Darwin's Paradox

Darwin
’
s

Paradox

Nina Munteanu

dragonmoonpress.com

With love, to my parents, Martha and Ilie, whose steadfast belief in what I could accomplish helped me soar to heights unimagined.

No creative endeavour succeeds in isolation. This creation was a result of many iterations and interactions, both personal and professional. I thank my high school English teacher, A.E. Whittall, who taught me the importance of metaphoric writing. Thomas Hardy’s novels inspired me with the love of the word and the wish to be a writer when I was seventeen. I thank Dr. Michio Kaku for discussions on the evolution of Artificial Intelligence. Janine Benyus provided diverting conversations on biomimicry and nature’s ‘intelligence’. I acknowledge the wisdom of many additional scientists whose works in chaos theory, neural science, epidemiology, co-evolution and ecology I consulted and have cited in the back of this book.

Special gratitude goes to my editor, Tim Reynolds, whose quiet grace with words and cadence transformed song into symphony. I thank Gwen Gades for faithfully taking on this beast and providing her unending energy, vision and support. Lastly, I thank Herb Klassen, who read the book in one sitting (I don’t think he intended to) and then provided excellent suggestions on matters of theme, plot and character.

This book was written listening to Enya, Dido and Pat Methany’s Off Ramp. I thank them for their inspiration.

***

What is to give light must endure burning.

Victor
Frankl

Julie
walks SAM’s crystal matrix, gazing at the shimmering of purple and green logic along the passageways. She imagines herself a creature of coloured light, a pilgrim like Dante, who wanders SAM’s vast and ordered crystal landscape in search of home. SAM used to “live” in her head back in Icaria. Her A.I. partner...her best friend...
This must be a dream then
, she thinks.

She knows her way around SAM’s peaceful digital home, but the place is strangely empty and she can’t sense her A.I. companion’s presence. Abruptly, eerie shadows scud over her and the glittering walkways morph into slithery, monochromatic tangles. A warm, cloying wind blows across her face, carrying the organic stench of something festering. As her steps echo toward a corner, an awful foreboding creeps into her heart.
When I get around that corner I’ll see the dark figure again
, she thinks, the memory splintering up and sending a shudder through her. The stifling air rasps through her lungs as Julie wills her feet to stop, knowing full well what will happen—her feet walk on, no longer hers to control through muscle or mind.

As she rounds the corner she sees the dark figure looming in the center of the tunnel and the rank perfume of decay overwhelms her. Enshrouded in black robes, the figure casts a gloomy shadow that reaches out and touches her feet. She shivers, trying to make out a face, remembering that in all her previous dreams she never could. Like all the times before, the figure beckons her with an outstretched, gloved hand.

She recoils, resisting the force pulling her closer to the figure, but her feet slip. Panic rising, she slides toward the figure and stares, drawn to look at the shadowed face but terrified at what she might see. She glimpses fluid features, swirling from one thing to another: first a young woman’s face, then a child’s, then a decrepit, wrinkled mass. The figure’s arms reach out to embrace her and she starts to slide forward again, arms thrashing out, grasping only air. Her feet skid on the slimy surface. Somehow she knows, deep in her dreaming soul, that if she touches the figure she will die.

Where’s SAM?
she demands, certain that this shadowy figure is somehow responsible for her A.I. companion’s disappearance.
What have you done with him?

[SAM is with us, a part of us now,]
the strangely mellifluous chorus of voices resonate in her gut.
[Soon you will be. You must join us also...It is time to return...]

“NO!”
she screams defiantly. As she fights the force of the voices and the dark figure, a soft chirping sound in the back of her mind suddenly escalates into wails of panic. Among the discordant alarm, a single note cuts in and she recognizes Angel’s voice:
Mom! Help!
The dark, deadly figure is abruptly pushed aside by a vision of her daughter, desperately hanging on to a tree over the gorge.

***

Casting a brisk glance around her, Angel slipped out of her cabin and stole across the camp. Only the trilling of a robin broke the silent mantle of first light. She inhaled the sharp sweet smell of wild honeysuckle that clung to the haze of early morning and hesitated at her parent’s cabin door to peer inside. Both lay asleep in bed, facing her direction, her father’s tanned arm folded around her mother in a loose embrace. Angel studied their peaceful faces and let a sigh escape her. She suddenly felt lonely. She knew they loved her, but they also had each other. Angel only had Aard, the scruffy but strikingly handsome hermit her parents had cautiously befriended six years ago. Aard wasn’t just her friend; he was her only friend. He was also thirty years older than her. A kind, yet somewhat mysterious man, he’d taught her family the art of survival in the wild. He also spun stories about life in Icaria that her mother seemed oddly reticent to share.

