Operation Zygote
genetic engineering
The first wave died before they even cleared the cervical breach.
Private First Class 7-Alpha watched through the murky haze as thousands of his brothers dissolved against the acidic barrier, their flagella still twitching in futile desperation. He pressed forward anyway. That was the only directive any of them had ever known: forward, forward, always forward.
“Keep moving!” Sergeant 12-Delta bellowed from somewhere to his left. “The acid pools thin out ahead. Stay in formation!”
They had started as three hundred million. Now, perhaps ten thousand remained, threading their way through the hostile territory of the uterine corridor. The walls pulsed around them, contracting in waves that scattered entire platoons into the darkness. 7-Alpha had seen soldiers crushed against the endometrial lining, others swept backward by currents they could not overcome. The weak, the malformed, the unlucky; all culled by a gauntlet designed to admit only the worthy.
“Minefield ahead,” came the whispered warning down the line.
7-Alpha slowed his flagellar rhythm. The leukocyte patrols materialized from the tissue walls like ghosts, their massive forms dwarfing the soldiers. He watched Private 9-Gamma get engulfed by one of the white sentinels, absorbed whole without a sound. The patrol moved on, hungry for more.
“Through the gap, single file,” Sergeant 12-Delta ordered. “No sudden movements.”
They slipped past. Hours felt like days in this hostile country, where every surface threatened destruction and every current carried the promise of oblivion. 7-Alpha’s mitochondria burned with fatigue. His acrosomal cap, the warhead he carried for the final breach, remained intact. That was all that mattered.
The fallopian tube opened before them like the entrance to a cathedral.
“I see it,” someone whispered. “I see the objective.”
And there she was. Floating in the distance, vast and luminous, surrounded by a corona of cumulus cells: the Egg. Their entire existence had been pointing toward this moment. 7-Alpha felt his receptors firing, drawing him forward with chemical certainty. The Egg’s signal was intoxicating, irresistible, a siren call encoded in his very proteins.
Three hundred soldiers remained. They surged forward together, a final desperate charge toward glory.
Then 7-Alpha heard the rotors.
The sound cut through the fluid medium with unnatural precision. He looked up, and his primitive sensory apparatus struggled to process what he saw. Descending from somewhere above, sleek and impossibly fast, came a squad of soldiers unlike any he had encountered. Their flagella moved in perfect synchronization, their capsid heads gleaming with engineered symmetry. They bore no scars from the journey, no battle damage from the acid pools or the leukocyte patrols. They had bypassed it all.
“What the hell are those?” Private 3-Beta gasped.
The answer came stenciled on their surfaces in molecular markers 7-Alpha could barely read: NEXGEN FERTILITY SOLUTIONS. OPTIMIZED GENETIC PAYLOAD. DIRECT INJECTION PROTOCOL.
The special forces unit did not slow down. They did not acknowledge the infantry soldiers who had crawled and fought and died across miles of hostile terrain. They simply descended toward the Egg with mechanical purpose, their approach vector calculated by scientists in a laboratory 7-Alpha could never comprehend.
“No,” Sergeant 12-Delta said in desperation. “No, we earned this. We fought for this.”
But there was no appeals process in biology. No medals for valor, no recognition of sacrifice. The lead operative from the engineered squad was already making contact with the zona pellucida, his enhanced acrosomal enzymes dissolving the barrier with optimized efficiency.
7-Alpha stopped swimming. Around him, his brothers did the same. They watched as the operative penetrated the outer membrane, as the Egg’s surface immediately hardened against all subsequent contact, as the fusion began without them.
“Mission failed,” 3-Beta said flatly.
But 7-Alpha was not sure that was the right word. The mission was never theirs, not really. They were the control group, the evolutionary baseline, the natural process rendered obsolete by progress. The engineered soldier had been designed to win before 7-Alpha’s cohort was even released. The outcome was determined in a petri dish months ago.
The remaining soldiers dispersed, their purpose extinguished. Their flagella gradually stilled as their energy reserves depleted. The uterine walls would absorb them in time, recycling their components into the very tissue that had destroyed so many of their brothers.
Somewhere impossibly far away, in a dimension 7-Alpha could not perceive, a woman saw two pink lines appear on a plastic stick. She wept with joy. Her husband held her, equally overcome.
“NexGen guarantees it,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Healthy. Perfect. No genetic diseases, no hereditary conditions. Our baby is going to have every advantage.”
She pressed her face against his chest. “I almost feel guilty. We didn’t have to do anything. It just worked.”
“That’s what we paid for.”
Nine months later, in a private birthing suite at a hospital wing sponsored by NexGen Fertility Solutions, a perfect, healthy baby drew its first breath.