Genome by Yabou
Chapter One
Warning: This story will be full of blunt talk about body parts and sexual intercourse. Most of it will be a sort of "medical observation" as the majority of this story will take place in a medical lab. If you are uncomfortable with this or not of the appropriate age, I warn you not to read. There will also be harsh language and violence.
Story Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairytale. I also do not own the definition in the beginning of this story. It was procured from Google and remains its property.
Genome
Chapter One
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Genome - (n.) /ˈjēnōm/ The complete set of genetic material of an organism.
Earth - 3033 A.D.
She sighed and scrubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers, willing her vision to stop glazing over so she could finish the rest of the rounds. Tipping the Medi-Visor back down, the young doctor watched carefully as data sheets and daily reports fed through the visual link. With only four patients left to check in her quadrant, she counted herself lucky with a rather routine evening, and her mind was already wandering to what she might treat herself to if she managed to sneak out early.
“Got a new one, Doc,” a rowdy male voice called to her as two attendants rolled in a sedation cart. Kagome sighed again and quickly tucked her evening plans away for another time.
“What level?”
“Nine,” the retriever whistled, grabbing a spare Medi-Visor from the shelf and slipping it carefully over his pointed ears. “Got lucky with this one. Mangled seven of the retriever-units, but I bet he’ll do the trick for your little research project.”
“Nine,” she dazedly repeated, pushing off quickly from the floor and letting her rolling stool gun down the open path between the cells. “How did you manage to find him?”
“Ah,” he paused, glancing up at her from the new subject. She noticed immediately when his dark eyes squinted - even through the green tint of the wraparound visor.
“Kouga,” she dared. “I need to know. It’s imperative to my research that we have the truth about every one of them. How did you find him?”
“He was pretty easy to find,” the wolf replied. “After all, he lives in a damn castle.”
Kagome gasped. “A tai youkai?! You captured a tai youkai? That isn’t allowed!”
“Sure it is,” he returned, pulling the Medi-Visor off and slamming it on the table. “I spoke to the old man this morning. He said you were getting desperate and that you needed the best of the best. Well… this is the best! He’s powerful. He’s canine, and he’s not mated. What else could you ask for?”
“Kouga, we have to have standards. It’s bad enough that the Council has decided that consent is no longer necessary. If you start capturing tai youkai, we’re going to upset the whole balance of their civilization. This is unacceptable!”
“Look,” Kouga growled, stepping forward and taking her flailing hands in his grasp. “I don’t really like this any more than you do, but I don’t have a choice. I’m a prisoner. Remember? If I don’t follow orders, I get fried. But if you don’t like this shit, go to your grandfather. He’s the one who made the order!”
“Kouga,” she mumbled as he released her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to react like that. It’s just… I’ve been trying to talk to Grandpa, but he’s beyond all reason. They all are! They’re so consumed by the lack of results that I’m beginning to think they won’t stop until they get what they want.”
“You’re still the best option,” the wolf youkai pressed. “You’re the only one who can talk to them without getting sentenced for treason.”
She nodded and took a long look at her new guinea pig. “I know. I promise to keep trying.”
“See that you do,” he replied, picking up his gear and tapping a sequence into the sedation cart, releasing their newest acquisition into the free space of a small cell.
With one last weary glance, he laid his hand on her shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I’m not sure how long it will take him to come-to. They had to give him almost two thousand grams of sedative just to get him inside the transport car.”
“Okay,” the young doctor replied. “I’ll keep an eye on him. Thanks, Kouga.”
Hiking up the leg of his pants to reveal the small, gray cylinder implanted in his ankle, he gave her a cheeky wink. “Just doing my job.”
Kagome watched him leave the medical platform with a frown. The area around his P-23 implant had been angry red with irritation, and there was only one reason why the holy magic inside the tiny shell would ever leech out to zap its host. He had been actively trying to fight the directive issued to him that day, and there was only one reason why the wolf youkai ever tried to ignore orders.
Her gaze flew back to her newest subject - interest piqued.
“So how do you know our resident wolf?” She questioned, leaning closer to the clear SuperGlass cell. “He wouldn’t fight for someone he didn’t know - especially not someone as strong as you.”
The tai youkai remained unresponsive.
“Come on, now. I know you’re awake. If you’re a level nine, two thousand grams of sedation would have worn off before they even moved you into the sedation cart, and those carts are definitely not equipped to contain someone as powerful as you.”
After a minute or two, she huffed and pulled the transcription tablet from her white lab coat pocket, determined to jot down a few notes before returning to rounds. Holding the small machine directly in front of the cell, she pressed a few on screen selections and opened the camera mode. Centering the picture on his face, the doctor gasped when piercing gold eyes flew open and leveled her with a glare through the digital display.
Quickly taking a requisite photo, Kagome dropped the tablet in her lap and offered up a smile. “Hello. Welcome to Earth. My name is Kagome, and this Medic Lab is currently hovering over the country of Japan.”
Long, white sleeves pooled back into place over the demon’s arms as he pushed himself into a sitting position. His eerie eyes only lingered on her form for a moment or two longer before moving on to survey the rest of the large room. The open area boasted thirty cells in total - all the same basic square shape and size. Each individual unit was also composed of the same odd clear material with a series of small holes on top and bottom to allow adequate air flow. A series of interconnected pathways surrounded each block so that none of the cells touched on any side.
The youkai lord noted areas of weakness in the construction - flaps that could be opened and closed with a series of locks to insert food or other necessities. The cart he was rolled in on was pushed to one side and seemed to serve as a bed while a small sink and something resembling a toilet cluttered the opposing corner.
He also noted, with much disdain, that the small human woman was still standing to one side of his cage.
“You do know Kouga, don’t you?” She questioned, tapping her stylus against the small device in her lap.
