We’d reached the point where with real time translation no one needed to learn another language, just in the way most people knew nothing much about the vehicles they didn’t need to drive any more.

‘They’d all laugh at me if they knew what I was trying to do. To create a new being with a fraction of natures resources, and a fool for an assistant,’ I said out loud, even though there was no one else was in the room. Any conversations I had with my lone assistant, who wasn’t called Igor, usually went along the lines of :

‘Hey, I pay my interns.’

‘Not that much.’

‘And it’s a lot more than most.’

‘Why do you think I’ve ended up here?’

‘So long as you haven’t brought any emotional baggage with you, where you are now suits me just fine.’

Putting staff problems aside, and it was the best place for them, the skills needed in this line of work were only the half of it. You had to have the ambition to put exactly what it was you had in mind correctly together into human form.

The advances in genetics were understood, or if not understood then largely known about. You didn’t need to have read Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Profiles of the Future,’ from 1962 to realise where we’d got to on that front. As well as being bang on about biotechnology ‘Profiles of the Future’ was pin point accurate about communications - with transportation it wasn’t so good - as according to its prognosis we were supposed to have colonised Mars by now - which was something, given the present state of murderous earth bound human play, I’d say we needed to get on with sooner rather than later.

But even with biochemistry triumphant, when it came to living tissue construction - the real consequences of those biochemical advances -, there was a reluctance to take it all in, push things further, think big, properly take what was happening in a small way on, and expand it into a much bigger picture.

What might be called the yeoman stock, the every man and woman, weren’t so aware about what we were, within reason, now capable of doing.

I was out on the frontier, joining the dots up, if you could join dots up when you were on a frontier. What I had in mind was a new super strain of human being, a combination of something that had a Catalan frame, but with Brazilian behaviour made a lot more analytical and logical while keeping hold of its unconcerned qualities, then stuffed full of fluent English sentences.

It was the mark one - the male version - further improvements would be added as and when they occurred to any subsequent editions. Bride of Frankenstein stuff would have to wait until later.

In such a pregnant with possibility environment, it was easy to run ahead of yourself - it was something I was good at. Fortunately I could temper this with bursts of cool and calm deliberation that tied myself in knots. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d overlooked not just something, but most of what would soon become the messy reality I was about to get myself into.

Lightening flashed, somewhere bells tolled. I went over and shut the window. There was no need for all that high voltage, Jacobs ladder, Tesla coil, ‘It lives, it lives!’ stuff yet.

‘The head is ready,’ said the assistant in a way that matched his limp.

The best temperature for active biochemistry was one on the cool side - Double Helix strands and Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid didn’t need to be under exhibition lighting to do their best work. A cool temperature, close to where you could see your own breath, yet remain hot under the collar about it, was just about perfect.

The vital organs had come along nicely in their trays, swelling with an incremental accretion of cells until they looked like the real thing, resembling the sort of seafood you wouldn’t choose in a fish market.

Such shapes, like amputations, might well disturb anyone who liked everything nice and neat, but the clinical coolness of my environment was enough to convince any not so innocent bystander they were quite right to think something disturbing was going on - though I’d never allow any such person anywhere near such a carefully out of controlled experiment.

I for one was satisfied what I was doing was scientific, whether I was following a recognisable procedure was a different matter. My logic, if that was what it could be called, was vague enough to be whatever you wanted to fit it into, and ethics? Well, what with scalpel in hand, bent over bits on a marble slab, this was neither the time nor the place.

I felt part of some long tradition I wasn’t sure about - maybe it was a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead, and this, combined with the idea insanity was insight too, encouraged me to continue.

I’d skipped over the child and adolescent stages, leapfrogging onto something in full mid twenties adult form. It, (the pronouns would sort themselves out later) was now brought all together inside the single sweep of sculpted surface skin.

I flushed with the thrill of living in a time when fiction could be made scientific fact. I cackled with laughter, but stopped myself short, thinking maybe I‘d overdone it and needed to open that window I’d previously closed.

My assistant returned from trying out different theatrical humps for the hunch backed look he was after, folded his arms, and like any half decent technical assistant went back to looking like a piece of furniture over in one of the corners.

When you were at the cutting edge of science there was always the chance you might get your fingers burned. But in the spirit of thoroughly mixing my metaphors I decided I would burn that bridge when I got to it.

The effects of science are outside of improvement and progress. How science gets used is often one unforeseen consequence after another. For instance I have heard disquieting stories of computers starting to identify themselves as Pricilla, Marmaduke, and Wotan. Maybe they are just stories, but if there is some truth to them, then what those machines have become is something more than computation.

Self consciousness to me seemed to be a Pandora’s box sealed inside an organism ill-suited to the purpose of having such stuff trapped inside it.

I am sure if a scientist had mistakenly created such a beast as what we’ve turned out like, they would have quickly switched the biochemical blunderbuss off well before it got to cause all the damage it has.

I didn’t underestimate the danger I was in - out of my depth in something I didn’t understand as I was. But here, laid out on the marble, all ready for the off, was the chance to get it right, get rid of all the errors and compounded errors through a much improved next generation, one without the back pain and the high emissions - yet even at this point of no return, I still had no idea, along with everyone else, what the spark to life was. At a guess, I’d have said it was the ghost in our organism wandering around in the indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries that make up our minds.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? were the questions we never got to know anything further about.

As could be imagined I was way too deeply involved, but as if to make up for this, my assistant had the look on his face of a Roman soldier who’d been detailed as security to a public stoning for Blasphemy in Judea. It was the look of someone both bemused and bored by proceedings at the same time.

When you went too far too fast as I just had, you got to see what you’d created looked the very opposite of how a monster was supposed to look. On the surface, and what else was there to go on to start with, I could see it suffered from that heightened form of deformity called beauty. Quite apart from being cleverer and stronger, both qualities simply part of the specifications, the creature we had here was also lovely.

Even though I stared straight at it, hardly able to get enough of it, I felt its first movement was in the corner of my eye.

I’d opened the box. I’d rubbed the lamp. There was no going back. It, in every sense of that word, was really happening.

As soon as it opened it’s eyes I saw through its surface sheen to the slime that oozed over what was no oil painting underneath.

There was a drop in the already low temperature, a colder contempt. A chilling attitude flooded the room, until I fully expected whatever it was to whisper something along the lines of ‘The horror! The horror!’ Instead the new entity, (I never got to know what it called itself) gave me a “born of us and fated to excel us” look and said, ‘Well thanks for that. If you could lend me something smart casual, I’ll be off. I’ve got people to see, things to do, powers to gain, lies to tell, nations to manipulate.’