Animalis (28 page)

Make a difference, save the world …
That was what Jax had wanted most. And hadn’t she let him have it? He had dragged Narasimha and the pyramid—humanity’s greatest threats—out into the depths of space. It was heroic, right out of a storybook. She should be so happy for him, so proud of herself for aiding him.

After another moment without a response from Hodge, she tilted her head to look at him. Hodge was belted into the co-pilot’s seat beside her, his fur drifting in beautiful waves without gravity to hold it down. His eyes were wide, still looking out the window at where Jax had disappeared. His ears stood up above his head, twitching back and forth, searching for the sounds that were no longer coming through their cockpit speakers. She could hear his nose cycling the air of the cramped cockpit, searching for scents that might as well have been a universe away.

“Maybe he’ll make it … I think he’ll make it,” Hodge finally said, and he sounded genuinely hopeful. “Don’t you?”

Hurley swallowed down the ache building in her throat. “Yeah,” she said. “I hope he does.”

And she tried to smile, but cried instead.

Chapter 24

The Ghost of Dr. Ivanovich

Jax was alone. Maybe Narasimha would regain control of her body soon and she would kill him before the carbon monoxide, which was building up in his suit, did. Unless she lost consciousness …

He pushed himself over to where Narasimha was pinned. He reduced her stream of air. It would either kill her, or keep her in an unconscious state until someone was able to find them.

His heart was still beating rapidly; he would need to calm it down quickly to cope with the new atmosphere content in his suit.

He closed his eyes and focused on his breath. Slower. In, and out. In, and out. Ten seconds on the intake, hold. Ten seconds on the exhale, hold. He could feel the rhythm slowing in his chest. Eleven seconds in, hold. Eleven seconds out, hold. He continued up to sixteen-second intervals.

A tingling sensation started to creep into his feet. It was spreading up his legs, tingling and pulsing. Not more than five minutes had passed; his brain couldn’t already be shutting off unnecessary functions, so something else was happening. His eyes were closed, but the vision he had in his mind seemed more than his imagination. He was experiencing his legs in a way he didn’t understand. They expanded out in his awareness, spreading like a blanket. Muscles, tendons, bone, veins, blood … more depth of sensation than he had ever known.

He tried to open his eyes, but his new world had slowed his experience of time. The muscles behind his eyelids were waiting for the synapses to fire and send their electric orders down the connected nerves. The pulse of the electron cloud within each atom seemed almost frozen. How was he seeing this? It couldn’t be real, could it, without his brain even functioning as fast as this strange consciousness? He wasn’t dying, he knew that; he could see the life in his body.

What else did this strange awareness have to offer? Jax pushed his mind out around himself. There, life—Narasimha’s incapacitated body. Her inner makeup spread before him. The hard, pointed nails were his nails. The golden fur was his fur. The tail, extending out of the base of her spine, was his tail. And the short tip of the tail … Memories flowed into him. It was a story more rich than the lioness had experienced herself.

The pain of the flesh separating under the knife. Blood working to seal off the open wound. Each cell obediently following the instructions dictated by its DNA. But there was pain before the tail had been cut from her body, more potent than the physical shocks of nerve signals. The scene filled with the living matter that connected to that moment. He saw, or experienced, another Animalis—a breed of house cat—whose lineage was also somehow contained in Jax’s awareness. Her tail had been removed, sliced off by a laser rifle, in an attack on a group of humans that had been breaking Animalis for farm labor. Jax could feel the sting of Narasimha’s pain, guilt for not protecting the cat, and remorse for the Animalis having to give life and limb for their cause. He could feel the deep connection that Narasimha made with those around her. Her love was simple, natural, and more potent than what Jax had felt, even for his own parents. Narasimha had cut her tail off and gave it to the cat, as a token of her love and her sacrifice.

Jax pulled himself out of the experience. What was happening? He hadn’t died, not this quickly. How could he be seeing, and living, someone else’s past like that? His imagination had never been
that
vivid.

