The Bonobos

 The ringing phone dragged me out of a deep sleep.

“Hello?”

“Mary, you need to come out to the lab right now,” it was my lab assistant Kasey.

“What happened?”

“Not on the phone. Come!” as she hung up.

Reluctantly getting dressed I headed out for the twenty mile drive out into the wilderness where the lab was located. Arriving, I headed for the office Kasey and I shared.

“What’s the problem?”

“Come on down to the Bonobo room,” as her shoes beat an angry tattoo down the corridor.

In the room we kept our experimental subjects, Kasey handed me the day’s log.

“Look at those doses,” she hissed, “I warned you about hiring people that had English as a second language. Manuel misread the amount and gave them close to a thousand times the dosage we ordered.”

Shit, it was true, he had. One of our reasons for the hiring’s had been to keep our research secret. I figured the less contacts in the country the less likely they would be to spill something. Kasey had been dead set against it for just this reason and now it had come back to bite me in the ass. She was pissed and in a I-told-you-so-mood. I couldn’t blame her.

Ours was a secret research facility where we hoped to make a breakthrough in a drug to increase body size. We were interested in curing dwarfism, a disease of humans, but our ultimate goal was something that could be used in agriculture to speed the growth and size of meat animals. That was our holy grail and a massive market that would generate a financial bonanza to us.

Our initial research had been reasonably successful and we were using Bonobo monkeys as test specimens. Booboos are humans closest genetic relative sharing between 98.7 to 99.4% of our genetic makeup. Any drug that worked on them was more than likely to work on humans or animals. Our current specimens were a brother and sister just a few months old.  They were still babies and like human babies, would be for some time to come.

Unfortunately Bonobos are highly social and the most sexual animals known. They put humans to shame. They use sex as a conflict resolution mechanism in their groups. With constant sex the more aggressive males are kept under control and there is much less conflict that blows into battles than would otherwise happen. Bonobo’s also practise the same sex positions that humans use including missionary, kissing, oral sex, genital rubbing and even homosexual activities. They are taught from a very young age to seek sex and the average Bonobo engages in some kind of sexual activity roughly every two hours. Fortunately the females are only fertile twice a year otherwise the Earth would covered in monkeys instead of humans.

We were breaking a few rules in using Bonobos because they will avoid incest sex with siblings and parents, thus any specimens should be housed in a group setting so they could practise their social mores. Unfortunately budget limitations were such that we couldn’t afford more of the expensive animals. That was one of our overriding reasons for the secrecy. If any government agency or animal abuse organization got wind of our activities, we’d get shut down.

Our current research animals, Tika, the girl, Harry, the boy, would not engage in sex as they got older, thus the normal pressure relief mechanisms were not present in our research. Kasey and I had debated various other ideas to work with them but only one practical solution presented itself and we both had issues with it.

Kasey and I would have to become part of their social group with all the implications that brought with it. We only had a skeleton staff of one custodian to clean and one lab assistant, Manuel who had already screwed up, along with Kasey and I.

Kasey was a sweet, young Asian girl, barely five foot in height. She had a gorgeous tight little body sporting a 32c set of breasts that looked out of place on her petite chest. She was twenty-two years of age with PhD’s in both biology and chemistry. She had been married for a few months.

Me, well think of tall geeky twenty-eight years of age and a lean body with b-cup boobs. Glasses completed my geekiness. I also had PhD’s in biology and chemistry. Never been married and only kissed once.

I was using my own money from some formulations I had sold to a large company years ago to fund this research. I was reasonably well off but paying for the current research was straining my cash flow. I didn’t want any outside help because we’d get stripped of our work somewhere along the way. That was the way the world worked in our line. Pickpockets have nothing on the bastards that fund research. They’d steal anything not nailed down. I wasn’t about to give my creativity to anyone.

Kasey gave it to me straight,“we should put them down.”

I looked at the log sheets as I considered this, “nooo, look they were given the shots this morning and I don’t see any ill effects yet. It would be premature just to kill them over a dosage mistake. I meant the whole point to this is to determine the correct dosages and whether the formulation will increase their size.”

Kasey was upset and started arguing with me that it was far more ethical to euthanize them and start over, than continue. We continued back and forth for several minutes until our next problem surfaced.

“Oh shit, we’ve got them upset,” I muttered. The Bonobos, sensing our conflict, were now displaying blatant sexual signals. Harry had erected and Tika’s labia had engorged. They wouldn’t have sex with each other. Research had shown that without their group conflict resolution of constant sex they’d start to display mental aberrations just like humans. In short they’d go crazy and be useless as test animals.

Kasey and I had discussed the only practical alternative of us joining their social group and playing with them. Neither of us had uttered the “S” word in our conversations but we both knew…..

…More to come later…