Problem Solving

She was tired, body and soul. The events of the last couple of days had taken their toll. Had it only been two days? With only a nightmare shattered nap in last forty-eight hours, she felt she could curl up into a ball and sleep right there on the deck plate. Again, there was just too much to do before giving in to that temptation. Onward she went.

However, once out of Johnson's sight Lee let her fatigue crash over her like a wave. She wandered drunkenly past the ready room without sparing a glance at the two tarp covered corpses in the interlock beyond. They are gone, she thought, and no amount of grief or reminiscence would bring them back.

Then she came into the minuscule galley separating the crew quarters and the ready room. The small mess room table was still covered with half empty mugs and half-finished ration packs. Borlov and Johnson had been so anxious to see the new world they hadn't finished that mornings breakfast. She recalled Hawthorne brooding over a cup of coffee while she watched in amusement as Johnson gulped down a biscuit of freeze dried pork and Borlov dainty pulled the carrots from a parcel of stew. When they had complained to Hawthorne about the quality of their meals, Hawthorne had told them that his rations were a fair share better than most ships offered. The two had known this of course, both having done their share of space travel, but Lee was sure that they were trying to break the taciturn pilot from his shell. Now Borlov would never have to endure the tasteless repast, and Hawthorne would never have to explain is sullen mood.

Lee hastened her exit from the galley as quick as possible, not wishing to relive the brief moments she'd had with the deceased.

It was impossible of course. Memories like ghosts lurked in every corner. Although the Excelsior was a large ship, its actual living spaces were confined. No matter where she turned a reminder of the two lost men was evident. The crew quarter in which she had nursed Johnson and Hawthorne came next. Hawthorne, who had obviously been a solitary person much like herself, had divulged his ill-fated family history and much of himself as he lay dying in that room. Lee had told him she would reciprocate. She had never had the chance and though it pained her to think so, she secretly was relieved not to have to live up to that deal. While Hawthorne's lineage was full of innovators and explorers, her own familial line had a much darker past. One she tried to atone for every day of her life.

She had to make Johnson understand. Had to explain her unwavering conviction to cherish all life no matter how repulsive or hostile. Inwardly a part of her seethed at Johnson's accusation that she was heartless. Janice Lee felt more deeply than the kid would ever know, and for more than the lives of two men. She felt not only for the 'creepy critters' of the galaxy, but for humanity as well. That was why she couldn't let Bradley Johnson make the same mistake her people had so very long ago.

Lee stumbled past the crew quarter and into the community head. On waking from cryosleep Borlov and Johnson had been chivalrous enough to allow her to wash and take care of necessities while they remained in their sleepers covered head to toe in sticky, foul smelling preservative gel. It was a courtesy seldom followed on space faring vessels, time and space often being minimal. In fact, Johnson had been opposed to the delay in readying for the safari, but Borlov had talked him into it. The kid had acquiesced, saying, "yonder commode is all yours, milady." That had been the first-time Johnson used the archaic nomenclature to address Lee and her first introduction to his quirky personality. Borlov she had never gotten to know at all.

The man who had saved their lives had seemingly been as quiet as Hawthorne and less forthcoming. And yet, he had confided personal information to Bradley Johnson. 'His whole family went into cryo just so they would be the same age when he returned,' Johnson had said. What kind of man inspired such devotion? she wondered. Surely one that returned love in equal measure as he received it. There was no one waiting for her return. And the lifeforms she managed to save on her crusade would never voice their appreciation. Suddenly despondent, Lee hurried her steps until she was in the cryochamber.

Lids were lifted on four of the six coffin shaped sleepers set in a semi- circle in the back of the room. Even in standby mode a chill radiated from the cryogenic capsules, permeating the entire room. In between the sleepers a stand held the operations computer. Lee went immediately to the console, intent on focusing on a complex problem to take her mind off the emotions building in her.

The operation of the cryochamber sleepers was absurdly simple. A program determined the dosage of anesthetic to induce before insertion of cryogenic fluids. Because universal freezing would result in crystallization of key organs, the computer also guided the nano-catheters spreading throughout the sleeper's occupant to vitrify varying organs to appropriate temperatures. For the user, sleeper operation was as easy as setting an alarm clock.

