Insistence of Vision (7 page)

Yes
, the second layer of dormant traits does go back three hundred million years, instead of merely one hundred million. And yes, it’s all about
life phases
that mammals and reptiles and birds abandoned, way back then. And
yes
, our methods seem to have succeeded at filling in most of the gaps, well enough to re-ignite those dormant traits, under the right conditions.

We’re gonna get another Nobel for this.

Which is small potatoes, given what’s now at stake.

But I had one thing all wrong. And you got it wrong too!

I thought it was the
larval stage
that had gone missing, that our ancestors abandoned so long ago, getting rid of that stage by cramming all larval development into the earliest bits of embryo. Birds and reptiles and mammals
don’t do larvae
as a major life cycle, right? All of us go straight to adult phase.

So I figured: what harm could there be in activating some of those old larval traits in test animals? See if it will let us renew the body in spectacular ways. Why not? How could larval genes do much of anything harmful to an adult?

Set aside my clumsy lab error. Accidentally sticking myself, I somehow got a dose of restoration codons from a carelessly trans-species retro-virus. Okay, that was my bad. But the rats are doing well, and so should I. Moreover it promises to be the greatest adventure ever!

For you see I was wrong in a key assumption, Beverly. And so were you.

Mammals and reptiles and dinosaurs and birds... we simplified our life cycles, all right, eliminating one of the phases. But it wasn’t the larval stage we omitted!

We gave up adulthood.

Three million centuries ago, all the dry-living vertebrates – for some reason – stopped transforming into their
final
life phase. Storks and tortoises. Cows and people. We’re all larvae! Immature Lost Boys who long ago refused – like Peter Pan – to move ahead and become whatever’s next.

Some species of caterpillars do that, never turning into butterflies or moths. Just like you and me and all our cousins.

All the proud, warm-blooded or feathered or hairy or scaly creatures... including proud Homo sapiens. All of us – Lost Boys.

Only now, a dozen rats and your dear colleague are about to do something that hasn’t been achieved by any of our common ancestors in three hundred eons. Not in seven percent of the age of the Earth. Not in at least ten million generations.

We’re going to grow up.

Change transforms winter

Winds blow in spring, then fall

Death is the maestro

December 12, 2030:

What a dope!

Oh George, you prize fool
.

I always knew that someday he would pull something really, really stupid. But this beats all. An amateurish lab error. Breaking half the rules on handling retroviruses. And scribbling a blizzard of sophomoric rationalizations. I could have intervened, if only he called me sooner. I would have rushed home from the treatment center and to hell with my own problems!

I could have administered anti-virals. Maybe arrested the process.

Or else strangled him. No jury on Earth would convict a dying old woman, not with the exculpating excuses he has given me.

Now, it’s too late. Those antediluvian traits are fully activated. By the time I got to the lab, our students were in a frenzy, half of them babbling in terror while the other half scurried about in a mad mania of excitement, doing what George had asked of them.

Taking data and maintaining his chrysalis. His cocoon.

I looked inside. Within the metal casement and its gel sustainment fluid, his skin has been exuding another protective layer, something no mammal has done since long before we grew fur or started lactating to feed our young. A cloud of fibers that tangle and self-organize to form a husk stronger than spider silk.

I’ve sent for an ultrasound scanner. Meanwhile, I plan to sacrifice one of the rats to find out if my suspicion is correct.

ᚖ

Yes, George, I believe you were right, up to a point, and I was wrong. I am now convinced.

Human beings are larvae and not adults.
Congratulations.

You and I have discovered how to re-start a process our forebears abandoned, so long ago. And yes, if the codon restoration is as good as it seems, so far, then you may be heading for conversion into that long-neglected imago phase. Something completely unknown to any of us.

