to study this marvellous specimen.
I’ve started initial autopsy and forensic tests.
Initial observations re: bone structure, skin/teeth sampling, and DNA code sequences to establish identification suggests that the specimen is Asian in origin.
However, closer observation of the molecular structure and DNA code sequence sourced from different parts of the body reveals several anomalies:
(1) The subject possesses no distinct cellular nucleus in some parts. It’s as if her biological structure on the cellular level has been devolving into something closer to the cellular physiology of a bacteria/virus, and in parts where sensitive bodily organs are located, that of a prehistoric reptile;
(2) The rate of cellular devolution, if devolution has actually occurred, is a thousand times faster than what its counterpart—evolution—can accomplish in approximately 1.5 million years;
(3) Also, it appears that Jane Doe’s DNA exists in both linear and circular form, loosely structured unlike that of human DNA, allowing no more than the simplest processes to occur;
(4) As it has been pointed out, first by Dr. Tomás de la Vega in the Oxford Journals of Molecular Biology and Evolution, the strongest and most versatile of all species, which can undoubtedly survive the onslaught of billions of years, is the one that retains the simplest if not the most primitive cellular physiology despite its multicellular state.
Dr. Tomás de la Vega and his team’s ETA from Vancouver would be at 2100 hours tonight, Philippines Airlines (Flight PR 119), Manila time. I can’t wait to hear what he and his colleagues have to say.
Dr. J.M. Williams
Log: 28 January 3039
Dr. Tomás de la Vega, Dr. Evelyn T. Bautista, and Dr. Manuel A. Barameda arrived last night at the UP Department of Evolution and Genetic Studies.
I personally welcomed the doctor and his team, and escorted them to the laboratory where the specimen was kept in a blast-freeze chamber. We lost no time conducting tests and experiments on the cadaver.
By sundown, Dr. de la Vega confirmed our initial findings re: DNA, but was hardly surprised at the discovery. He said he has been following developments on the subject matter.
In fact, he pulled out a book he wrote as a young expert on Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, From Beauty to Beast: Charles Darwin’s Miscalculation of the Evolutionary Sequence, and pointed to his theory, which he called “The Devolution Revolution”.
Our discussion on the matter was candid enough to shock our previously held notions about the Darwinian theory. Suffice it that the Dr. Tomás de la Vega had spent a lifetime of research and experiments to prove Darwin wrong.
I took the liberty of recording what he said last night. Here’s an excerpt:
“From the very moment life occurred, evolution kicked off with natural selection, and gave the first life forms the ability to adapt to their environment and adjust to the surrounding conditions.
“The Earth was young and volatile, subject to the meticulous and ever-changing blueprint and temper of Nature. For reasons of continuity, life evolved into simple structures and organisms in order to triumph over the temper of the times. Complex life would’ve died in a split second under these extremely harsh conditions.
However, as evolution would have it, life refuses to stay austere. As soon as life progressed from simple organism to complex life forms, something needs to be done for it to survive. The development of instinct, therefore, became a necessary biological offshoot of this need.
“Where single cell creatures lived and reproduced through mitosis, multicellular creatures emerged as a result. A couple million years and they began to grow arms, legs and feet, some even wings. The earlier creatures, mostly those hunted as prey, developed armor and ‘weapons’—fangs, claws, scales, exoskeletons, powerful hind legs for speed—to fight off predators.
“With these came, too, an insatiable hunger, and, in time, skills for the hunt. Every creature known to man is both predator and prey, and its most primitive form, both scavenger and hunter. This was an expected outcome in order to preserve Nature’s all-important balance.
“Apparently, the development of creature instinct had become Nature’s first priority, leaving the progress of the brain locked in its infancy for eons.
However, through the confluence of millions of years of experience, surviving one catastrophe after the next, one predator after the other, Nature decided to take a gargantuan experiment into the evolutionary process: to finally breed a creature with a highly-developed brain.
“For Nature, this poses a huge problem and a big risk. In order to develop the brain, the natural process is forced to take a detour in order to focus all its energies and vital powers on the advancement of the brain, leaving other features underdeveloped or less than satisfactory for survival.
“Instead of an exoskeleton, horns, and protective armor, as a substitute for fangs, claws, and speed, Nature produced mammals and provided these with feeble hide as covering, and arms and legs to make up for the lack of speed.
“In time, the human genus appeared—the hominins as we know them. Then came homo erectus from which modern man, homo sapiens, appeared.
