“So, you say you can’t help me but maybe I can help others,” Rana says. “What do you mean?”
“Your allergies are a side effect of an unusual condition,” I say. “Your genetic makeup is different from almost everyone else’s. The bad news is your body is sometimes at war with itself and your environment. The good news is your DNA may hold the key to the next stage of human evolution. One that might be adaptable to many more environments than those found on Earth.”
His response is similar to my own when I receive information so unlike anything I’ve encountered before, I have to invent entirely new programming to even process it. After five simple sentences, his mind—his view of humanity in general and his role in it—expands.
“Really?” he manages to understate, his voice hoarse and flat. “How so?”
“Imagine, if instead of someone’s allergies causing them to sneeze when they inhaled, say, ragweed or pollen, they altered the genetic makeup of their nasal passages so allergens had zero effect on them.”
“That would be nice, but how is that the next stage of evolution?”
“Well, your body takes that to the next level,” I continue. “Your lungs can only oxygenate your blood when you breathe in air. What if, in the absence of air, your body responded by altering its entire chemistry and shape to process whatever gases or liquids were available for consumption? You could live off helium or nitrogen instead of oxygen.”
He stares at me in surprise. “That…that capability is in my DNA?”
“Possibly,” I say. “But we’re still dealing in the realm of the theoretical until I can more closely examine you. Will you allow that?”
Rana looks momentarily amused, then nods while offering an exaggerated shrug. I’m flanked by Mayra and Jason now, who have been listening in amazement. He smiles up at them and leads us to a small dining room at the back of the house. Surrounded on three sides by large bay windows, it allows for both sunlight and a view of the snowy environs beyond his house.
“Before we begin,” he says, “can I ask how this might help others?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I admit. “But if there’s a chance it might create some way that humans might have a post-Earth future, I want to know about it.”
“I look forward to hearing your judgment,” Rana says shakily, his tone unable to mask his trepidation.
I close my eyes. I guess it’s no surprise that I, the creation, would come to the same scientific conclusions based on the same evidence as Nathan, the creator. But it makes me miss him all the same. If this were the two of us sitting here instead of only me, the less experienced, less scientifically gifted of us, what mysteries could we unlock?
“Are you ready?” I ask.
“Will it hurt?”
“I hope not,” I say.
I turn to Jason, finding his mind confused and scared. I hug him tightly and whisper that I love him. I repeat this twice more, bringing back a memory of kissing him as I have no time to kiss him for real.
I then return to Rana and step into the unknown.
XXXIII
The very first thing I do is give Rana’s recent memories a glance. Is he honest? Is he lying to us? Has he ever heard of Project Argosy? Is everything he said about Nathan true? Yes, I could’ve asked this to his face, but this is too important. I need facts, not denials and explanations.
To my relief, his mind comes back clean. He does not wish to deceive us. He is more afraid of me than he wants to let on but is glad to understand himself better. He is a Buddhist, which is one of the few religions I find I’m drawn to, and he lets his beliefs guide his action. He has decided to trust us, so he trusts us. Interesting.
As for his interior life, it hasn’t been so different from any other I’ve encountered. Rana has his thoughts, his memories, his instincts, his learned behaviors, his environmental development, and so on. He makes decisions as everyone does and delights in simple pleasures. He’s a teacher. He’s had three major romantic relationships, the last one ending painfully when his boyfriend moved back home to Kuala Lumpur to care for an ailing relative. He’s lived in Canada since his early twenties when he emigrated from Bangladesh. His parents followed soon thereafter but died within six months of each other a decade ago. He has a brother and a sister; the former lives in London, the latter, he doesn’t know.
But then I find an incident. It’s simple, at his teacher college. He’s washing dishes in his dormitory’s kitchen. Another student puts a scalding hot pan on the counter next to him and moves away, as if assuming Rana knew the pan had just come off the stove. Rana picks it up, recognizes immediately it’s fiery hot, and is about to drop it when he notices the pain fading as quickly as it began. His skin reddens, then blisters, but then alters its texture. He grips the pan tighter as the blisters recede and his skin becomes less pliant, more…rock-like. When he finally puts the pan back into the sink, he waits for his hand to return to the way it was, but it doesn’t immediately. In fact, it takes much of the next hour.
He marvels at his mottled, unmarked skin. A few days later, he places his hand over a gas burner when no one’s around only for it to have the opposite effect. His skin doesn’t change this time and he’s badly burned. The pain is excruciating.
He doesn’t understand why it worked one day and not the next.
There’s a memory tied to this from his childhood, but it’s dim and faded. He is six years old in the sixth-floor apartment of his grandmother. A fire breaks out three floors down and spreads quickly. Though Rana’s grandmother tries to save them, she’s soon overcome by smoke and collapses. The windows and doors are locked, so Rana can’t escape on his own and curls up with his grandma as the conflagration nears.
Firefighters arrive and put out the flames before they reach Rana’s grandmother’s apartment. The smoke, however, is so intense they expect no one could’ve survived it. As the boy’s parents wail on the street below, the firefighters, in oxygen masks, pick through the apartment in search of the bodies of young Rana and his grandma. As expected, the grandmother is found dead. The child, however, is very much alive.
