Roger was socially awkward. He was a big, pear-shaped man with sparse hair and a scraggly, miserable-looking beard. He had made an effort, putting on his best clothes, but this amounted to a slightly crumpled white shirt and beige pants, the ubiquitous semiformal attire of his fraternity days, which he subconsciously reverted to whenever he was unsure. Nor was the venue conducive to his comfort—it was too fashionable, the food too fusiony, the waiters too good-looking, the drinks tinged with exotic fruits, the whole thing just off. Rais, never having set eyes on Roger before, had misjudged the entire evening. The most unhelpful part, however, was the glowering Maria, sitting opposite poor Roger and making him thoroughly anxious, for she was bored and, as often followed, entertaining herself by being cruel.
Roger was not good with females, and one of Maria’s caliber made him very jittery, so that he spent half his time flicking his eyes toward her before quickly returning his gaze to the misery on his plate. Roger, it turned out, was also not good at reading the menu, for he had mistakenly ordered an assorted seafood platter, hoping for some combination of shrimp and scallops, and had been served instead a sea urchin and octopus gumbo.
What Roger was good at, however—pretty much the only thing really—was thinking. Specifically, he was a near-genius geneticist with far-reaching theories on human evolution, work that he pursued in his free time, while fulfilling his near-menial day job at a middling lab in Vegas that catered mainly to vanity family tree haplogroup testing. This was a fad now, so middle-aged men and women giddy with excitement could go off to Ireland to finally find Great-Uncle Harry.
“Look, Roger, just order something else. They’ve got burgers here, I’m sure…” Rais said, trying to make up for Maria’s utter, unconcerned rudeness.
“It’s okay, I like this, er, octopus soup thing.”
“We should have just gone to a bar,” Rais said. “We’ll do that, yeah?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Of course you don’t,” Rais said. “Do you want some ice cream, perhaps?”
“For fuck’s sake he’s not four years old,” Maria said.
Roger, whose face had lit up, now stared back at the table morosely.
“Look, we’ll just have a bunch of dessert.” Rais signaled the waiter. “Can’t go wrong with that…”
“Our house special, sir, is bacon ice cream with a pumpkin mousse…”
“No, no, we want something normal. Like cake. You have any cake?”
“Cake? Cake?” The waiter stroked his beard in contempt. “Sir, we have a Thai-Austrian fusion of mango sticky rice with Sachertorte, if you wish to be conservative, haha—”
He stopped talking because Maria had grabbed his tie and yanked his head down, literally, to her level.
“Listen, dickhead, my friend wants cake. The food here is garbage, as you well know, so please, for the love of god, get us something fit to eat so we can end this miserable night.”
“Miss, we don’t… we don’t have real food.”
“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you go to the bakery down the street and get us something.”
“Yes, madam.” The waiter straightened up. “Of course.”
“That—that was great!” Roger said, speaking coherently finally, his admiration overcoming his natural reticence.
“Thanks,” Maria said, thawing slightly. “I’m the muscle.” She was always a sucker for genuine flattery.
“Roger, man, thanks for helping us out,” Rais said.
“Sure, man, anything for the Jew—”
“Er, Rog, we try not to call him that anymore,” Rais said, as conversation in neighboring tables diminished noticeably. “You know, it being racist and all.”
“Right, right. Well, the J-E-W throws a lot of work at me, so when I got your skin cells I did the karyotype right away. G-banding, right? It condenses and stains the chromosomes so they can be studied under a microscope. Standard stuff. Anyway, the results were so weird that I repeated them a bunch of times, using different techniques, and now I’ve been working on them the whole week. Like voom! I can’t think of anything else.”
“Well, that’s great, Roger.”
“You gotta tell me, man, what the hell are they?”
“I will, I promise, but why don’t you give me your theories first?”
Roger, talking about work, was a different man now, far more animated and articulate enough that even Maria was interested.
