I decided to send Hayes an update.

He ended up coming in earlier today and I could not have been more excited to show off our progress. We had already switched over to a morphic cell line – taken from a patient in a burn unit here in Colorado. She was a wolf of some uncertain descent – although you wouldn’t know it looking at her. Her right hand, arm, shoulder and face had been severely injured from a grease fire. An industrial sized kitchen deep-fryer had caught aflame and her efforts to put it out with an extinguisher had instead splattered sizzling oil all over the place. Namely her. The file photo was grizzly – a wrist and lower arm devoid of fur and bundled tight with oozing gauze. A muzzle deformed by heat, snout sanded down to the bone by a rough licking tongue of heat. One eye was effectively glued shut by her presently fused eyelids. The damage draped down her neck and neck like a sickening shawl of melted flesh. The burn unit had had to perform an emergency skin graft to repair her throat after it became infected and ended up not using all of the flesh they borrowed from her right thigh. Hayes had convinced them to donate it to our project.

The look of revulsion that crumbled his face and bent the tilaka on his brow spoke volumes regarding the success of our work. It is the look of surprise. The mask you wear when gazing into something unexpected. I have seen that look before. I have worn it before. It is what we scientists adorn ourselves when confronted with an unanticipated discovery. A strange crystal in the bottom of our beakers. A curious color change in solution. A napkin sized hunk of skin dangling off a mannequin. Hayes arms folded as he gawked at the glistening, naked flesh I had put on display for him – as if to put a barrier between himself and the product.

“What is this?” he had managed after a moment, to which I was oh so happy to reply,

“It’s her.”

There was an awkward span of disquiet as Hayes struggled to digest the information. To intake the majesty of what our project had accomplished. I offered further elucidation,

“As you can see, Dr. Hayes, we have been able to successfully grow a tissue culture from our candid collaborator. We’ve transferred cultured cells into solution and have been spray coating them onto a surface so that – “

“Well – yes I can see that,” he rudely interrupted, “But, what is it.. mounted on?”

“Oh! Do you like the mannequin? We needed a solid support for the growing tissue and I decided that, rather than use something mundane that a more dynamic surface would suit. As you can see –”

I paused to wriggle my arms into the black neoprene arm ports of the glovebox. The upset in homeostasis caused a hiss and sputter of escaping pressure to billow from a side port. The whoosing wail compelled an air compressor beneath to whirl into motion. The thu-thu-thunking of the piston forced me to raise my voice over the mechanical symphony as I grabbed the sides of the mannequins head and pivoted it to more directly face us.

“ – the keratinocytes take very readily to the surface! Through careful application, we can grow the developing tissue into any structure we want! We transplanted some of the facial tissue and are trying to grow fingers –”

– I motioned to the hand fragment sporting what amounted to a fingerless glove of wolf-skin.

“I recalled from the patient’s photos, she had experienced damage around the eyes? So what I have done here is drawn some lines. We’re going to inject ceramide¹ – and that’ll make the cells here engage in apoptosis,” I picked up a pipette to demonstrate, circling around the black-marker spots a few times for emphasis. “..Bam! Instant eye holes.”

Hayes was silent for a while. I considered repeating myself in case he had not heard me over the pump but his look of disgust had not softened. His gaze stretched across the face of the mannequin – before twisting away, as though he could not bear to meet its eyeless stare. Instead, he scrutinized the hand whose frozen grasp awaited the touch of developing skin. I tried to read his expression, but looking over my shoulder, elbows deep in arm ports was neither comfortable nor useful. I could see something whirling in the gears behind those bent mawari ears. He scanned along the fleshless fingers of the hand, musing on it before looking at the pipets and then back up to me.

“How fast is it growing? Do you think you could have an arm’s worth by April?”

“That might be pushing it, but yeah I think so. Do you want me to send you progress shots?”

“No thank you Dr. Fluttertail – I’ll send you measurements for the patient. I’ll meet with you then,

I frowned a bit, watching him leave in a hurry. I rather expected him to be more… excited about the advances we’d made. The specificity of his request was promising, but his tone was off-putting. Wasn’t this exactly what he wanted? He knew how much work had gone into this project. It was hard to imagine something as visually distasteful as skin growing on mannequin could turn the stomach of a morph whose own daughter had half her flesh sizzled off. Perhaps it was a cultural thing – but even so, one really oughtn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.


1] Tarek A.T,; Thomas D.M,; Lina M.O; “A house divided: ceramide, sphingosine, and sphingosine-1-phosphate in programmed cell death,” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 2006 12, 2027-2036

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Chapter 1 – Acquisitions
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