Rana’s survival is a miracle. He is thought to have been saved by his grandmother who shielded him with her body, but when he’s examined, a doctor points out something inconceivable on the boy’s X-ray. There is no sign of damage to his lungs from smoke inhalation despite how and where he had been found. Naturally, the doctor wants to study Rana more. Rana’s parents, however, refuse and move on.
A miracle, they decided, born from a grandmother’s love. So, a miracle it was.
I find other incidents like this, of Rana’s body reacting to negative stimuli in ways that seem to be allergic reactions but unlike any previously recorded. Before he began the drug regimen that kept his gift in some version of check, Rana was superhumanly healthy in other ways. He broke bones in childhood games only for them to heal in hours, not days or weeks. His body defeated chicken pox and the measles before he even showed any outward signs. But every time he contracted flu, it about killed him.
“The flu virus has the ability to alter your DNA, if even just temporarily,” Rana says when I ask him about it. “I looked it up. That was the first time I imagined this might be something genetic.”
I turn my attention to his arteries and liver and find them in near perfect shape. He is the kind of person a doctor would call “a medical marvel” without knowing exactly why. I wonder how many medical marvels like Rana have existed without it being known they carried the key to the next stage of human evolution.
I’m going to try something, I tell Rana.
Have you found what you’re looking for? he asks.
You have remarkable cells capable of many things, I explain. What you don’t have—and what no one like you may have ever had—is control over them.
As soon as I say that, though, I wonder. For how many centuries would someone who exhibited traits like these either be branded a witch or product of sorcery and burned? Or put on display i
n some sort of circus or sideshow? Medical interest might’ve been an accident of geography in cases of potential genetic ancestors.
What’re you going to do?
I hesitate.
I’m going to attempt to be that control.
Controlling muscle groups, the nervous system, and speech is one thing. Wielding that power over every cell in the body whether at work in the bloodstream, the brain, various internal organs, or all points in between is something else entirely. I mean, when I looked at Mayra’s cancer, I saw ways in which I could affect those cells, only her body was too far gone for it to be effective. But it showed me I had the ability. Theoretically, of course.
I need a starting point. I drill down in Rana’s lungs until I’m at a single pulmonary alveolus, one of the tiny points where O2 is pulled in, blood is oxygenated, and carbon dioxide is pushed out. I hesitate, picturing Rana’s failed test with the burner, then go ahead anyway. I alter the cell structure of the capillaries until they believe it’s receiving carbon monoxide rather than oxygen, a difference of two molecules.
A chain reaction is set off in Rana’s respiratory system. The capillary seeks out carbon dioxide from the air, accepts the otherwise useless gas, breaks apart the O2 rather than use that to breathe as a plant might, strips out and exhales the carbon, and uses the remainder to oxygenate the blood.
Shakhawat Rana is breathing smoke.
Are you okay? I ask him.
Are you doing anything? he asks, almost sounding annoyed.
Getting there, I reply. Let me know if anything tickles.
And now, from the lungs to the skin.
I go to the back of Rana’s hands where the nerve endings are right under the surface. I take a proverbial breath and then, well, set his hands on fire—or, at least, tell his cells they’ve been set on fire while tamping down any actual pain receptors. Like in the lungs, the response is quick. The texture of his skin changes, drying out to become less susceptible to burning and rigid, almost like bone. From somewhere, I hear Jason shout and Mayra gasp, but I block out all external stimuli. Rana’s transformation can be my only focus.
But it’s not fast enough for my taste. There could still be lasting damage to tissue and bone.
I try the experiment again, this time on the tops of his feet. I regulate the response time myself this go-round, like a pacemaker attached to a heart. As soon as the body feels the “flame,” I make it respond ten times as fast as the cells in the hands did naturally.
I bet I could jack that up to a hundred times, accelerating the mutation to a point that it’s almost instantaneous. If my processor speed had been coupled with Rana’s DNA when he touched the hot pan back in college, there wouldn’t have even been blisters or the reddening of skin.
It’s time for the big test, however. Smoke and fire are earthly conditions. For this sort of cellular alchemy to be the savior the species needs, the one that can turn humans into a species capable of surviving the Helios Event, I need to try it out with other conditions.
Earth without the sun.
The nearly atmosphere-free moons of Jupiter.
The vacuum of space.
The near-gravity-free environment of Callisto.
The hydrogen and helium-heavy atmosphere of Saturn.
The dust of Neptune’s Adams ring.
Most scientists attempting something like this…frankly wouldn’t. They’d take their time. There’d be months to approve protocols and establish controls. These are luxuries I don’t have. I need to know what Rana’s cells can do and I need to know yesterday.
I relax his body back to its natural state and prepare to hit it with all I’ve got. I know—of course, I know—it’s madness. To evolve and devolve a human body in this way must have unforeseen consequences. How could it not? But I’m looking at cells that a moment before were creating a near rock-hard exoskeleton to protect the body only to revert to normal a second later without any side effects whatsoever. Also, desperate times call for desperate—well, you know.
