When they got a block away from The Crew, Peter began shouting, “What was that? What was that? Robbing a shipment of magic hides? There’ll be guards. Guns. Big, big guns. If it’s worth a quarter of a million dollars, there’ll be enough protection to guard a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of merchandise. This isn’t our league. We shouldn’t be doing this! What are you doing?”
Eddy looked up at him, incredulous and somewhat hurt. “We’re switching leagues, Prof. That’s the whole point-point. I mean…I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. I put in a lot of time just finding out about this shipment. And then more-more-more time into making sure there was a buyer. I thought you wanted to do this.”
“I did. I mean. I thought we’d do the same thing for the gang. I didn’t think we’d try something like this.”
“But Peter, this is just some flash to kick us off-off-off. If we do it, we’ll be in tight on the ground level of their operation. More money, more power. And things’ll be easier. The guys at the top, they tell people-people what to do. That’s what we want.”
“Eddy, nobody will ever let me tell ’em what to do.”
Eddy grinned up at Peter. “You don’t know how it works yet, sonny. Stick with me. I’ll get you there.”
They had two weeks to get everything ready. The whole thing made Peter nervous, and he didn’t want any part of setting it up. “Just tell me where to go.”
Eddy smiled at him and said, “Running.” So Eddy went out every day to case the site of the heist. He came back at night and reported who he had bribed. Because he knew some of the guards couldn’t be bribed, he hired a decker to break into the airport computer system in order to shuffle the security shifts to place only Eddy’s men on duty the night of the heist.
“See,” Eddy said, “no guns. No killing.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. Just tell me what I have to do.”
Two days before the heist, on a Wednesday, Eddy came home early, his arms full of Japanese take-out.
“So, how’s the research going?”
“Fine,” Peter said, glancing up from his portable. He was certain Eddy was about to tell him all the things he’d done that day to set up the job.
Instead Eddy began laying out food on the table and said, “No, really. Really. How’s it going? Tell me more stories. Hungry?”
The smell of the food drew Peter—sushi and noodles and spiced rice and fish. It made his mouth water. He still thought Eddy was leading him on, but as long as he could eat…
He saved his work and shut down the portable. Then he got up off the floor and pulled out the troll-strength chair he’d bought the week before. He knew he probably should start working at the table, but the habit of working on the floor was too ingrained in him now.
Eddy pulled down the cheap plates they’d swiped from a fast food place and placed one before Peter.
Peter eyed him suspiciously.
“What?” Eddy asked. “What? What?”
“You’re being awfully nice.”
“I can be nice.”
“I’m not denying that. I’m just saying you usually keep it hidden.”
“Ouch.”
Peter looked at the food. Six different dishes waited his approval. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome. Now, why are you a troll? Why are there trolls? Why trolls? Why not talking rabbits?”
“Talking rabbits?”
“I saw an old flat cartoon once. Flat cartoon. It had a talking rabbit. Once trolls and talking rabbits didn’t exist. Now we got at least one of them. One. Why?”
Peter scooped a spoonful of octopus onto his plate. “That I can’t tell you. My guess is, my guess is that once a lot of the monsters did exist. A long, long time ago. And then the magic went down…”
“The magic went down?”
“Yeah. I’ve been reading about magic. I figure, I’m a troll, and I better know about magic.”
“You know, you’re talking better.”
“I am?”
“Maybe not better. But stronger, more confidence.”
“Huh.” Peter opened his mouth to take a bite of octopus. It tasted meaty, and of the sea. He continued talking while he chewed. “Anyway. This guy, a mage, Harry Mason, he guessed that what happened in 2011, when all the magic started occurring…that was the start of magic’s rise. First the elves and dwarfs started being born. Then the Indians got their shamanistic powers. Then people started tapping into hermetic magic. And then, in 2021, some people just spontaneously began to change into metahumans—orks and trolls—one out of ten—it just happens. So the magic built in power.”
“Yeah. I see.”
“So he postulates that the magic, before 2011, was slowly growing back in strength after being down for a long time. It fell from a great height a long, long time ago. Like Atlantis—that might be a true story. A powerful place based on a time when magic was even stronger than it is today.”
“Atlantis? You mean Atlanta?”
“No, I mean Atlantis.” Peter looked carefully at Eddy to see if he was joking. “You’ve never heard of Atlantis?”
