Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 34

Chapter 34 - Playing God

With Beckett now relegated to the tender mercies of his fellow medical practitioners, Eventus was free to slip around the various members of the Atlantis expedition and head down to biological engineering lab seventeen.

It was one of the smaller labs, six pods held in a cylinder configuration that could cycle position over a single DNA sequence. Its original use had been as what amounted to a prototyping facility for testing out the validity of certain genetic alterations before they were introduced to a newly terraformed planet as part of a general population.

He'd chosen this lab in particular over one of the larger ones because it was both out of the way, and secure enough that he wouldn't have to worry about a member of the expedition finding their way inside without a significant amount of effort.

A moderate concern given he was going to be playing god in a way he rather suspected the humans from Earth would probably frown upon. Though amusingly playing god had always been perfectly acceptable to his people, at least so long as you had the proper authorizations and didn't impinge on the free will of any sapient beings you were creating.

Which was something Eventus himself had always considered extremely distasteful, possibly to a degree higher than the majority of his people given the scathing rebuttal he'd written about what they'd decided to do when the Asurans had refused to fight.

Sure they had lacked souls, so their actual level of sapience was questionable at best according to everything his people knew about the subject. But they didn't know nearly enough about what caused souls to sometimes develop ex-nihilo in things that didn’t previously have them to say if that would have eternally remained true.

Honestly, if it had been up to him they would have at least tried to transfer one of the Asuran consciousnesses to a fully biological body first just to see what happened. One of the options he was keeping in the wings if it turned out the Asurans had not developed something approaching a soul in the past ten thousand years.

“If anyone asks.” He offered in a joking tone as he entered the command string that would fill the pod with the biological substrate fluid. “This is Major Lorne's fault for showing me Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings on our trip back.”

Of course, the physical parameters of his genetic template was closer to elves as portrayed in Dungeons and Dragons then the ones seen in Lord of the Rings, but when the universe hands you a ready made excuse, it doesn't hurt to use it.

For a couple of reasons he was only going to produce a single Elf to start with, the other five pods being relegated to the much slower process of growing Asgard using a randomized combination of genetics from the pre-genetic enhancement samples of their species that the city possessed.

“The problem is whose genetics to use for a base to apply the genetic template to.” He muttered to himself as he began scrolling through the extraordinarily long list of human samples in the database.

Any of the humans or near humans currently living on Atlantis were out since he was already going to be walking a moral tightrope with them just by creating life like this. And as tempted as he was to try and use Dea’s DNA as a base given she had helped him with the original proposal, the idea of creating what would basically be the near identical Elven sister of his dead girlfriend left him feeling kind of skeevy.

Even if he was pretty sure that Dea would have thought it a great idea due to the fact it would give them a direct comparative datapoint about any major psychological differences generated by the template.

He glared at the screen for a moment in defiance of the idea before hanging his head and letting out an annoyed sigh. “Ten thousand years dead and you're still convincing me to do things I know I'll regret.”

Though to be fair misplaced personal guilt for her death was probably playing a big part in that.

Entering the command string that would bring up Dea's profile, he let a brief melancholy smile graced his lips at the picture that appeared before scrolling down to the DNA map and selecting it as the base point for the template.

There were several incompatibilities, mainly between the longevity enhancements and what the humans so colloquially called the ATA gene. But he'd expected that given the one or the other problem had been something his people had been trying to figure a way around since before Atlantis had left Earth.

Thankfully the ATA gene had been purposefully designed in such a way that it could be easily stripped out of a DNA structure that was in an information state to no negative effect on the resulting humanoid. One of the steps his people had taken to avoid the same 'no way back’ fate that had ended up causing the Asgard so much trouble.

So all it took was a thought to remove the conflicting portions, leaving behind a pale shadow of the gene structure that would at most slightly ease the ability of her mind to process digital information.

The only thing left then was the small unfilled portion of the DNA strand that represented the uncertainty that had plagued him most during the centuries of on again off again work he'd put into the template, cross-compatibility. 

Real life genetics were too messy to allow half-elves as a guaranteed result of a pairing between a human and elf. At least, not without functionally dead ending the elven genome to the point the species would be a functionally static existence. And the very idea of that offended him on an almost instinctual level given it would mean locking them out of the possibility of developing mental and spiritual abilities like his own people had.

Leaving things up to chance however ran the risk that elven genetics would slowly outcompete everything else except Lantean and Lantean descended humans. Since genetic incompatibilities between the two subraces would make successful reproduction between them so statistically unlikely that he'd probably have better odds bedding an actual Wraith Queen.

Meanwhile the solution others had decided on left a bad taste in his mouth. Because while allowing it to be what basically amounted to a fifty fifty yes no chance for inheriting the full modifications or none at all might work for cases like the Satedans or Taranians. A lifespan ten times longer than the norm could cause a lot more problems than Lantean-like physical capabilities or model-like looks.

“I'd ask for suggestions from the Ascended peanut gallery.” He put forward to the empty room, having no real clue if any Ascended were actually watching or not. “But I get the feeling you'd suggest I just don't do this at all given how close to messing with free will the mental programing so she can function as something even approaching an adult will have to be.”

“You know what.” He continued as he focused his attention back to the data stream. “I'll leave it up to the universe. Seven digit random number. If it's prime, an orderly yes or no, if it's not prime, I'll let chaos reign.”

With the he sent the command to generate the random number, fully aware the Ascended might be placing a hand on the scale given his complete inability to know otherwise.

The number 6033353 came up, and Eventus gave an amused shake of his head. “Chaos it is.”

With those words he filled in the last missing bits of the DNA sequence before sending the command that would transform it into a viable zygote and deposit that inside the pod.

“And now we wait the fifteen days it will take you to develop into a twenty or so years old inside the growth medium.”

During which time the pod would slowly feed a developmental program into her brain that should give her the skills needed to operate on the level of a somewhat emotionally stunted bi-libgual adult.

Not exactly the most optimal way to do things, but Adria had been a good cautionary tale, at least once Eventus had understood just what the Ori had likely done to her mind, of the type of extreme free will overriding obsession that tended to form if you injected anything more than that into a still forming personality. 

This did however mean he was going to have to find someone to functionally big sister her through the various things the developmental program didn't cover, but hopefully he could convince Teyla to take on the job given the Athosians were pretty much the only group he actually trusted not to try and push things too far.

“Which just leaves the question of what to name you.” Eventus murmured to himself as he stared at the pod.

For a moment he was tempted to go with something overly grandiose like Eve just to mess with the earthlings. However they'd been studious enough about avoiding mention of anything even remotely religious related that a name like that would probably be more trouble then the brief bit of amusement would be worth.

“You're an Elf… What are Elf names…”

Drumming his fingers on the control panel he considered the question. Anything from pre 2005 Earth fiction was out for obvious reasons, which was a bit let down since he would have loved to go with Deedlit. But he'd been bad with names before gaining a brain optimized for information storage and the only other Elf whose name he recalled that he was sure wouldn't exist yet was…

“You know what, that works, I'm gonna call you Rayla.”

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Author's Notes: That moment when you let your inner mad scientist out and end up making a partial clone of your dead girlfriend.

Though to be fair to Eventus, Dea was a slightly obsessive cultural scientist, and she would in fact have loved the idea of using herself as a base for a number of reasons. (Pretty much a normal Ancient when you think about it.)