MONDAY, MARCH 5, 1888—NEW YORK
We have settled into what we both hope are permanent accommodations in the Empire Hotel, a remarkable establishment owned by our benefactor and investor, Mr. Jonathan Seymour.
The icehouse below contains enough food provisions to last the entire establishment one full year—an untested claim that Mr. Seymour is proud to make—and remains at a constant temperature sufficient to preserve our friend, Mr. Katkov’s beast.
Poor Katkov. And still, after these years, Warren and I continue to refer to the thing as Katkov’s Beast.
Since Mr. Seymour brought us to New York, we have placed the small man in permanent storage. Jonathan Seymour and I have engaged in partnership, the purpose of which is to fund scientific and medical research. And here we are again—research! The arrogant endeavor to control more and more of our shrinking world.
I have opened a small medical practice as well, and my dear Mr. Ripley Reed Warren has returned to his passion—he writes for the New-York Times.
We are very happy here; the city is magnificent.
I must admit that it took a good deal of persuasion—and no small amount of financial enticement—for Mr. Seymour to entice us to agree to a sea voyage to America, but when all had been said and done, Mr. Warren and I both arrived at the conclusion that shipping advancements have provided some remarkable improvements since our ordeal on the Alex Crow, some eight or so years ago.
We have come very far.
In settling into our new home together at Mr. Seymour’s Empire Hotel, I have had more than several personal meetings with the man. He is quite odd, not to the point of being a danger, and I am entirely convinced it is the effect on his psychology of living in such opulence and comfort. In any event, it is Jonathan Seymour’s peculiar conviction—as the deranged Mr. Murdoch had theorized when we first saw the beast on the Lena Delta—that our little ice man is some earthly incarnation of Satan himself.
What I believe to be the origin of Katkov’s devil is of little consequence. Consider this: The thing did not exist at all in the eyes of the world until I rescued it from his icebound prison. In doing so, I feel endlessly confident the small man is destined to serve some greater, as yet undiscovered, purpose.
Satan or aberration of nature, let Seymour believe what he chooses—including the preposterous concept that the cells and the structures of Katkov’s creature can somehow be, in his words, “reinvigorated.”
Despite the gloomy weather that hovers over the city, there is a promise of spring in the air, and with it Mr. Warren and I share a hopeful optimism for our future here at the Empire.
R.R.W. and I walked together through the park and dined before bed.
TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 1888—NEW YORK
The terrifying irony of our situation has come full circle, hasn’t it, my dear?
From ice, to ice, fooling ourselves as always.
I think I will die without you. This is hell.
This morning came the news that Mr. Warren had been found. We are trapped inside the Empire, whose lower floors are nearly buried in snow. The city is without heat and electricity, and travel is impossible due to the snowdrifts, some of which exceed twenty feet in depth.
Yesterday afternoon, my great friend Ripley Reed Warren left the Empire Hotel, determined to go to the offices of the Times, and he never came back to me. I was so consumed with worry, but had convinced myself Mr. Warren had taken shelter at his place of employment. The police came to notify us today that R.R.W. had been discovered buried in a bank of snow on Seventh Avenue. He must have stumbled in the tremendous winds and was swallowed by the relentless snowfall.
This is the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me.
What will I do now?
What will I do now?
- - -
From Male Extinction: The Case for an Exclusively Female Species:
In early 2002, Dr. Jacob Burgess, a senior research scientist employed by MSRG and working within the semiautonomous Alex Division’s de-extinction laboratory, obtained approval from Chief Operating Officer Harrison Knott to investigate the viability of reversing the extinction of a hominid species that was discovered and preserved by Alexander Merrie during an Arctic expedition in 1881.
Burgess had successfully produced a variety of extinct annelid as well as one mammal, Rattus macleari, in earlier trials. Both of Burgess’s initial attempts at de-extinction focused on the regeneration of males, since there were reasonable concerns expressed regarding the impact of reintroducing potential breeding populations. Later, these considerations were determined to be scientifically impractical as far as the progression of the program was concerned. Knott instructed Burgess and Alex Division to attempt reintroduction of both male and female specimens of the Polynesian crow, Corvus polynesiensis. The birds—called Alex crows—thrived within their captive environment at MSRG/Alex.
The hominid specimen—Merrie’s so-called Siberian Ice Man (SIM)—was a unique individual of undetermined classification and origin. No similar specimens had ever been reported as having existed. Merrie’s original drawings of the SIM animal detail proportional skeletal and muscular characteristics that suggest the primate, which stood erect at a height of 1.15 meters (45 inches), was entirely bipedal, and walked upright. Furthermore, the SIM organism preserved by Alexander Merrie was a fully formed adult male.
Although photographic and filmic verification of the creature exist, MSRG/Alex have not publicly released documentation to verify the presence of Merrie’s original SIM specimen. Archival searches of the Illustrated London News from 1881 provide one illustration of the specimen on display at an entertainment venue near Whitechapel. The striking feature of Merrie’s Siberian Ice Man is that the creature appears to have short, thick horns growing from the animal’s occipitofrontal skull.
Dr. Burgess himself cannot respond to inquiries regarding the SIM de-extinction attempt, citing contractual obligations to MSRG/Alex, although the records of other de-extinction programs are a matter of public record. Dr. Burgess, Harrison Knott, and Colton Petersen, legal counsel, subsequently testified to the joint congressional Committee on Environmental Anthropogenesis in 2008 as to the results of those well-publicized de-extinction trials. Former and current MSRG/Alex employees, however, verify that Burgess’s experiment succeeded in producing a viable male SIM offspring—an exact living replica of Merrie’s 1880 discovery.
The de-extinction process for vertebrates generally depended on the laboratory formation of a viable blastocyst developed in vitro, then monitored and sustained for a period of five to ten days.
The first SIM blastocysts, produced from active stem cells whose nuclei were redesigned with a fully diploidal set of SIM chromosomes, had been implanted in common chimpanzees, but the pregnancies never came to term. According to sources actively employed at MSRG/Alex in 2002, Burgess implanted a ten-day-old SIM blastocyst into his own wife, who was newly pregnant with Dr. Burgess’s own child, a son, named Max.