Jax pushed his awareness out farther, and found the pyramid, locked in his new, timeless reality. It shook him to come in contact with it. As his mind began to spread out with what made up the pyramid’s existence, Jax wanted to tremble, to cower back and hide from it. The history of life over the entire planet. More than that, every element of emotion—joy, triumph, remorse, sadness—were now within his sphere of experience. What he had seen from his own eyes, and heart, were less than molecules in the cosmic expanse of the reality that was
life
. What he had known as love was a tiny fragment of what had been experienced in the pool of life that he was now a part of. He wanted to hide every moment when he had thought his life was too hard, and disown every time he had thought he had achieved something great, for fear that this accumulation of existence would crush him with some immeasurable laugh at his own insignificance.

But at the same moment that he realized he was a speck of nothing, a warm, comforting sense of purpose filled him. This thing, this access point of all life, had brought him here. Like a two-sided mirror, Jax’s focus had expanded out to the entirety of life, and the focus of life had been brought down on Jax.
Don’t move. Watch him,
it seemed to whisper.
What will he do?

He could feel it now; he was inside the machine. He had activated the pyramid. But it was more than DNA that he had power over now; he could see the history of the world, and every detail as it existed in the now, and fragmented trails of possibilities and probabilities spread out into the future. It was all kept within the DNA, and as it passed from life to life, it accumulated a record held as a code in the very atoms of the DNA molecules. Jax could see the pyramid reading subtle differences in the subatomic particles within the atoms, reading it just like the binary of a computer. A feeling of immense power came into him, and it scared him.

This
was
the machine that had created the Animalis.

Jax wanted to understand it. He started to follow histories that were contained in the DNA around him. His own path had connected with Narasimha, Hank, Grimshaw, and at each of the points of connection, he could transfer from his DNA to theirs.

When he found himself holding Moxie and pushing her inside of Hank’s space suit, his curiosity became excited. Had the Animalis created the two strange creatures? It couldn’t have been Narasimha that had used it, or else she wouldn’t have been looking for them.

Moxie’s DNA spread out its secrets before Jax.

“Hello,”
a strange and inhuman voice said.

Jax stopped examining the DNA in surprise. The voice hadn’t been in the history. It was immediate, something in the endless time he was experiencing. He tried to mentally answer
“Who’s there?”
but the thought didn’t extend out of him like the voice had.

“You made it, Jax,”
the voice said again. “
Are you looking at our body?”

The history of Moxie was still spread out in Jax’s mind.

“Thank you for keeping us safe. You protected us.”

Was it Moxie speaking to him? He tried again to find the source of the voice. There was a connection in his thoughts. Jax could sense the entity at the other end of the connection, but it wasn’t part of the DNA. There was no arrangement of electron spin for the pyramid to decode to show its history. It was on a different plane of existence. Jax’s mind struggled to envision how it could exist outside of the realm of reality that everything else was in.

Although it wasn’t DNA itself, it had a permanent connection, spreading down into two bodies. Jax followed that connection and found himself at Moxie again, and Little Hank. The entity was spread throughout the two creature’s entire existence. It was them, or controlling them, or manifesting itself through them. The thought of clay came to him: maybe the creatures of DNA were like figures of clay, and this entity was like a hand reaching down to move and control the clay. Jax was making wild assumptions. He didn’t understand almost anything that he was seeing.

“Now, you are like us,”
the entity said.
“You can make changes.”

He could make changes?
“How?”
he wanted to ask, but his thoughts stayed within his own mind. Changes could be made in this strange realm, just like clay. Even he might have been changed. Narasimha had said he was changed. That’s why he was different. That was why his leg had grown back.

Jax dove through the ocean of information and found himself in the arena. His DNA history linked with the bear’s, and hundreds of spectators. He focused down on the DNA describing his leg, moving back to the moment Misha had pulled back, biting down, holding him to the ground with her foot.

Before the leg was torn off, he came across a gap in his DNA’s record. It wasn’t a big gap, just a difference between what it was before, and what it was after. Before, his leg would have gushed blood, killing him within minutes of the incident in an explosion of pain. After the gap, his leg had been altered to cut off its blood circulation, and deaden the nerves. Not only that, but the cells would immediately begin rebuilding the leg.

