“I didn’t think anyone did,” said Nandita, “but finding the facility at Plum Island has forced me to reevaluate. If that lab could continue, there may be other labs as well, remnants of the old green movement, designed to run entirely on self-sustaining power. The obvious first guess is the ParaGen facility itself.”

“ParaGen was bombed pretty heavily in the Partial War,” said Kessler.

“I know,” said Nandita icily. “I was there. But it was a rugged facility, and something may have survived. ParaGen had the equipment to make a creature like that—though in the old days we would have made the changes more subtly, more human-like—and also to do whatever else the creature was talking about. Fixing the world, the climate.”

Ariel sneered. “How could ParaGen ‘fix’ the climate? You were a genetics company—you can’t just gene-mod the wind.”

“You can use genetics to fix anything, given enough time and energy,” said Nandita. “Genetic engineering is the most powerful force on the planet. The ParaGen facility was built on an old radioactive materials site, and we built bugs designed to absorb the radiation and neutralize it; we made other bugs to nourish the soil and plants. By the time of the Break, it had become a paradise. I’m not saying this is what happened, because I don’t know, but someone with the time and the means could alter the climate by engineering bacteria designed to radiate or absorb heat, or to unlock water tied up in certain areas or aquifers. On a large enough scale you could change the weather patterns, and eventually the seasons themselves, but it would require an unbelievable amount of energy to create and distribute that kind of bacteria on anything less than a geologic time frame. ParaGen’s old facility might still have power, but they don’t have that much.”

“So somebody made a bunch of germs to alter the weather,” said Isolde, “and a creepy monster thing to tell us about it. The fact that that sentence explains anything says a lot about how little sense the world makes right now.”

“That doesn’t explain how it recognized Nandita,” said Ariel. “This wasn’t some random vat-born monster; it knew you. It had seen you before, and the way it talked, it was expecting you to recognize it.”

“What if it was gene mods?” asked Xochi. “Not a new creature, but someone you used to know . . . modded up and . . . weirdified. You know what I mean.”

“That many gene mods would drive a person mad,” said Nandita. “We’ve seen it happen before, and on a much smaller scale. Something that drastic would break the subject’s mind in half.”

“That might actually explain it,” said Ariel. “Do you know who it might be?”