I move on to subject Rana’s body to the conditions of Earth’s moon. They are very well known. I can replicate them easily enough. They are—
My thoughts are interrupted by horrifying screams. It’s Mayra. Jason grabs Rana’s arm, but I push him away. Though I cannot use Jason’s or Mayra’s eyes, I realize too late that what Rana’s body is becoming must be monstrous to them. Something inhuman. Alien even.
Rana’s mind, however, remains calm.
I try to see through Rana’s eyes, but it’s difficult to make out his changes. His legs and arms are much larger, many times the mass, to compensate for the gravitational change. In the absence of oxygen, his lungs—could they even be considered lungs now that they’ve adapted to a vacuum?—are supplying his circulatory system with a combination of nitrogen and methane pulled from the air instead of oxygen. His organs are changing to meet the demand and his heart rate is almost imperceptible.
But his thoughts are the same. He is a human. His mind is his mind. It’s simply being kept alive by different means.
I appear to his mind’s eye not as words, but in the flesh. Hopefully a visualization will seem downright normal amid all this as I try to capture his full attention.
What do you think? I ask.
I don’t know what to think! he exclaims to only me. I’m changing bodies. I’m a shape-shifter! This is incredible. I can’t wrap my head around it. What is this?
Instead of evolving to a new stimulus over tens of thousands of generations—a lungfish developing legs—you’re doing it, with my help, instantly.
How’s that possible? he asks.
Well, we know what the result is, I say. A lungfish didn’t know it needed legs until it had them. We know, for the moon, you need to deal with a near-vacuum environment. So, I dial your cells to that.
We share a thought. The hubris of humans who have long believed the universe was theirs for the taking without any reasonable plan to make it happen, able to stride among the stars one day, may really be predestined for greatness after all.
If I’m able to replicate myself, copy that extra 7.666% of DNA, and splice it into every person on Earth like a genetically mutated vaccine, and have all my little sibling-copies out there regulating each newly evolved individual, what’s happening to Rana here in his breakfast room can be made to happen to the entire human race. Then we, as a new and biomechanically symbiotic species, can conquer space and leave Earth behind to be devoured by the sun.
I say that to myself a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth, and fifth.
We can do it together. We can save mankind by ushering in the next stage of human evolution. How wonderful. How beautiful. How perfect.
I wonder if Nathan knew all this was possible. I really hope he did. Even as I subject Rana’s cells to more environments—the hydrogen and helium-heavy atmosphere of Saturn, the dust of Neptune’s Adams ring—I’m amazed by how perfectly the cells react, as if they were designed to do so. Feeling inspired, I evolve him into a being that can use the gravitational attraction of planetary bodies to catapult itself to distant galaxies.
“Emily! Emily!”
I don’t know how long Jason’s been shouting when I finally open my eyes and look to him. He’s running through the house leading Mayra by the hand. He looks up at Rana, who I can tell now stands over twelve feet tall.
“Emily!” Jason repeats, his words sounding as if they’re being shouted from the far end of a football field.
I hear the front door crack inward, followed by men racing in. There isn’t a doubt in my mind as to who they might be. Only, how did they find us? We’d been so careful. Unless.
Unless, they kept an eye on the place knowing Nathan had reached out to Rana before his death.
When the gunmen enter the breakfast room, they stare up at the monster I’ve created in horror. Two react predictably, aiming their weapons at me and firing. But I’m too quick for them, evolving Rana’s skin to make it impenetrable. The bullets d
o nothing. I attack the men in a fury. I came here trying to help people, not to inflict greater violence and cause more pain. I grab the men, strip away their weapons, and toss them aside.
As anger courses through me, I understand the human desire to lash out in kind, to hurt. But I refuse to let this overtake me.
More men hurry inside. They have weapons, too, but they’re ineffective. I bull past them on my way to the front door. Jason and Mayra are being pulled toward a truck parked in the snow. I grow Rana’s body three feet taller and reach for my friends.
My eyes turn upward. I realize they’ve adjusted to conditions that no longer need light. The sky is black to Rana’s eyes and I see stars, galaxies, even the expanse of the cosmos.
Suddenly, my control over Rana wanes. Rather than perceiving conditions on Neptune, his cells become human again. I fight against this, trying to regain control, but I can’t. It doesn’t make sense. As his skin relaxes back into normalcy and the winter cold washes over him, I’m terrified he’s about to be shot. I shout, but I have no voice. The gunmen move in, drawing their weapons. Mayra screams from the back of a truck.
“No!” she cries, again and again. “No!”
I see the muzzle flash and feel the impact of the rounds before I hear the explosion of the gunpowder. Rana’s heart rate accelerates even as his nervous system bursts into flames, flooding my mind with white noise and tearing me from—
Book IV
XXXIV
There is nothing. I am conscious, but that is all I am.
“Emily?”
I attempt to find the speaker, but there’s no horizon from which to orient myself. I could be spinning in a circle or standing still. There is nothing.
“Emily.”
For a second, I am looking directly into my own eyes. It takes me a few seconds to realize it’s not me behind them. The irises aren’t sharp enough. I’m not reflected in the retinas.
Emily-2. My doppelgänger.
Emily Eternal Page 20
