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“What will you do?” asks his father.
“Finish school and find someone I can help research this.”
“I didn’t know the scale of your ability until Tampa.”
“I didn’t know, myself.”
Andrew bangs on the door as he opens it. “Good morning graduate, get up!”
Michael startles awake in the bed that Andrew realizes must be new for the lack of feet sticking over the end. “Shit, Drew, what’s up.”
“You’re up! I’m going to school with you then we’ll get lunch.”
Michael doesn’t move. The bedframe raises and drops.
“Bro, I just got this bed, don’t break it.”
“And you can’t get used to it, you’re about to move!”
The comforter is tossed as if by wind and Michael rolls his head up with a scowl. “You’re real fucking cool.”
Michael drives Andrew’s route, who does not follow the warmth in the engines and the tires and the little radiating lines into the clothes of the figures in other cars. They park in Andrew’s old spot, students still call out to him on the path and in the outer commons and inside Michael shakes his head and walks off with “Later, bro.” Andrew ignores more calls of his name and steps around the little huddles and pushes through the door to the offices where the receptionists greet him by name and a commotion builds for pictures that goes through the ringing of the bell. Into the windowed halls under a blue sky, to the small gym, a bright yellow sticker on his shirt. His old coach blows a whistle as he spots him. “Hey Andrew!”
They talk and follow the class outside around the school’s track. With another whistle the group gathers and the coach tosses out a few basketballs and says “Alright, go do whatever, just keep active.” The football players stay.
“What’s college ball like? one asks.
“Busy. I could give you the gist.” They nod.
“So, last summer, I started with summer conditioning, all the freshmen have to, but the whole team’s there working out.”
“Devaris?” asks another.
“Yeah, he was there from the start, too.”
“Cool,” they say.
“I’m in the gym at sunrise, then I go to breakfast, then summer classes, which we have because the fall is so busy we need the spare time. Then August camp and everything kinds of blurs as you’re headed into games, but then you’re on the field at Lucas Oil or Mercedes-Benz and it’s all worth it.”
More pictures with the coach and the students. Andrew stays until the end of the period and follows the students back through the small gym and to the head football coach’s office who greets him with “I heard the Heisman was in the house!”
“Hey, coach.”
“Great damn season, Andrew. No surprises here.”
Andrew doesn’t think his laugh conveys his annoyance as he looks over the now small-to-his-sensibilities trophy case in the office. “When Walker wins the Super Bowl in a few years maybe people will finally listen when I tell them he’s the best. He was turning miracles at Florida and it’s like me and Jerry Jones were the only ones who noticed.”
His coach laughs. “I should have known better. How’s it been? How’s it looking?”
“Good. We got that Smith kid from Harvard-Westlake. He should be able to manage.”
Andrew watches the end of the mock procession in the large gym, his brother the tallest of the group where some wear red hats with US flags and others wear white Adidas rain jackets. Michael drives them to a sports bar where day baseball has started and they watch and eat and leave and listen to play-by-play in the car and finish the game at home, then it’s time to leave again. James avoids the freeways, taking the shaded roads with few intersections and traffic as sparse as spotlights until they near the stadium. Someone recognizes Andrew at the giant steel hawk and he politely waves and then they’re past the long wall of doors where Michael is guided off by a chaperone he’s a head above. Andrew watches in the field, his brother down the concrete ramps and through the caverns to the gathered mass of students. Above they find their seats. When they’ve settled a hand touches his shoulder and a voice says “Pardon me, young man.”
Andrew’s smile is automatic but it fills as he turns to a man whose wrinkles fit the faded Braves hat snug behind his ears, a fray on the edges and worn marks where the man’s thumb and forefinger must have pulled to adjust a thousand times. A woman sitting beside him has wrinkles too and a ring and a jacket hanging over the armrest onto the man’s thigh but her soft sideways look is what speaks familiarity of every time this man has invited him to converse with strangers.
“Would you happen to be Andrew Black?”
“That’s me.”
“I thought so. You’re quite the football player.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Why aren’t you playing for the Bulldogs?”
“They didn’t try that hard, probably because their offense is so good already. And I wanted to play with Devaris Walker, so.”
“But he’s graduated,” says the man, looking off. “He’s gone to the uh, Cowboys, right?”
“Yeah, but the kid we’ve got coming in looks good.”
“Compared to Walker?”
“He just has to get me the ball.”
The man chuckles. “I suppose that’s true, isn’t it.”
