That was the world Yuri, Lin, and I had grown up in. It was a world we didn’t want our children to grow up in. We were going to change it, no matter the cost. And in each other, we found kindred spirits, linked by a shared childhood across thousands of miles and two continents.

Lin’s field was genetics, and the subject was an obsession for her. Her father was also conducting genetic research on the Beagle, which meant that in addition to the research opportunity, her time here was a chance to reconnect with him. This was something Lin and I shared in common: the Citium was an opportunity to connect with our fathers, to share in their life’s work, and perhaps even to fill in some of the years of our childhoods we had lost.

Genetics was a booming field. Watson and Crick had figured out that DNA was arranged in a double helix in 1953, and the discoveries had accelerated after that. When Lin talked about the promise of genetics, she lit up. She was unlike any woman I had ever met. Physically, she was an anomaly, the embodiment of Hong Kong itself: distinctly Asian features with a mixture of British mannerisms and behavior. She was unassuming, utterly without ego. Perhaps that was what attracted me the most. She was hardworking to a fault; often I found her in the cramped office outside her lab asleep with her head on her desk. I would lift her small body up and carry her through the p-ways. Sailors stood against the walls to make room for me to pass, never missing an opportunity to heckle me.

“Finally bagged her, eh, Willy?”

“What’d it take, Will, tranq dart or a shot of tequila?”

“Make way for Prince Charming, boys!”

I endured the jabs without a care in the world. I deposited her in her bunk, pulled the covers up, and turned the small noisemaker on—they were good for helping folks stay asleep; the berths weren’t separated by shifts, and bunkmates were constantly coming and going. The hard surfaces throughout the vessel made for a noisy existence.

Reading people was part of my job. After a few weeks, I knew what Lin saw in genetics: the promise of a civilized human race. She believed that somewhere in the human genome lay the answer to why some people were evil. To her, the key to the Looking Glass was simply identifying the genetic basis for all the traits that ailed the world and getting rid of them.

Yuri, on the other hand, didn’t believe that the threat of nuclear war was humanity’s greatest enemy. Pandemics, he argued, had decimated the human population far more than any war. He believed that globalization and urbanization made an extinction-level pandemic inevitable.