“The brain,” Julie said.
“You aresmart ,” he told her. “Absolutely right. The sum of all these changes meant that they were evolving into hominids.”
“Humans, right?”
“Humans are hominids, true, but it took millions of years for the first hominids to evolve intoHomo sapiens .”
“But once they got back to the jungle, couldn’t the hominids get back together with the mystery primates?”
Bright as Julie was, Ellis wondered how far he could delve into the intricacies of evolutionary drift with a thirteen-year-old. He paused, looking for an analogy. He knew she played the cello in her school orchestra…maybe she could understand if he related evolution to music.
“Think of DNA as a magnificent symphony, amazingly complex even though it is composed with only four notes. Every gene is a movement, and every base pair is a musical note within that movement. So if one of those base pairs is out of sequence, the melody can go wrong, become discordant. If enough are out of place, it can ruin the entire symphony. But sometimes changes can work to the benefit of the symphony.
“Imagine the sheet music for a concert arriving in a city far from where it was composed. The local musicians look at it and say, ‘No one around here is going to like this section, nor that movement; we’d better change them.’ And they do. And then that version is shipped off to another city even farther away, and those local musicians find they must make further changes to satisfy their audience. And on it goes, until the music is radically different from what was on the original sheets.
“This is what happened to the sheet music of the hominid’s DNA. It was progressively changed by different environments; but the chimp DNA never left its hometown, so it changed relatively little. And because they’d been separated, with the genes of one group never having a chance to mix with the genes of the other, each group kept evolving in its own direction, causing their genomes to drift further and further apart.
“At some point millions of years ago both groups reached the stage where neither was a mystery primate anymore. By the time the hominids started spreading into different areas of Africa, it was too late for a reunion. The hominids were playing Bach, while the chimps sounded like heavy metal. They couldn’t play together. Too many changes. One of the most obvious was the fusion of two primate chromosomes in the hominids, leaving them with twenty-three pairs instead of the twenty-four their jungle cousins still carried.”
“But sims have only twenty-two pairs, right?” Julie said. “What happened—?”
“That’s way too long a story for now,” Ellis said quickly. “Suffice it to say that the two groups had evolved so far apart that they could no longer have children together. Once that happened, their evolutionary courses were separated forever. So you see, a chimpanzee cannot evolve into a human any more than a human…”
His voice dried up.
Julie said, “But that doesn’t mean a sim won’t evolve into a human.”
“Sims are different, Julie. Theycan’t evolve. Ever. To evolve you must be able to have children, and sims can’t. Each sim is cloned from a stock of identical cell cultures. They are all genetically equal. Evolution involves genetic changes occurring over many generations, but sims have no generations, therefore no evolution.”
“This is pretty heavy luncheon chatter, don’t you think?” Judy said.
Ellis was grateful for the interruption.
“Your mother’s right.” He chucked Julie gently under the chin. “We can continue this another time. But did I answer your question?”
“Sure,” Julie said with a smile. “Sims will always be stuck being sims.”
Not if I can help it, Ellis thought.
8
SUSSEX COUNTY, NJ
“You’re not getting another beer, are you?” Martha called from the upstairs bedroom.
Harry Carstairs stood before his open refrigerator, marveling at the acuity of his wife’s hearing.
“Just one more.”
“Harry!” She drew out the second syllable. “Haven’t you had enough for one night?”
No, he thought. Not yet.
“It’s just a light.”
“Aren’t you ever coming to bed?”
“Soon, hon.”
She grumbled something he didn’t catch and he could visualize her rolling onto her side and pulling the covers over her head. He twisted the cap off the beer, took a quick pull, then stepped over to the bar. There he carefully lifted the Seagram’s bottle and poured a good slug into his beer.
Gently swirling the mixture, he headed for his study at the other end of the house.
He was drinking too much, he knew. But it took a lot of booze to put a dent in a guy his size. Still he didn’t think it was a real problem. He didn’t drink during the day, didn’t even think about it when he was surrounded by the hordes of young sims he oversaw. Their rambunctious energy recharged him every morning, filling his mind and senses all day.
But when he got home, when it was just Martha and he, the charge drained away, leaving him empty and flat. A dead battery. Not that there was anything wrong with Martha. Not her fault. It was all him.
He wished now they’d had kids. Life had been so fine before when it was just the two of them. And SimGen, of course. Martha worked for the company too, in the comptroller’s office. SimGen became part of their household, turning their marriage into a ménage à trois. But it had been a rewarding arrangement. They’d built their dream house on this huge wooded lot, traveled extensively, and had two fat 401(k)s that would allow them comfortable early retirement if they wanted it.
But a few years ago he’d begun to feel an aching emptiness in their home, to sense the isolation of the surrounding woods. He knew the day, the hour, the moment it had begun: When Ellis Sinclair had informed him about the sudden death of a sim.
Not just any sim. A special sim, one Harry had known throughout his entire time at SimGen. He’d taught that sim chess and turned him into a damn good player. They used to play three or four times a week.
And then he was gone. Just like that. Died on a Saturday, into the crematorium on Sunday, and his quarters stripped by the time Harry returned to work on Monday morning.
The boilermakers—Martha thought they were just plain beers—numbed the ache. But the ache seemed to require more anesthetic with each passing year.
Harry settled himself at his desk and reached out to restart the computer chess match he’d paused in midgame when—
He stopped. That feeling again. A prickling along his scalp…as if he was being watched.
Harry abruptly swiveled his chair toward the window directly behind him and caught a glimpse of a pale blur ducking out of sight. He sat stunned, frozen with the knowledge that he hadn’t been imagining it. Someone had been watching him through that goddamn window!
He leaped from his seat, lumbering toward the sliding glass doors that opened from his study onto the rear deck. He slipped, fell to one knee—damn boilermakers!—then yanked back the door and lurched onto the deck.
“I saw you, damn it!” he shouted, voice echoing through the trees, breath fogging in the cold air. “Who are you? Who thefuck are you!”
He stopped, listening. Where’d he go? But the woods were silent.
And then Martha’s voice, frightened, crying: “Harry! Harry, come quick!”
Harry ran back inside, charging the length of the house, shouting her name. He made it up the stairs to the master bedroom where he found her standing in the dark, staring out the big window overlooking the front yard.