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Jason gave a slight chuckle. He perceived Oual's advice about Violet as a thinly-veiled threat, but he wasn't about to break the air of civility he had built here.
"If people knew Violet for what she is," he said, calmly, "I fear I would attract a different kind of clientele entirely."
Jason placed his hands on the desk in front of him and stood up, slowly, as though even this small movement on his part had to be carefully calculated. He turned his back to Oual in order to gaze out of the window, his hands locked behind his back in a cliche CEO stance.
"Violet is not an experiment, Detective," he said after a considerable pause. "I knew precisely what I was doing when I created her. She isn't the product of curious fiddling, of plucking a gene and replacing it with another to see what it does. I assure you that nothing that takes place in my labs is quite so scandalous."
Jason's eyes closed slowly. He was remembering making Violet, remembering how frightening it had been to do so. Remembering why it had to be done.
"Would you like some coffee, Detective Oual?" he said abruptly as he turned to look at Oual once more. Before Oual could answer, Jason had moved over to the coffee maker on the other side of the room. He poured himself a mug of it, and continued to speak as he stirred in his sugar and cream.
"For now, the operations of GenCo have not been rendered illegal," he said. "It's an uphill battle. Many say that our work is evil, that the natural design should not be tampered with. But others, like myself, recognize the potential of human engineering. The human body has within it the code to eliminate disease, to slow aging, to do just about anything imaginable. I am merely unlocking a code that the human race already had in its database. But to get the world to understand that is nearly impossible. With every new piece of legislation aimed toward my company, my hair gets a little grayer..."
Jason laughed and shook his head, turning back toward Oual and walking back toward his desk with coffee in hand.
"My apologies, Detective," he said, sitting back down. "I must remember that you are here to speak specifically about Violet, not to threaten to shut me down."
He took a thoughtful drink before continuing.
"As for why I created Violet," he said, "my reasons were both selfless and selfish. She is a clone, and her creation was the last request of someone very close to me."
Jason opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a photograph. It had been faded by time, and it had the wrinkles and fingerprints of overuse. He slid the picture over to Oual for his inspection. The woman in the photograph looked almost identical to Violet, though perhaps a few years older. They even had the same mismatched eyes.
"This is--was--my sister, Lily," Jason explained. "We were twins. She meant the world to me."
A genuine sadness overtook Jason's features then, and for the first time since the conversation started he looked more like a man than a CEO.
"She became ill when we were very young," he continued. "She was emotionally and physically fragile, and her condition afforded her few friendships. I was the only person she truly confided in, the only one who truly knew her for who and what she was."
"As Lily's sickness began taking her, she became obsessed with immortality, with life after death. By this time we were in high school. I had already expressed my interest in genetic engineering, and this excited Lily. She made me promise, only a few weeks before she finally passed on, that I would give her a second life, that I would create her anew. I didn't know what to say to her, so the only thing I could think to do was to agree."
"I never intended to actually go through with it until I began working at GenCo. If I could go back, I sometimes think I would stop myself. But I missed my sister, and my loneliness overtook my sense of reason."
"You see, Detective, Lily wasn't just an ordinary girl. She was the most powerful psychic the world has ever known."
Jason closed his eyes again, pausing for a moment, remembering, perhaps, or suppressing things he wanted not to remember.
"Violet is Lily's clone," he said, "but Lily's disease was a recessive genetic trait, and I feared that Violet would suffer the same fate she did. In removing the disease from Violet's code, I altered something...something important. Violet has the same abilities as Lily, but they are unstable, uncontrollable. At first, Violet was like any ordinary child, but her abilities overtook her...her mind couldn't handle the strain."
"You see, Detective Oual," Jason continued, regaining some of his businesslike composure, "what you must understand about Violet's abilities is that she creates nothing. She doesn't make illusions, which is why much of the time she is unaware that they are surrounding her. Rather, she hacks into her victim's mind, literally manipulating his or her senses into seeing whatever she desires them to see. She can make them feel whatever emotions she wants, make them see whatever she wants, she even has the potential to control their very motor function. Her powers are undetectable, she leaves no trace, no telltale sign of intrusion."
"But she has no focus, which makes her potentially dangerous. I feared that, if I left her in the lab, they would want to use her as a weapon, the same way they tried to use Lily. So I took her into my home, hoping that I could repair her mind without alerting the world to her presence. But I didn't count on her raw power, nor on her ability to detect my intrusion."
"You see, Detective, I am the second most powerful psychic in the world. Second first to Lily, and now to Violet. I thought that I could use my abilities to stitch her mind back together, to repair the damage Lily's powers had done. But Violet's mind treats my intrusion like a disease. It attacks, and sets off Violet's fearful emotional responses. By trying to help her, I lost her trust."
"The best I can do now is monitor her, but sometimes she can even resist me in this. I have tried to keep her from running freely from the house, but her mind is frighteningly adapt at protecting itself. Without her knowledge, Violet has made every caretaker she has encountered in the house fall in love with her and become fiercely protective of her. They've begun aiding her in her escapes and growing distrusting of me. It's gotten to the point where I've had to fire everyone who has worked with Violet for fear of my own safety."
Jason sighed. He looked at Oual, but there was a sudden cold helplessness on his face as a revelation overtook him.
"Of course, you've spent quite some time with her," he said, regaining his air of detachment. "So you may by now be under her influence already."
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either side of the genetic modification issue. 