Lucas sighed.
She had told him too much, Karina decided. As much as she wanted for it to be a bribe, a down payment for the information he held, at least in part she told him what she did because he was lying beside her, bruised, beat up, bloody, and hurting. He needed a distraction and she had enough compassion to give him one. But she hadn’t meant to pour her heart out. It just happened. He was in pain, and although she had the means to ease his suffering, he refused to feed, because he didn’t want to hurt her. He wasn’t willing to trade his pain for hers. The least she could do was talk and try to distract him.
Karina reached over and touched his hand. His fingers closed on hers. Lucas glanced at her, surprised. They had that in common now—both of them treated any act of kindness with suspicion. She didn’t expect kindness anymore, except from him. But she was an outsider. He wasn’t.
“There are no scared women here to watch us,” he told her.
“It was never for them. It was for you.”
She almost cried and couldn’t even understand why. It was the stress, Karina told herself. The trauma of watching hundreds of people die at once. And the fever, which kept rising and rising. Her breath felt hot when she exhaled. Her skin was dry and too tight. And now there were rings of red dots all over her arms.
She had never told the entire story of her marriage to anyone. It’s the fever. Of course it is.
Lucas was looking at her. Sprawled like that, even battered, he looked enormous. If a week ago someone had told her she would be locked in a vault with a nude, bloody man who was trying his best not to devour her to stop his pain, she would’ve dialed 911 to report a lunatic running amok.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Lucas said. His voice was laced with fatigue. “You can choose to believe it or not. It can be the truth or just a story. It’s your choice.”
“Okay.”
Lucas closed his eyes. “Suppose there is a civilization. A powerful country. It has taken over all of its available territory, but it knows that it must expand. It must continue to grow outward, or it will rot and collapse. This civilization sends colonists out to explore new territories. They find fertile lands and colonize them. When they succeed, they let the knowledge of the large civilization fade. The small colonies grow and prosper on their own, and when they develop enough, they rediscover their mother civilization and rejuvenate it with their unique achievements.”
He glanced at her.
“Okay,” Karina said. “I can see how that would happen.”
“Suppose a new island was found for colonization. An island with an abundant ecosphere and great resources. The civilization had done this many times before and they had developed a protocol. The colony ships arrived and the colonists created thirteen small settlements, Houses, one for each colony ship.
“Genetically, all the colonists belonged to the Base Strain. It’s a very stable breed of human, long-lived, resistant to diseases, armed with superior DNA repair mechanisms to counteract mutation. To successfully colonize a new environment, a species must adapt to it. To facilitate this adaptation, most of the colonists were exposed to an agent inhibiting their cellular and DNA repair and vulnerability to native viruses.”
“They deliberately made their people weaker? How does that make sense?”
“They didn’t just want a colony,” Lucas said. “They wanted a unique colony, perfectly in tune with this new island. That’s how the civilization kept itself from stagnation. The colonists wanted an explosion of mutations in the future generations, and they needed a shorter life span and faster sexual maturity to pass the new changes on to their offspring. That’s why scientists experiment on mice: they breed quickly and don’t live very long. The shorter life span goes hand in hand with faster sexual maturity. But it also brings negative anthropological consequences: immaturity, inability to pass on knowledge, loss of ethics and culture, and so on. These consequences were considered acceptable. The colony had to develop on its own without the knowledge of its origin anyway. The sooner people forgot where they came from, the better. A small group of the colonists remained as Base Strain for control purposes. They lived in the settlements, the Houses, and monitored the whole thing. With me?”
Sort of. “Go on.”
“Mutations bloomed. A succession of several dozen subspecies of human followed. Some subspecies developed variations, people with similar powers or physiology. Subspecies 29 showed all of the adaptations necessary for survival, but all eight of its types were plagued by sensitivity to heat and alarmingly low fertility. Subspecies 44, type 3, produced exceptional Mind Benders, who were prone to insanity.”
“Is that what Henry is?”
Lucas nodded.
“We’re not talking about islands, are we?”
“Some say islands,” Lucas said. “Some say planets. It’s just a story.”
A story, right. “Aliens.” She stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me that all of us are aliens?”
Lucas sighed. “You could say that. You could also say that once the planet shaped us and twisted our DNA, we are now just as native as anybody else.”
“What about Subspecies 30?” What about you?
Lucas’s eyes fixed on her. “Subspecies 30, types 1 through 5, otherwise known as Demons. A venomous, carnivorous, predatory variant of human with the ability to drastically alter its morphology. They were powerful, aggressive, territorial, and they dominated their point of origin for a few hundred years, hunting in small packs, but this subspecies was not viable long term. They were crippled because their bodies couldn’t produce a set of small molecules necessary for their survival, so they had to cannibalize other humans to get it.”
“Cannibalize?”
“At that point the various subspecies of human had only a rudimentary language and no memory of where they came from,” Lucas said. “No ethics, no morals, nothing. They were forming fledgling societies and ‘might is right’ was the law. If I need your blood, and there is nothing in my upbringing or experience that tells me I shouldn’t, why wouldn’t I kill you and eat your flesh? Being a nice guy is a modern concept.”
He was serious. He was actually serious.
“Should I keep going?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“This went on for hundreds of years. The small remaining pockets of Base Strain, the original colonists, kept as a control group, meticulously documented all of it from their Houses. They didn’t interfere. They just cataloged what occurred.