If you look at humanity’s cosmic calendar, and lump billions upon billions of years in a 31-day monthly calendar beginning January and ending in December, the Big Bang would’ve occurred on New Year’s Day, first life on Earth appeared sometime late September, and the emergence of the first humans on December 31, New Year’s Eve, around 10:30PM.
“With the development of the human brain, man was able to manage and control, in a manner of saying, his physical state and his environment. The 20th-century author, Carl Sagan, once proposed that humanity’s chances of survival grew exponentially when we made a bargain with nature: not only should we progress extragenetically, meaning, development in the molecular and cellular level, but in “extrasomatic knowledge” as well, meaning “information stored outside the body”. In other words, learning.
“By this ability, we were able to adapt to nature’s ferocity and power, and bridge distances, through industrial progress, the powers of arts and culture, communicate and even appreciate beauty through writing and literature, technical knowhow, and imminent ideological discoveries, leaving his kind with sufficient means to adjust and familiarize itself with its surrounding, hence triumphing over it.
“This is where Charles Darwin seemingly proved himself wrong. He assumed that with humanity’s achievements in the realm of industry and the arts—extrasomatic knowledge—what man had undergone was no less than evolution, meaning an improvement of the human species both genetically, and as proof of this, our extrasomatic accomplishments.
“However, as the language of genetics and evolution implies, what we went through was a ‘devolution’ into being the weaker of the species, save for a developed brain. In the process, our instincts have suddenly taken a back seat.
“All these are really just temporary. Nature and evolution are still at work in the sidelights, busy as ever in the department of physiological transformation, biding their time until they’ve exhausted all means to develop the brain.
“Once the brain has fully matured and reached its evolutionary zenith, the final stages of the evolution-devolution process is forced to take another gigantic leap: a return to its original physiological design, not one destined for creaturely comforts, but one that’s engineered to fight, hunt, invade and survive the most challenging terrain, and triumph over the harshest conditions, but with a twist: a predatory creature completely armed with primitive weapons and armor, but one made more efficient because of its highly-developed human brain.
“Have you ever imagined the kind of violence a bacteria inflicts on a human body? It has in its employ a cache of weapons, from life-threatening toxins to the ability to inflict damage on the cellular level. Now imagine scores of humans with bacterial or viral ability to replicate in vast numbers, use instinct for destruction while armed with a highly-developed brain.
“It’s as if natural selection chooses who to develop, time and again, with creaturely violence to preserve the primordial genetic continuum. We have seen the beginnings of this slow yet sure transfiguration, or rather, mutation in the past—birth pangs, I call it—which would soon give rise to a fully evolved species of predator-man.
“We have stood witness to it time and again: in wars and dictatorships, in imperial rule, in genocides and carnage of unbelievable proportions, in rapes and plunder, humans acting like beasts on the prowl.
“These are the reasons why some of us wonder how man can accomplish such levels of violence and carnage seen only in beasts.
“For reasons I have yet to discover, Nature’s experiment with catastrophes and tragedies, including acts of repression and environmental degradation, had, alas, triggered something in the human gene pool to rekindle its primitive design for survival—to kill or stop any and known threats.
“This forced man, via genetic transformation, to revert to being beasts without regressing the brain’s abilities. The problem with this is that the changes, which through evolution took millions of years to develop, required but a matter of weeks or months to reach its final stage.
“I came to this conclusion when seven unusual specimens—humans with creature-like features—were discovered recently in various places: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, China, Mexico, Africa, and Lebanon. While studying the subjects, I asked Dr. Martin G. Smith, an expert on cellular biology, what strings all these specimens together. And then it hit me. All these specimens came from countries where catastrophes have been brutally rampant, and repression and persecution widespread.
“Strange as this is astonishing, we found out that all these specimens died of what seems like cancer at the genesis of their mutation. It’s as if cancer—the sudden multiplication of cells in certain areas of the body as these are often triggered genetically—is actually nature’s way of attempting to make that evolutionary leap, dividing and transforming, yet failing to achieve its desired outcome for some reason or the other.
“This brought me back to my days at the university. I remember the hour quite clearly. My French professor in Genetics, Adélaïde Bélanger, and I had a full hour debating whether cancer, as we know it to be a disease today, is actually evolution’s way of attempting an evolutionary leap.
“I was able to silence her ranting only after I raised the issue of teratoma tumors found mostly in women. These tumors, after having reached maturity, have been said to contain hair, teeth, bone, even as complex organs such as small brains and eyes, both limbs, even feet. Some contain even the vestiges of tissues found in the lungs, thyroid, and liver.