Still, remembering Johnson's assertion that instruments were prone to fibbing, Lee physically checked to see if there was adequate cryogenic fluid and that the nanites were still viable. It took her less than a minute to discover that there was more than enough cryofluid and the nanites lay inactive in canisters beside each sleeper unit. Of course, there was, she admonished herself. Hawthorne had expected to bring his clients home safely after all. Lee had wanted a challenge on entering the cryochamber and found she would hardly have to do much more than press a few buttons to prepare them for the ten-year journey home.

Sitting on the edge of a sleeper, Lee allowed the full brunt of her weariness to fall upon her. Without even realizing what she was doing she lifted her legs above the rim of the capsule and climbed in. The preservative gel that protected skin while the occupant lay hibernating on deep space flight was absent, having been recycled for the return flight. But its foul petroleum smell lingered. The cushioning of the bed was form fitting, designed to lull the occupant into deep sleep prior to the freezing process. Lee curled up on the comfortable mattress and was dead asleep before she knew it.

She dreamed. This time not of a place she had never known, but of a wasteland she was all too familiar with. Home.

She is standing in the center of a deserted city. Everywhere she looks there are buildings of stone, steel, and glass. Monuments to humanities architectural mastery. Some of the world's tallest skyscrapers stab the heavens here, some of the world's most beautifully designed buildings once mimicked the harmony of nature here. No more though. Here nature has been erased.

Silhouettes of creatures, not all of which are strictly human in shape, are flash burned into walls and streets like a mosaic of macabre graffiti. They are the only evidence that anything living ever existed. Not a blade of grass stirs, no bacteria lie safely hidden in the cracks and crannies of the city's stone. The city is sterile. Beyond the ghost city the asepsis continues. No forest, lake, or mountain has been spared. Down to the smallest and hardiest microbe, life has vanished. Now you see me, now you don't.

A song comes to the dreaming Janice Lee's mind - Dust in the wind. That is what every living thing has become. From Cambodia to Kazakhstan, from Istanbul to the shores of Japan, everything is dust in the wind.

A breeze blows, stirring layers of detritus down hallowed streets. The dust swirls around her feet. It curli curls in the air with the vitality of something alive. But Lee is not fooled. It is death. It is the remains of a people who had once laughed, loved, and made plans for the future, believing tomorrow was just another day away. There is no future here now. This is a place in stasis. With every breath Lee inhales some of those extinguished lives. They fill her lungs, lay there to rot and ruin, anchoring her to this devastated place and time. They course through her veins in the form of guilt.

Except for the mournful howl of the wind and the dreamer's harried breath, the city is utterly, eerily silent. The dreaming Janice Lee is frozen, anxious for the end which she knows is coming to shine down upon her. Extinction in the form of sixty high yield missiles race to toward the already devastated city. The intolerant and fearful pure humans are taking no chances. They cringe in their massive cities beneath the ground, praying their attack on the surface dwelling monsters will be successful.

It is the Purge. There is nowhere to run, no place to hide. This doom is as inexorable as the rising sun, and just as bright. Only the world's end is a blinding blue luminosity. There is no explosion in the dream. It just is. The grey city is painted azure and its sole occupant consumed. The end has come home as well. Come home to claim it's progenitor, come to embrace its mother. Now there is a sound. Not so much an explosion, but something more akin to the finality of a coffin's lid slamming shut.

Lee awoke with a start. She lay in darkness and complete silence. For a frightful moment, it seemed the dream had followed her into wakefulness and she was indeed entombed. Then she remembered crawling into the sleeper. Must have knocked the lid closed while I was sleeping, she thought. With groggy effort, she pushed the plasteel cover up and over. Still exhausted, with no idea of how long she had slept, Lee nonetheless had no intention of resting again. One nightmare a day was enough, thank you.

However long her repast had been, she concluded that it had been long enough for her to confront Johnson. Her nightmare had awakened her conviction and it was time Bradley Johnson knew the truth. Janice Lee, which was not her real name, rose to tell the last remaining survivor of the Plethora Minor safari her own story.

