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The Mad Scientist Creates Life

Life! The real final frontier,
much more difficult than FTL,
or accelerated cloning; life de novo,
that proved more difficult than anyone had imagined:
back in the 20th century they thought
you started with the right raw materials,
stirred them together, added a spark—voilà! Life itself!
Would that it were so simple!
It’s not that people didn’t try.
It was the Holy Grail of experimental biology for decades,
but how many ever found the true Grail?
He easily mastered cloning, but that turned out badly.
(We won’t go into the endless arguments,
the cruelly similar personalities
that were not quite what he remembered,
the gradually accumulating resentment,
not to mention disposal of the bodies.)
He had searched the world
for someone who could take her place,
but there was no one,
and the search was frustrating,
unearthing so many who, at first blush,
seemed to fit the bill,
but who lacked the stability necessary for one who
lived with a scientist who really was quite mad.

Well, if what seemed the easy way wasn’t going to work,
there was always the hard way. He had the time,
and the resources, both intellectual and financial.
There were late nights in the lab,
weirdly colored lights flashed in gothic windows,
but at last, success:
small membrane-bound spheroids divided themselves
in a medium not unlike sea water.
At this point, one simply waited a few billion years—
in the meantime, there were other projects,
and of course he needed to find a way
to conquer aging, so he’d be ready when she was.