Andrew looks below again, to the students walking through the tunnels. He easily finds his brother, taller than the rest who walk in–well, all his shadows. Shadows. Andrew wonders if his brother will become the more famous Black-in-name, the one who strangers recognize and ask for pictures and friendly seniors wonder why he isn’t pitching for a local school and once his skill is proved which teams will tank in hopes their draft pick is close enough to the top to grab the next 6’7 Uncle Charlie from Georgia. It would be cool to have you on campus. It will be cool to have Michael on campus, someone he can finally talk the truth to without a dark flight or unfulfilling cryptic texts, someone who will understand when he asks what the fuck he’s doing running all the time and treating Emilia that way and hold him to something better. Andrew shakes his head and takes a deep breath and in the field he sees someone different. Standing behind railing in a section that might be for wheelchairs, a man whose chest and shoulders are above everyone around him, massive arms with massive hands resting on the railing. He finds their position relative to himself and looks across the stands and can just see the giant.
Andrew stands for pictures with his family and gladly stands for another with the elderly man but his annoyance grows as Michael’s friends and lowerclassmen Andrew doesn’t know group around him for more. In the field he sees the giant trod through the concourse until he’s in sight and unexpectedly talking to Michael. The giant makes Michael look short and small for no lack of muscle anywhere on his body but now Andrew can see his face and he finds a curious youth. He walks to them.
“Hey.”
“Aw shit, Drew black,” says the giant.
Michael says “This is Marcus, Jerome’s little brother.”
“‘Little!’ How old are you?”
“I’m fifteen,” says the giant.
“Damn. You playing football?”
Even this slow nod from the giant looks like it could concuss. “I just started last year.”
Michael says “Milton’s got two freshmen like this.”
“Two? Just like this?”
“Yeah,” says Michael.
“Jesus.”
The giant holds out a phone comically disproportionate with his hand. “Could I get a pic with you, Drew?”
“Yeah, man,” and Michael is given the phone and takes the picture and this invites a last pair of students to ask.
“That doesn’t happen as much at school. They don’t give a shit.”
Michael says “I don’t give a shit either.”
Their mother sees them laughing and elbowing each other.
After dinner Michael is in and out of the house quickly. Andrew reads a book until the pages drag and stands and stretches and walks to his father’s office, who looks at him then back to the little television. “Have you seen this?”
“Seen what?”
James turns the television.
The title chyron reads CONNECTION FOUND BETWEEN UQ-MARKER & THE HAZE
“—once we learned that UQM is perfectly inherited, it was a simple matter of tracing the lineage to its oldest occurrence. Uniformly, the oldest individuals who bear the UQ-Marker were conceived in March of 1954, which was of course during the Haze.”
“What does that mean?”
“We couldn’t begin to guess. As everyone knows, when the Haze disappeared, all samples taken disappeared with it, and the rudimentary techniques used at the time to study its composition found nothing. There has always been speculation around the emergence of megaflora and megafauna as being connected with the event, but research produced no specific chronological link like we see in this. This is the closest we have to something concrete.”
“A fascinating conversation, thank you again for your time, Dr. Cuevas. Coming up at the top of the next hour is John Canton, who will also be speaking with us on the discovered link between UQM and the Haze and the fresh controversy this has brought in the work of his clinics. Stay tuned.”
James mutes it. “The obvious assumption from this will be that Controllers have UQM parents. That’s a filter, Andrew. Your name is going to be on a list, if it isn’t already, of potential Controllers.”
“We’ve always thought it’s a matter of time.”
They watch muted advertisements until the show returns.
”We continue our discussion on the Harvard-Johns Hopkins researchers who have identified a possible link between the UQ-Marker and the Haze. Earlier this week, the German anti-UQM fertility interventions movement DEB issued a statement freshly condemning the work of John Canton. In the US, lawmakers in the states of California, Oregon and Washington are set to discuss such interventions in the coming weeks. Speaking on this now, John Canton himself joins us live from his office in St. Louis. ‘King Canton’ is of course the retired-undefeated world heavyweight champion in boxing, the co-founder with Dr. Henry Batton of Epitaxial Foundries, and the founder of the Canton Centers for Reproductive Health, the first and largest fertility clinics exclusively working with UQ-Marker donors. Thank you for joining me, John. What do you make of this discovery and the response to it?”
“Sure, thanks for having me. My inclination is dismissal. While UQM research only now has this chronological link, research has considered a possible link with the Haze since it became aware of the profile at the outset of the Owens study. Conclusive data is nice but this changes nothing and it certainly shouldn’t change the world’s approach. If UQM had been found to predate the Haze, movements like DEB would find a different reason to pointlessly oppose our work, just as they’ve slanderously referred to it as eugenics.”
“Why do you describe their opposition as pointless?”
“Because UQM is inevitable. The trait passes with perfect inheritance every single time from a UQM parent to their child. Even if my centers disappeared overnight or never existed, a woman who is not UQ-Marker who wished that for their child could simply find a UQM father and naturally reproduce with them. UQM fecundity is incredibly well-established and after conception birth is guaranteed. We saw that in the Owens study and we have seen that in seven years of Canton Center-assisted births. Following successful conception there have been zero recorded instance of miscarriage or stillbirth–zero!–that were not induced by severe injury. In a few hundred years every single human alive will be UQM. My clinics are simply accelerating the process.”