Johnson was sprawled across the console, snoring loudly. Lee noticed that he was sweating profusely, his matted hair plastered over his eyes and falling on the keyboard on which his head rested. Tentatively she brushed his hair aside and felt his forehead with the back of her hand. The kid was burning up. Before she could pull her hand away, Johnson startled her, saying "What's up Doc?"

Lee couldn't be sure whether it was exhaustion or illness that afflicted Johnson. Although he tried to affect his normally affable nature it was obvious that he did so with great effort.

"How Are you feeling?"

"Better than I look," he said, the same rictus grin that Hawthorne had worn before his demise stretched across the kid's lips.

"I've got good news, " Johnson said. He pushed himself from the console like an old man afflicted by debilitating arthritis.

"That sly fox Carl didn't fly blindfolded. It seems the precols set up a satellite trail through the gap. Its telemetry would have been encrypted, but Hawthorne apparently broke the code. We're not going to have any problem getting home. That is if you solved our sleeper dilemma."

Johnson breathed a sigh of relief and answered, "Hawthorne might have been foot loose with his client's lives, but he took no chances with his ship. The sleepers are automated as well."

Johnson collapsed back into the captain's chair. "Great. I don't think I could stand another freeze-dried pork patty. I'd rather starve first."

"I'd think we'd perish of thirst long before we starved," Lee observed.

"I was being rhetorical. You really have to work on your sense of humor."

Noticing a change in Lee's expression, Johnson said, "Sit down, Doc. It looks like you have something to get off your chest."

"I do," Lee said taking the copilot seat. She pivoted the chair so that she faced the kid.

"You wanted to hear my story. I think I'm ready to tell it. It may explain why I'm so eager to save Plethora Minor."

"Okay Professor," Johnson said. "Shoot. We have a bit of time to waste before we lie down for the big chill. Tell me, why do you want to save that hell hole so badly?"

Lee took a deep breath. She'd determined to have this conversation, but never how to begin it. How best to approach the flamboyant Bradley Johnson and have his full attention. After nearly a minute had passed without her speaking, Johnson asked, "Cat got your tongue?"

Always with the archaic references and phrases, Lee thought. How was it that one so young knew so much trivia from centuries well before the advent of interstellar flight?

"Cat got your tongue? That is a phrase from the twenty first century. How is it that you know it?"

A blush that colored his flushed cheeks momentarily a healthy pink filled the kid's face. With apparent fondness Johnson began, "I majored in history at Hopkins college on Eden Prime. Minored in entertainment. You should have seen my father's face when he learned I'd dropped engineering to pursue those curriculums. He cursed the day he introduced me to Spielberg vids." There was bitterness in Johnson's voice toward the end of this admission.

"Spielberg. The movie director?" Lee said.

"You know Spielberg? He was a distant relative and many of his original works were passed down the family lines through the centuries." Lee raised one eye brow and stared quizzically at Lee as he came to a sudden realization. "Say, how is it you know Spielberg also? Come to think of it, how is it you know about all the movies I talk about. Were you a history buff before you copped out to study alien feces?"

A sad smile crossed Lee's lips. "Their called coprolites. And to answer your question, no. I did not major in history. My first doctrine was in genetics and I graduated from Oxford University."

"Oxford? The only Oxford University I know of was on Old Earth."

"That's right," Lee said.

"But that is impossible. That place was defunct well before the expansion era.

"It was," Lee said, letting the kid come to his own conclusion. Johnson shook his head in denial.

"For that to be true you would have to be over a thousand years old. You'd have to be one of the First."

"I was born in Beijing the year 2407," Lee began. "I wasn't one of the First. That term is a misnomer historians use when they're uncertain of a significant person's departure from OE. There were colonial ships taking off from Earth well before I did. You just won't find those departures listed in the texts. It was a hectic time and no one wanted to be reminded of our failures. The Ludwig Arks for instance. It was a privately funded program that began with disaster. Terrorist stormed the gates of the space port before the two Arks could take off. They made it up, but were never heard from again. Since Ludwig never disclosed his ultimate destination, no one can be sure whether they made it or not. No, I was not one of the first. I was just one of those lucky enough to escape Old Earth before things really got bad."

Incredulous, Johnson had to ask, "How many sleep years have you made?"

"Don't you know its rude to ask a lady her age?" Lee said, feigning a lightness she did not feel.

