ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2007
- Posts
- 16,135
Jamie
Jamie nodded slowly, tolerantly, as Dale recited his theory. "Yeah, no, that's a good start. Bit off-base, but you're thinking; I like that."
"I am not gonna stay a rabbit!" Gar became very agitated as he began to understand what Dale was thinking. "Of all the things... I could have been a tiger, a hawk, a bear but I will not be a rabbit!!!"
As Gar yelled each animal he shifted quickly into it. His body shifting in the blink of an eye, until finally... angry and exhausted, he was a rabbit again.
...and as this happened, Jamie's eyes lit up like darksome lanterns, and his grin became wide enough almost to split his face. "Don't you see? You see? You don't see. Oh, that's beautiful."
McNichol strolled in, and Dale warned Merick to conceal the skinwalker: "Son, put the bunny in the box."
"Can you still put the bunny back in the box," Jamie philosophised, "if the cat's already out of the bag?"
...evidently, this question was rhetorical, because Jamie didn't wait for a response before turning to face McNichol and grinning like he'd just run into his oldest friend: "Edgar! That was quick! Record time. Bit of an April Fool's joke, few months late, hilarious! ...don't you think so?"
Again he waited only a beat, and then his face immediately switched to a dour expression: "Oh, who are we kidding, since when have I ever cared what you think? Stay tuned, though, eh? You might learn something from us Daikinis."
In a blur of motion, hardly superhumanly fast but still packed with energy for such a slender frame, the scientist ran across the room to a bare patch of wall next to the computer desk, yanking a permanent Sharpie marker out of a cup of writing utensils next to one of the monitors. He then whirled to face the rest of the room, back to the wall, face awash with excitement as he popped the cap off of the marker.
"Now then," he began, "Dale-me-Lad-- count the letters forward and back, that's a palindrome --mutations happen all the time in nature, some say that's how evolution progresses, Hopeful Monsters and Punctuated Equilibrium and all that song and dance. But they are, by very nature, random, nonspecific, and are extremely often detrimental. The idea that our boy there would mutate into an actual biological species rather than some alternate human form sort of stretches the boundaries of what mutations can and can't do. Not only that, but, wahey, he's continuing to mutate, right before our very eyes, and he's changing again not into alternate human forms but into very very specific animal species. Not possible. The likelihood of DNA self-recombining into a viable form once, let alone multiple times, without killing its life-form dead, that's not just off the charts it's beyond the capacity of our numerical systems of quantification."
He turned to face the wall, and, ignoring whatever protests McNichol might voice against this vandalism, he began to draw. Big round circle. And as he drew, he spoke.
"Viruses," Jamie continued, good head of steam going, "meanwhile, mutant viruses, that's a good notion, they do tend to manipulate and adapt their hosts so that their chances of survival are better, but again, again, viruses are by very nature microscopic and this one would have to be manipulating our Dear Little Friend on a macroscopic scale. Does the virus have some sort of collective consciousness, some sort of viral hive mind? It would have to have that, otherwise each part of our Dear Little Friend would be adapting separately and oh, that wouldn't be pretty, wouldn't be a nice quick smooth metamorphosis like that, no sir. Never heard of a virus with a hive mind before, but I'm not going to dismiss the notion out of hand."
He kept drawing, kept scribbling, approximating countries and continents, evidently he was drawing a globe, a map of the world...
"Radiation," he prattled on, "now that's something. But radiation on the scale involved to create instant mutation like this, well, that'd sleet our DLF with sufficient rads that he'd just sort of crumble like a palimpsest after about five minutes, he wouldn't live through that. Plus, again, still mutating, even after the conditions that created the mutation have been subtracted. You'd have to continue irradiating him if you wanted him to continue mutating, but here he is, blipping from species to species all by his onesies."
Again he whirled to face the people in the bunker, tapping his forehead with the edge of the marker, indicating that he was thinking he'd been thinking they should think right along with him: "All of these are powerful catalysts. Deoxyribonucleic acid's occasional tendency to randomly and spontaneously mutate, viruses' effect on their environment, radioactivity, all of these could start something like this, but none of them could effectively keep it going. Unless? Unless... oh... unless the aforementioned radioactivity is meteor rock radioactivity, which is unlike any other kind of radiation on the planet, and unless the virus involved was particularly aggressive and virulent, and unless that DNA contained one of those ever-so-elusive metagenes... this is all very very astronomically unlikely, of course. Infinite improbability. But then again?"
Jamie grinned, and murmured: "'By your powers combined...'"
He then whirled to face his ad hoc drawing of The Earth, and drew another great circle around it, another layer...
