_ I need you to understand biochemistry!
_ I need three hundred euros. Wait! Biochemistry?!? Four hundred!
_ You are a bad person.
_ You are a weak lawyer, mother. If you asked me if I wanted fifty, I would, especially since I know I wouldn't have to bed someone for the money.
_ You are right. We have a deal?!?
_ Of course, spill biochemistry in that virgin brain!
_ Please!
_ Where are we going?
_ Exactly where it all started.
_ Long before I was born?
_ Yes, long before you were born. In fact, to understand, we have to go back to the moment when I was single-celled for the second time.
_ But as far as I know, you were born people. She became an adult witch.
_ Indeed, but from the copying of the genetic material of a single cell. All the cells in my original body were dead, but Hèsmí thought I was beautiful, so she remade me from my DNA. It had to be that way, because adding an extra dimension to me, adult and multicellular, would be exhausting.
_ But what about your memories, your personality?
_ So, everything that I was was "recorded" in a 4D DNA and then I was reassembled four-dimensionally, it was enough to "read" this transcribed information and pass it to my reborn memory.
_ Brillant! So they recorded your memories and your personality, put it in a single cell of your body and made it fourth dimensional?
_ Actually they killed my three-dimensional body, but before they copied everything in a four-dimensional cell.
_ Were you reduced to a single cell?
_ Yes, people underestimate the cells; they are assembly lines, where some enzymes unwind the DNA, others unzip, complementary nucleotides fit together, an enzyme with a top zipper glues them together, click, click and then the mRNA goes to a ribosome where, click, click, there you have microRNA and tRNA, all running, sometimes standing still, doing things and tRNA codons and anticodons, coupling like drunk teenagers, and nosy enzymes editing this or that on the fly. You know, life is a process, it doesn't really exist, I myself, and you, and everything that has a soul, are something else, a soft breath of Hèsmí, which the Indians called Prahnah and which, while it exists, moves a process, a small piece of existence.
_ What is life I know from the Teachings... But to value my 400 euros, talk more about the organism. How from the unicellular did you become a person? I mean, were you never a baby, I mean, in the fourth dimensional phase of your existence?
_ So, the complexity of life is in layers. We start with a zygote which, being a cell, is already, as I told you, incredibly complex. This little time bomb turns into a baby. The cells reproduce, at first all the same, but then they start to differentiate: plunct, plact, zun! And then they migrate, you know? The migration of cells, that gradient of control: dGRNs, perfect inerrant specialization to form implausibly precise and complex things like anvil, malleus, stapes, eardrum in the ear, and kidneys, liver, anterior pituitary. Everything, you know? Méhtēr was visibly excited.
_ All the baby's organs are - she continued - almost always perfect, and at the same time. Everyone knows Murphy's Law: if something can go wrong, it will. A baby should bring Murphy joy because the opportunities for disaster are nearly endless
_ But things almost never go wrong, thankfully.
_ I understand, continue! Duhghtér said, as he spread cane molasses on a slice of rye bread.
_ The functioning of said baby is as mysterious as its formation. Babies grow. Children grow. How does this happen? For example, the baby has several small, hollow bones that grow year after year into large hollow bones. For this to work, cells (osteoclasts) eat the bone from the inside, making the cavity bigger, while other cells (osteoblasts) deposit new bone on the outside. The complex and implausible communication between explosion and clast supposedly makes this work. The whole baby does this sort of thing. It's kind of a witchcraft, isn't it? I mean, there's magic involved. The skull grows. Kidneys grow. The heart grows. All, with few exceptions, perfectly. Meanwhile, the kidneys excrete, the endocrine glands secrete, the neurons connect in a strange but correct way, the skin grows in perfect layers, the nervous system unfolds – perfectly. it's all very strange and quite improbable, but in three dimensions that's how it is.
_ You never leave words alone, mother. What's the point of saying that in three dimensions it's like this? Do you want bread?
_ I want! she ate the bread with cane molasses, drank a glass of carbonated water with lemon and ice, and then continued.
_ I love when I think that in you my DNA was not all wasted. I mean, of course there's something that in three dimensions you can't visualize, that you can't figure out, and maybe there's no way, but you see, in four dimensions it's infinitely simpler and I suppose in five even more.
_ Until...
_ In the dimension where Hèsmí lives, a thought is enough for us and our destiny to be created. It is!
_ Yes! But what about my father? So it happened at the same time, but it was different... Do you remember that in 4D things that seem complex in 3D become very simple?
_ Perfectly, doctor!
_ I was a caprice of creation, Hèsmí gives itself that right, when instead. Even as a woman, isn't it? But there are side effects. The Goddess could avoid them, but for what? Destiny is a straight line, from her to us. Chance is the luck that moves in the process.
_ Like this?
_ See, I am Information. Bundle of them, actually. Extracted from what was, from what I was. But for that a process was necessary, and that always generates disturbance. Without time and space, it happens anywhere, at any time. In that dimension you call it quantum entanglement, when you want to imagine it. Everything they don't really know what it's like, they call quantum, you know...
_ Yes, yes, continue!
_The disturbance came in reverse and obverse. The verse calls him some sort of alien viroid/fungoid, which just fell into a cave of what is called when we live in central Romania, from Transylvania. A comet fragment, you know? It fell. People were curious, even thousands of years before us. Your father, for that matter. Young yet. He contaminated himself, but not directly.
_ Like this?
_ The alien needed a vehicle, something he could modify. A mouse, and in it, bacteria: Yersinia tuberculosis. The contaminant was four-dimensional, so each bacterium was contaminated in a different way. Billions, all but two died. His father took a breath; the other turned into Yersinia pestis, infected his grandfather. He died. Everybody died. Out of every five people, two are gone. Five thousand six hundred years before you were born, Hèsmí reaped in death the life he had given his father.
_ Like this?
_ The other living bacterium, had the right modification, once in your father's body it interfered in the telomere of a cell of his marrow. He started not to produce more blood, but also to practically no longer die. This bacterium also reproduced, but a limited number of times. Those infected with it have survived, some to this day, albeit at a cost.
_ What would be...
_ You know what it is. These people still needed blood, but they didn't produce it, so they had to get it in other ways. And they also needed vitamin D, like everyone else, but they quickly discovered that ultraviolet radiation killed him. The blood they got also supplied that.
_ But I...
_ You are a special case, you know. Even you breathe because you want to. The bacterium was facultative anaerobic and so are all of you. I myself need to breathe, otherwise I die. Of course, I am also reborn, but it is a process that hurts a lot, so I avoid it.
YOU ARE READING
The Great History
General FictionThe Being, who is the Mother, speaks to the one who was created, who is the Daughter, about all the mysteries that exist about things: their geometry, their functioning, their history, their geography and what they serve: faith, hope and love, but a...