Johnson did not respond with his habitual coyness. His haggard face displayed sick wonder and dread of the expectant answer. The kid was not stupid, despite his affectations to the contrary. The only people who accumulated as many sleep years as she had been either leap-frogging toward an envisioned goal in the distant future, or running away from a troubled past. Lee felt her reason for subjecting herself to centuries of cryogenic hibernation had to do with a little bit of both.

"I've been wakened six times from cryo since departing OE. Six times in nearly six hundred years. I never thought to count exactly how long those slumbers were."

"Why?" Johnson said.

"You only know OE from texts and holos. No record or simulation can truly describe how horrible things had become on Earth.

Much off the ozone layer had dissipated. The ice caps melted to nubs creating islands where before there had been continents. Whole coastal habitats were drowned in a matter of decades. The long mythicized Greenhouse effect plunged the Earth into an age of apocalyptic change. As if mother nature weren't enough, humanity had just about used every natural resource available. Inevitably men began to fight for what remained. They will tell you World War Three was fought because of the religious and cultural differences between the East and the West. The truth is that the war that killed more than thirty percent of Earth's population was started for oil and gas. Western civilization had been bred on the tit of petroleum and could not let go."

"Blah, blah, blah," Johnson said. "Anyone with half a brain knows this. Your generation fucked up the environment and nearly placed homo sapiens on the extinction list. What has all this to do with the fact that I'm talking with someone who is arguably the oldest person in the universe? And if that's not enough, why this ancient, albeit hot person, wants to save monster isle from the clutches of dread humanity."

Lee sighed. She should have known the kid would be impatient to hear how her tale affected him. Still, she knew that to properly state her dilemma she would have to make him see how dire the age she had been born to was. She continued her description of the Hell the earth had become despite the disappointed scowl on Johnson's face.

"The very air we breathed was tainted by mankind's hubris. Disease was rampant and more countries were in anarchy than were governed. Even the most analytical atheists among us wondered whether the biblical apocalypse was at hand. It wasn't a hard impression to come by. Ninety percent of life on Earth was extinct. I grew up reading books about animals that might as well have been creatures out of myth. The big cats, whales, the raptors. All were gone by the time I was ten. As a little girl, I dreamed of the time when all the extinct lifeforms, large and small, majestic and maligned, roamed the Earth freely once more. It wasn't until my later teenage years when I learned of the field of genetics that I realized that it could be possible to bring my dreams alive.

By the time I went to college there had already been numerous breakthroughs in genetic engineering. Cloning, especially of livestock, was common practice. Genetically modified crops were the norm as well. Had to be to survive the toxic soup of an atmosphere and soil centuries of neglect had brewed. It was the success of those modified plants that got me thinking. What if every life form on Earth could be engineered to endure the existing conditions of Earth? The planet was beyond fixing. The relatively quick terraforming processes we use today had yet to be dreamt of and wouldn't be invented for several hundred years. As I saw it, for humanity and the remaining species of Earth to survive, we would have to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of the planet in a fashion much faster than evolution intended."

Johnson leaned forward in his chair to scrutinize Janice Lee's face. His blood shot eyes studied her intently, as though if he looked hard enough he could see the demon lurking behind her fleshy facade. "Shiva. You're talking about Shiva," he said. It was an accusation, not a question.

Lee shrank back from his fevered gaze, turning her head aside, unable to withstand the contempt she imagined radiating from him. If their tenuous friendship were to dissolve, now would be the moment. She could not bear to see Bradley Johnson's damning stare. "Yes, I was one of the scientists responsible for Shiva. My birth name was Ada."

"Wong." Johnson finished for her. The tone of his voice expressed more astonishment than horror. Lee regarded him hesitantly. There was no doubt. Johnson leaned back in his chair with a look that might have been hero worship. She was stunned speechless by his reaction to her revelation.

"Ada Wong the Witch, Mother of Monsters, " he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

"You know who I am, what I did? And you're not... repulsed?" Lee stammered.

"Wong, " Johnson began, but was swiftly interrupted by the living legend across from him.

"The name is Janice Lee. The Witch died long ago," Lee said.

