There’s still a lingering contact high from Kierk. Maybe it’s the nicotine. Or maybe, Carmen thinks, she can blame evolution for making humans pair-bonding mostly-monogamous primates. After all, there’s Kierk’s intellect (showing an ability to plot on behalf of his genetic material), his broad shoulders (capable of brutish brawling with other male humans for dominance), his long legs and lack of adipose tissue (good for hunting, tracking, warfare), his combination of aggression and empathy (willing to commit violence to protect the genetic material he cherishes). And he makes her laugh (sexual market value). Of course she knows it goes both ways: her intellect also demonstrates an ability to plot on behalf of genetic material, her lithe and dexterous form (excellent for gathering, crafting, stealing), her facial and musculature symmetry (indicates lack of parasites and strong immune system), her beauty (as sexual selection becomes its own tautological self-reinforcing phenomenon wherein beauty is attractive because beautiful children are attractive), and her fat deposits are all in the right places (good for the creation of the brains of more genetic material, which are mostly made of fat). But at the same time Carmen hoped that all these things were merely expressions of something else, that the deep structure of the universe rewarded this reciprocal altruism between consciousnesses, that as one traced the physical to the biological to the psychological to the spiritual it was obvious no one description captured all of it—that there was the underlying abstract truth that two are better than one, that unification was primary in ontology, that all of metaphysics was love and strife—the evolutionary was just one level of description, a single-dimensional slice of a high-dimensional object.

Regardless of its origin or ontological status she really does feel different. Beyond the exchange of saliva and flesh and friction and cum and the pressing of our bodies and all that other truly excellent stuff there were other, deeper things at work, from the exchanging of the species of fungi that live in our lungs from our breaths, the microbiome of our mouths and urinal canals and in our eyes and hair and the colonies on our flesh, there was even the exchange of human cells, the development of microchimerism wherein genetically different cells from other people are found throughout our own bodies—while cells are often thought of as this strict matrix, the bricks we are made of, actually organic cellular structure is not like inorganic architecture at all. Cells migrate and move, the whole body is always shifting, a thing with its own currents and eddies and tides. And Carmen knows those cells with different DNA are taken up in our permeable bodies and end up in our brains as well as our bellies, our genitals and toes, our lips from kissing. We are destined to become a cellular chimera made out of our mothers and fathers and lovers and children, monsters all.