Little Judith was put on teams in order to round out her personality. Never mind the fact that she was much younger than the rest of the children and that the older kids taunted her. When she cried to stay home, her parents coldly told her that everything-good or bad-was a learning experience.
Judith's parents wanted her to have a life that neither of them had enjoyed. Mrs. White's father had been a minor city officer in a small town near Springfield, Massachusetts. Mr. White's father had been-to his son's eternal shame-a truck driver. According to the Whites, both of their mothers had never realized themselves as complete individuals, having stayed at home to raise their respective broods.
Judith would have the best. Just as they had not. For the first year or so of grammar school, young Judith had worked hard to fulfill their expectations. In her parents' eyes, of course, she never succeeded but she tried her best. And for almost two years it appeared, at least on the surface, as if things were going perfectly well.
That is, until the first incident.
As with most parents who pushed too hard, the Whites found that their daughter eventually pushed back even harder.
The first time was small. Someone had gathered up all the toilet paper in the girls' lavatory in their daughter's public school and set it ablaze. The bathroom had gone up in flames. The school had to be shut down for the day.
Judith denied she was the culprit. And in spite of the testimony of the two other girls who had been with her and a teacher who had witnessed her leaving the smoking bathroom, her parents had insisted that their daughter was innocent. No matter what the others thought they'd seen, their precious Judith would never do such a thing.
The school had suspended her for a week. Her father had threatened to sue. Eventually, the school had given in.
During the two short days she was forced to stay home-for the very first time in her life-her parents had doted on her. At least it seemed that way to Judith.
They had come running to her defense. They had stood up for her when no one else would. They had become, for one brief moment, real parents.
Forget the fact that their chief concern was how the whole affair reflected on them. Judith's by-now-twisted mind saw their behavior as an act of love. For the first time in her life, she almost felt good. And she wanted the feeling to continue. In her next plea for attention, Judith used a pencil to stab one of the girls who'd squealed on her.
Everyone in class saw it clearly, including her teacher.
Judith was thrown out of school.
This time, her parents reacted differently. In the face of overwhelming evidence, they'd screamed bloody murder. Within forty-eight hours, Judith was shipped off to the Excelsior Academy for Young Women, deep in the woods of New Hampshire. She was seven years old.
At the school, Judith's young intellect was nurtured by stern yet caring teachers. Without the negative influence of her self-absorbed parents, Judith excelled. She graduated at the top of her class, moving on to a prestigious prep school. Four years later, Judith was valedictorian.
Her parents were there for graduation. Aside from her annual Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, it was the only time she'd seen them since they'd shipped her off to Excelsior. Unlike those holiday visits, however, at graduation Judith didn't even try to be polite.
When Judith's father tried to hug her, she shoved him away. When her mother tried to kiss her, she spit in her face. It was the happiest day of her miserable life.
Judith could finally sever the tenuous ties with her unloving patents. She had gotten several scholarships to fine colleges. She no longer needed Mr. and Mrs. White.
College was a breeze. Judith had an exceptional intellect. She moved swiftly, achieving her B.A. in two years. After graduate school, her brilliance got Judith noticed by a bioengineering firm on the famed high-tech Route 128 north of Boston. It was a short jump from there to the Applied Genetic Research Department of BostonBio. Shorter still was the time it took Judith to develop the BBQ project.
As the guiding force behind the creation of the world's first fully genetically engineered animal, Judith White was unstoppable. She was also arrogant, single-minded, bossy and virtually impossible to get along with.
When some of the earliest prototypes of the creatures were developed-the ones with the equine DNA that would help name their successors-Judith wasn't averse to taking the weakest of the lot and strangling them in front of her team.
She would wrap her strong hands around their necks and squeeze in the cruelest, most giddily delighted way until the animals' tongues lolled from their mouths and they dropped over onto the floor.
When she was finished strangling one of the hapless creatures, Judith would always say the same thing.
