“SO, THERE ARE GENETIC DIFFERENCES between those who survive and everyone else—both the immune and those who die from the epidemic,” Xander says.
“Yes.”
“Interesting. Why do you think this is?”
I tilt my head, look back at him. “Why do you ask why, rather than what does it do so we can try to work out how to stop it?”
“Changes in the genetic code of a species over time: what do they mean?”
“Changes can be from environmental and other pressures; mutations that are random are then perpetuated if they give a survival advantage.”
“Yet ninety-five percent don’t survive this epidemic. It’s like it’s going the other way.”
“Unless these genetic differences are just random. Until the epidemic hit, they didn’t mean anything.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know.” I try to focus closely and fail. I lean back, eyes closed. Sleep is coming for me at last, no matter what either of us may want, and my thoughts are floating the way they do before you nod off, random fragments and images flickering through my mind. How’d we end up having junk DNA that most people don’t? DNA that makes us survive?
I open my eyes again. “How can you get wholesale repeating sections of DNA in some people and not others? Random mutation here and there couldn’t do that. It’s almost like…it was done on purpose.”
He’s thinking. “The best gene splicing and editing technology we have now probably couldn’t do that. Even assuming it could be done, and even if the changes could be made in germ cells so they’d be passed on to offspring, it would take generations to distribute it in the population like it is. If you go back long enough ago to distribute an applied change through the population, that technology wasn’t even dreamed of then.”
“All this talking about why is very interesting, but isn’t the whole point to try to come up with a way to stop people from getting sick, stop them from dying? All I can see is that the immune and those who die lack these sequences—assuming that what I’ve seen in the small sample sizes is the same for everybody. So maybe we can predict who will survive if they get sick after being exposed to the epidemic, but that isn’t going to help anybody else. And me adding a chunk of DNA to somebody to save them isn’t something I think is possible. It’s not like when I made my hair straight—that was a tiny adjustment to a gene that was already there. I can’t create whole repeating sections of DNA from nothing. And we still have no way to predict who will be immune.”
“You need subjects who haven’t been exposed to the epidemic—to study the differences further and, once you know if they are immune or not, to compare more closely between immune and non-immune subjects.”
“No.”
“No?” He’s surprised I’m objecting to the obvious next step—the one I’d realized myself earlier—but no no no. I’m not experimenting on healthy people, not like that. It’s wrong. Besides, all I need right now is to sleep.
I close my eyes and slip into black.