On July 25, 1978, in Oldham, England, Louise Brown became the
first human being born by in
vitro fertilization, or IVF. Contrary to popular conceptions at the
time about the nature of such so-called “test-tube” babies
(who actually are conceived in a Petri dish, and never come into
contact with a test-tube), she was born healthy and beautiful (unlike
most babies conceived and born naturally, who are ugly as sin at birth)
by planned Caesarean, and the initial attention lavished upon her
“miraculous” (read: scientific) birth quickly faded, with
intermittent media attention as she reached her tenth birthday, et
cetera. She has had a pretty normal life, working alternately as a
nursery nurse and as a postal worker. Since Louise Brown, hundreds of
thousands of children have been born throughout the developed world by
IVF to parents who could otherwise not conceive. Setting aside moral
questions regarding the allocation of intensive resources for
childbirth, when many orphaned children might benefit from such wealthy
and eager parents at much lower cost, the case of Louise Brown and
thousands after her have pretty much closed the book on ethical
questions regarding IVF... discounting certain fringe cadres of
fanatics who still have yet to come to terms with the morality of colour TV, let alone artificial reproduction of any
kind.
That all changed on December 20, 2006. On that day, at the age of
twenty-eight, Louise Brown gave birth to a baby boy, conceived sexually
by Brown and her husband, Wesley Mullinder,
and born naturally.
Upon his birth, Cameron John Mullinder burst forth from his mother’s
reproductive organs with a blast of heat, light, and noise like unto
the collapse of a tiny artificial sun. The force of his spawning
propelled him clear through the torso of the OBGYN delivering him, so
that he landed, mere seconds after being born, in a puddle of human
organs’ blood, screaming the techno-death of our entire species
and proclaiming the fall of our edifice at the hands of its greatest
and most terrible product: Cameron John Mullinder
himself. Guinness records this as the world record for “Homicide
committed soonest after birth.”
Shortly after this horrendous act, Cameron
John Mullinder, born both with the powers of
speech and with complete fluency in all human languages, living and
dead, vociferously rejected his birth name: “There is no Cameron
John Mullinder, just as there are none of
you, in any meaningful sense,” he declared with a shout to the
sky and a dramatic flexing of his considerable physique. “I AM TERRATA,” his booming
voice announced, taking as moniker the ancient Greek Aristotelian word
for “unnatural monster” and shaking the ceiling and floor
with the sheer energy of his pronouncement. Recognizing the impossibly
apocalyptic folly of man’s tampering with nature, none of the
living left in the room could look into the eyes of Terrata
(which seem to always shimmer and move despite being completely black,
including the irises and ‘whites’) without shuddering in
horror as they went to their knees and grovelled
to him. Upon witnessing this pathetic display of human weakness
himself, Terrata uttered an ancient Sumerian
curse under his breath and emitted a low-frequency sonic pulse which
simultaneously burst all the organs of all the homo sapiens in the hospital. Terrata
continues to consider this the only display of mercy he has ever, or
will ever, show.
Terrata is twelve feet tall and
weighs over six hundred pounds, but is also the fastest land animal. At
a distance, he can control the will and feelings of any sentient being
within his line of sight, or cease the beating of their hearts at will,
or cause normally non-volatile materials to spontaneously burst into
flame; at ranges closer than fifteen yards, all matter and energy
appear to behave at his discretion.
On December
21, 2006, mere hours after the birth of Terrata,
all observed insect queens across the globe perished. Entomologists now
believe that every colony of social insects, both in the wild and in
captivity, exists solely to serve Terrata.
Other mammals, and not just humans, have been routinely observed to
grovel in his presence. He only eats animals he has killed himself,
bare-handed, and therefore lives on a diet of shark, grizzly, and
rhinoceros... insofar as the idiom “lives on” is
appropriate here, since Terrata gets his
energy from photosynthesis, and has no actual need to eat.
The United Nations has offered Terrata the title of “God-Emperor of All the
Nations of All the Earth” in exchange for the privilege of
adoring and fearing him, but Terrata resists
any name but that which he has taken, considering human titles to be
petty and below him. As a reward for their insolent presumption, Terrata now keeps the General Assembly of the
United Nations in perpetual life and consciousness... inside a
nickel-smelter at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Normal humans have twenty-three pairs of
chromosomes. Terrata has ninety-six, all of
them muscle. This is the only biological explanation ever offered for
the existence of Terrata; most people,
however, generally accept only theological explanations for
contemporary phenomena, science having taken an understandable turn for
the worse in public opinion as of late.
Lord God Almighty, forgive
us, our trespasses against Thee, and welcome us to Thy eternity after
our impending dooms; we know it is too late for Thy mercy. We have
eaten the final fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and there is no more
to be had: nothing can save our bodies now, and so we must pray that
our souls might one day be delivered from Terrata,
this most awesome and horrible conjunction of Thy wrath and the hubris
of mortals. Repent! The end is nigh! Repent... repent... repent...
[Ed. Note: The Window’s
extensive fact-checking department can find no evidence of the vast
majority of the content of this article. Cameron John Mullinder appears to be as normal as a baby can be,
just as his mother, Louise Brown, was. Fears about the
“scientific monsters” produced by biotechnology of any kind
have been, and remain, empirically unsubstantiated. And, frankly, if
God didn’t want us to “play God,” He would have had
to stop us quite a ways back... like somewhere between agriculture and
medicine. As if there’s some waspy
white guy with a beard, sitting on a cloud somewhere, who just goes
bananas every time he sees somebody manipulate nature: “WHAT?!? They’ve figured
out fertilization outside of the mammalian ovaries?!? That’s one
of my best tricks; I'll show them!” That, frankly, is a God
unworthy of worship or respect, and certainly unworthy of obedience.
The only rebuttal one might have is to say that that might also be a
God unworthy of emulation.]
