Daryl Gregory - The Devil's Alphabet

“You smashed in my window,” the man said. He was a little younger than Pax, with a head shaped like a candy corn: a brush of bleached hair, a broad forehead, and cheekbones that narrowed to an elfin chin, a dark soul patch under his lower lip like the dot in an exclamation mark. Something about the hair and the deliberate counter-culture look said that he came from money.

“Next time you’ll stop,” Deke said. “Now, empty your pockets.”

“I didn’t steal anything!” he said. “I’m a journalist.”

“Really,” Pax said. He swung the camera on its nylon lanyard. “For who?”

The man didn’t answer. Deke grabbed him by the front of the shirt. Pax said, “I think you should answer our questions.”

“Fuck you,” the man said.

Deke grabbed him by his face, his fist completely engulfing his head, and the man screamed into it. Deke’s face was rigid with anger. His white arm trembled, as if he were on the verge of cracking his skull like an egg.

“Deke! Shit, Deke!”

Deke held the man for several seconds. Then the trembling stopped, and Deke released him. He felt to the floor, gasping.

“Your pockets,” Deke said.

According to his driver’s license he was Andrew Weygand, twenty-three years old, from Wheeling, West Virginia, and an organ donor. He said he ran a website called TheOpenSwitch.com. “TOS does investigative articles, opinion pieces-”

“Jesus, he’s a blogger,” Pax said. “Arrest him, Deke.”

“You’re a cop?” the man said. Pax couldn’t tell if he was alarmed or relieved.

“He’s the fucking Chief,” Pax said. Deke sighed.

The man said, “I didn’t even break in, you know. The back door was open.”

“Right.”

Weygand said he was looking for someone called Brother Bewlay. Pax glanced at Deke-he couldn’t tell if Deke recognized the name.

“It’s the screen name for a guy who posted to the blog a lot,” Weygand said. “TOS is supposed to be just about the Switchcreek Event, but it gets pretty tangential-government conspiracies, fringe science, political activism, you name it-all the usual nut-job issues, right? I let anyone comment as long as they don’t get abusive. Brother Bewlay, though, was one of the serious posters. He knew his facts. Personally, I suspected pretty early that he was from Switchcreek. He never said so, probably because no one would believe him. Anybody can say they went through the Changes, right? But Bewlay-sometimes he said stuff that seemed so insightful and weird that it had to be true.” Pax looked up questioningly, and Weygand said, “Like how betas weren’t really male or female, they were a new, third sex. He won a lot of converts. Of course, some people thought he was a total bullshitter, and there were plenty of flame wars, but-hey, careful with that?”

Pax looked up from the camera screen. He’d sat on one of the wooden chairs and started clicking backward through the recent shots in the machine’s memory. The first thirty pictures were of the inside of the house, five or six per room, as if Weygand was going to make a virtual tour of the place.

“Never mind the camera,” Deke said.

“Is he okay?” Weygand asked. “He looks like he’s going to pass out.”

“I’ve had a tough week,” Pax said.

“Get to Switchcreek,” Deke said to the man. “What you’re doing here.”

Weygand took a breath, his eyes still on the camera in Paxton’s hands. “About a week and a half ago Bewlay went offline, no explanation. It’s usually not a big deal, right? And we were all so busy talking about the suicide in Switchcreek that nobody noticed for a while. I finally emailed him-we’d had a lot of personal conversations outside the blog-and when I didn’t get an answer after a few days I thought, oh shit. Now I never do this-I believe in privacy, right? But I pulled the server logs and did a lookup on his address. The IP was definitely coming from the Lambert area. I decided I had to find out if he-if she was him.”

“How would you know?” Deke asked. “If Bewlay didn’t tell you anything about himself-”

“Her computer,” Weygand said. “If some of Bewlay’s files are on there, then that’s that, right? But even if I couldn’t get onto the computer, I thought maybe there’d be something in the house that he mentioned in one of his messages. Like-okay, look at this book I found.”

Weygand popped up and went to the bookshelf. “This Richard Dawkins’ book, The Ancestor’s Tale? Bewlay quoted from it, more than once.”

Pax took the book from his hand. It was a thick, beige paperback with a heavily creased spine. The book flopped open in his hand to a chapter headed “The Gibbon’s Tale.” Under a complicated diagram Jo or someone had written in the margins, “Missing branches-clade tree unrooted?”

“Anybody could have read this,” Pax said, though he’d never heard of the book. The others on the shelf were heavy on medicine-a Physicians’ Desk Reference, The Handbook for Genetic Diseases and Disorders, Modern Obstetrics -but there were an equal number of books on physics, quantum mechanics, and evolution. The Dawkins guy had his own shelf.

Weygand reached for another book. “Okay, look! This physics book by David Deutsch? Bewlay talked about it and I went out and read it myself. Bewlay was the first person on the boards to find scientists who were applying quantum computation and quantum evolution theories to explain the Changes. He even started posting articles from the physics journals.”

Weygand looked from Pax to Deke, excited now. “See, Bewlay’s big thing was that the Switchcreek clades weren’t diseased , they weren’t damaged humans-they were alternate humans, with genetic information ported in from a parallel universe. Quantum teleportation, man.”

Deke stared at him. “What ?”

“Look, it’s not that crazy. Do you guys know about the intron mutation counts?”

Deke looked at Pax. “Paxton, what was I just saying about that in the car?”

“I think you said they were undersold and overhyped. Or the other way around.”

Weygand’s smile was half-lit-he couldn’t tell if they were playing with him. “Okay, everybody knows that TDS screwed with the DNA of people who caught the disease, but nobody suspected that the number of changes would increase with second-generation children, the ones born with TDS. Introns are these parts of the DNA that change faster than other parts.”

Deke said, “What does this have to do with the children?”

“Okay, with second-generation children there’s, like, a huge difference in the introns-it’s like the kids descended from a completely different species than their parents.”

Pax looked at Deke. Deke shrugged. “So TDS scrambles the introns too.”

Weygand only seemed exasperated by their ignorance. “Not scrambled - different . People with the same type of TDS show the same changes. Betas have intron sequences like other betas, argos look like argos. And betas are as different from argos and charlies as they are from normal-uh, people who don’t have TDS. You see what this means?”

They didn’t see.

Weygand said, “Look, imagine if evolution took a completely different course millions of years ago. Let’s say our ancestors died out, and instead some slightly different cousins took over. Neanderthals, say. If today those cousins dug us up and sucked some of the marrow out of our bones and looked at the DNA, these are the differences they’d expect to find, right? It’s like betas and argos and charlies are visitors from another world, a parallel universe-you’re what humans would have turned into if our ancestors had taken a few left turns two million years ago.”