“Sample B and sample K, right? Well, right off the bat, we got something majorly weird. B has twenty-four chromosomes. Humans have twenty-three, right, in diploid pairs, so B has gotta be a great ape. I have a look at it, and sure enough, chromosome two is split in two, just like a great ape would have it, except the sizes are a bit different, and then I scan it for some common gorilla or chimp or bonobo markers, and nothing there—I mean, there are major differences in genes, they’re further away from the great apes than we are, despite the twenty-four. So it’s an unknown branch of great ape, am I right? I mean, that’s mind-boggling, because there just aren’t any unknown offshoots we know about.”
“Okay, back up a bit to the chromosome two thing.”
“So humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and all the other apes have twenty-four chromosome pairs. This was a major problem for evolution, because we’re supposed to be related to a common ancestor, so how the hell did we lose a whole chromosome pair and still be functional, right? And we know we lost a pair, because what are the chances of gorillas, chimps, and bonobos all gaining an extra pair by chance? Well, the obvious answer turned out to be the correct one. We didn’t lose any genetic material at all—turns out somewhere along the human branch, two of the chromosomes just fused together. There’s evidence of this on chromosome two, which clearly has the centromere and telomeres and genetic information of two smaller ape chromosomes. It just all fits together perfectly. So that’s kind of the big circumstantial evidence for evolution of man from ape, but of course, the weird Bible guys froth at the mouth thinking about it. Anyway, this thing still has the twenty-four, which means it split from the common ancestor before the humans. Our closest relatives, the Denisovans, had twenty-three pairs, and most likely Neanderthals did too, so sample B has to be an ape offshoot.”
“He certainly looks like one,” Maria said.
Roger gave her a puzzled glance. “However, that’s not even the most remarkable thing. The really strange thing is that this thing isn’t diploid. See most mammals are diploid, meaning the chromosomes come in pairs, one from each parent. This sample is tetraploid. That’s four chromosomes per set. This happens in plants and some rare animals, like frogs or salmon or reptiles. It almost never happens in mammals. The only case I can think of is the viscacha rat, in Argentina. There are most definitely no unknown species of great ape with viable tetraploidy. Therefore, I believe this is a joke sample, although I have no idea how it could have been made. I must conclude that this is a birthday present from the Jew, because my birthday is coming up. It is the day after tomorrow.”
“It is not a hoax.”
“It’s a living sample? You’re sure?”
“I swabbed B’s mouth last week while it was passed out in its own vomit,” Rais said.
“Okay, okay, I explored that possibility.” Roger was visibly excited now. “Look, it could be a massive, massive mutation. It’s possible that when this thing was being conceived, the two gametes doubled for some reason, creating a true tetraploid, and then that carried on through mitosis. This is possible. It happens in humans sometimes, but the fetus normally miscarries, or if it’s born, it doesn’t survive long. Gross congenital defects. Sample B is an unknown ape with gross congenital defects.”
“It is not an ape. I will tell you what it is later.”
“It’s definitely got gross congenital defects,” Maria said.
“This brings us to sample K. Sample K is a human with twenty-three chromosomes. It seems like a normal human, although there are some possible anomalies. The majorly strange thing is in the Y chromosome. Now in normal humans the Y chromosome is about a third in size to the X chromosome. Why is that, you ask? ’Cause it’s lost a lot of genetic material over the past few million years. Parts got miscopied, left out, whatever. The Y has fewer functional genes than other chromosomes, but it’s important because it determines sex, right, it essentially makes males. It carries the SRY gene, which starts off testicles in men. It also has genes that create sperm. Now this is the curious part. Sample K has a longish Y chromosome. It’s like got twice the amount of information. That’s not supposed to happen, right, the Y chromosome tends to get shorter with time, because it doesn’t recombine during meiosis—”
“I’m losing it a bit,” Rais said, raising his hand.
“Meiosis is when the cell divides to make the sex cells, with like half the chromosomes, dumbass,” Maria said. “Like the sperm has twenty-three and the egg has twenty-three, and you put them together and get a perfect forty-six? What? I took bio.”
