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The Next Big Thing

"If you'll come this way, please."

The head of marketing stood to one side and gestured towards the door. There was no way to differentiate it from the other doors in the corridor, nothing to mark what lay beyond it. The head of marketing held his pass against the card reader by the doorframe, and there was a loud click from its mechanism.

"What are you taking me to see?" the CEO asked as he pushed the door open.

"Only the next big thing."

The room beyond the door was a laboratory of some kind. Racks of small cages lined the walls, each one containing an assortment of creatures small enough to sit on a child's hand. The air was filled with a smell of antiseptic and a constant murmuring.

"Is that English?" the CEO asked uncertainly. "Are those things talking?"

A young woman dressed in a white lab coat stepped forward. "Hi. Doctor Manson." She offered her hand to the CEO. "And to answer your question - yes. They are." Dr Manson fiddled with her glasses, settling them on the bridge of her nose. "Poetry, actually."

"Really?" The CEO listened carefully. The scientist was right - the creatures in the cages were indeed quoting scraps of poetry:

"I wandered lonely as a cloud ... ."

"All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred ... ."

"In secret we met, in silence I grieve ... ."

"The concept came from one of our focus groups," the head of marketing began. "We decided to combine collectibles and pets. In order to make them more appealing, we had them genetically engineered for intelligence."

"And the poetry?" the CEO asked.

"Well, our ABC1 parents stated that they would be willing to spend money on something with educational value."

The line, "Posterity will ne'er see a nobler grave than this," sounded clearly above the background noise. Dr Manson blushed. "Although there are still some bugs to be worked out of the conditioning."

"Indeed." The CEO bent down to look at one of the creatures. There was something unsettling, almost - but not quite! - human about the intelligence in its eyes. He turned back to Dr Manson. "What do you call them?"

"Well," she said, "the taxonomy is a bit problematic. We were thinking of Mus sapiens - ."

The head of marketing interrupted her. "Something more catchy. I was thinking poeticmon."