Fear Nothing

before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been coopted, hasn't it?”
        His smile had faded. He looked tired.
        When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.
        I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.
        “Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”
        “Even you.”
        “Oh, mi amigo , especially me.”
        “Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”
        'Infection' isn't quite the word.”
        “But close enough.”
        “Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”
        “So maybe they had no choice. You did.”
        “I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”
        “From the end of the world?”
        “They're working to undo what's happened.”
        “Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”
        “There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it… then wonderful things could come from this.”
        As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.
        “Toby,” I said.
        Manuel's eyes shifted to me again.
        I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is - you're hoping that if they can bring it under control, they'll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”
        “You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”
        From the barn roof, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession,.
        I took a deep breath and said, “That's the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”
        “And something may still come of it.”
        “It was a weapons project?”
        “Don't blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She'd never have had a chance to do this work for the right reasons. It was just too expensive.”
        This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother's most profound concepts necessitated.
        Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn't spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.
        I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.
        My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.
        She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I'd be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I'd have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.
        She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.
        Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.
        How I love the world in all its beauty and strangeness.
        Because of me, however, the world will grow ever stranger in the years to come - and perhaps less beautiful.
        If not for me, she would have refused to put her mind to work for the project at Wyvern, would never have led them on new roads of inquiry. And we would not have followed one of those roads