I believe that I am finally beginning to understand. With the help of my darling Miranda, I have begun to conceptualize the function of the genetic anomaly, and I think that my plan may be able to work. I am feeling confident for the first time since this project began.
What is this, Everly wondered. It seemed to be some kind of journal. She looked back into the open drawer, overflowing in identical journals, and yanked out a handful at random, shoving them against her back, into the waistband of her pants. Hurrying back to the chair she’d been sitting in before, Everly just managed to situate herself before the door opened with a rush of air, and Richard entered, holding a very daunting-looking needle.
“Now then,” he said, “we first need a sample. We’ll need to test it for the genetic anomaly, make sure you have it. Then we can decide how to proceed.”
Everly’s eyes were latched onto the medieval-looking syringe in Richard’s hand, and so it was with a certain amount of queasiness that she said, “You never really said what it is. The genetic anomaly. What it’s for.”
Richard busied himself in setting up the equipment he needed to draw Everly’s blood, speaking as he worked. “We call it STM,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I call it. It’s all very hard to explain, but that stands for Space-Time Modifier. Essentially, the anomaly allows enhanced individuals to release extremely high levels of energy, energy that, as far as we have been able to decipher, defies certain laws of space-time.”
“Right,” Everly said, feeling dizzy with this explanation, and not at all satisfied. “Energy. Space-time. Got it.”
There was something else too, right alongside the dizziness from Richard’s words and from the very large needle that he was now inserting into the vein running through the crux of her elbow.
It was that same sense of falling, of plummeting, of rising, of realizing.
The same sense that she had been here before—in this lab, in this chair, with this needle (the same needle?) being inserted into the soft flesh of her arm.
Hearing the same words spoken out of Richard’s mouth in the same tone, at the same pace, with the same doctoral level of serenity that he used now to calm her nerves as he drew out the enhanced blood from her enhanced veins.
She thought she knew what he was going to say before he said it.
It went like this: “It is exceptionally rare,” she thought.
“It is exceptionally rare,” she heard Richard say aloud right after.
In her head: “As of now, we have only ever successfully identified about one hundred unique genetic codes carrying the anomaly.”
Out loud: “As of now, we have only ever successfully identified about one hundred unique genetic codes carrying the anomaly.”
And then she knew what she was supposed to say next, as well as the response that would follow:
“And are you one of them?”
In her head first and then from her mouth.
“No,” Richard said, silently first inside Everly’s mind, and then out loud into the echoing lab space. “No, I am not.”
Richard was watching her curiously now, which was different from the way the scene progressed in her head.
In her head: He was excited, bubbling over in pent-up enthusiasm over the research that he hadn’t been able to share with anyone, or with very few someones, and now he had her, or a slew of hers, or all of the runners and residents filling up his building.
But with her eyes she saw Richard pause instead, contemplative rather than enthusiastic. For a moment she could see both Richards—the real and the imagined—and this strange doubling broke her free of whatever it was she had fallen into.
Again.
Blink blink blink blink.
Everly blinked. Richard blinked. They blinked at each other, and then Richard turned back to his work. When he was finished drawing the blood he required, Richard withdrew to the other side of the room, to his computer and a boxy machine that was set up next to it, and Everly watched at first as he fiddled around with various knobs and keys, but then the weight and dizziness from the episode before must have caught up with her because the next thing she was aware of was the darkness of her eyelids closing, followed an instant later by the stark whiteness of the lab as she opened her eyes, and a sharp beeping sounded close to her ear.
“What happened?” Everly asked, rubbing at her eyes and struggling to sit up. The stolen journals pressed limply into her spine as she propped herself up in the chair. “Did it work?”
Richard nodded absently, scrolling through a list of data that appeared on the computer before him. “The results are in,” he mumbled, still scrolling. Then his hand paused, and she saw him nod once, almost to himself. He looked at Everly, his features set and expressionless.
“I was right,” he said. “You have it. You have the genetic anomaly, Everly.”
Chapter Seventeen
Richard Dubose entered the Eschatorologic for the first time four years after securing his PhD in molecular biology.
Alternatively: Four years before Richard Dubose entered the Eschatorologic for the first time, he had secured a PhD in molecular biology, writing his dissertation on a rare genetic anomaly that somehow no one before him had discovered, or at least no one before him had thought interesting enough to dedicate their life’s work to. He had so little proof of said genetic anomaly at the time of writing said dissertation, however, that his adviser only barely allowed him to receive the desired degree. It’s just a blip on the scans, he was told so many times, but so what? What does it mean?
He did not know, but he loved that he did not know, and he did not understand why they (the proverbial “they”) did not love that, too.
Here’s how it went: for three years in grad school, Richard Dubose had taken interesting but predictable classes and received high but predictable grades and had learned about the human body at a fast but predictable rate. Except that he had chosen a STEM route more for its unpredictabilities than the alternative, so there was a flavor tinged with dissatisfaction about the whole endeavor.
Then one day: the discovery. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. A blip, his adviser said, but the blips weren’t supposed to exist without explanation.
Finally: unpredictable.
Richard Dubose then spent every waking moment with the blip. And trying to find the blip again.
It didn’t happen in graduate school.
It didn’t happen, in fact, until three years after graduate school, and then it wasn’t at all on purpose, but rather by the best kind of accident.
He was in Malaysia, on grant money that he had been reluctantly offered because still he was the only one to believe in the significance of the blip. What he had discovered in the three years since barely receiving a doctorate: it was something about energy. That’s it, but that was almost enough, at least to his ever-hopeful and overly idealistic heart, and so he built a device supposedly capable of detecting unique fluctuations in energy patterns.
So far, it had yet to do anything other than squeak loudly and uncomfortably upon being turned on.