The tai youkai ignored her repeated inquiry and stood, moving to the opposite side of the cell.
“Ok,” she smiled, holding her hands up in a gesture of appeasement. “I get it. I’ll just come back in a little while.” Moving away from the silver-haired dog demon, she trailed down the row of units to check on her last four subjects where another inu caught her attention.
“Inuyasha?” she questioned, stopping close to the entrance to his cell.
The hanyou gave her a frustrated glare. “You brought in someone new.”
“Yes,” she replied simply while allowing her Medi-Visor to show his stats.
The half-demon had been in their captivity for several months. He was one of the first to be acquired without consent, and in the process of his capture, one of the retrievers gave him a substantial stomach wound. His body was still fighting off the remains of infection.
“Do you know him?”
“Keh,” he replied with a toss of his long silver hair, hands stuffing into the sleeves of his white, lab-issued haori.
“Ah,” Kagome’s smile widened. “So you do know him.”
“I didn’t say that,” the easily irritable hanyou snapped.
“You didn’t have to,” she teased.
“Keh.”
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“So much for an easy day,” Kagome grumbled, dropping her tray on the table and slumping into her seat.
“New arrival?” Her co-worker questioned.
“Yes,” she replied, breaking her chopsticks apart with more force than was necessary causing the ends to be unevenly matched.
“And?” He drawled, watching her scrub the wooden ends against each other and sending little splinters all over the table.
“And I can’t believe what the Council is doing,” she exclaimed. “This is completely unacceptable. We should not be capturing them to begin with, but to capture a tai youkai is like breaking down their whole infrastructure! The tai youkai are their leaders. When we remove one, the ensuing competition to replace them could be detrimental. This was why tai youkai were forbade from participating in the experiment to begin with!”
“Kagome,” her fellow doctor placed a soothing hand on top of hers to calm her down. “I believe you are drawing more attention than you intended.”
She swallowed her tirade and took a careful perusal around the room. “Oh, Miroku.” She whispered. “It’s just so frustrating. Grandpa won’t listen to me anymore, and I’m just not sure what to do.”
“We understand,” Sango replied, scooting her chair closer to the upset young doctor. “But this is not the place. There are not many who feel as we do, Kagome, and we do not want to take any chance of causing a misunderstanding.”
Kagome read the caution in both sets of eyes and willed the blush out of her cheeks. She knew what they meant - knew what they wouldn’t say here in front of all these people who were rushing about trying to find a cure to what might be the end of the humans as a species. She was a grandchild to one of the founding Council Elders. She was allowed to have her ‘whims of fancy’.
They were not.
Anyone else who muttered words about the slippery slope the Council was traveling would be jailed for treason. Or worse.
“Okay,” Kagome evenly replied. “Maybe we should… go see a movie.”
“Not tonight,” Miroku answered, threading Sango’s arm through his. “We’re due to go down to the surface to visit my parents.”
“We’ll be back in a few days,” Sango assured, leaning over to give her friend a gentle hug. “We’ll do something then, okay?”
“Sounds good,” she responded. “I have plenty of work to keep me busy until then.”
As they made their way away from the table, the young doctor allowed her thoughts to return to the great creatures held captive in her quadrant of the Medic Lab. She was responsible for the Non-Cons, youkai who were taken without their consent. As a matter of fact, most of the youkai who had originally consented to medical testing to help the humans had left the facility after the Council ordered that other youkai be captured.
They were appalled by the idea of their friends and family being held in cages for experimentation.
Kagome didn’t blame them.
And while it was true that the progress of her work would affect the future possibility of natural procreation within the human race, she couldn’t justify the cause with the capture of innocent creatures. The only hope she had of releasing them was to finish the prototype of the SR-17 drug. It was their best bet of reversing the effects of a booster shot, called C-4, that had been administered nearly one hundred years prior.
During that time, a horrible plague had ravaged the planet Earth, killing almost seventy-three percent of the world’s population. Doctors and scientists alike rushed to find an immunization to compete with its deadly effects, and in the course of one year, they found it. C-4. With only three months of trial testing, they moved on to mass production and began administering the drug to every person on the planet.
It saved millions of lives, but in the process, it also began a genetic mutation that wouldn’t be noticed for nearly eighty years. Male sterility. In essence and for reasons unknown, C-4 caused the retraction and degradation of the male penis and testes. At first, men were diagnosed with undescended testicles. Surgeries were performed. And then, it was noticed that the testes were also malformed.
The fat protecting them from overheating was too thin.
The inner walls were too thick.
Over generations, even the penis was not left unharmed. And so in the course of only five generations, ninety-nine out of every one hundred male humans were sterile.
Genetic testing began immediately. The human genome was charted and dismissed. Scientists discovered that the mutations had gone to far to be corrected within the species, and they turned their studies toward youkai. Even though they no longer inhabited the planet Earth, some were still frequent visitors from their nearby galaxy, Cerberus.
At the humans’ pleading, several of the demons submitted to genetic testing, and out of nearly thirty different youkai races, the dog-like specimen were found to be the most compatible. However, they were also some of the most reclusive of all the youkai. Within months, only a few dogs and wolves agreed to further testing, and the Council became anxious. After all, the human men who still held viable sperm were being quickly drained, and it was also discovered that the genetically manipulated children were even more vulnerable to the sterility mutation.
It didn’t take long for the Council to decide that they didn’t need anyone’s approval to capture youkai and force them to submit for testing. Earth was declared a military planet, and dozens of ships filled with retrievers were sent to the youkai galaxy.
Kagome twirled her spoon thoughtfully in her cup of cooling tea.
It was only a matter of time before the Council went too far.
Someone would eventually lash out and demand they release their prisoners.
And then there would be war.
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