“The defendant will now speak before the tribunal.”
“This all seems highly irregular. Legally speaking, I mean.”
“The defendant has created highly irregular times. Explain your motives and actions in your own words.”
“Oh fine, oh fine, well, it was mostly about the pigs.”
“The pigs?”
“Feral pigs specifically, yes. Crossbred with wild boar. Country’s FULL of them – it’s a global problem, really, we’re just one of many –”
“The defendant will keep track of her point.”
“Oh right yes. Well, we had something of an advantage here: thanks to conservation efforts, Australia has a healthy population of predators big enough to tackle a full-grown feral boar as a meal. Saltwater crocodiles. Largest living reptile on the planet, wonderful creatures. And they’ve been eating feral pigs like candy since the ‘70s rebound at least. They turn rivers into absolute barriers to hog territorial expansion, it’s quite amazing –”
“The defendant will keep track of-”
“-BUT they can’t actually meaningfully reduce the total hog population, just curb its growth slightly. And so we figured-”
“Define ‘we’.”
“Me, Doctor Ludwig, and Pamela Hicks. You’ve got all of us here, I believe?”
“Continue.”
“Okay, fine. So we figured that we could use what was already a proven ecological asset as the foundation for a genuine panacea for an unsolved and long-ongoing environmental issue. We just had to motivate the salties to eat more pigs.”
“Which you didn’t do.”
“No, no, we did! We really managed it! Basically, the problem we were dealing with wasn’t that they COULDN’T eat pigs, it’s they couldn’t eat ENOUGH pigs. So we developed this sort of heavily-modified symbiotic variant of a tapeworm, and after careful and sufficient testing we poured a few billion of their eggs into rivers and lakes across the continent.”
“Describe this tapeworm.”
“Well, we wanted the crocodiles to be hungry, so we tweaked an organism that would normally leech nutrients from their host’s meals to absolutely gorge itself on them, then dissolve itself on reaching full capacity in a slick, high-energy slurry that would act like a crocodilian energy drink. End result was an exothermic organism with an endotherm’s digestive speed and appetite, and a hell of a lot of energy to pursue that appetite.”
“The tribunal would like to ask the defendant a question with a yes or no answer: did the defendant wilfully create and widely disseminate a biological contaminant intended to transform the bulk of Australia’s saltwater crocodiles into perpetually-starved high-speed eating machines?”
“Well, that’s-”
“Yes or no only.”
“Yes. A bit. But-”
“The defendant will now explain the further modifications that occurred after the initial crime.”
“-oh good yes, I was getting to that. Which ones?”
“The bulletproofing.”
“Well, people were shooting them.”
“The crocodiles had begun roaming the land.”
“Lots of energy to keep those little legs walking and a big appetite to feed, so yes, we expected them to get a little more prone to terrestrial hunting. That was why we first started working on the algae –”
“The defendant will return to the topic at hand.”
“-yes, that was the algae! We originally started developing a keratin-friendly algae that could evaporate heat quickly and tolerate dry air so they wouldn’t cook themselves to death when they were on land for long periods of time, and then after people kept shooting at them for no reason –”
“When did these modifications take place?”
“Last July, I think.”
“At that time the death toll was over six thousand.”
“Look, they were expected to hunt pigs. We assumed that the average human being was less of an easy meal than aa pig, and clearly we were wrong. I’m sorry for assuming the best of our species?”
“The topic at hand, defendant.”
“So anyways since people were shooting at them we decided we could take advantage of the rugged, tough coating the algae developed when it dried out and sort of encourage it to layer itself densely like Kevlar. A big crocodile already has a pretty good suit of armour, but the algal encasement really helped protect them.”
“Which is why the death toll quadrupled over the next two months.”
“Statistically, it seems a bit likely, yes. That’s when Doctor Ludwig suggested the eye implants.”
“Explain the eye implants.”
“So, the idea was that they would alert humans that a crocodile was near through a simple co-opting of the natural function of the tapetum lucidum. The salties can already see in the dark by reflecting light back through their eyes as eyeshine, right? So we just add extra light sources to that to make their eyes REALLY ‘pop’ no matter what, and humans will receive tons of advance warning of their presence. Easy peasy! We spent the next four months catching every croc we could and fitting them with ocular implants that turned their gaze into flashlights.”
“At what point did you become aware that these devices were deadly weapons?”
“Well, I don’t know when we became ‘aware.’ I mean, we heard rumours, but we figured people were exaggerating until we saw one of our fresh surgeries use his eyes to saw a tree in half.”
“This was?”
“In December, I think?”
“Were you aware that global news first received credible video of a crocodile with ‘laser eyes’ using them to cut through a car door in mid-October?”
“No. We were very busy installing new ocular implants in the crocodiles; we were basically working twenty-four-seven. And none of us were big on the news in general. We live in our heads, you know?”
“That leads us to the final line of questioning for this session: would the defendant explain the purpose behind the cranial alterations to the seven test crocodiles recovered from her lab?”
“Oh, we were making them smarter – or well, trying to. Intelligence is such a hard thing to describe, let alone qualify or quantify, you know? But it seemed like a lot of the problems we were dealing with would go away if the crocodiles were clever enough to understand that killing humans with the concentrated light from their eyes was wrong, even if they were firing harmless weaponry at them. Also Pam thought after that we could teach them how to do their own ocular implants. We were REALLY sick and tired of doing those surgeries by then, which is why we got a little sloppy on the particulars of neurological booster we developed – ‘more neurons in the brain with more connections faster’ was the closest we bothered aiming – and why it was a brute-force genome edit delivered through a retrovirus injection. Way less cutting and stitching involved, I tell you. My fingers were practically fused together by the time we got around to finishing up, which is probably why I was asleep in the lab when you fellas got me. I passed out trying to spellcheck myself!”
“That is more than enough for now. Return the defendant to-”
“Hang on a second, I just-”
“The defendant will-”
“thought of-”
“-be SILENT-”
“-something-”
“-AT ONCE.”
“-did you say seven? Seven crocodiles? In my lab? Because we were working on about fifteen.”
***
In retrospect, it was agreed the sentencing would likely have been lighter had the primary defense not been ‘Australia’s received enough invasive animal species; it’s time to give one back to the world, isn’t it?’