As Angel watched her parents sleeping her mother twitched, her face tightened and she mumbled something unintelligible.
She’s having the bad dream again
, Angel thought, as she shrugged her climbing rope over her shoulder, and turned away from her parents’ cabin.

Angel darted out of camp, down the well-worn path toward the meadow where she and her mother would pick blackberries later in the summer. Angel gave the flowering brambles a glance and picked her way through the heath scrub toward the gorge. Her heart raced as she neared the place she’d been repeatedly forbidden to visit, but she’d be back long before either of them woke up and no one would be the wiser. Angel smiled, excited, and quite pleased with her plan.

The clearing just before the gorge yawned ahead. This marked the place in the gorge where she’d heard the strange noises and seen those flickering lights. No creature she knew of could have made them and she didn’t for a moment believe her mother’s lame explanations that they were swarms of fireflies, northern lights or even dry lightning. Time to finally check out what lay below, she thought, peering over the cliff edge and into the gorge.

Angel secured her rope to a nearby tree and was just about to cinch it to the caribiner on her strong belt when the chirping noises in her head suddenly flared, sending a clear note of alarm through her. She spun around and met the feral eyes of a cougar. It snarled and she drew in a sharp breath, instinctively jerking back from the beast.

Too close to the edge, she slipped with a shriek. The rope ripped from her hands and she tumbled over the edge. Something caught her hard on her leg, abruptly stopping her fall and sending a flash of pain that brought out a cry. She scrambled for a hold and realized she’d landed on a stunted, gnarled tree that grew out of the cliff face. She clung desperately, body dangling over nothing.

Mom!
her mind screamed. A rock slithered past and she dared to turn and watch as it clattered down the cliff, starting a small slide of rocks and dirt into the deadly darkness of the gorge. She hoped the cougar was long gone, spooked by her cry and sudden fall. Her arms shook with a biting ache and a sharp pain shot up her left leg. She wondered briefly if she’d broken it then bit back the thought and replaced it with another: soon my whole body will be broken. I can’t hold on much longer...

***

Daniel twitched out of sleep and realized that Julie had awoken him by jerking herself awake with an outcry. She was sweaty and her breaths came in shuddering spasms. He lifted himself up on an elbow and gently brushed the long strands of honey-coloured hair from Julie’s flushed face. She seemed to be dreaming about Icaria a lot lately. “That nightmare again?”

Julie threw off the blanket and sat up, swinging her legs over the side of their bed. Daniel stroked the gentle, beautiful curve of her tanned back. She glanced back at him and he saw that she’d traded her usual expression following the nightmare—that of distraught confusion with one of alarm. “No—well, yes, but that’s not it.” The words rushed out, urgency edging into panic. “It’s Angel. She’s in trouble. At the gorge.”

Julie was up and dressing before Daniel had a chance to check the light outside. “That’s ridiculous,” he objected, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “Angel’s eleven—she sleeps in every chance she gets.”

“She’s down there, I tell you,” Julie insisted, eyes flashing like a forest on fire. She’d pulled on her buckskin shorts and was cinching in the belt. “Are you coming or not?”

“How do you know she’s there? Did you hear something?” Her senses were far superior to his. She heard and saw a bird in the distance minutes before he heard it fly overhead, and she brought it down for supper with her bow long before he even made a move.

“Don’t ask me how. I just know,” she said in a voice strangled with emotion. She pulled her sleeveless buckskin top over her head.

“That’s ridiculous.” He watched her lace up her old Enviro-Center hiking shoes. “She knows she’s not supposed to go there—”

“Well, she’s there,” she cut him off, her voice sharp.

He stared at her with startled realization. “You don’t trust your own daughter.”

“Should I?” she snapped. “Come on!” She ran out of the cabin.

“Okay, I’m coming!” he called. “Wait up!” Daniel pulled on his buckskin pants and hopped out of the cabin to keep up. Julie was already out of the camp, sprinting down the main path by the time he got his boots on and caught up with her. “Shouldn’t we have checked to make sure she isn’t in her cabin asleep while we’re out here running like idiots in the dark?”