And the change, the gap in the DNA, had come from something. Maybe Moxie and Little Hank, Jax couldn’t tell; the trail of influence drifted off without leaving a record. It hadn’t come from the pyramid, or anyone using it.

The machine was incredible. Jax wanted to know more.

He brought his focus through time to the moment the machine had been conceived by Dr. Ivanovich. From the present, Jax followed the life of the pyramid’s DNA back to its formation. He was surprised to see Moxie and Little Hank beside the pyramid the entire journey.

Before the machine had been loaded onto the rat Animalis plane, it had been locked underground in the frozen tundra of Russia. Moxie and Little Hank had been its sentries, keeping humans away from the device for nearly one hundred years.

Jax followed the path of its existence back to the very beginning. He could see Dr. Ivanovich injecting DNA that had been taken from the two ferret creatures. That was the moment of its birth. But Jax could see all of the doctor’s work coming from tiny gaps in his own DNA. He had been affected by the entity, or entities.

Jax moved to when the machine had first been used. He could feel the body within the pyramid: Dr. Ivanovich. He sat, legs crossed, hands resting at his knees, in a meditation position. His breath was coming under control and slowing down. His heart slowing. Then there was a spark, and the story only existed in the thoughts that had been in the doctor’s mind as he traveled through the strange reality of DNA.

Jax watched as Ivanovich stretched his consciousness to six potted plants he had prepared on his desk: three identical flowers and three freshly planted seeds of the same type. Jax could see the first plant change under the influence of the doctor’s mental focus; instead of red petals, this flower would be changed to blue. Jax saw the projected future of the plant change. The cells would shift their behavior based on the new instructions given by the DNA. The plant would turn to blue within a matter of a few minutes once Dr. Ivanovich returned to normal reality. Then, within a day, the plant would return to its default red color.

They moved to the next plant. Jax felt the doctor pulling in traits from other plants. He wanted to see, when time resumed, if this flower could be transformed into an entirely different species of plant: a tomato plant. The projection of the future changed, and the plant deformed, trying to take on the attributes of the new plant. As well, within a day, the plant would return to the red flower it had been, but with damage that would take several more days to mend.

The third plant’s DNA was given instructions to change into a bird. The projection ended in the plant’s death, cells tearing apart before another structure had taken their place. It would die within an hour, incapacitated by the quick deterioration taking place within it.

The doctor repeated the process on the seeds.

The first seed projected a natural life as a blue-colored flower.

The second projection showed a fully functional tomato plant. If nourished, it could bear fruit, reproduce, and even form new hybrids with other plants.

The third plant grew as an abomination. Never fully functional as either a flower or a bird. It would die within a few days.

Dr. Ivanovich left the machine and watched the projections come to fruition. After the plants’ alterations had run their course, the doctor continued his experiments, and eventually created the Animalis.

Jax returned to the awareness around his body. Could he do the same?

He focused in on himself, on the instructions that dictated his eye color. It took some trial and error, but as he touched pieces of the DNA, he could see his eyes shifting from brown to yellow, orange, red, purple, blue. He stopped on blue, and watched the projected change take place in his eyes. They would shift in a matter of minutes, and remain blue for a little less than twenty-four hours.

He shifted the DNA back, and the projected change vanished.

He could do it: change the world in whatever way he wanted. But what would he do? What was he supposed to do? Jax wasn’t ready for this moment; no one was here to guide his action. The question echoed through his mind:
“What will he do?”

He searched for Hurley. She was frozen in time in the atmosphere, Hodge and Little Hank at her side. Jax could see her spreading out before him, her possible future, and her accumulation of past experience. She would make it to the surface of the Earth, and she would look for him. It made him happier than he had expected, to feel her love for him. He felt her flutters of joy when she had been with him at ACTS. Her rage was his rage when Hank had tortured the Animalis hyena. Her anxiety that someone would hurt Hodge. There was an innocence and purity in Hodge that she knew was better than her, and more honest than her. If he was hurt, there could be no justification for it. Jax saw the fear she felt when she allowed herself to want to be with Jax. Unsure if he would see her as lovable, desirable, beautiful, or good.