“She’s right, of course,” Roger said. “And during meiosis, normal chromosomes kind of swap DNA—it’s called recombination. It means the eventual offspring benefits from greater genetic variety. Getting back to it, the Y can’t take advantage of recombination because it doesn’t fit with the X anymore, except right at the ends, because it’s lost a whole lot of genes. This means the Y gets passed on pretty much intact from father to son. That’s important.”
“Yeah, that’s how you trace family patrilineage,” Rais said.
“Yeah. So anyway, this sample K has a long Y, which is strange, but could just be a mutation. I was curious why, though, so I went ahead and used FISH to light up the Y. That’s basically the technique we use to look at individual genes on a chromosome. What I think this guy’s got is called sperm heteromorphism.”
“That sounds bad.”
“Not really. It’s common in moths and butterflies.”
“Rare in humans?”
“Never found in humans, as far as I know. It means the body makes two kinds of sperm. In this case, I think he makes haploid sperm and diploid sperm. Normal sperm for humans is haploid, right, it sends just twenty-three chromosomes including a single Y or X, which combines with the ovum’s X, and you get an XY or XX zygote with a combined forty-six regular chromosomes. Then there’s the bigger diploid sperm, which sends forty-six chromosomes, including a YY or an XX. Now you get YY or XX sperm sometimes, but it’s an accident, and normally those fetuses abort naturally. In a human, this kind of thing leads to major birth defects. This guy is making them on purpose. It’s just strange.”
“It’s actually beginning to make some sense now.”
“Owfff, can you just get to the point?” Maria said.
“Not yet,” Rais replied, and smiled. “Rog, keep going. I want to hear your theory first.”
Roger took a deep breath and drank some water. “Okay. Logically, these two cases are related, since you sent me the samples together. Sample B is a tetraploid male with twenty-four by four chromosomes. Sample K is a diploid male with twenty-three by two chromosomes, a seemingly normal human, except for the strange Y chromosome, which appears to allow it to mate with tetraploids. If I could get a sperm sample from sample K, I guess I’d find that he makes both haploid and diploid sperm, probably in equal proportions, which, theoretically, would allow him to have viable offspring with either normal humans or the tetraploid ape thing. See, the sperm with the extra chromosomes would be bigger, thus a different shape. I’m guessing the shape itself would ensure that the correct sperm would get into the correct egg. Of course we also have to look at the epigenetic side of things. It’s possible that something environmental triggers the production of either kind of sperm. It’s actually pretty common for an outside stimulus like temperature or something chemical to switch genes off or on.”
“What about the extra chromosome?” Rais asked. “Won’t that lead to a mule-type situation?”
“You’d think that, right? I was worried about it, but then I looked at it another way. The fusion of chromosome two was a mutation, right? I mean, it happened to one guy first. So how was he able to pass it on? He must have had offspring with a regular ape with twenty-four chromosomes. The answer is that no genetic material was lost in the fusion. The two smaller ape chromosomes just lined up against the bigger human chromosome, and you got viable, fertile offspring no problem. Of course, it’s not that simple. Every gene codes for different numbers of proteins. There’s most likely an RNA signaling system that works on top, which directs which protein exactly is being made. Basically DNA is a lot more resilient than people think, and mutations often stick around for millions of years, until they actually have some impact. Anyway, in short, it just works.”
“Say that you’re correct, and our sample K mates with a tetraploid twenty-four-chromosome ape creature like sample B. What would the offspring be like?” Rais asked.
“Well, everything says they’d be grotesque, unviable, sterile deformities.”
“Supposing they weren’t.”
“Then you’d have tetraploid hybrid creatures with genes from humans and some branch of great ape descended from our common ancestor. A creature that could be mostly human or mostly ape in look, but able to fully mate within the tetraploid community, as well as with human males carrying the anomalous Y chromosome,” Roger said.
