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.
Amanda is still going on about the Vyrus.
– But I’m thinking primal thoughts now. Earthy. Who needs space? I mean, we all came from something. That LUCA thing? That’s our slime. The primordial one they’re always going on about in PBS specials. But what was it that took the pre-nucleus slime and gave it a nucleus? Made it into nuclear cellular stuff.
A slide that looks like an organ that’s been pierced from the inside by glass rods.
– Take some pre-LUCA bacteria. No nucleus. A cell without a nucleus. Perfectly normal stuff. Lots of it all over the place. And say, I mean, say for fun there’s a pre-LUCA virus. Which is generally considered primal bullshit because what’s a virus living off of back then, but we don’t care about that because we all know just how weird stuff really is. So we have this thing, this virus, with a strong ability to mutate and persist, and we have it penetrating some bacterium. And what, I mean, what if it mutated into a nucleus? I mean. And all.
Been here an hour, I think. Still plenty of time before Predo crashes in, I think. But time to get it together and figure out-
Wait, what did she say?
– What did you say?
– I said.
She spins toward me.
– I said, Joe, I said what if we’re all, all of us, what if all life is descended from a virus? I mean.
– Wait.
– I mean, the Vyrus, I mean. What if. Because-
– Wait.
– There’s more.
– I didn’t finish fucking high school. Wait.
She waits.
I think a little. But it’s not like it helps.
So I take a drink instead. And that shakes it loose.
– Why aren’t we all infected?
– HERV. Human endogenous Retrovirus.
I take another drink. No help.
– I don’t think any of this matters.
She spins her chair.
– It’s the remains of viral material scattered in the human genome. But it’s not all the same.
She points one index finger at herself and the other at me.
– My HERV is different from your HERV.
I rub my eye. I have a headache. A bad one. I want to punch someone. It reminds me of how I felt every day at school.
– I was infected.
– Yeah-huh.
– Someone chewed on my neck to get at my blood and some of his blood got into me and I was infected. That happened.