“And of the American lawmakers discussing your work?”
“I welcome their discussion, it is the prerogative of the people and legislators of every state to choose for themselves whether they want this, but I know they’ll see the truth, and when they finish, my clinics will be that much more secure against future opposition.”
“I see. You mention as well that DEB has called your work eugenics. You called this ‘slanderous’–why doesn’t it apply? Are you not essentially focusing on the creation of a ‘better race?’”
“Our work is the logical conclusion of the Owens study, it doesn’t apply because we know for a fact UQM exists. This isn’t a disastrous ideology from a century ago where traits were arbitrarily considered better, UQM has occurred in every single population group, exactly what we would expect when identifying its chronological origin as an event that affected the entire world. As to examples, an East Asian UQM is largely identical with a North European UQM and both with a sub-Saharan African UQM. They are exactly as healthy as one another, and while there are the obvious differences in appearance, differences in proportions and a degree of athletic variance, outlier general athleticism relative to their base population remains and they are all profoundly healthier and more physically capable than those without. On that demographic level, I invite anyone concerned to look at the endorsements of our work in the United States by American minority advocacy groups.”
“What are those health advantages, John?”
“We saw them in the Owens study supplement where they found a natural mortality rate also of zero. This is a population with a quantifiable zero-rate of physiological and neurological illness, disease, and cancer. The panacea lives and walks among us. Spreading it so our grandchildren’s grandchildren all have this isn’t merely a good idea, it is our moral imperative, as it is reciprocally a moral abomination for someone to deny their children a life of perfect health because they fear the suggestion that it’s a better way of life. I empathize with them, I really do. I know some would prefer their children have it, but they want to have their own children with their husbands or wives, and that is absolutely valid. But the more UQM who are born, the fewer times that decision will have to be made in the future. The purpose of my clinics is so everyone has it. The purpose of my clinics is to eliminate their own work and close down.
“Well spoken. Earlier in the spring you opened in your forty-eighth state with new Hampshire. You also have international clinics, and I’d like to ask about your operations in Singapore.”
“Of course. We operate around the world. Japan was our first international partnership, quickly followed with Canada and Mexico, then Korea, Taiwan, Sweden and Switzerland. The site in Singapore is still under construction and it was beyond the boundary of the sphere so it wasn’t at risk even prior to Redhat’s intervention, but we’ve had our crew there shift to taking assignments from the emergency management of the Singapore Civil Defense Force, at no cost to them, as they aid in reconstruction. We have no immediate point on the timeline on the resumption of the project, but we don’t consider that important. Recovering from the disaster is what’s important, so our crew will work in that as long as they’re needed, and restart when they can, and then we’ll have our clinic there as well.”
“That’s very charitable of you, and yes, the sphere is why I brought it up. While there was already speculation of a relationship between the Haze and Control, this discovery has caused a surge in discussions on that connection. What do you think of this, and more broadly, of Controllers?”
“It’s the rational conclusion. If the Haze brought us the changes in plants and animals, and it brought us UQM, then why not Control? I am incredibly optimistic about Controllers, just as I saw you were. Epitaxial is one of the companies researching Psychic Break, and with Redhat’s continuing promise to intervene in spheres he has bought us desperately needed time. But I do think my hopefulness and optimism is a little different than yours. Controllers violate our current understand of physics, and just as UQM, that has endless possibilities and applications in improving human welfare. The amount of work that could be done, in energy generation and the engineering of megastructures, of advancements in spaceflight and colonization—”
“You believe Control could be used to get to space?”
“Absolutely. They use their minds to fly and lift hundreds of thousands of tons of material, why wouldn’t work in space? If it does, we could escape the tyranny of the rocket equation. If Controllers can hang facilities in orbit themselves, we could be colonizing the Moon and Mars in a timeframe we never thought possible. It isn’t possible for me to overstate how excited I am for the future.”
“These are, indeed, extremely intriguing possibilities. Great comments, John. If you’ll stick around, we’re going to break.”
James turns off the television.
Andrew says “Did you see Michael and me talking to that giant at the stadium? He’s fifteen and he’s got to be a foot taller than Michael, and Michael says Milton’s got two guys that tall.”
His father nods. “You know about this?” asks Andrew.
“Yes,” and his father opens his tablet, taps on it, then turns it around, showing a group of soldiers, a giant behind them. Shirtless and twice the height of the shortest man and broader than two of the others combined. “I found this a couple weeks ago. I’d have thought it was a fake if I hadn’t read so many stories lately of unusually tall young people. The popular guess is the gigantism observed in plants and animals has finally crossed to humans.”
“So it’s a matter of time before we regularly see people walking around who are twelve feet tall?”
“Could be. They’re going to be quite the athletes.”
Andrew nods. “They’re going to have to make new leagues for them.”