IT’S A hot day and there’s no money for air conditioning, so every window in our conference room is propped open with ancient textbooks or donated boots three sizes too big for any of the kids here. Dr. Jacoway comes shuffling in to give us one of his dreamy lectures on science. He’s an old man, as fat and gray and sad-looking as a storm cloud. Below his too-short pants his ankles pouch in such thick rolls of ashy flesh that, if I didn’t know better, I seriously might think he was a kime too, maybe part walrus. A few of the younger kids start giggling, just watching him walk in.
“Origins,” he murmurs, then waits, maybe for us to be quiet or maybe until he can remember where he is. “How many human myths—and please know I include you in that heartbreaking category, human, yes, Homo mutandus every one of you children—concern origins, whether of some aspect of our universe or ourselves? The origins of life, thought, the sun? Now we have a new origination to consider: yours.”
There’s an awkward silence, but except for a few titters, no one interrupts. Everyone knows this is just how Dr. Jacoway acts. He stares into the corner, and his face looks like it’s melting down a drain. It took me a few days to get over constantly worrying that he was about to start sobbing.
“So: tell me the story. How did the chimeras come into being? Make it mythic, please, my dears. Make it a grand enough narrative to be worthy of you. Give yourselves something to live up to.”
He falls silent, and his eyes roll sleepily from one face to the next. Is he actually waiting for someone to raise a hand? What’s the point, when everyone knows the story anyway? There’s nothing all that mythic about a bunch of bored scientists at Novasphere getting sloppy and dropping a test tube or whatever happened. We all look around at one another, eyebrows raised and antennae fidgeting.
The totally amazing thing is that Marley puts up her hand. It’s a shock, because as far as I can remember, she hasn’t spoken once in class, just slumped in the corner with a book. And even though she kept turning the pages, you could tell she wasn’t really focused on them.
Dr. Jacoway doesn’t call on her, just gapes in complete bafflement. Marley looks almost too abashed to talk, but then she does anyway.
“I think we’re being punished by God,” she says, so softly it’s hard to hear her. “For how people have hurt the planet so much, and made so many species go extinct. So, like, now we have to be the animals. But it’s not fair, because we’re just kids! We’re not the ones who even did it.”
By the last sentence her voice is cracking. The whole room falls into a stunned silence, and Marley buries her face in her crossed arms. It’s the second time she’s said something a lot more interesting than I would have expected—but even bigger than that, Marley used the word we.
“I rather consider you children a great blessing, my dear,” Dr. Jacoway says, with an awkward little laugh. “Please don’t envision yourself accursed.”
I get up to go sit beside her, to try to comfort her somehow. She sees me coming and jumps up, crimson-faced, and storms from the room. The door slams, and there’s another aching silence.
“Poor child,” Dr. Jacoway murmurs. “Well, let her go for now, let her go. Any other thoughts?” Silence. I think about following Marley, but it seems like she’ll just get mad if I do. Maybe Dr. Jacoway is right.
“Um, probably it was a retrovirus?” Rowan says at last. “They experiment with retroviruses for genetic engineering anyway, because viruses like that copy themselves over DNA that’s already there. So, say, if they engineered a really powerful virus and then it mutated and started shuffling random genes around?”
That’s what a lot of people assumed. My dad explained to me once why that couldn’t be right, though. But it’s a relief to think about an explanation so calm and rational after Marley’s. It’s like Rowan’s voice cleared away all the tension, and everyone can start breathing normally again.
Dr. Jacoway nods to himself at the front of the room, his eyelids drooping like he’s listening to a symphony. He never looks anyone straight in the face for more than half a second. “Insufficiently glorious, I think, Rowan. If we were seeking to explain, oh, a genetic tendency to acne, or to pattern baldness, that might be a story adequate to the case. But it’s much too trivial to account for anything so astounding as yourselves. Try again.”
Ophelia laughs sharply. “The sun got bored with regular humans, so it burned holes in their DNA and replaced it with coiled-up sunbeams that pretended to be DNA from different animals! And it was a great invention, because the chimeras were the most magical thing the world had ever seen.”
She has her glasses on and I can’t tell where she’s looking, but the words seem aimed at me—or maybe at Marley, even though she can’t hear them.
I rub my legs together, feeling the scabbed ridges of my scratches. I know now that can’t have been a dream last night, no matter how much the idea that it was real scares me. I just wish I’d been brave enough to find out what the blue wanted to show me.
Dr. Jacoway sways on his feet, mulling Ophelia’s version. “Pretty,” he admits at last. “A pretty story. That’s a beginning, certainly. But it lacks the fervor, the bite that transcends mere prettiness and attains the genuine sublime. Real myths aren’t quite so self-serving, in any case.”
