Or was it transform the world? Would the recipient change the world? The science in front of me, the documentation, was not meant for a layperson. A change to the genetic code? Or changes. Radical changes. Not to become superhuman or erase difference or erase anything. References to the salamander’s unique defensive toxin, and the alkaloids in the flowers preferred by the hummingbird, which could be hallucinogenic to humans. Some evidence of a quest to harness their power without the toxicity. Chemical biomimicry.

Could it mean a kind of healing? A kind of healing, an ebb and flow. A restoration of the health of the world? Is that what the diagrams meant? Incoming and outgoing. A contamination that meant the ecstatic.

I was irradiated by my belief. Riddled through. But was I ready to follow?

One last magic potion.

One last chance. One last terrible, awful choice.

I spent some time frozen, arguing with my own thoughts.

Derangement or genius? Was it even possible? If I was right, to create not a deadly pandemic or a biological bomb but a new, true seeing? Let the world in through your pores like a salamander, see all the colors of the flowers only a hummingbird could see.

Yet both Ronnie and Silvina were dead. Not ascended, not “repaired.” Dead. Sick, sick, stupid thought. Maybe they had been the wrong hosts drawn to imperfect serums. Maybe they hadn’t, in the end, been strong in the way I was strong. Could that be why I had been chosen? If I had truly been chosen. By fate, if not really by Silvina.

What if one last syringe was just chance?

What if Silvina was just delusional?

I left the question, along with Silvina’s body, for a time, because I trusted there was something more to find. Because I needed to sit with that question for a time.

Because I needed to look through the enormous round window.

[108]

An ark existed there beneath the earth. Or a kind of ark.

I would have been the first to look upon that miracle except for Silvina, except for Ronnie. Because she would have had to create it with only the most trusted, loyal friends. Because double-blinds were necessary to prevent any one person from knowing what it meant. Because it would have taken decades from first thought to last. Because when she started no one had ever built an ecosystem this way.

What I saw, when I came close to the window, was a scene lit by an artificial sun. The glass so thick and rimed with green, it was like looking into the past.

But it was actually the future.