Read Online Lucy by Laurence Gonzales - Free Book Online Page A

no one would have a scientific reason to do it. What could be gained? There must be another explanation.
    Jenny dove back into the text with her mind racing. She skimmed until she found what she was looking for: “In light of that, I raised up Leda, the genetically modified bonobo, to the age of maturity and began my first experiment March 3 three years ago, inseminating her with my own materials using a mild sedative to keep her calm and employing the conventional method of artificial insemination that has been proven effective in captive populations.” Jenny heard herself groan out loud. The words swam on the page. For at the same time that she was fascinated with the concept, she felt her whole body revolt at the idea. And she was acutely aware of Lucy as the living, breathing child with whom she had just had breakfast. She wiped her eyes to clear them and read, “The process failed again and again, producing no results at all until the summer before last, when I inseminated her for the ninth time on June sixteenth and succeeded in producing a zygote. The child, a male, came nearly to full term but was badly deformed and had to be destroyed.”
    Oh, no, Jenny thought: He killed a deformed baby. Could this be real? It must be a hoax. Or else he must have been mad. Jenny was standing now, pacing her study, her heart pounding. She felt queasy as she read, “After another four failed attempts, the following insemination produced a pregnancy beginning in August of last year. Lucy was born without incident April fifth of this year, weighing 2.7 kilograms.”
    “Oh, God,” Jenny said. “Oh, no.”
    It all made sense now. All the odd behavior, the nest in the tree, the girl’s superior strength. The crazy outbursts. Her keen senses … All at once, Jenny’s scientific curiosity fell away and her heart went out to the girl. Jenny felt herself flooded with emotions. She was angry at Stone, his megalomania, his lack of empathy. She was fearful for Lucy and what would come. She was fascinated as a scientist at the prospect of learning about someone who was half bonobo. And at the same time she was trying to figure out all the implications of the situation that she and Lucy were now in. For all at once Jenny recognized that she was deep in, too. Perhaps well over her head.
    She read on, her stomach churning. “I examined the child thoroughly at birth and found her to be normal in every way and completely human in appearance. This proved one of the main points of my experiment, to wit, that humans can be moved into a more favorable spot in the evolutionary matrix, a position in which we may enjoy some of the superior qualities of our bonobo cousins. That gives me hope that by this means, a new race of people, more like the bonobo but with human intelligence and language—therefore better suited to living in harmony with nature—can gradually evolve, beginning with this lineage, which I hereby bequeath to the future.”
    “He went mad,” Jenny said. That was the only explanation. Whether he was telling the truth or not, he clearly went stark raving mad. Maybe there’s a real human mother somewhere and Stone himself was simply schizophrenic. Lucy seemed like such a normal girl in most ways. Maybe this was Stone’s psychotic fantasy world.
    But at the same time, Jenny knew that modern genetic engineering could indeed make it possible. Stone really might have created a human-bonobo hybrid. And if he did, then the result of his experiment was in the living room reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.
    With hands shaking and her mouth dry, Jenny skimmed quickly through the sections concerning Lucy’s early childhood, nursing, and then the rapid, vaulting progress of a living child. When Lucy was four months old, Stone flew with her to London to obtain a passport: the one that Jenny had taken from Stone’s cabin.
    A year later Stone noted, “Lucy is definitely a bipedal creature and shows every sign of normal language