Just remember: both those guys were elected President. Twice.

Much of the lab was underground. There was a cement cap on top of it and then they shoveled in several feet of the rich, rainforest loam and stuck a few trees in it; the trees died and bent over sideways like old men walking into heavy winds that somehow came from all different directions, but the main thing was they provided shelter for the ventilation shafts and assorted pipes that had to come up through the surface, mostly to inhale fresh air and exhale bad.

Inhale, exhale. The lab was a living thing, if an artificial one. It had a vast stomach that digested the fuel brought in covertly from miles away, long pipes that excreted its shit in the muddy Amazon miles away, a million eyes secreted throughout the woods and a massive ear suspended over the shack of a poor Tupi-descended farmer in the guise of a mighty, rusted satellite dish--he got all the football games played in São Paulo and the enormous digital brain of the lab got everything else in the world.

The lab was a mother. She was meant to give birth.

Having not come into the world in the usual way, she couldn't give birth in the usual way. Teams of scientists, Republican fugitives from the Christian-Right crowd, huddled together over long benches and row after row of beakers, burners and Erlenmeyer flasks. And, of course, the most precious items that had been brought down to Brazil from the United States: red and gold stoppered vials containing the biological essences of two great men, Richard Milhous Nixon and Ronald Wilson Reagan. All overseen by a malevolent genius, a brilliant mad scientist with no ethics, no scruples, no humanity to speak of.

"Vhat ve need," Herr Doktor said, "is a vay to combine Herr Nixon's strategic gifts for ze realpolitik unto ze volksy charm of Herr Reagan and ve shall haf ze perfekt candidate vor American politiks!" Herr Doktor was a white-haired man of indeterminate age and shadowy origins who'd arrived in Brazil in 1946 and started a thriving dentistry until dark-suited American men with briefcases full of money had arrived to offer him a choice between even more briefcases full of money or having his residency in Brazil challenged--not that he would have a hard time finding a new home, they allowed, as the Israelis were known to have extended an open invitation to Herr Doktor to come to Jerusalem to address certain legal questions pertaining to his previous career and affiliations. He wasn't necessarily sympathetic to the Republican cause, it must be said, but he did like a challenge.

And so they labored, in the lab in Brazil, for decades.

There was a stormy night, blasts of white lightening playing hell with the lab's communications to the outside world, when an aide came into Herr Doktor's room and knelt beside his sickbed. "Success," he whispered in the ancient one's ear and Herr Docktor opened his pasty blue eyes and opened his gumless mouth and howled in triumph, and died.

You didn't tell him, an accusation came as soon as the aide was beyond Herr Doktor's door. The women, oh the women were wailing beyond as they gathered round Herr Doktor's bedside to mourn and prepare the body for cremation, not burial, because evidence must be destroyed and such had Herr Doktor become now he was gone. You didn't tell him, and the aide said, "I told him enough. I told him we succeeded."

"You didn't tell him we only managed a partial blend. That we only managed to distill Nixon's paranoid vindictiveness and obsessive desire to avenge himself against any imagined slight, with none of the original Nixon's sly acumen or comprehension. And that all we could salvage from Reagan was his folksy, anti-intellectual charm with none of his naïve idealism. In short, all we have created is a charismatic, insipid, paranoid, hateful, ambitious, malicious creature with no merits beyond a certain photogenic quality.

"What's she going to do," the accuser sneered, "I'm sure she could get elected governor somewhere as Reagan did, but then what? Resign amidst vague criminal and corruption charges midterm as Nixon did? Become a Vice-Presidential nominee who embarrasses a decorated military veteran running for President? Become a divisive influence within the Republican party as Reagan was in '76?"

"I don't know," the aide said, suddenly exhausted. "Now that Herr Doktor's dead, the project is finished. Destroy the lab, Situation Omega. Evacuate, activate the self-destruct sequence."

"And the woman?"

"I don't know...," the aide said, wearily rubbing his eyes, "send her to Alaska or something."