"Let's say you had a boy who could change into animals," he suggested, "just a faerie tale fable, eh? But unlike your average werewolf, who only morphs into one species, or unlike a vampire or a skinwalker who can often partake of a library of creatures-- depending on the legend --this boy, this beastly boy, he can change into any animal he so names. How would his body know how to do this? How could he match his body to the patterns of creatures he may only ever have seen on Animal Planet, never encountering them directly? Lacking Durlan hypersenses-- oh, those loony Durlans --or Andalite DNA-sampling technology-- am I the only one here who read those books? --how could he craft a biologically viable facsimile of any lifeform?"
He drew an arrow, and then a collection of arrows, all of them pointing to this extra layer he'd drawn around the Earth.
"Morphogenetic fields," he murmured. "Not the, erm, developmental biology kind, but the kind postulated by Rupert Sheldrake. Morphic fields, energies that serve as a kind of... psychic databank, in which are stored all patterns of life that future evolutionary iterations may incorporate elements of the past to ensure their preparedness for anything. Essentially, the very potential of all life on the planet. The Earth is a living thing, and living things have minds, and minds have memory, and memory helps us predict..."
He spun to again grin his grin at the room's denizens, capping the marker and tossing it spinning away.
"...the meteor rock infected that big ghastly dog, which in turn infected the rabies he carried," he concluded, "the saliva-borne infection passed itself to our Dear Little Friend when the dog bit him, infusing him with the meteor energies and putting his genetic structure into a state of flux. And then another meteor crashed down and the power levels skyrocketed... thus fizzing and sparking, reduced to his best instincts, our Dear Little Friend struggled to save his fellow living things, but in so doing he entered into the panicky psychic fields of a big oul' variety of species, a whole spectrum of goggies and kittehs and all-sorts, and with all that psychic input he managed to attain a form of morphic resonance, vibrating in time with the morphic fields of all those animals and the planet itself, enabling him to pattern himself after... well... any species that's ever lived, really."
He beamed, and shoved his hands into his pockets, and waggled his eyebrows as he walked back over to Merick and Gar and them.
"All of that's probably bollocks, really, Rupert Sheldrake's theories really aren't accepted by mainstream science," he mused, still grinning, "probably bollocks. Forteana. I was just being extra extra Puckish just to get Edgar's diminutive goat."
He walked over closer to the rabbity Garfield, and he leaned down close to him and he murmured, ever-so-seriously: "All the same, though, just to be on the safe side? Try not to think of humpback whales, eh? Just don't... think about them. At least until we get aboveground. Personal favour?"
Jamie nodded slowly, tolerantly, as Dale recited his theory. "Yeah, no, that's a good start. Bit off-base, but you're thinking; I like that."
"I am not gonna stay a rabbit!" Gar became very agitated as he began to understand what Dale was thinking. "Of all the things... I could have been a tiger, a hawk, a bear but I will not be a rabbit!!!"
As Gar yelled each animal he shifted quickly into it. His body shifting in the blink of an eye, until finally... angry and exhausted, he was a rabbit again.
...and as this happened, Jamie's eyes lit up like darksome lanterns, and his grin became wide enough almost to split his face. "Don't you see? You see? You don't see. Oh, that's beautiful."
McNichol strolled in, and Dale warned Merick to conceal the skinwalker: "Son, put the bunny in the box."
"Can you still put the bunny back in the box," Jamie philosophised, "if the cat's already out of the bag?"
...evidently, this question was rhetorical, because Jamie didn't wait for a response before turning to face McNichol and grinning like he'd just run into his oldest friend: "Edgar! That was quick! Record time. Bit of an April Fool's joke, few months late, hilarious! ...don't you think so?"
Again he waited only a beat, and then his face immediately switched to a dour expression: "Oh, who are we kidding, since when have I ever cared what you think? Stay tuned, though, eh? You might learn something from us Daikinis."
In a blur of motion, hardly superhumanly fast but still packed with energy for such a slender frame, the scientist ran across the room to a bare patch of wall next to the computer desk, yanking a permanent Sharpie marker out of a cup of writing utensils next to one of the monitors. He then whirled to face the rest of the room, back to the wall, face awash with excitement as he popped the cap off of the marker.
"Now then," he began, "Dale-me-Lad-- count the letters forward and back, that's a palindrome --mutations happen all the time in nature, some say that's how evolution progresses, Hopeful Monsters and Punctuated Equilibrium and all that song and dance. But they are, by very nature, random, nonspecific, and are extremely often detrimental. The idea that our boy there would mutate into an actual biological species rather than some alternate human form sort of stretches the boundaries of what mutations can and can't do. Not only that, but, wahey, he's continuing to mutate, right before our very eyes, and he's changing again not into alternate human forms but into very very specific animal species. Not possible. The likelihood of DNA self-recombining into a viable form once, let alone multiple times, without killing its life-form dead, that's not just off the charts it's beyond the capacity of our numerical systems of quantification."