Julie slowed for a moment and glanced sharply at Daniel as he came along side her. “The insect-voices in my head warned me,” she explained, “and I heard her scream in my head. I know I didn’t imagine it, Daniel. I saw a clear image of her on the gorge cliff. She’s hurt and she’s hanging off a tree branch.”

They ran faster.

***

“Hey,” Aard’s friendly voice called from above. “What d’you think you’re doing? Training to fly?”

Angel wanted to cry out his name in relief but she burst into tears instead, unable to look up. Her breaths shuddered through her, threatening her tenuous grip on the tree. She slipped a few centimeters and screamed in renewed alarm.

“Angel,” Aard’s voice took on an edge. “Don’t move. I’m coming down!”

She heard him scrambling above her then her own rope snaked down beside her as dirt and pebbles rained down from the ledge above. The rope twitched and bounced as Aard maneuvered himself down hand over hand. Then he was beside her on a tiny ledge. He tied a loop in the rope and clipped it to the caribiner on her belt. “Okay, you won’t fall now if you let go. Grab a handhold on that branch and work your way across.”

She couldn’t move.

“Let go, Angel,” he said.

She shook her head, crying.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice softening.

“My leg,” she said between choking sobs.

“Okay,” he said, almost as if to himself. “I’ll get you up. Just stay there.” She heard his labored breaths as he climbed back up the cliff free-hand. He finally called down, “Okay, Angel, I’m going to pull you up. Just let go when you feel me take up the slack on the rope.”

She felt the hard tug on her belt and felt secure enough to unclench her hands from the tree and grab hold of the rope. She unhooked her good leg from the tree and bit by bit, Aard pulled her up to safety. As she neared the summit, she heard concerned murmurs and knew her parents had arrived.

“Here,
this’ll help you relax.” Julie sat on the bed beside Angel and handed her a tumbler. Angel rose up on her elbow and inhaled the pungent smell of chamomile tea. She wrinkled her nose. Her mother smiled with amusement and pushed the tumbler into her hand “It’s good for you. Drink it.”

Angel knew better than to argue with that tone of voice. As Angel took a small sip of the tea, her mother inspected the flexible splint Aard had used to set Angel’s leg. “He did a good job.” Then she tilted her head and smiled lopsidedly with wry amusement. “That’s a heck of a way to get out of doing Tai Chi with me this morning.”

“Yeah,” Angel laughed with embarrassment. She wanted to talk some more about their new way of communicating between their minds, through those chirping sounds in their heads. On their way back to camp, she’d babbled excitedly about it and her mother had eagerly listened. But now Angel felt ashamed of what she’d done, and angry at herself for letting the accident happen. It would be one more thing she’d done wrong that her mother would go on about.

As if reading her mind, Julie sighed. “Why do you keep doing things we tell you not to do?”

There was enough exasperation behind her voice to draw out Angel’s anger.

“Everything fun and neat isn’t allowed,” she said, pouting.

“That’s not true, darling. You’re being dramatic again.”

Angel huffed. “Mom, I’m eleven I’m not a kid anymore. I can think for myself. You don’t have to keep doing it for me, you know.”

Her mother stiffened and gave Angel a lame smile. “I do that, don’t I?”

“Now that we can ‘think’ to one another, are you going to do it then too? One day I won’t be around and you won’t have anyone to order
around—”

From the way her mother looked at her, Angel wished she could have taken that back. But it was true, she decided, feeling just a little bad that she’d hurt her mother’s feelings. It didn’t stop Angel from setting the tumbler down and turning her back on her mother to lie down again.

“Get some sleep, darling.” Her mother got up from the bed. Angel wanted to turn, be kissed and hugged, but her mother was already gone.

***

Angel sighed awake. She rose with a stretch and, feeling very hungry, hobbled to her parent’s birch log cabin to ask about lunch. She hadn’t broken her leg, like she’d thought. Aard figured she’d stretched a ligament, though, and it would heal soon enough with careful working of the muscles.

Angel stopped in her tracks when she overheard her mother’s clipped voice inside: “Don’t you think it odd that Aard happened to be there right then? We got there when we did because she called me. But what’s his excuse? That he just happens to hang around cliffs at five in the morning?”

“He’s just odd, Julie,” her father responded with an impatient sigh. “He could’ve been there doing his Tai Chi meditation—”

“Fine,” her mother said sharply and the sound of her voice told Angel that she’d turned and was heading outside. Angel hopped around the hut just in time to spy her mother storm out and across to the cooking hut.

