Project Apex by Michael Bray Page B

once, but I know his work. He’s supposed to be brilliant, which is why I’m surprised he missed such a huge and obvious flaw."
    "What are we dealing with here Mr. Draven?" Marcus said, straightening a little in his seat.
    "Is Genaro there?" Draven said, ignoring the question as he started to separate some pages from the rest of the file.
    "No, he isn't.
    "Get him there. I need to talk to him."
    "He's unavailable until at least tomorrow. Anything you need to say you can do so now. This conversation is being recorded so I can relay it back to him straight away."
    “That’s not good enough. I need to speak to him. I have questions.”
    “He seems to think you are the most knowledgeable on this subject, Mr. Draven,” Marcus said with more than a hint of irritability. “That’s why we came all this way to get you.”
    “As far as research about the Tiger monkeys goes, yes I am. Most of this relates to Genaro’s work after my involvement ended. No disrespect, but I don’t have time to dumb it down for you. I need to speak to him directly.”
    Marcus cleared his throat and straightened his tie. Draven could see he had pushed a little too far, and hoped it served to relay how urgent his request was. “Mr. Draven, please. I appreciate what you’re saying. However, we can’t reach Dr. Genaro right now. Could you please give it to me in simple terms so I can at least give the rest of the people working on this some kind of idea about what we’re dealing with?”
    Draven sighed, tapping his fingers on the file. "Okay fine, I’ll give you the simple version. It seems to me that Genaro based his entire program on the single paper I published in nineteen-ninety-nine on the specific healing properties of the tiger monkey. What he wouldn’t know is that there was much more to my findings than made the article. Long story short, this species of monkey had all of these amazing regenerative properties and a killer immune system, but it all came at a price."
    "Go on," Marcus said, his brow furrowed.
    "I conducted experiments on these creatures and found that along with the increased resilience and seeming unlimited regeneration, the monkeys also had flaws. Something put into the creature’s genetic makeup by nature to counterbalance its amazing abilities. My experiment’s showed the male monkeys possessed incredibly inflated levels of testosterone, so much so that they would go into a frenzy and fight to the death with other members of the group for little to no reason, often with no provocation. Have you ever heard of the term roid rage?"
    "Yes,” Marcus said, folding his hands on his desk. “That’s what they call increased aggression in long-term steroid users."
    "Exactly. Now imagine that a thousand fold and you will see why I’m so concerned. In the wild, the Tiger monkey aggression was controlled in a sense because they had a definite hierarchy within the community with one male acting as the Alpha to which the rest of the species deferred. Also, due to the harshness of their environment in the Congo, they were forced to exist together in a form of uneasy alliance. What you, or should I say, Genaro has done, is take those traits and merge them with the volatile and complex human machine."
    "What does that mean for us?" Marcus asked.
    "Humans as a species are an incredibly selfish, violent and bloodthirsty race. We are ruled by greed, jealousy, anger, selfishness and every other flawed emotion you can imagine. Think about it from the point of view of those who have been changed for a second. What would you do if you had almost unlimited power, and a volatile no tolerance temper to boot? To put it a better way, what would you do if the restrictive rules of society, of right and wrong no longer applied to you? What if you were superior to your fellow man and knew nobody could do anything about it? Would you still take orders from those you deemed beneath you? Or would you decide for yourself what you wanted to