Gabriel snorts in irritation and flops his head down on the table. His skin crawls with blue and lavender static.
“It couldn’t have been a virus,” I say. “That’s what my dad told me. Viruses can insert genes into DNA, but not very many genes, because they’re just too small to carry that much information. We have entire chromosomes copied from other species. Like, if you imagine we’re books, then a virus could slip in a few words from other animals, but we have whole chapters! There’s no way a virus could do that.”
Dr. Jacoway turns to me, blinking as if I’d thrown a bucket of water over his head. “Ha. And where did you come from, inexplicable child? Another one, indeed, in the space of ten minutes! Have I seen you before?”
He knows all the kids he helped raise from the time they were babies, but he can’t seem to remember me or Marley at all. I’ve been introduced to him three times already. There’s a new flurry of giggling.
“I’m Ada. I got here almost a week ago.”
“Your dad, you say, no less. Homo mutandus by analysis, then, but by neither appearance nor upbringing? A wisp of the other under cover of sapiens? Am I correct?”
Almost everyone is fizzling with stifled laughter now. Ophelia has one hand clamped over her mouth. I try to tell myself that it’s the situation that’s funny, and that they’re not laughing at me.
“That sounds right?” I tell him. More or less, anyway.
“Ah. Perhaps your passage here from other spheres will allow you to bring us some sorely needed perspective. It was not a virus, you say, that sparked your existence. Your reasoning seems apt. What then?”
It was a mistake to mention my dad; it just makes everyone resent me. “There are parasitic algae that can do the same thing a retrovirus does: they invade cells and write over sections of DNA. But because algae are a lot bigger, scientists could engineer them to copy whole chromosomes from whatever animal they infected first, then when they moved on and infected people, they could write those chromosomes over big chunks of human DNA. In theory, that could have been how it happened.”
It’s just a theory. Since the scientists at Novasphere who worked on the project were murdered and their computers were burned, it doesn’t seem like anyone is ever going to know the details.
Rowan looks impressed and gives me a quick thumbs-up, curling his fingers into his flipper. So even if we were arguing last night, he’s still my friend, anyway. Gabriel doesn’t look up from the table, but I notice his mouth tighten as a flare of red shoots through his cheek. What’s aggravated him this time?
“Algae,” Dr. Jacoway muses. “Algae. Yes, that’s better. The crash of the waves, the inexorable drag of the tides, Aphrodite herself emerging from the foam. And the chimeras appeared, as we know, here on Long Island, a spit of land caught between sea and sea. Perhaps indeed we may find that all of you are a dream cast on our shores.”
Gabriel lifts his head up, scowling. He’s never quiet for this long. “Are you for real, Dr. Jacoway? Aphrodite? That has nothing to do with anything. We’re not some dream. We’re the new reality.”
At my old school nobody ever would have gotten away with being so rude to a teacher, but Dr. Jacoway just bobs his head and flaps his arms with this slow, vague beat. The breeze from the open window stirs his gray scribble of hair. He looks pretty absurd, but no one’s laughing now. All at once there’s a sense in the room that whatever is happening is crushingly serious.
“A fair objection, my angel Gabriel. But. Watson and Crick, Gabriel. Their discovery of the structure of DNA.”
“So they discovered it.” Gabriel isn’t even pretending to show respect. Dr. Jacoway has his problems, but he’s much too nice to be treated this way. “We know that.”
“They considered a number of structures DNA might have. There was more than one possibility, you see. But they pursued the famous double helix because of its beauty. Because it was a spiral staircase fit for life itself to climb, like a lady elegantly ascending to nature’s present multiplicity. Their intuition proved correct. Beauty is what led them to the truth, Gabriel. May it do the same for us.”
No matter how bad the blue creeped me out last night, I have to admit that it’s always been beautiful: as changeable and wild as moonlight on water, but smart, playful, and so free. And leading me to the truth was probably exactly what it wanted to do. I just couldn’t handle it. My legs tense with the urge to run straight back to the woods. I need to go there alone as soon as I possibly can. Search for whatever it wanted me to see.
Gabriel’s fuming, the static on his skin speeding up and shifting green and orange. “I don’t think the truth is beautiful. It’s usually ugly as dirt. What was so beautiful about your friends getting their brains blown out?”
Dr. Jacoway’s friends? What is Gabe saying?
“Will you think me heartless, Gabriel, if I tell you that it was? It’s no use to pronounce to me how ugly it ought to have been. I was there. I saw it for myself. The supernovas of gore on the windshields, the hands clawing at glittering asphalt, the sun reflecting on the pool of my own blood as I neared death. I have never been the same. I know far better than you can how my mind was shattered that day, and what wonderful people were lost. But in my own grief, in my own brokenness, I still see stars.”