"That felt great. Any coffee left?" The carcass was left for an underling. In this and in other matters, she gave off every sign of a woman who was mentally unbalanced. If she'd been a man, Judith probably wouldn't have lasted long at her job. But she had one remarkable asset. In a field of nerdy men and beefy women, Dr. Judith White was an absolute stunner. She merely had to flash her perfect teeth or bat her long eyelashes, and the board of BostonBio would drop an inquiry before it even started. Of course, if she didn't get results, this brand of manipulation would have lasted just so long. But the fact was, Judith did get results.
In another corporate entity, BostonBio had once been the Boston Graduate School of Biological Sciences. BGSBS had been at the vanguard of genetic manipulating in the late 1970s, but had fallen on hard times after a freak accident involving one of its top geneticists. Judith had spent much of her early time at BostonBio exhuming and digesting the records of the earlier BGSBS experiments.
Judith had to admit, the research was brilliant. Flawed, but brilliant. She would have enjoyed meeting the woman responsible for the earlier exploration into breaking down the genetic differences in mammals, but her predecessor had vanished years ago under a cloud of controversy. The woman was presumed dead.
Still, her research lived on. Powerfully so.
The technology in the seventies wasn't what it was by the time Judith took over at BostonBio. Though the work of an obvious genius, the original breakthroughs at BGSBS had been misdirected. Judith had taken what she could learn from the dusty files she found hidden away in a secure basement and augmented it. Refined the procedure.
One of the results of her tireless efforts was the BBQ. The awkward, pathetic-looking creature that was ostensibly the savior of the starving world. The other, more important result was Dr. Judith White herself.
She was like a woman possessed. First, she meticulously reconstructed the circumstances of the original experiment. The one that had-in the minds of many at the old BGSBS-gone completely wrong.
For many months, Judith had no luck. The substance had been taken orally the first time years ago. She had tried that the first day.
Nothing happened.
According to the eyewitness accounts of the original incident, the effect had been virtually instantaneous.
It should have worked, but didn't.
Judith had tried various alterations in the formula. Still with no success.
It was maddening. The work with the BBQs proved that what she was trying to do was possible on one level. But the laboratory animals-at the time still very young-presented a less complex problem. The manipulation of their DNA had taken place prior to their conception. Judith was attempting to alter the entire system of an adult living organism.
Judith was almost ready to give up when she found something she hadn't seen before while rereading one of the Boston Blade accounts of the time. The newspaper was from BostonBio's own archives. It had been preserved in thin plastic, yet had yellowed with age.
The reporter who had been on the scene described the thick brown substance that clung to the exterior of the test tubes. He told how it had slid like burned gelatinous fat down the woman's hand and into her mouth.
Into her mouth. That was it!
Although the formula for the chemical compound used to retard temperature changes in scientific containers had been altered and improved over the years, Judith White was able to have some specially manufactured from the old formula. It was the same stuff that had clung to the test tube in the old newspaper account.
She had determined by her earlier experiments that human saliva was likely a catalyst to the change. Alone in her lab, Judith had carefully mixed specific DNA-altered genes, saliva and some of the gelatinous packing compound. Rather than swallow the vile mixture, she injected it into her arm.
The results were obvious and immediate.
Icy cold. Intense disorientation. And the change.
After her recovery from that first injection, she had prescribed a strict regimen of shots.
The formula as it now existed would destabilize after a few weeks. The original scientist would have eventually changed back. Judith didn't want that. She altered the formula to ensure that the change would be permanent.
And Dr. Judith White had changed. As a result, the world around her had changed, too. It was a change for the better.
Her perspective, while always warped, had altered dramatically. The evidence was everywhere.
It was in her attitude. In the way she moved. In the contempt she felt for humans. But at the moment, it seemed mostly to be in her appetite.
JUDITH WHITE AWOKE above a cluttered alley amid the overflowing rubbish barrels behind a Chinese restaurant.