Johnson held his hands up in supplication. "Okay, Lee it is. As I was saying, in all the centuries you've been hop-scotching through time you never read a history book or watched video about yourself?"

"Not often. The first time I learned about the long-term effects of Shiva was when I arrived at New Haven. That was after my first cryosleep. There was an intergalactic manhunt for me at the time. I was wanted for crimes against humanity." A thousand years had not erased the anger and despair that proclamation arose in her. Tears welling in her eyes, hands clenched in turmoil, Lee struggled to continue. "The way they portrayed Shiva it was as if it were weapon and not the cure it was meant to be. Everyone knew that Shiva had been my countries, perhaps the entire Earth's last hope."

Unfazed, or indifferent to her rising emotions, Johnson said, "You have to admit that a virus that fundamentally changes its host into a completely different organism might be mistaken for a weapon. "

"It took nearly a hundred years for outward effects of Shiva to become prevalent. Up until then those life forms affected adapted to the environment without physiological mutation. What happened is that the environment finally collapsed so drastically that nothing so called normal could survive. Shiva merely compensated with equally drastic measures. While the rest of the world was forced to live underground in artificial habitats, the Shiva infected lived topside without the need of respirators or radiation shielding."

"With gills and stone for flesh," Johnson noted.

Lee had seen countless photos of Shiva altered humans and knew those were the least of the mutations. Shiva was a harsh mistress. Like the God from which it derived its name, the virus was both a destroyer and creator. It molded for functionality, not ascetics. Some of the things it created made the beasts of Plethora Minor look angelic in comparison. Collectively called the Shivan, those life forms adapted by Shiva became the dominant species above ground level. Of course, humans were not the only life forms affected by the DNA enhancing virus. In fact, many flora and fauna began to display the lengths to which Shiva would go to preserve it's host long before they became evident in mankind. Lee supposed this was because humanity was one of the key stressors in those species lives.

A few decades after the seeding of Shiva, plants and animals that had forever been the staple of human survival began exhibiting defensive and offensive traits. Properties with which to thwart predation. Rice, the main dietary supplement of Asians for countless centuries, became inedible. It's first move was to produce a mild sedative. When reports of mass lethargy began pouring in from all corners of the Asian Alliance, researchers at first believed a new epidemic resistant to Shiva had arose. Before panic could breed, one observant scientist noted that the periods of sleep occur immediately after meals. The government merely advised people to continue eating rice until Shiva combated the new strain. Which it did in a matter of weeks. It took another five years for the plant to devise a new strategy. The second change might very well have eliminated Asiatic people a hundred years before the purge of all Shivans a century later. This second strain was poisonous and seemed to appear overnight. It was as if the morphed flora knew that to spring its trap incrementally would only give humanity time to counteract its efficiency. It should have become obvious that Shiva was a disease that wanted its host to live. More than a million-people died before the root cause of death was detected.

Had Lee been on Earth to witness the advanced evolutionary chess game being played between the Shiva infected species, perhaps she could have envisioned its ultimate end and done something to prevent it. But she had been in cryosleep aboard the colonial starship Darwin, dreaming of her new home while her old one rushed to certain destruction. She often wondered whether the sentient among the Shivans, not all of them originally of human stock, welcomed the blinding blue luminance of neutron bombs that erased them from the face of the Earth during the Purge.

"It wasn't as if I was there when Shiva's side effect reared its horrendous head." Lee retorted. "I was only half way through my journey to New Haven, a hundred light years from OE, when the message concerning the fate of the Asian Alliance and every living creature with in that country's borders, raced ahead of my colonial shuttle to the human occupied planets.

"New Haven was still a pioneer planet back then. Provincial governments ruled the shanty towns dotting the new world, but little else. Security wasn't their uppermost concern. Back then colonists were more concerned with the raising of crops than they would have been about the defection of a proposed terrorist. Taming the planet's environment was their top priority. In fact, I had been hired by Nasa Inc to do just that. It's why I left Earth in the first place.

"The day my shuttle landed on New Haven, record breaking electrical storms were playing havoc with their computer systems. Communication included. Apparently, no one had told the air traffic controllers to be alert for an Asian female wanted genocide. I slipped under New Haven's radar rather easily. I didn't even know I was a hunted person until I saw a holo projection of my face and the consequences of Shiva portrayed on a historical program at one of New Haven's terminal bars. When I saw what we, I had done, what the horrible results my theorems had given birth to I panicked. I ran. I ran and never looked back."

