Fear Nothing

of the night in her kitchen, clearing our heads with more beer and going through my father's account of the origins of our new world, our new life.
        

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        My mother had dreamed up a revolutionary new approach to the engineering of retroviruses for the purpose of ferrying genes into the cells of patients - or experimental subjects. In the secret facility at Wyvern, a world-class team of big brows had realized her vision. These new microbe delivery boys were more spectacularly successful and selective than anyone had hoped.
        “Then comes Godzilla,” as Bobby said.
        The new retroviruses, though crippled, proved to be so clever that they were able not merely to deliver their package of genetic material but to select a package from the patient's - or lab animal's - DNA to replace what they had delivered. Thus they became a two-way messenger, carrying genetic material in and out of the body.
        They also proved capable of capturing other viruses naturally present in a subject's body, selecting from those organisms' traits, and remaking themselves. They mutated more radically and faster than any microbe had ever mutated before. Wildly they mutated, becoming something new within hours. They had also become able to reproduce in spite of having been crippled.
        Before anyone at Wyvern grasped what was happening, Mom's new bugs were ferrying as much genetic material out of the experimental animals as into them-and transferring that material not only among the different animals but among the scientists and other workers in the labs. Contamination is not solely by contact with bodily fluids. Skin contact alone is sufficient to effect the transfer of these bugs if you have even the tiniest wound or sore: a paper cut, a nick from shaving.
        In the years ahead, as each of us is contaminated, he or she will take on a load of new DNA different from the one that anybody else receives. The effect will be singular in every case. Some of us will not change appreciably at all, because we will receive so many bits and pieces from so many sources that there will be no focused cumulative effect. As our cells die, the inserted material might or might not appear in the new cells that replace them. But some of us may become psychological or even physical monsters.
        To paraphrase James Joyce: It will darkle, tinct-tint, all this our funanimal world. Darkle with strange variety.
        We know not if the change will accelerate, the effects become e widely visible, the secret be exposed by the sheer momentum of the retrovirus's work-or whether it will be a process that remains subtle for decades or centuries. We can only wait. And see.
        Dad seemed to think the problem didn't arise entirely because of a flaw in the theory. He believed the people at Wyvern - who tested my mother's theories and developed them until actual organisms could be produced - were more at fault than she, because they deviated from her vision in ways that may have seemed subtle at the time but proved calamitous in the end.
        However you look at it, my mom destroyed the world as we know it - but, for all that, she's still my mom. On one level, she did what she did for love, out of the hope that my life could be saved. I love her as much as ever-and marvel that she was able to hide her terror and anguish from me during the last years of her life, after she realized what kind of new world was coming.
        My father was less than half-convinced that she killed herself, but in his notes, he admits the possibility. He felt that murder was more likely. Although the plague had spread too far-too fast-to be contained, Mom finally had wanted to go public with the story. Maybe she was silenced. Whether she killed herself or tried to stand up to the military and government doesn't matter; she's gone in either case.
        Now that I understand my mother better, I know where I get the strength-or the obsessive will-to repress my own emotions when I find them too hard to deal with. I'm going to try to change that about myself. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do it. After all, that's what the world is now about: change. Relentless change.
        

    * * *
        
        Although some hate me for being my mother's son, I'm permitted to live. Even my father wasn't sure why I should be granted this dispensation - considering the savage nature of some of my enemies. He suspected, however,