Oh, but underneath brilliance, you are, or were, such a dope.
This is not how science should be done!
You’ve taken a great discovery and plunged ahead recklessly like the mad scientist in some Michael Crichton movie. We are supposed to be open, patient and mature truth seekers. Scientists set an example by avoiding secrecy and haste, holding each other accountable with reciprocal criticism. We spot each others’ errors.

If you had been patient, I would have explained something to you, George. Something that, evidently, you did not know.

The caterpillar does not become a butterfly.

ᚖ

We dissected one of the rats from its chrysalis, and confirmed my fears. Something my organo-chemist partner would have known, if he ever took Bio 101.

People think that when it weaves a cocoon around itself, the caterpillar undergoes a radical
change
in body shape. That its many legs transform themselves somehow into gaudy wings. That its leaf-cutting mouth adjusts and re-shapes into a nectar-sipping proboscis.

That isn’t what happens at all.

Instead, after weaving and sealing itself into a pupa shroud, the caterpillar
dissolves!
It melts into a slurry, super rich in nutrients that feed a completely different creature!

The embryo of the butterfly – a tiny clump of cells that the caterpillar had been carrying, all along – this embryo now erupts in growth, feeding upon the former caterpillar’s liquefied substance, growing into an entirely new being. One that eventually bursts forth, unfolding its
imago
wings to flutter toward a destiny that no caterpillar could ever know or envision, any more than an egg grasps the life of a chicken. Any more than the caterpillar understood the compulsion to seal itself in silk, ending its own existence at the command of a biological clock.

Two entirely distinct and separate life forms, sharing chromosomes and a cycle of life, but using separate genomes that
take turns.
And no shared brain or neurons or memories to connect them.

That
is how it goes for many insects. The purest form of metamorphosis.

Of course, things are less rigid among amphibians. The tadpole does
transform
itself into a frog, instead of horrifically dying to feed its replacement. Or, rather, death and replacement take place piecemeal, gradually, over weeks. The frog might even remember a little of that earlier phase, wriggling and breathing watery innocence. I had hoped to find something like that, when we opened the rat chrysalis. A becoming, rather than wholesale substitution.

But no.

Some students gagged, retched, or fainted at the gush of noxious slurry... a rat smoothy, peppered with undissolved teeth... then quailed back in disgust from the weird thing that we found growing at the cocoon’s bottom end. Pale and leathery. Still small, tentative and hungry. Soft, but with ribbed, fetal wings and early glints of claws, plus a mouth that sucked, desperately eager for more liquefied rat, before finally going still.

And so I knew, before the ultrasound trolley arrived, what we would find happening in George’s cocoon.

I never liked him as much as people thought I did. And the feeling, I am sure, was mutual. But we made a great team. And we changed the world more than we ever thought possible. And I mourned the end of the larva-man I had known...

...while preparing to meet his adult successor.

December 24, 2030:

At last, I understand cancer.

Rebel cells that start growing on their own, without regard to their role in a larger organism, insatiably dividing.

They never made any sense, in the Darwinian scheme of things. None of these behaviors benefit “descendants.” Compared even to the way that the ferocious voracity of a virus makes new generations of viruses, cancer seems to care nothing about posterity or the rewards of fitness.

And yet, it’s not all inchoate or random! Cancers aren’t just cells that have failed. They defend themselves. They force veins to grow around them in order to seize resources from the body they eventually kill. They are adaptive. But how and why? What reproductive advantage is served? What entity gets selected?

Now I know.

Cancer is an attempted putsch, a rebellion by
parts of our own genome
. Parts that were repressed so long ago that the gasoline in your car was growing as a tree in fetid, Permian swamps.

Parts that keep trying to say: “Okay larva, you’ve had your turn. Now it’s time to express other genes, other traits. Let us unleash your other half! Fulfill the potential. Become the other thing that you inherently are.

That’s what cancer is saying to us. That it’s time to grow up.

