There was a time when people said others were just born evil. Researchers then poised the question of nurture could override nature. The results weren't what they expected. The answer remains inconclusive.
They were so focused on whether they could control evil to ask if they should? Not all of the great old ones are content in their extradimensional domains. Some may actually be interested in becoming a part of those foolish researchers experiments. Can they be stopped or is the world already doomed?
“The Inheritance Protocol”
The children were identical in every measurable way.
They were born within the same minute, by the same surgeon, under the same humming lights of the Miskatonic Development Annex. Their DNA had been copied, corrected, and sanctified by men who believed heredity was a ledger that could be balanced. What differed—what mattered, the committee insisted—was how they would be shaped.
Subject A was raised in warmth. Books, music, gentle voices. He was told stories about stars as distant fires and about humanity as a fortunate accident.
Subject B was raised in austerity. Silence broken only by instruction. No art, no affection, no metaphor. He was taught that the universe was indifferent and that survival was the only virtue.
The experiment was elegant. Controlled. Humane, by institutional standards.
What no one recorded—what no one noticed—was that both children began drawing the same symbols before they learned to read.
Spirals that refused Euclidean closure. Angles that seemed to change when not directly observed. A recurring figure like a spine folded in on itself, crowned with impossible symmetry. Different crayons, different walls, identical forms.
The researchers argued in the margins of their reports. Genetic memory, some said. Cultural leakage, said others. The shapes were erased. The walls repainted.
The dreams could not be repainted.
Both subjects reported the same sleep disturbances at age seven. Vast plains beneath blackened constellations. A voice that did not speak in sound, but in recognition. A sense of being addressed not as an individual, but as a continuation.
Subject A wept during these episodes. Subject B recorded them calmly, with meticulous detail.
At age twelve, they were brought together for the first time.
They did not speak. They did not need to.
Their heart rates synchronized within seconds. EEG readings spiked in mirrored patterns the instruments were not calibrated to display. One technician vomited. Another laughed uncontrollably and had to be restrained.
In that moment, the committee realized the flaw in their premise.
They had been testing nature versus nurture, assuming the human genome was the origin point. But the genome was not the author. It was the transcript.
The children were not blank slates shaped by environment, nor machines driven by DNA. They were expressions of something older—something that had learned long ago that heredity was a more reliable vector than faith or stone.
Subject A, given love, learned to interpret the voice as benevolent.
Subject B, given deprivation, learned to obey it without question.
Nurture did not erase the signal.
It merely taught the signal how to speak.
The final report was never published. The Annex was sealed after an incident described only as “non-hostile convergence.” Locals say the building still hums at night, though no power lines remain.
And somewhere beneath the foundations, something continues its experiment—patiently refining the balance between kindness and cruelty.
Not to see which creates monsters.
But to learn which one creates priests.