"So you were a fugitive. I get that. How did you come by your new persona? I mean, don't get me wrong Doc, but you're not the kind of person I envision commingled with the underbelly of the galaxy. "

Lee could see she had the kid's full attention now. Despite his obvious fatigue Bradley Johnson was absorbed by her tale. Now if only she could make him see the wisdom of sparing PM.

"Let's just say that Carl wasn't the first smuggler I've known. You'd be surprised who you'll associate with when your life is on the line. All of that is beside the point. I'm curious as to why you're not more repulsed at the revelation of who I really am."

"Quid pro quo, Clarise. If you had stuck with the hard science instead of taking up the crusade for every down and out amoeba in the galaxy, you would have learned that there have been improvements to Shiva. How else do you suppose someone like my father lives for hundreds of years?"

"I always thought that people of wealth used cryo-sleepers to keep an eye on their assets. But cryosleep is no cure for mortality. Each time someone sleeps there is minor crystallization damage to tissue despite the use of Nano catheters. Accumulated use only magnifies that damage. You're telling me someone has altered Shiva into a fountain of youth," Lee said, her lower jaw agape in disbelief.

"Yes. It kind of sucks to be an heir to an immortal. Don't ask me how it works though. That secret is above my considerable allowance.

Lee furrowed her brow in concentration during the minute of silence that came after Johnson's explanation. It didn't take her long to formulate a theory.

"I believe I just might know." Lee said, her excitement about the positive use of her tailored virus evident. "Shiva works by undifferentiating cells, much like stem cells in the human body. Once undifferentiated, those cells begin to change in response to whatever adverse environment the host is enduring. I'm guessing someone figured out how to target specific chromosome structures. If Shiva could do that then it could stop the loss of telomeres, the chromosomal caps that regulate cell degradation. That would prevent the aging effect that telomere loss normally represents. When we created Shiva, we could never get it to be that specific. While computer simulations speculated that the morphological virus might extend lives, no one dared to believe it could make its host immune to death. When we released Shiva, it treated any cellular change adverse to maintaining life. We never imagined the infected could be changed into completely different species."

"Kind of a big miscalculation on your part. Didn't you guys conduct trials before sprinkling your magical pixie dust all over Asia?"

Lee remembered the day that Shiva had been deployed. She recalled standing in front of the window of her office in the Chinese World Trade Center lll in Beijing, observing flights of enormous bombers flying wing tip to wing tip over the nations of the Asian Alliance. At any other period, the sight of enormous jets dispersing clouds of purple colored mist would have been cause for panic. On that day, however, people had run from their homes, eager to inhale the agent of their salvation.

They tore off the respirators they'd been forced to wear for decades and breathed deeply of the virus laden fog. Children danced beneath the descending purple haze, believing the Earth would once again be their playground. Had they known the horror that would be visited upon their descendants they would not have been so jubilant. Lee often wondered whether her people would have embraced the chance her experiment offered even had they known its possible outcome.

'Hope is a drug every bit as addictive as any narcotic,' Lee thought. Shiva was a last-ditch effort to fulfill that most desperate of human needs. She remembered the day her dream had saturated the skies of the Asian Alliance. She remembered hope blossoming in her chest like the first sign of spring after a merciless winter. She remembered opening a window to inhale the gift she had bequeathed to humanity and all the beleaguered species of Earth.

"There wasn't time. Even with their self-imposed isolation, the countries of the Asian Alliance were still affected by the same climatic changes and diseases that plagued the rest of the world. Laboratory trials were held for over a decade before the decision to use Shiva was made. We simply never foresaw how drastic things would become or the lengths to which Shiva would go to adapt its hosts."

"Well you'll not get an argument from me on that account. You guys really did screw the pooch," Johnson said, displaying one of his insufferable cocky grins. Even though his smirk was less boisterous than normal, Lee felt her temper rising. She knew the kid was baiting her as he had so openly done with Hawthorne, but it irked her nonetheless. Couldn't Johnson see how hard it was for her to disclose this private portion of her life, or how important the discussion of Plethora Minor's future was to her. And he had called her cold hearted. Lee took hold of her emotions before continuing.

