helping you,” Lucy spat.
“The process is simple,” Sheviz said as though he had not heard her last retort. “I will anesthesize you and connect you to this heart-bypass machine. I’ll then begin the process of cooling your core temperature down to around ten degrees Celsius before replacing your entire blood volume with a chilled saline solution.”
Damon Sheviz showed her a small test tube as he went on with delight.
“At the point when you are clinically dead, without a heartbeat or brain function, I will insert this fertilized egg into your ovary. With your body in hypothermic suspension, your immune system’s ability to reject foreign tissue will be hindered sufficiently for the egg to take hold on the lining of your uterus.”
Lucy felt a bolt of nausea lodge deep in her throat.
“Whose fertilized egg?”
Sheviz smiled.
“That of a Nephilim, a fallen angel. The specimen that you found will rise once again, cloned by me and carried by you, and God’s kingdom shall return.”
Lucy blinked, unable to comprehend the madness infecting Sheviz’s mind.
“Those remains are of a species not of this Earth,” she said slowly, carefully. “They’re not of an angel, they’re of an extraterrestrial species that—”
“Pah!” Sheviz sneered. “Only someone poisoned by secularism could be so blind to the truth. This, Lucy, is our history becoming our future. Imagine, the blood of God running in the veins of men once more, this godless age of filth and despair eradicated once and for all.”
Lucy lay back on the gurney, shaking her head. As a scientist she had no fear of dying, for there was nothing to fear in the unknown, only something new to be discovered. Blind faith instead feasted upon the bloated carcass of ignorance, gorged itself on fanaticism and dogma, and Sheviz was its ultimate creation.
“So this is what you did to the others?” Lucy uttered, trying to conceal her revulsion.
“No,” Sheviz said. “They gave their lives to span the ages that have passed since Genesis, to overcome the genetic divide between our ancestors and modern man. They made possible this chimeric linking of man and God, so that our holy covenant may be complete.”
Lucy realized that Sheviz’s mind had truly gone, entirely devoid of any sense of responsibility for the deaths that he had caused.
“You’re insane,” she said softly.
“The word of our Lord was spoken in this very land,” Sheviz insisted, “and science has done nothing but endorse the word of God.”
“How’s that?”
“Our common origin with the Nephilim, the children of God, as recorded in our bloodline. Think about it, Lucy: all of this time we have searched for evidence of God, and all of this time it has run in the veins of a lucky few, the descendants of the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, of Adam and Eve themselves. How else can such pure blood, O-negative, have appeared without precedent six thousand years ago?”
Lucy spat out a cackling laugh.
“Evolution,” she said in terminal delight. “It’s rare because it’s a line from a common ancestor not diluted by genetic drift and random mutation. There’s nothing godly about it!”
“Evolution by natural selection is impossible,” Sheviz spat. “It is the same as a whirlwind passing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747—pure chance. Design by God is the only alternative.”
Lucy slowly shook her head.
“It’s nothing to do with chance and everything to do with time. You cite your God as the designer of everything because you say complex life can’t exist without a designer, yet who designed your designer? If everything complex that exists requires a designer, then your theory collapses beneath the weight of its own contradictions: it fails miserably because it cannot explain the origin of your designer, who must be complex to have designed everything in the universe in the first place. Your God, by your own definition, cannot exist.”
Sheviz’s eyes flew wide and spittle flew from his lips as he seethed, too lost now in the throes of fervor to speak. He reached across to a table nearby and produced a syringe tipped with a wicked-looking needle.
“Time for you to make history, my dear,” he intoned. “You will help me because if you don’t, then the experiment might fail and you’ll lose your life. For your own sake, Lucy, let’s work together.”
“Like hell,” Lucy muttered.
“We have cloned the blood of a Nephilim, but it has been rejected by all previous subjects, despite their being universal recipients carrying the AB blood group. Why is this?”
Lucy remained silent, staring at the ceiling. Sheviz smiled coldly.
“Allow me to