From the journal of Dr. Lew Cambridge
Day forty-three.
Adam’s limited understanding of the patient’s physiology led to our assumption that she’s fully human, in the same way that he’s fully human.
This may not be the case.
There are a tremendous number of qualifiers in this assertion. Both Adam and (ha-ha) Eve are human-but-immortal, which by default means they are not human in the same sense that the rest of mankind might be called human. Leaving aside, for the moment, genetic markers, a minimum expectation of a human being would be age and infirmity. Adam neither ages nor becomes sick. Eve does not age, and until whatever happened to her sometime in the past year transpired, she didn’t become sick either.
This should mean they’re something other than human.
Adam agreed to donate blood and hair samples before leaving the island. He was exceedingly reluctant to do this, citing the multiple occasions in which a medical professional attempted to use such samples for ill—something about a secret government project, on which he declined to elaborate. The argument that this testing might in some way aid me in curing Eve was what won the day. This was even after he made the point that he and the patient are from different “stock”, as he put it.
I’ve run extensive tests on the samples he provided, and have found no evidence to contradict his self-identified humanity. I don’t have the material or the time to do any DNA sequencing (I’m sure he’d be happy to know this) but I don’t think it would lead to any different conclusions. At the same time, I can appreciate his trepidation, because my curiosity is positively afire: if I had a sequencer, I would definitely be using it.
We ran the same tests on the patient as the ones on Adam’s samples. The patient yielded slightly different results, although I’m becoming convinced that what I’m looking at may be a cross-contamination, because the tests indicate she’s both human, and goblin.
It was an odd result for many reasons, the primary being that there’s no such thing as a human/goblin hybrid.
Species hybridization is not at all unheard-of, but the only confirmed instances are: incubus-human; satyr-human; and imp-human. My unusual field of study admittedly has more unknowns than knowns—for instance, next-to-nothing is known about the breeding habits of rakshasas, wraiths or the yeti. I have also never been able to get a straight answer from an iffrit. And of course, there is a lengthy list of creatures whose existences I can’t confirm at all, never mind gaining a substantive understanding as to how they reproduce.
The point remains: to my understanding, goblins and humans cannot produce an offspring. There should ergo be no reason to expect to find traces of both species in one donor.
Upon receipt of that unusual result, I took a second blood sample and re-ran the test, taking extra caution to avoid any contamination. (I don’t know how the first sample could have become contaminated, as neither myself nor my lab assistant are goblin-born. However, it’s the most likely explanation, and so the best thing to do is attempt to control for that.)
The second test yielded the same result, but a different ratio: the percentage of the sample that could have been called goblin was only slightly larger than the error margin of the test itself.
This presents a tantalizing possibility.
To date, we have been unable to fully isolate and examine the disease within the patient. We had a similar problem isolating it in the residual samples we had left from the mermaid, but this was in large part due to the lack of information we have on mermaid biology as a whole. (This study is ongoing, on the remaining liquefied samples. The living mer-folk have all left the island, blessedly.) There are no other active carriers of the disease at this time.
It has been a cardinal frustration for myself and my team, that despite the patient’s evident biological humanness—about which we know a great deal more than we did about the mermaid—we still can’t definitively isolate a sample, even though she clearly suffers from the disease.
I’m left with the cynical conundrum: I’d like samples of the disease so as to develop a cure for it, so that the next being to be afflicted can be saved; and I would like another being to contract the disease so that I can get a clean sample.
Finally, there’s this: if the presence of goblin within the patient is declining, I can’t escape the notion that her body’s strikingly effective immune system is busy eradicating it.
On many levels, this is preposterous, and seems even more preposterous now that I’ve committed the notion to paper. The test we performed wasn’t designed to identify infections or contaminants in the patient; it was only to flag the genetic markers of the patient’s species. If there were goblin within her—if, for instance, she was injected with the blood of one—it wouldn’t present in this way at all.
Yet, I can’t shake the idea that this is what we’re seeing happening.
We have decided to wait a week and then take a new sample and re-test it, to see if the markers for goblin continue to decline.