Ex- Ferris creates life part 2

The attic room in Ferris' home - what had been his father's laboratory, was a maelstrom of test tubes, rubber pipes, bunsen burners, petri dishes, centrifuges and a number of cages containing rats and mice. All connections led to a single small glass tank in the centre of the room which was sitting on heated pads.

"Haven't you wondered what I have been up to all these months in dad's old laboratory and what I was doing with the animals you have supplied me with?"

"I hoped you were torturing them, I am sure they deserved it" replied Ferris' mother.

Ferris flicked on a central switch and the ceilings lights in the room pulsed. He walked over to the glass tank, disconnected it and handed it to his mother.

"I have been working on this project for the last two years. There were a few scientific and moral hurdles to overcome but last week this happened" said Ferris.

His mother held the tank up to her eyes.

"A goldfish happened?" She asked.

"Take a closer look" said Ferris.

She looked into the tank again. There was a small amphibian creature swimming around it in cloudy water. It was not a creature she was familiar with.

She looked up at Ferris and back to the creature. "You ought to change this water it's a bit cloudy."

"Its amniotic fluid" explained Ferris. "Oppenheimer speculated that man was his own creator, that there was a incestuous synchronicity in evolution. The key to life itself has remained illusive, it's pursuit anachronistic, some might say, perverse. But examining my father's research into exogenisis it occurred to me that a common origin of everything, from blades of grass to imploding dwarf stars might dwell inside everything. I took some of the raw cellular material from the reproductive organs of rats, mice, birds and fish and compared it on a sub molecular level with stamen of flowers. I exposed them to extremes of temperature, to vacuums and controlled pseudo nuclear explosions and whilst I found some community in the structural displacement of the DNA there was nothing that resembled a baseline, particularly when compared with what we know about the formation of stars."

"I hypothesised that all matter incubates the seeds of it's own demise, that these seeds were contained in an envelope pressed into its infant hands at it's genesis and that once opened it could never be closed."

"I was searching for Pandora's box in a submicroscopic valley of the kings but the truth wasn't hidden within the lungs of a Sphinx but inside a grain of sand. What doesn't kill you does you good but what if we cannot exist without the seeds of our demise? What lies within the phial of poison that will fell both a gas giant and a razorback clam? I challenged myself to find the least likely solution and by the purest chance, three months ago, it found me. Inside the temple of the Pharaohs, walls lined with tapestries woven from plasma, depicting the lives of the dwarf stars who pockmarked the moon there lies a throne chiselled from a single shard of anti-matter. A piece of that throne lies within everything. It was inside the car park that Daniel's father made him descend, it is inside the lions that swim within your veins and it was inside this creature in this bowl when I made it."

Ferris' mother replaced the tank carefully, put her arm around her son and squeezed him to her.

"So, what you are trying to tell me, is that you have created life from anti matter" she said, "and this is it, proof."

"Yes."

"You have harnessed anti-matter and created life at the age of 8."

"Yes."

She smiled broadly and kissed the moss patch of brown hair on top of his head. "No-one is going to believe you."

"My father was a nuclear physicist, my mother is a research biochemist, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that...."

"Oh I think it is sunshine, there's no fucking way that anyone is going to accept that you came up with the most important discovery in the history of the human race. You, a snot infested Star Wars obsessed child who can barely spell his own name."

Ferris was beginning to shake, tears were lipping over the floodgates of his eyes. "But Daniel knows - he knows..."

"Daniel, is that it - it's hardly corroboration by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg is it? I think the massed ranks of the world's press and the Nobel Prize panel are going to need something a bit more substantial than the word of your rather pathetic friend here as grateful as I am to him. No, I think it is fair to say that mummy is very clever and you are a very proud little man. Now sod off to your bedroom," she ushered Daniel and Ferris from the laboratory "and play with Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo while I work out what to wear for my interview with the International Herald Tribune."

---
An hour later, when the tears had finally subsided, Daniel sidled up to Ferris on his bed and offered him half of a Kit Kat.

"We need to leave, you and I, leave here" said Ferris "we need to find somewhere that is ours. We aren't needed here and we aren't safe."

"I always thought you enjoyed adversity" said Daniel.

"I enjoy attention" said Ferris "its just that it's always associated with pain and disassociated with love ".

"We can't leave" said Daniel "not until this is over. If I am to become my parents as they became my grandparents, if I am to become the Medusa and the Hydra then I need to understand why."