Chapter 172 Mystery

• "What can I tell him?"
• Jakob looked up over the rim of his cup of tea at his husband. When the two came back to the store-room and read the completed analysis of Harman's genome, they had to admit they weren't as surprised as they could have been. Vague hints had been in the hidden files on the Mini-Colossus, but to have concrete numbers and code sequences was another matter. In some ways it hadn't been a revelation at all because most humans' DNA contained traces from earlier species as a matter of routine, but Harman's percentage was nearly twice that of what others genetic profiles contained...and the mix of these two particular strains ratios were not random; further, the ovum used was not one from the stocks Ernst had used in his own labs.
• The Daedalus Foundation was still at work researching and apparently tinkering with the human genome in new ways, but how far they had gone since Ernst's day and the present was unknown. Was it just a way for otherwise sterile parents to insure their family's survival into the future? Simple protocols existed for procreation, and off Earth repairs could be made to damaged gene sequences, but this went beyond that into the realm of actually creating something new. As the `Father' of the Neo-Neanderthal species, Ernst-Karl couldn't claim any moral high ground without being hypocritical, but he hadn't altered the basic human genetic structure to do what he'd done.