Is our development as a species no different from the development of a cancerous tumor? Is teratoma the homo sapien’s first attempt at cellular division?
“Such a specimen, if at all we unearth one, could change the whole course of what we know as genetics and evolution. This will be the real missing link.
“Suffice it for now that devolution is the true evolution, nay, the true genetic ‘revolution’. Because in our fullest evolved state, humans MUST remain as beasts.”
Dr. J.M. Williams
Audio Log: 30 January 3039
This is Dr. Evelyn Bautista. With me is Dr. Williams’ digital audio log recorder. This morning, at about 0500hrs, I was rescued by operatives of the ITP-CID from inside the mess hall of the UP Department of Evolution and Genetics. I am now at its headquarters in Ortigas, holed up in a top secret chamber three miles below sea level.
Yesterday, the 29th, further tests and experiments were conducted on our Jane Doe.
Apparently, Dr. de la Vega had discovered another anomaly which could very well explain the physiological state of the specimen in question.
At 10:07 AM yesterday, findings from a sampling taken from the subject’s brain revealed an enormous burst of activity. It’s as if, in Dr. de la Vega’s words, “the brain is directly controlling the subject’s body mass and structure on a cellular and molecular level.”
This, above any other, left us to conclude that the specimen, first and foremost, was not dead but very much alive, but in hibernation.
Secondly: the specimen, however motionless in general and without a heartbeat, was quickly mutating into something definitely non-human. Dr. de la Vega and Dr. Williams had instructed us to bind the specimen’s arms and feet just to be sure.
Half past the hour of noon, while most of the staff and doctors were out for lunch, a commotion inside the laboratory was heard all the way up to the mess hall. The sound of crashing and breaking of glass. We rushed to where the noise was coming from.
At the entrance to the lab, adjacent to the hallway leading to the staircase, two creatures of identical features stood. They were not human but reptilian, with hideous faces that resembled a crocodile, torso of a snake, its chest and lower limbs wrapped in what seemed like the exoskeleton of an armadillo. Their fingers and toes had turned into claws, their eyes bloodshot, their teeth fang-like.
Everything happened so quickly. The first to be gorged by one of the creatures were two of Dr. Williams’ staff members, assistant scientists Renato Villanueva and Bart de Asis. Both hid themselves in the maintenance room for safety.
Then came the other creature and proceeded to rip apart my colleagues Dr. de la Vega and Dr. Barameda in one fell swoop. From where I and Dr. Williams hid behind a table, we saw the creature rip the torso of Dr. de la Vega using its huge claws, the way a chef would use a cleaver.
No, they were not in a feeding frenzy. From where I was watching the carnage, they seem to be in the thick of a murderous rampage. This is something an animal, even the vilest of predators, would rarely be guilty of.
Why were they not feeding? Why were they simply killing?
Dr. Williams, out of desperation, scampered to a nearby open hallway, leaving me behind. It didn’t take long for the two creatures to grab hold of the good doctor and rip him to shreds. While they fixed their attention on Dr. Williams, I ran to the mess hall and bolted the doors.
The odd thing was, I saw both creatures staring at me as I was running, yet they hardly moved a muscle to give chase. From the look on their faces, it was as if they wanted to let me go. I was holed up in the mess hall until morning when the ITP-CID operatives arrived. By the time they discovered my whereabouts, and the slew of body parts scattered in the lab, the two creatures were long gone.
Dr. Evelyn Bautista’s log: 02 Feb 3039
My notes on Jane Doe:
The specimen, apparently, had taken on the survival qualities of a single cell organism, first by reproducing via multicellular mitosis in a span of two weeks, and second, by recreating through mutation the features of three predators: the Viper, the Brazilian Black Crocodile, and the prehistoric Raptor.
As for its features resembling the Viper, the bodies inside the lab were found with cobra venom in their systems.
Jane Doe’s supposed “death” was, in fact, the time it took for its complex DNA structure to transfigure to its simplest form and complete its final stages of evolution.
The specimen is very much alive.
The evolution of Jane Doe has reached its zenith. At the rate of these creatures’ reproduction via multicellular mitosis, at the end of 3039, all life on Earth, as we know it, will have faced extinction.
Only these creatures will remain unless we find a way to stop them. But how do we stop ourselves from evolving?
Welcome the New Triassic Era.
+End of Log Year 3039