“Hey, what’re you doing?” Someone laughed behind her. Angel jumped. Aard leaned against the hut wall, arms folded over his chest, his tangle of blond hair and bushy beard sparkling like gold in the sun. “Spying on your parents again?”

“Please don’t tell.”

“I won’t, but you definitely need some lessons in covert ops.” He grinned.

She grinned back. “Teach me.”

***

“What’s for supper?” Angel sat down next to her father. “Where’s Mom?”

He looked up from the sock he was mending using the sewing kit Aard had given him from his last trip to Icaria. Angel knew her father never asked Aard how he’d gotten it because he thought Aard had stolen it. Aard was in the same position as she was her parents didn’t trust him either. “She went berry picking,” her father replied. Then he gave her a hopeful smile. “Maybe she’ll get enough for a pie.”

“Why does she need to be alone?”

He frowned and tilted his head. “What makes you say that?”

“She always goes ‘berry picking’ when she needs time alone to think, Dad. Besides,” she rolled her eyes in sarcasm, “there aren’t any berries out right now. It’s April.”

Her dad ruffled her short auburn mop. “You’re a funny one,” he laughed. “Don’t worry,” he hugged her reassuringly. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with you.”

She wasn’t so sure of that. Her ability to communicate with her mother’s mind had taken them both by surprise, and although she’d seen evidence of great joy in her mother as they’d briefly discussed this discovery between them, she’d also sensed a wary concern.

***

Angel noticed a thoughtful look on her mother’s usual sanguine face when she returned and prepared the meal. Her eyes gleamed with a distracted intensity, as though she was holding a private discussion in her mind. Was Angel the subject?

Aard, who often joined them for supper, begged off, explaining that he needed to investigate the cougar tracks. He’d sounded strange and Angel noticed her mother’s eyes narrow as she looked in his direction. Angel didn’t blame Aard and wished she could disappear, too.

The three of them spoke little during supper and Angel watched her father throw glances at her mother when he thought she wasn’t looking. Angel felt tension in the air. A kind of sadness had fallen on her mother that made Angel feel uncomfortable. She wanted to have it out, discuss her act of disobedience openly, shout at her mother for being so controlling, but neither of her parents brought up her accident.

After supper, as Angel did her assigned chore of the dishes, Julie slipped out of the camp toward the rock pile that overlooked the western gully and brilliant sunset. Angel watched her then made to follow. She felt a restraining hand on her arm. Her father smiled down at her. “Finish the dishes, honey”, he instructed. His silent message:
my turn to talk to her
. He set off down the trail, after her mother.

***

Julie listened to the carillon of the birds and let her gaze stray to where the heath melted into sky. Five hundred kilometres beyond that shimmering horizon lay what used to be home. She cupped her hand to shield her eyes from the blazing sun and squinted, picturing the glinting towers of Icaria-5 in the distance. She inhaled the sweet, boggy scent of cottonwoods that rode the gusts and she frowned at her inexplicable yearning to return there. She was happy here, living a simple natural life with her cherished family. What was drawing her back to the city that had exiled her in the first place? Did it have to do with Angel and their newly found communication? No, she’d always felt it. So, maybe it was guilt...

All of the machine voices that used to reside in her head since she was five had disappeared long ago when she and Daniel had traveled out of their range. But the chirping sounds had never left her. Constant companions, they’d melded with her intuitive awareness, providing her with enhanced cognitive and motor skills and an uncanny danger sense. She remembered back in Icaria when the chirping had saved her life once from the slashing knife of a crazed victim of Darwin disease. Darwin disease...they should have called it Julie Disease. She’d been its first carrier. When she was five, her father had relinquished her to a hubristic team of scientists who’d code-named her Prometheus. Her father’s cousin, Janet, then gave Julie a dose of the artificial virus, Proteus, thinking it would change the world for the better. Instead it unleashed a plague and changed Julie’s life forever.

Initially encouraged by preliminary results on Julie, Janet had over-zealously introduced the virus to the public through a common drug and watched in horror as it morphed and devoured the lives of millions of people. Because Julie had the subtly unique genetic makeup of a veemeld, the disease didn’t kill her like it did everyone else. To her it did what it was designed to do: it provided a conduit to hear all the intelligent machines in the city, including SAM, her cherished A.I. friend and mentor. Unable to reconcile with her atrocity, Janet had committed suicide, leaving young Julie to live out the legacy of what she’d erroneously inspired.

