Based on the characters from my novel "The Cold At The Heart Of The Light."
“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?
( Read more... )