She flicks through a series of slides that look like gunshot wounds, but they aren’t.
– So, OK, so it’s an RNA virus. Start with that. I did. ‘Cause an RNA virus is fast. It creates so many copies of itself so fast, it makes just a ton of mistakes. More mistakes equals more mutation equals greater variance. And blah and blah and blah. Hardier species, we’ve all read Darwin by now and so OK. But so what? Because this thing isn’t mutating over eons or centuries or years or, whatever periods that normal stuff mutates over. I mean, lasting mutations. Not flukes and sports. Not that a virus can really be a sport, but you know, right. So. Radical and lasting mutations that happen like when you turn your back and then turn back.
She looks over at me and bugs her eyes.
– Creeepy.
She looks back at her screens.
– Cool. But creepy. So I start thinking creepy.
More slides.
I drift closer to the door into the living quarters.
Sela snorts, twitches, settles.
Amanda stops on a trio of slides.
– Really, really creepy. Like, don’t laugh, what if, and I hadn’t slept in like six days when I thought this, but what if it’s a space virus?
She taps a key and the slide in the center zooms and it’s just a smear on the screen.
– And I don’t mean like a drifty space virus that hitches a ride on a meteor and crashes into earth and like somehow is adaptable to our environment and stuff. I mean, what if it’s like a targeted virus. I mean, Joe, I mean, germ warfare from outer space, I mean.
She taps that same key and the smear becomes a blur.
– Not against us. That’s stupid. I mean, I hate calling it this but my dad never gave it a name and just whatever, but look at the zombie bacteria. There’s all this, like, snobbery in the Vampyre community about this stuff. You all act like, oh, Zombie scum created by a bacteria must be eliminated while we higher forms created by a virus must live on. But, ha ha, bacteria are so much more advanced than viruses that it isn’t even funny. I mean, bacteria are alive. Viruses don’t even have a nucleus. But still, the Vyrus and the zombie thing, they have these weird similarities. Like, one thing the Vyrus does is it sometimes mimics bacteria. To get close to other bacteria. And infect them. It burns out like that, but it happens when you put them together. Which is weird. So imagine this scenario where you have, and I already said don’t laugh, you have these aliens at war. And this war it’s on like, a massive scale. Galactic in scope. Which means, ipsy-facty, that it’s slooow. ’Cause of E=MC2, yeah? OK. So what if a big part of this war is about territory. And so they, here, see, they infect whole worlds. They, this is wild, they design bio-agents for prospective territories, places they may want to colonize in like millions of years, and they shoot these weapons at the worlds and they infect certain species and their enemies do the same thing and the idea is that the infected species will fight it out and the one that wins is programmed by the infection, I mean, just in the way it has to exist, what it eats and just the basics, what it does to live will help to make the world more hospitable for the aliens in millions of years if they ever come.
I laugh.
She doesn’t.
I stop.
She looks at me.
– Who are you, Joe Pitt? What are you, Joe Pitt? I mean, are you secretly trying to backstab me by pretending to backstab Predo? Or are you secretly fighting for your alien masters and you don’t even know it?
I lean against the wall.
– You’re not serious.
She tilts her head back and forth.
– Well, not anymore. But I was.
She turns to her screens.
– Just that it’s unnecessary.
A series of slides that look like railroad ties welded together at odd angles.
– Because we know like, what, like one percent of the life on earth. And there are at least ten times as many unknown viruses as there are other life-forms in that remaining ninety-nine percent. She shrugs.
– I mean, who needs outer space to explain weird stuff with all that right here.
I edge the door open an inch.
On the bed, a foot. But I can’t tell if it’s attached to anything.
It’s all stuff I can’t follow, but Amanda keeps talking anyway.
Says stuff about how most of the genetic material on the planet is viral. String it all together and you’d have a line that stretched ten million light-years. Talking about three branches of life, eukaryotes, bacteria and archaea, and how viruses just live off those three. Mentions something called LUCA. Says that’s the last universal common Ancestor. The first single life-form before life split into its three categories. Tells me that a virus’s strength is its ability to persist. That most of the human genome is viral DNA. How things called retroviruses program RNA to make viral DNA that splices into host cells’ DNA and how it gets passed on as the cell does its normal replication.
Mostly it’s just words and letters to me.
If I get the sense of one out of ten things she’s saying, I’m lucky. But it’s kind of always been that way. Between how smart and how crazy she is, there’s not much room for a guy like me to understand much of what comes out of her mouth.
I stay busy with whiskey and cigarettes.
And with thinking about that foot on the bed. Wondering if it’s attached to a pregnant girl.
I’d go try and get a better look, but I’m trying not to move around too much because one of Sela’s eyes is open now and I can’t tell if it’s just something that happens, or if she’s awake.
Talk about creepy.
But there’s room for more.
– Want to see something amazing?
I go over to the desk and look at the screens. Moving slow, trying to see if Sela’s eye follows me.
It does.
– What you got?
What she’s got is more blobs on her monitors.
She’s pointing at one, harsh pink and green, rods and blobs.
– This is it.
I look.
– It what?
She looks up at me.
– The Vyrus, Joe. That’s what it looks like.
I look again, but I don’t recognize it. It’s not the face of god or anything, just a picture of the flu I caught a long time ago. The one that makes me need blood to survive.
– It’s pink and green.
She flicks her fingers and something similar appears, but it’s blue and green and the blobs look more geometric.
– This is it too, but a different sample. From someone else. And it’s like that. I mean, whoever it’s in, it’s different in them. Not just how its traits manifest, but its appearance. Which is the weirdest thing about it. And it had me totally pissed at it.
Sela grunts.
I point at her.
– Is she gonna try and kill me?
– Um, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know, but mostly she’s cool after a little blood. Mostly she’s like herself. But she’s been hungry so long now, months, so she’s also mostly kind of feral. But I think you’re cool.
I move toward the gun racks.
Sela growls.
I move away from the gun racks. Remembering how I looked for cigarettes and booze instead of setting myself up with a piece.
Now I’m starting to get itchy about the clock.