“Which brings us to our original contract, the haplogroup study.”
“Well, we look at SNPs, which is single nucleotide polymorphisms, meaning just one nucleotide is out of place, whereas this is a major, major genetic difference in the chromosome. I mean, the magnitude of this is mind-blowing. I broke sample K’s Y into a bunch of snips and looked for them, and they match the historic samples I told you about before, plus some notes on unlikely-looking Y chromosomes, which just about confirms that this is a peculiar mutation that has been with us for a very long time and spread out over a very large land area.”
“Okay, let me tell you the secret. Sample K is my uncle, the emissary Kaikobad. Sample B is Barabas, a djinn.”
“Like an actually djinn?”
“Yup.”
“Woohoo! Yessss! Woooh! I knew this was something cool!”
“You’re going to believe him, just like that?” Maria asked. “You’re not going to like ask for a rational explanation?”
Roger leaned forward, his eyes big, sweat beading his forehead, a vein popping on his neck. “Hey, I’ve waited for this moment my whole life. I knew magic was real. I knew there was more to life than chairs and tables. I was raised by Wiccans. I’ve seen magic.”
“So, Roger, what’s your best guess now?”
“So first off, looking at djinn DNA, we appear to come from a common ancestor, except for the tetraploidy. Can you imagine what this means? This is proof of another intelligent species on earth! Wait, they are intelligent, aren’t they?”
“They’re either complete idiots or they’re psychopathic mass murderers,” Maria said. “Take your pick. Guess which ones are on our side.”
“If we assume that we are all descendant from the great ape line, at some point there was a tetraploidy mutation. The chromosome count matches up, but no other branch off the ape line has any kind of polyploidy. The break-off must have been distant,” Roger said.
“What kind of time frame?” Rais asked.
Roger began to sketch on the tablecloth with a pencil.
“If we make a third hypothetical djinn line, that split must have occurred at least eight hundred thousand years ago. The djinns could have split off the main line as early as that or much earlier—there’s no way to tell without more study. The other issue is the whole tetraploidy thing, which is not really present in great ape genes. However, it could be. People think DNA is like eighty percent garbage, but that’s wrong of course. We carry a lot of useful mutations, and they only get expressed when it’s relevant. That’s the whole point of epigenetics. That’s how animals can adapt so fast to environments. So it’s entirely possible that tetraploidy is carried somewhere in the great ape line, and for whatever reason it got switched on with the djinn branch. Hell, even humans could be carrying the genes—we just don’t know enough to rule it out.
“If I could map the whole genome, I could get a better idea. You have to give me a live sample…” Roger was now practically grabbing Rais by the neck. He was surprisingly strong, seemed well capable of strangling him out of excitement. “I need to see it, man. You can’t keep me out of this!”
“Relax, Rog, trust me, I’m not trying to keep you out. We might have trouble finding a djinn who’ll actually cooperate with this. I don’t think they’ll be exactly thrilled by your ape theory.”
“Well, give me your uncle then, let me verify the Y chromosome issue.”
“He’s in a coma back home.”
“Let’s fly back there then,” Roger said. “I’ll charge it on the lab. I’ll sell all the equipment if I have to.”
“We can’t, we’re a bit pressed for time,” Rais said.
“Wait, he’s your real uncle, right?”
“My father’s cousin.”
“So let me run the tests on you. You might have the same condition. Ys get passed on intact. If it runs in your family, well…”
“What?”
“Gimme a sperm sample, man, let me check if you’ve got the goods.”
“Ugh,” said Maria. “This is just getting ridiculous now.”
“Like right now?”
“I can’t sleep knowing all this, man. I’ve got to see djinns, man. This is like a Nobel Prize–winning type of breakthrough in genetics, dude. We’ll pop over to the lab and you can get some out.”
“You want to come and help me?” Rais asked Maria.
“Is stabbing you in the eye going to help?”
“No, psycho…”
“Then no.”