He turned to face the wall, and, ignoring whatever protests McNichol might voice against this vandalism, he began to draw. Big round circle. And as he drew, he spoke.
"Viruses," Jamie continued, good head of steam going, "meanwhile, mutant viruses, that's a good notion, they do tend to manipulate and adapt their hosts so that their chances of survival are better, but again, again, viruses are by very nature microscopic and this one would have to be manipulating our Dear Little Friend on a macroscopic scale. Does the virus have some sort of collective consciousness, some sort of viral hive mind? It would have to have that, otherwise each part of our Dear Little Friend would be adapting separately and oh, that wouldn't be pretty, wouldn't be a nice quick smooth metamorphosis like that, no sir. Never heard of a virus with a hive mind before, but I'm not going to dismiss the notion out of hand."
He kept drawing, kept scribbling, approximating countries and continents, evidently he was drawing a globe, a map of the world...
"Radiation," he prattled on, "now that's something. But radiation on the scale involved to create instant mutation like this, well, that'd sleet our DLF with sufficient rads that he'd just sort of crumble like a palimpsest after about five minutes, he wouldn't live through that. Plus, again, still mutating, even after the conditions that created the mutation have been subtracted. You'd have to continue irradiating him if you wanted him to continue mutating, but here he is, blipping from species to species all by his onesies."
Again he whirled to face the people in the bunker, tapping his forehead with the edge of the marker, indicating that he was thinking he'd been thinking they should think right along with him: "All of these are powerful catalysts. Deoxyribonucleic acid's occasional tendency to randomly and spontaneously mutate, viruses' effect on their environment, radioactivity, all of these could start something like this, but none of them could effectively keep it going. Unless? Unless... oh... unless the aforementioned radioactivity is meteor rock radioactivity, which is unlike any other kind of radiation on the planet, and unless the virus involved was particularly aggressive and virulent, and unless that DNA contained one of those ever-so-elusive metagenes... this is all very very astronomically unlikely, of course. Infinite improbability. But then again?"
Jamie grinned, and murmured: "'By your powers combined...'"
He then whirled to face his ad hoc drawing of The Earth, and drew another great circle around it, another layer...
"Let's say you had a boy who could change into animals," he suggested, "just a faerie tale fable, eh? But unlike your average werewolf, who only morphs into one species, or unlike a vampire or a skinwalker who can often partake of a library of creatures-- depending on the legend --this boy, this beastly boy, he can change into any animal he so names. How would his body know how to do this? How could he match his body to the patterns of creatures he may only ever have seen on Animal Planet, never encountering them directly? Lacking Durlan hypersenses-- oh, those loony Durlans --or Andalite DNA-sampling technology-- am I the only one here who read those books? --how could he craft a biologically viable facsimile of any lifeform?"
He drew an arrow, and then a collection of arrows, all of them pointing to this extra layer he'd drawn around the Earth.
"Morphogenetic fields," he murmured. "Not the, erm, developmental biology kind, but the kind postulated by Rupert Sheldrake. Morphic fields, energies that serve as a kind of... psychic databank, in which are stored all patterns of life that future evolutionary iterations may incorporate elements of the past to ensure their preparedness for anything. Essentially, the very potential of all life on the planet. The Earth is a living thing, and living things have minds, and minds have memory, and memory helps us predict..."
He spun to again grin his grin at the room's denizens, capping the marker and tossing it spinning away.
"...the meteor rock infected that big ghastly dog, which in turn infected the rabies he carried," he concluded, "the saliva-borne infection passed itself to our Dear Little Friend when the dog bit him, infusing him with the meteor energies and putting his genetic structure into a state of flux. And then another meteor crashed down and the power levels skyrocketed... thus fizzing and sparking, reduced to his best instincts, our Dear Little Friend struggled to save his fellow living things, but in so doing he entered into the panicky psychic fields of a big oul' variety of species, a whole spectrum of goggies and kittehs and all-sorts, and with all that psychic input he managed to attain a form of morphic resonance, vibrating in time with the morphic fields of all those animals and the planet itself, enabling him to pattern himself after... well... any species that's ever lived, really."
He beamed, and shoved his hands into his pockets, and waggled his eyebrows as he walked back over to Merick and Gar and them.
"All of that's probably bollocks, really, Rupert Sheldrake's theories really aren't accepted by mainstream science," he mused, still grinning, "probably bollocks. Forteana. I was just being extra extra Puckish just to get Edgar's diminutive goat."
He walked over closer to the rabbity Garfield, and he leaned down close to him and he murmured, ever-so-seriously: "All the same, though, just to be on the safe side? Try not to think of humpback whales, eh? Just don't... think about them. At least until we get aboveground. Personal favour?"
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