Inktober #10: Pattern (Patreon)

Backstory for Meg from "The Cold At The Heart Of The Light."

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“The pattern’s going to be roughly the same in every cell you look at within a specific organism,” David said. “There might be some that stand out as different, mutations or chimerism or whatnot, and then of course there’s things like the symbiotic bacteria in our bodies, but the basic cells are all going to have the same pattern in them. Do you see it?”

How could she tell? There were so many things that were the same in each of the rat’s cells, how could she pick out a specific pattern as being the DNA?

“It just – it’s a symphony, a tapestry,” Meg said. “How do I pull out individual threads? How do I hear specific instruments?”

“I don’t know,” David said, frustrated. “It’s not my power! I can see how chemicals interlock with each other, but what you’re doing is so much more complicated, and you know so much less science and math than I do—”

“Well, excuse me for being in junior high,” Meg snapped.

“You’re not in junior high. You haven’t been in school at all for a year, and with a power like yours, and a mind like yours, that’s not okay.” David glared at her. 

Meg huffed. “Oh, yeah, I’m just gonna go sit in class all day, in high school, with kids whose biggest issue is the bitch in the other homeroom who’s stealing her boyfriend, and then after I get home and do my homework, I’m gonna go kill some people for Mike. Right? That totally fucking makes sense.”

David took a deep breath. “You don’t belong in school. No one belongs in school, it’s essentially a warehouse for children, with some stamping dice to crush them into similar patterns to maintain the status quo. But you need to be reading. I got you books on biology and chemistry—”

“They’re boring. They don’t feel like they have anything to do with what I see and feel and hear.” Meg couldn’t even describe what sense she was using to detect things inside the rat. How could she compare what she was sensing with the dry, flat words on the pages of the books David had given her?

“Okay. Take me through it. What do you see?”

“It’s—more like hearing. I think. Like a piece of orchestral music, but there’s so many instruments.”

“And what can you tell from the music?”

“Um. It’s a rat. It’s sleeping – there’s chemicals in its body that are making it sleep, they don’t belong there. It’s female. Mostly healthy but it’s got fleas. All kinds of yuck on its teeth.”

“Right. Now go deeper. Focus on a smaller part of the rat. Not the brain, that’s too complicated.”

“OK, I spy, with my super-power eye… a tail. Am I good with the tail?”

“Sure, the tail should be fine,” David said. “What can you tell me about the tail?”

“Uh, there’s bones all the way down,” Meg said. “Lots of bones, real small. I mean, even in comparison to the size of the rat. And there’s, uh, there’s tubes with blood in them – wait, veins, those are veins, right?”

“Veins, arteries and capillaries. Yes.”

“Okay, and there’s this spiderweb of things all over the place where… something is changing. I can’t tell what, but it’s like the spiderweb is lighting up.”

“Does it connect to a central trunk line running through the center of the bones?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess it’s doing that… so nerves, right.”

“Are there muscle fibers?”

The rat’s tail twitched. “I guess so. When I poke them, they make the tail move. I can see them get short and thick, or stretch out and get long.”

“Focus on them. Go deep.”

“Yeah, um… they’re made of… things. Bags. Little watery bags. Well, actually they are tubes but they’re tubes that are like bags. Sausage! Like it’s got a containing membrane on the outside and then all kinds of stuff on the inside.”

“Look at the stuff on the inside. Can you find another bag?”

“About forty billion of them…”

“I don’t – wait, you’re probably looking at mitochondria. And exaggerating. Look toward the center for a larger bag than the forty billion tiny ones.”

“Yeah, I can feel that. Kind of squishy. It has… doors? Revolving doors? Does that make sense?”

“Yes, there are molecules whose function is to let things in or out of the nucleus by essentially bonding with that thing and inverting so the chemical they’re moving is on the opposite side. Look past the doors. There’s something in the center. Around 42 somethings, actually.”

“I thought it was 46.”

“That’s us. Humans. This is a rat, they have 42.”

“The secret meaning of life is ‘how many chromosomes does a rat have?’”

“Yes, Adams should have replaced the mice with rats. Mice have only 40. Also rats are smarter. Look at those chromosomes, please.”

“I – I can see them. They’re in colors.”

“Which colors?”

“I, uh. I don’t know. When I try to look at them hard they change, but it’s four colors. It’s always four colors. Sometimes it looks like it’s red, blue, green and yellow, and sometimes it’s more like brown and beige and grey and black, and sometimes it’s all different shades of purple—”

“Focus on the pattern. Can you see the patterns the colors make?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can hear them. They have a rhythm, they… that song. That song is everywhere in the rat. The whole song, the whole orchestra of the rat’s entire body, it’s all the songs from these things, repeating over and over with different instruments.”

“Change the pattern.”

“OK. Um, I can’t change red to blue or green to yellow; red and green always match and then blue and yellow match. I have to change two at the same time.”

“Change some and listen to the way the pattern changes.”

Meg was sweating, the rat becoming somewhat slippery in her hands, or rather her hands becoming too slippery to hold the rat. “I’m hungry and my head hurts, can we quit?”

“No. You’re in the genome. This is where it all happens, Meg, this is where you change the world. You can make a man grow an extra arm, but if you master this, you can make all his children have extra arms too.”

“I don’t want to change the world, I want pizza.”

David sighed explosively. “Just change something and see what it does.”

“I changed, like, five things, and it didn’t do anything.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense… oh, wait. It’s mRNA that does all the work. It’ll take time to propagate. Plus who knows what the genes you just modified do? You’ll have to work on a lot of rats to get an idea of what to change.”

“There’s supposed to be more rats than people in New York.”

“That’s a myth, but there’s plenty of rats.” He took the rat from her and put it back in its cage. “All right, Meg. I’ll order us pizza, you go take a shower. You need it.”

Meg grinned. “Okay! I like that idea!” She adjusted something – she had no idea what – in her head to relieve the headache. 

“I mean it, Meg. You need to read those books and you need to practice with more rats. Practice until it stops hurting your head and making you sweat like a teenage boy playing football in full gear in July.”

Meg stuck her tongue out at David and headed to the bathroom to take her shower.