Her father had never told her what was going to be done to her. One night she went to bed and the next morning she woke in a hospital with strange sounds screaming through her head. She’d fallen suddenly ill in the night, her father had explained and said no more. He took the secret with him when the Pols dragged him away years later. The secret ruined Julie’s family: her mother turned to alcohol and sober or drunk could barely look at her any more. She often beat Julie for no reason. Julie remembered how, after the Pols took away her father, her mother, smelling of whiskey, used to awaken her at night by crawling into Julie’s bed, clutch her to her breast and sob until she fell into a restless sleep. It was only when Julie turned twenty that she and SAM made the discovery that collapsed her world: she was Prometheus, responsible for the plague.

Weeks before Julie found out that she was Prometheus, Zane, an epidemiologist with the Special Pathogens Branch at CDC, had confided to her at a party that the first stage of the virus, called Pro-1, was sexually transmitted, invading the brain and central nervous system. But his lab also proved that a non-infectious transposon stage, a second stage of the virus called Pro-2, replaced Pro-1 after five months, during the last stage of an infected victim’s dementia.

It bound itself to a specific site on the female gamete, where it lay dormant—a provirus like the ancient hantavirus in mice—waiting to vertically migrate from host to offspring; except in the case of a Darwin host they were usually dead or certainly incapable of giving birth by then. It was, in fact, this discovery that had alerted Julie to the possibility that Darwin was manufactured rather than natural, and had mutated from its original purpose: it wasn’t logical that a natural virus would invest energy in a transmission stage that was destined to fail, as if its maker was irrational...like a human.

The fact that she was only five when she supposedly carried the first stage of the disease and that SAM believed that she had never carried an aggressive form of the virus strongly suggested that she had indeed not infected anyone. This theory was confirmed when Daniel didn’t contract Darwin from her in all the years they’d been together. Although there was still the question of Frank...

Julie had known that her gametes probably carried the virus. When she found out that she was pregnant with Angel in the heath, she couldn’t help worrying how the virus might affect her baby. Would it kill her precious child like it had millions of Icarians or would it just continue to live inside the daughter like it did inside the mother? To her relief, Angel was born healthy and seemingly unaltered. Once Angel started talking, Julie quickly discovered that her daughter could hear the same chirping sounds she did. Julie had no doubt what it was—it was Darwin speaking to her. Now mother and daughter could speak to one another through the virus. As wonderful as it was, Julie wasn’t so sure she liked its vehicle.

Daniel came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. She flinched in surprise then relaxed when she realized who it was and folded her hands over his, leaning comfortably against him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said too quickly then pulled away to give him a reassuring smile. “Just thinking about stuff.” He didn’t ask what and moved beside her to watch the sunset, obviously waiting for her to elaborate in her own good time. He’s learned to be patient, she thought with an inward smile and followed his gaze to the fired ripples of altocumulus clouds. She tracked a line of jet stream across the darkening sky. It was one of the few signs that Icaria—civilization—remained. If not for signs like that jet stream and Aard’s occasional pilgrimages back there for supplies, Julie often had the unsettling impression that they were the only people left on Earth.

She stole a glance at Daniel’s profile, bronzed by the setting sun. He’d matured since their hasty exodus from Icaria-5 twelve years ago. A network of smile lines radiated from his coal-black eyes, reverted from their previous nuyu-treated blue. His hair, once blue, had also returned to its natural dark-brown colour and he’d let it grow out in a thick tangle over his shoulders. It reminded her of when she’d first met him as Neo, the awkward cocky techno-slummer, who’s breath smelled of nano-soup and who kept trying too hard to impress her.

Years living out here had settled Daniel. He’d let his anger go, grown content. He’d moved on from those belligerent teenage years when she’d first met him in the slums of the inner city. Even from those cynical years as a young man when she’d met him again. He’d taken to building and gardening with ease and she could sense in him a quiet calm. A practical man, he reveled in the simple tasks allotted to him in his role as hunter, gatherer and protector of his family. He’d embraced the heath since that first day she’d introduced him to it and he’d since fine-tuned that relationship into one of deep spiritual appreciation, letting the heath nurture and calm his soul. The heath had been good for him, and perhaps, she thought, letting a faint smile cross her lips, she might have had a little to do with it...

And what about her? Had the heath been equally good to her? At first she’d missed her A.I.’s constant company, his banter and his crazy ‘blonde’ jokes. Eventually, though, she got used to the relative silence in her head. She’d had moments of doubt, curiosity and a yearning to return to Icaria. She’d hoped that over the years those feelings might diminish, but they didn’t. In fact, they’d escalated.