“No. What is it?”
“It was a place. An island that supposedly sank—”
“Oh! Right! There’s that foundation that’s looking for clues about Atlantis.”
“You never heard the stories about it?”
“No. Should I have?” Eddy seemed a bit defensive.
“I don’t know. When I was growing up, I read lots of stories like that. Atlantis. King Arthur. Alice in Wonderland. They weren’t supposed to be true. But, fantasy. You know. Childhood.”
“Profezzur, you remember how you an’ me used to live on the streets when we first met?”
“Yeah.”
“My parents died in the plagues. That’s how I grew up.”
“Oh.”
A silence formed, and they both tried to ignore it as they scooped more food onto their plates.
“So, those were people you read about,” Eddy said finally, “that King and Alice? Or are they flatscreen and trids?”
“I read about them. But people made flatscreens and trids about them, too.”
“Hmmm. Yeah, I never read.”
“Would you like to learn?” Peter offered. He really wanted to help Eddy do that if he wanted to.
“Naw. That’s for profs like you. I know you all think reading is power or somesuch, but, if you haven’t noticed, I’m gettin’ by just fine without it.” Peter thought he heard regret in Eddy’s response, but decided to ignore it.
“Well. That’s the magic. Maybe it was here once before, and maybe it’s back now. And the way I see it, the magic is something in the environment that caused my body to change from what it was.”
“What? Like getting a tan?” Eddy laughed, and Peter joined him. But then Peter said, “Yes! Kind of. Like a suntan. The sun influences the body to react a certain way. See, the genotype…the genetic sequence…it determines what the body will be like. And the brain, too. But it isn’t set in stone. It isn’t as if, at conception, a person’s body and mind are completely determined.
“What the body and brain end up as, those are the phenotypes. The genotype determines which phenotypes can arise in any given sequence of environments in which the individual who carries that genotype lives and develops.”
“Huh?” Eddy asked, and laughed again.
“It’s like a kid growing up. He’s given a genotype at birth. But how he ends up… Well, if he gets enough food to eat, he develops one way. He’s healthy. He’s got muscles that support him. If he doesn’t get enough food, his limbs get thin, his belly bloats. Both bodies are consistent within the range of possibilities dictated by his genotype. But only the genotype’s interaction with the environment can fully determine what the phenotype will be.”
“So you’re saying you had the range of genetic possibilities to become a troll, and by interacting with the environment, an environment with magic, you became a troll. Became a troll. Became a troll.”
“That’s my guess. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Another theory is that people have been subconsciously using magic since it rose in power. The mages know how to use it on purpose, but the rest of us just sometimes tap into it without much control. Maybe parents back in 2011 made their kids into elves and dwarfs, then later, people transformed themselves into orks and trolls. The idea is that it’s kind of like…” He searched his head for the magic terms he’d recently reviewed. “A kind of physical manifestation of a person’s true nature, just like a mage in astral space has a true nature.”
“So, you turned into a troll because you thought you were a troll?”
“Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”
“But you hate being a troll.”
Peter thought back through the haze of memory before his transformation. He remembered that he’d felt only loneliness, a longing. He felt himself ugly and socially inept. He couldn’t remember the specifics, but the sensations filled his chest, hollowed out his lungs, replaced them with a thick chill. Could he have believed himself into being a troll? Maybe.
“Anyway,” he said, shaking off the feeling, “how it happened is almost a religious debate at this point. There’s no way to prove the past now. No archaeological records. No one knows. What matters is that my DNA is really different now. That’s all I’ve got to work with. Whether it was passed down to me or whether I did it myself doesn’t matter. This is just the way it is.
“The research on this has only been around for thirty years, and since the corps gained power and the U.S.A. fell apart, information isn’t developed or shared too well. Somebody might be working on a means of identifying and manipulating metahuman genes right now, and I’d never know about it.”
“But you could find out.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are ways of getting data out of corps. Like I used to do.”
“But that takes money.”
“Exactly, Profezzur. Exactly.”
Eddy shoved a forkful of rice into his mouth and then his mouth curved into a huge grin. And Peter could see now that even though Eddy had not once brought up the heist, and that even though the conversation was all about genetics, their life of crime rested at the center of the subject matter, like a nucleus floating in the middle of a cell.