Spoiler Alert!! Much will be revealed!

I have had so many people ask me how I came up with such a wild idea for a story, that I decided I better confess. . . 

My story “Animal” which appears in volume 30 of Writers of the Future has undergone several rebirths (pun intended) from its inception back in 1996. The idea came after watching a National Geographic special on the new technique being used at the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES), a research branch of the San Diego Zoo that is today defunct, as far as I can determine. The Mongolian wild horse was, at that time, extinct in the wild and captive breeding programs had decreased the variation in the genetic pool.  In order to produce more of these rare horses with greater genetic diversity faster, the process of cross-species surrogacy was used. In other words, domestic horses were implanted with Mongolian wild horse embryos that had been fertilized in vitro. Within a few years, their numbers were restored and wild horses were being reintroduced in Mongolia. Success!

The idea struck me like the proverbial lightning bolt. Humans have taxonomically close relatives . . . the great apes.

So, I wrote a screenplay because that’s what I was into back in the ‘90s. My story was set in the San Diego Zoo, 1990’s, and was about a desperate woman who had lost her husband in an auto accident and was so bent on going through with having a child by him that she infiltrated the CRES program which was in the process of saving mountain gorillas by using lowland gorillas as surrogates.  

I bet most of you can see the problem with this immediately. Why I didn’t see it then is a mystery, except I had optioned the script to a fairly well-known producer who loved what this story had to say about humanity’s blind drive to populate and overpopulate the earth. I tried to force inorganic solutions on the script that never really worked. The actors and directors who read it usually said, “This is totally unbelievable.” And they were right.

A woman in the 1990’s could have found a human surrogate for her child. Duh.  Big story problem that no amount of convoluted setup could solve. But beyond this obvious problem, people said they could not swallow the fiction that a gorilla could carry a human child. Now, that did surprise me. I had done my research, I had interviewed medical doctors both human and veterinary, and I was assured that it could happen today (in the 1990’s) without much, if any, medication, like the immunosuppressant, mentioned.

I quit writing not long after this, shoved all my notes in a drawer, burned my house down (accidentally of course), which meant that most of my writing was gone as well. I was certain I would never write again.

Thirteen years later, I dug this story out with the specific intent to turn it into a short story so I could win the Writers of the Future Contest.  After all, Patrick Rothfuss said that was how his career got started. And I actually still had one hard copy of the script. 

The story problem was obvious, the fix exciting. Move the story to the future and put the social pressures in place that would cause a woman to do such a thing. In a world where reproduction was controlled, and human population obliterating any chance of survival for all the non-food species, my story and the message I wanted to convey all fell into place. What a feeling! A feeling so good it has spurred me on to get back into writing for real.

But what I still hear from those who’ve read “Animal” is that they assumed this was impossible, a gorilla giving birth to a human.  It’s science fiction, after all. Well, yes. But I’d really like everyone to know that this is absolutely possible, even today. I would like people to feel just how tightly connected we are to other species, our genetic cousins.  They are not “other.”  We have not ascended to a place higher than the other animals by virtue of our brains. We have put ourselves there through egocentric isolationism.

Let’s rethink our place here. And make room for our cousins. 

We weren't left here alone, the singular product of evolutionary whim. Yet we see ourselves at the top of the food chain, all other species are meant for our table or to drag our wagons. Why do we use animals to act out our morality tales? Is it just another task for those who have been left by the gods to make our lives easier?

The other night I parked at the school where I teach, headed out to the telescope shed to share the sky with my students. When I got out of the car, two coyotes stood about fifteen feet away, with a very unsettling look about them. My flashlight in their eyes made one cower and the other to circle him protectively. Yet, I felt a bit afraid. It must be in our genes. We used to be the hunted, yet now wildlife have to find a way across ten lanes of freeway in order to hunt for their meals or find a mate. Most end up rotting in the median. Yet, when darkness surrounds us, and eyes reflect from the dark, our heart rates go up. When the day comes when there are no animals waiting in the darkness, when rodents and humans outnumber all other species combined, will we miss them? 

There have been numerous extinction events throughout the history of life on earth. Animals we can't even begin to imagine once hunted the ground we call ours.  Yet, to my uneducated mind, I don't believe any one species has meant the death of most others. . . until now. Supernova events, asteroid impacts, runaway oxygen production--these and many other conditions have meant the end of life for over 80% of the existing species on earth--many times over. The rise and fall of diversity is staggering. 

When we're alone here, will we miss them? Will we resurrect them from the liquid nitrogen deep freeze and build zoos once more, where children can point at a zebra and wish they could ride it? Or will we decide to make room for them before we realize they've gone, before we understand that seeing those eyes reflecting red in the dark are part of who we are, that fear should go both ways. 

What will it be that ends our reign on this wonderfully fecund planet? And what species will rise to replace us? Whoever they are, I think we will be the characters in their bestiary, acting out the weaknesses of those new rulers of Earth.