I cut him off, tugging on his jacket. “This idea that Eva had,” I said. “About there being a cannibalism… like a gene for it…”
“That’s not the case,” he says primly, but his face lights up. “All the same, you should ask Winnie about whether she’s found any evidence of cannibalism in the bone fragments she’s finding.”
“I’ll do that, thanks.”
In fact I do it on my phone while he’s still talking, waving his hands around at the lacy wrecks of the buildings around us, his bright yellow gloves the only colour for blocks around. No response from Winnie. I refresh the screen a few times, and shrug.
“Epigenetics,” says Victor. “The research is just starting back up again. You know how it is. We had all the written research in the world, but all the experimental lines and organisms were long, long dead.”
“Yeah. But it’s not really—”
“No, no. What I meant to say was there’s no cannibalism gene in humans. We’ve never found any evidence of that. But if you’re thinking that a good number of epigenetic traits related to survival in general were activated in descendants, then yes, that’s very likely. Metabolic management, things related to homeostasis in general. Body temperature management. Calcium cycling. Adipose storage. There’s even evidence that the microbiome is different. There’s likely to be phenotypic plasticity that’s—”
“What?”
“Ah! You see it in some species. Let’s say frogs. When tadpoles get overcrowded and food is scarce, some of them get a developmental leg up by eating their conspecifics. These ones, they get stronger jaws, sharp little nubs that look like teeth. The victims, I mean the food, the prey, don’t. Visually, if you pick up a handful and sort through them, you can easily see which ones are cannibals and which ones aren’t. That’s how much they change. Their DNA doesn’t change. But they all carry the genes needed to turn.”
“Horror movie,” Darian says, without turning around.
Victor jumps, nearly walks into a fire hydrant, and lowers his voice. “It’s… it’s a well-studied adaptation response to difficult environmental conditions. Traits that help digest meat and bone, too. Their digestive systems can’t really handle it before the changes.”
Idly, I think of the old ladies the writer refers to, and whether we would see, in their skulls, evidence that they were doing what they were supposedly doing. The teeth and jaws of monsters. But I don’t think that happens in humans.
“These are our ancestors,” I say slowly. “We inherited all that.”
“Yes.”
“And if there were… these epigenetic changes…”
“Well, certainly I would think so,” Victor says. I find myself curiously interested in his teeth, white and uneven, and Darian’s, large and sharp. He didn’t even let me finish my sentence, but I suppose he knew what I meant.
But I’m bothered by it, and I corner Victor after dinner, in the starry dark, as we quietly work at our separate stations before bed. I apologize profusely for interrupting him, but he’s running some kind of comparative DNA analysis on tree trunks and the fresh seedlings we’ve seen, and his computer is clearly busy, a progress bar taking up an inconvenient amount of the screen. He swivels on his sproingy chair and regards me brightly in the light of the LED lanterns. “Emerson! Pull up a… a concrete block.”
“The writer thinks mostly old women survived,” I say quietly. “But that’s not how it would be in nature. Is it?”
“Oh, no. No, often not. Where the old survive, of course, it’s because they’re exhibiting traits that we would call human-like: culture, memory, problem-solving, even sociopathy. In general if there’s that kind of… of… of winnowing in a survival situation, you’ll find the young and strong surviving.”
“Smaller chicks being pushed out of the nest if the parents don’t feed both chicks properly. That kind of thing.”
“Or the smaller chick being killed and eaten by the larger. It’s just calories, you know.”
“Victor.”
“I mean, in nature,” he says hurriedly.
“But people don’t do that,” I say. “Even in survival situations. We’ve found no evidence of… of that kind of thing during the Setback. Even in old material from concentration camps. People protect and shelter the weak, they don’t kill them to survive.”
“No? Airplane crash survivor demographics.”
“What?”
He holds up a hand, and tilts it unhelpfully in the air. “When you look at the numbers of people who die in airplane crashes, people always want to think that it’s whether you’re in the nose or the tail or over the wings. Or whether you had just eaten, or were wearing your seatbelt, or… things like that. But when you run the real statistics on who makes it out alive, if anyone does, you’ll find that for some reason it’s males, aged 15-60, sitting anywhere on the plane. Way over the rates of women of any age, children of any age. What does that tell you?”
“I… I don’t know. Maybe the weight, the distribution of muscle mass…”
“Nope. Try again.”
But try as I might I cannot make myself say that it’s clear, as Victor thinks it is, it’s clear that that’s because men are shoving people aside to get to the exits. None of this ‘Women and children first!’ like in the old movies.
Victor is a year younger than me, he’s thin and looks flimsy, but he’s a foot taller than me and I find myself wondering whether he’d push me aside if our plane was crashing. If he’d want to survive so badly that he’d do that. He smiles uncertainly at me, perhaps seeing my thoughts written on my face.
“You should sleep,” he says.
“I’ve still got work to do.”
“Oh?” He tries to take back his surprise, but it’s too late. I’m not offended, really. I know what they think about my research, even if he’s more polite about it than the others.
“Goodnight, Victor,” I tell him, and stalk back to my station, and put up the paneling, and cry a little bit before I keep reading. Because of the colour schemes of their preferred software, the others glow all different colours in the darkness—Winnie is a soft violet, Darian’s a gray-blue, Victor is pink and red. Mine would be gold, from the greeny-gold colour of the text reader, diligently transcribing my anonymous author’s crabbed scrawl into a tight and readable text. I bet it would look pretty from above. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll try to get a photo.
June 24
Horror yesterday. When we think we have seen more than our fill.
And shock, when we think we can no longer be shocked.
Just at dusk, a statue darted across the street in front of us, startling, like a stray cat—though of course much bigger, as big as a horse, but still the likeness was unmistakeable. And catlike it hesitated when it saw us, one paw up, spiked and clubbed like the bloated claw of a scorpion. The grotesque face remained in profile. And then we saw something in its muzzle, ragged and red. Another corpse, I thought wearily, but it writhed just as I thought this, and screamed, and I involuntarily lunged for it.
V. got a handful of my jacket and yanked me back. There are more, he whispered, and I barely heard him; in fact I did not realize what he said till later.
But we both saw it. The thing, the monster, had a child in its mouth. Not dead. Alive.
I pore obssessively over my memory of it, as if I am scrolling back and forth and zooming in on a photo on my phone, getting as close as I can till I can see nothing else. I’m shaking, my fingers are shaking.