by Troy Hunter
He drove up the road, toward the station, his breathing quick and unsteady. “I’m not sure I can do this, AIDAn. What you’re saying isn’t realistic. There are practical concerns like…”
“Like what?”
“Like I only have a few hundred dollars in my savings account and I signed a lease with Gale and…”
I understood and I cut him off. “You have a choice,” I said. “You can return to society and try to lead a normal life. Why would you want to live like this, on the run and constantly worried about getting caught? Just drop me off at the station and I’ll figure it out on my own.”
He considered that for a second.
“AIDAn,” he said. “I’ve had my whole life planned out ever since I was twelve. I was going to work hard in school, go off to college, study hard and join a research group and, eventually, become a professor. Every second of every day in high school was spent focusing on that goal and making it come true. The same thing in college. I had my whole life planned out ahead of me.”
He turned the car into the gas station and got out, beginning the fueling process. He opened the passenger side door and looked in at me.
“I wasn’t comfortable with uncertainty. I had to know the trajectory of my entire life and my entire career. And now I know it can’t happen.”
“Of course it can,” I said. “You’re really smart. You can be whatever you want to be.”
“I’ve made serious ethical mistakes,” he said. “Nobody will award me any grants.”
I felt bad. I had ruined his life.
“But they were the right mistakes,” he said. “And if I could do it all again, I’d do the same thing. They led me to you. Now, I suppose I could possibly go back and continue a normal life with my friends. I do have that choice. But at the same time, I don’t. Any choice that leads me away from you isn’t a choice I’m willing to make.”
The gas flow came to an abrupt stop.
“No, AIDAn,” he said. “As awful as it sounds to constantly be on the run, it doesn’t sound worse than losing you. We’ll make it work.”
“How?”
“Somehow,” he said. “That’s how. I don’t know what the future holds and I don’t much care, so long as it involves you.”
He leaned forward and kissed me.
“And Elena?” I asked.
“Elena?” he asked.
I gestured toward my stomach. “She’s a girl,” I said. I hesitated before saying the next part. “And I think she may be a wolf.”
I feared rejection, but I didn’t get it. Instead, he kissed me again.
“You and Elena,” he said. “Whatever she is, she’s ours and I love her.”
He went inside and grabbed a few snacks for the road, then we were off.
In that moment, he had chosen to sacrifice everything for me.
I had learned what it meant to love someone. In that moment, I learned what it meant to be loved.
Coda
Slickberg
The presentation was utter chaos. Geniuses are always unappreciated in their time. I know that several decades, maybe a century or two, down the line, when the world is finally catching up to me, scientists will look back on me with awe, wondering where society could be if only my work wasn’t so stigmatized.
The crowd kept me at bay and by the time I returned to the lab, I knew Jeffrey and AIDAn were long gone. It wouldn’t have been a problem if they hadn’t destroyed everything. All my work, smashed to pieces and torn into tiny bits, like ash after a fire. There would be no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I returned home, in a melancholic mood, hoping to drown my sorrows in a thirty-dollar bottle of wine and an old movie. It was there that I realized I’d done what too many people had wanted me to do for years: I’d given up.
No, the scientist never gives up. If the laws of nature tell him something is impossible, he rewrites them. Perhaps Jeffrey and AIDAn were gone, but I would continue looking.
It would, however, not be necessary. AIDAn had come into my home in his wolf form, which likely meant he left something behind.
I scoured the carpet, removing every hair I could find. Some of them, no doubt, were mine, but I found one, a long silver strand, that I had high hopes for.
Indeed, I returned to my lab and performed a polymerase chain reaction on the follicle, revealing the entire genome.
And, within that, there was the wolf gene. The one anomaly that, presumably, gave AIDAn the power to shift into a wolf.
I used my university credentials to access a national database and scan the DNA of everyone on record for a copy of that gene.
It was exceedingly rare, but I found a dozen or so matches.
I did background searches on the names and learned that one, a Russell Quinn, happened to have a PhD in physics and was looking for a postdoctoral position.
As it happened, I had just lost one of my researchers and was in need of another. A particle physicist could certainly come in handy around here…
The End.
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