The morning sun filtered through the lab's high windows, casting pale gold light across the concrete floor. Mariel hunched over her terminal, shifting between translated field notes, satellite images, and video clips. Yun stood beside her, watching a silent loop of footage from a wildlife drone in rural Finland.
"This one's a reindeer," Yun said, tapping the screen. "It's grown hardened plating across its shoulders. Almost looks like a natural exoskeleton."
Mariel's eyes narrowed. "Same case as the Kazakh steppe elk two weeks ago. Except that one had four eyes two extra grown over the brow."
Yun flicked to the next file. "Brazilian jaguar horns protruding from the jawline. Aggressive behavior, even toward its own kind."
Mariel's fingers danced across her keyboard, cross-referencing regional memos. A new pattern was emerging. Every continent. Every climate. Isolated animal populations, suddenly mutating. And not just subtle changes these were grotesque, violent shifts in anatomy. Bone pushed out through skin. Joints reversed. Some species grew claws or tusks where none should exist. Others lost pigmentation or developed thick, chitinous shells.
"Communication?" Yun asked. "Anything like what we saw in the Arctic wolves?"
Mariel shook her head. "It's not organized. No interspecies coordination. But animals of the same kind yes. Primitive signs of communication. Calls, posturing. Some seem to mimic pack behavior, but it's erratic. Not strategic."
She pulled up footage from a South Korean mountain pass. A troop of mutated monkeys each with spiked tails and blackened skin gathered around a wounded member. They shrieked and thumped their limbs in a crude rhythm. But there was no sign of planning, no intelligence behind it. Just instinct.
"It's like their brains are adapting just enough to stay tribal," Yun said, "but not civilized."
Mariel nodded. "They're still animals. Just... twisted."
She opened a file from Argentina. A mutated condor soared past a ranger outpost, one wing featherless but lined with jagged bones like a blade. Its beak had elongated into a jagged spike. The memo noted it had pierced a goat clean through the skull mid-flight.
Yun winced. "That's not evolution. That's weaponization."
They moved on to the Canadian forest report. A herd of elk with twin antler sets one forward, one backward. The backward set impaled undergrowth as they ran, creating tunnel-like trails. One was caught on camera scraping bark with its tongue revealing teeth that no herbivore should possess.
In another clip, a desert fox in Egypt scuttled sideways using a third pair of legs that had grown beneath its ribs. Its eyes glowed under infrared like it had developed new night vision organs bulbous growths on its temples.
"Are these mutations random?" Yun asked.
"No," Mariel replied slowly. "They're chaotic, but not aimless. Every change seems to serve a purpose l defense, offense, survival. They're becoming something else. Something designed to outlast us."
The wall display behind them mapped recent mutation incidents. Clusters glowed across Siberia, the Andes, Sub-Saharan Africa. No straight lines. No harmony. Just spreading patterns like wildfire through nature's veins.
Yun glanced at a folder marked Confidential – External Labs.
"You've read the Czech report?" he asked.
Mariel hesitated, then nodded. "A mole found burrowing under a NATO base perimeter. Had fused forelimbs. Created jagged tunnels strong enough to collapse structural concrete. Its skull was triple-layered. One of the biologists called it a 'living drill.'"
Yun stepped back. "Whatever's causing this... it's making monsters."
A quiet chime interrupted them. A new file arrived from their partner in South Africa Dr. Asimwe Nkosi. Mariel opened it.
SUBJECT: ELEPHANT CALF – ANOMALY 712
Juvenile found with segmented ridged plates along the spine, akin to armor. Rear limbs elongated, producing a loping gait. Attempted to trumpet, but emitted low clicking sounds instead. Herd responded by surrounding calf protectively. Locals interpreted it as a sign some sort of blessing.
Attachment: video + tissue samples in transit.
Mariel played the video. The creature lumbered forward on warped legs, its back gleaming like obsidian armor. Primitive. Grotesque. And completely unnatural.
"It's spreading faster than we thought," she whispered.
Yun looked out the window at the forest beyond the compound. The trees swayed gently in the wind, unaware.
"What if this isn't mutation," he said, "but evolution?"
Mariel turned to the map, now riddled with red zones and escalating markers. The ecosystem was changing. Not because of time. Not because of human manipulation. But because something intelligent something feral was awakening inside the DNA of the world itself.
And they were running out of time to understand it.