"They called me the Mother of Monsters. An apt name I suppose. Some of the things Shiva created were abominations. But there were miracles amidst the monstrosities as well. While the Shiva infected were no longer strictly human, they had been creatures perfectly fitted to their environments. Men have forever sought to mimic the properties of another species. Why else construct machines that soar the open skies or dive to the greatest depths of the sea?

Shiva eliminated the necessity of artificial constructs. Want to climb the highest peaks of the Himalaya? Shiva would increase oxygen intake and hair growth over a matter of nights. Acclimation that generations of Sherpa never truly achieved. Make your living out at sea? Ingest saltwater until Shiva could dilute it and eventually derive not only sustenance, but utilize oxygen molecules in the water for breath. People did grow gills, and if they swam long enough in the ocean, fins as well. Shiva transcended evolution. It endowed mankind with the transformative power of God."

Lee saw the unease this statement caused Johnson. As far as she knew the kid didn't have a pious bone in his body. Still he persisted in refuting any argument she might have had.

"Does someone here have a god complex?"

When Lee did not refute his accusation, he tried a new tactic.

"So what? Shiva made Yeti and people from the Black Lagoon. Call a spade a spade. They were monsters. Pure and simple."

"You're the entertainment historian. What characteristics did the writers, film makers and scientists of the later twenty first century imagine the evolved homo sapiens would have?"

Johnson chuckled, apparently remembering one of the B rated movies of which Lee was referring. "If you mean the big headed brainiacs of the black and white era, then I do. Now there were some horrible vids. What of it."

"The point is that those predictions always assumed that we would lose our capacity for emotions in lieu of vastly superior intellects."

"They were B rated movies," Johnson shrugged.

"Yes they were. But in real life none of that occurred. Pure humans look just like they did ten centuries ago, and the hyper evolved Shivans never exhibited any of those traits. It turned out that emotion was a greater attribute than intellect. The Asian Alliance had just as many missiles at their disposal as the countries that contributed to the Purge. But the Shivans never retaliated."

"Kind of hard to press a button with flippers," Johnson quipped.

Ignoring the jibe Lee said, "There were Shivans just as cognitive and ambulatory as any pure human. Although the Shivans were superior to their homo sapiens ancestors, they empathized with their executioners and chose not to annihilate them."

"How do you know this."

"There were records, recovered after the radiation died enough for exploration. "

Johnson seemed to shrink further into the captain's chair. His initial vigor waning. He waved a dismissive hand and said, "So what has this history lesson got to do with our current situation?"

Lee puffed her cheeks out in a sigh of exasperation. She had hoped the kid would come to his own conclusion, but it looked as though she would have to spell it out. "Potential, Bradley, potential. PM's life forms have apparently undergone equally phenomenal, if not swift, evolutionary changes as the Shivans. If the Shivans had been allowed to flourish would they have developed apex creatures like those of Plethora Minor? On the other hand, if Plethora Minor is allowed to flourish, what magnificent sentience will evolve?"

Johnson was suddenly animate, surging forward in his seat. "That is something I hope never to meet. The things down there are no cuddly teddy bears. Their all teeth and claws. If you think anything remotely benign can come from those demons then your more delusional than I thought."

Agitated, Lee said, "Once and for all, they're animals, not demons!"

"Really, Doc? I was going to spare you this, but it looks as if you're not going to give me any choice." Johnson swiveled his chair so that he faced the command console. Clammy hands found a switch.

"What is it, Bradley?" Lee asked, wondering what new calamity had befallen them.

"I don't know if Hawthorne chose to cease listening to the whole precol message, or did and decided it was no big deal. I might be able to forgive naivety. It's not exactly easy listening. But if he tuned into the entire thing and still thought it wise not to inform us of the ship storm we were heading toward. Well then, I take back every nice thing I might have said about the man. Anyway, I found the recording and cleaned it up a bit. Say hello to your pretty pink ponies."

Johnson flipped the switch. The crackle of a subspace radio signal filled the cockpit. The tempo raised and fell, slowly becoming less distorted.