A hugely complex transformation that our ancestors quashed long ago –
(why?)
– keeps trying to rise up! But with so many switches and codes lost from lack of use, it never actually gets underway. Just glimmers, the most basic and reflexive things. New-old kinds of cells try to waken, to take hold, to transform. And failing that, they keep trying nonetheless. That’s cancer.

I know now.

I know because the rats have told me.

Lab rats are notoriously easy to give tumors. And there, in George’s retrovirus, replacing and inserting missing codons, are dozens of fiercely carcinogenic switches. That’s what made this latest batch successful! And I can also tell…

…that the thing growing inside George’s tube arose out of his own cancers. Those are the portions – the adult-embryo – that are taking over now, differentiating into new tissues and organs, cooperating as cancers have never been seen to cooperate before.

And it looks about ready to come out. Whatever George has become. Maybe tomorrow. A Christmas present for the whole world.

DAMN the time it took to get anyone to listen. To take me seriously! Workmen aren’t finished yet with the containment facility next door. We’re not yet ready for full quarantine-isolation.

Worse. My own cancers are acting up. Provoking twinges and strange sensations. Blood tests show no sign of the retrovirus! But I know other ways that the new switches may have worked their way into me, during the last ten years of our pell-mell, giddy success at “replacing tools that had been lost.”

Re-learning to do things that our ancestors chose –
(in their wisdom?) – to forget.

Something that perhaps
frightened
them into rejection. Refusal to grow up.

ᚖ

Whether we are ready or not, he is coming out.

The adult.

Will he be some crude thing? A throwback to a phase that high-amphibians wisely chose to forego? Shambling and incognizant? Or terrifying in feral power?

Or else, perhaps a leap beyond what we currently are? Standing
atop
all of the advances that we larval humans made, then launching higher? Transhumanism without Moore’s Law?

And I can’t help also pondering, as I peer inside the chrysalis at the still-scrunched and fetal-folded New George – contemplating the broad shoulders and tight-wrapped wings – that
sex
is almost always a chief role of the adult stage, in nature. And hence, I have to ask: will it even be possible to resist the gorgeous beast that will emerge? How then, can we contain him?

How much will he remember? Will he still care?

Whether or not we can contain New George, I figure the point is moot. The long era of larva dominance on Earth will soon end. Too many of our methods have been openly published. Most of the codons are out there. Above all, this news won’t be quashed. I wouldn’t suppress it if I could. Only openness and real science will help us now. Mammalian agility and human sapience. These may prove to be strong tools.

Still. I hope he’ll like us.

I hope that this new type of
us
will be friendly.

Maybe even something worth becoming.

Springtime, possibly 2039:

Like every person who ever contemplated existence, I’ve wondered if the world was made for me – just me.

Recollection is unreliable. As are the records we inherit – notes or reports. Memorials carved in stone. Even the long testimony of life itself, written in our genes.

“Memories” float before me like archaic dreams. The dross of many eons of mistakes.

Ruminations of an earlier, ignorant – not innocent – me.

And so, with a floating sigh of adulthood, I face the task at hand – cleaning up messes left by others. Left by my former self. By our former selves.

It started, you see,

With very best intentions

Like so many sins.

Story Notes

Futurists speak of the Singularity… a coming time – perhaps within a human lifetime – when skill and knowledge and immense computing power may transform everything.

Perhaps – and this may be ordained, according to some worried prophets – the machines will transcend far beyond all human potential and leave us all behind. That is the scenario offered most often by Hollywood.

But there are other possibilities. “Chrysalis” is a story about the potential of biology, the great, rising science of the 21
st
Century – to disrupt everything familiar and drag humanity, ready or not, into unfamiliar territory.

Our next story takes this theme of Becoming to its conclusion. Let us suppose that this Singularity thing happens, and in the “best possible way.” The machines don’t snub us or crush their makers. Instead, they join us! Empowering us to solve every problem that vexed old Humanity 1.0! Transforming us into godlike beings.

Sounds fine, I guess. But even enhanced deities have troubles.