1. I've heard teeth can explode in air this cold. Imagine.

[bestsir]

Who: Harry Goodsir and divers hands.
What: Continuations from Harry's TMD threads, plus open to anyone else who wants in.
Where: All around.
When: In the days leading up to September's event.

Harry has found a house. It's much like the others, but what catches his attention is that it appears to have been owned by a person—a woman, he concludes from the clothing and other belongings left behind—with an interest in natural history. There's a bookcase in the front room with a variety of scientific and medical texts—nothing scholarly per se, but popular studies accessible to lay readers. He cannot find any other trace of the former inhabitant—no body—and so after wrestling with his conscience for a bit, he eventually gathers up what seems most personal and puts it all in a storage closet. Just in case.

He'll open the door to anyone who stops by.

Otherwise, he is out and about, making himself useful where he can.

Comments

[alef]

Rei takes the book gingerly, as if it's a delicate thing, and not just bound paper. Even though she point-blank asked for one of these, it's still surprising that this man actually gave it to her, like it's nothing.

"Thank you," Rei says. It's her second time saying those words, but it doesn't feel any less strange than the first.

She flips it open to an early page. You are more than your genes, she reads. You are your connectome.

"You never learned genetics?" That does strike her as a little strange. Every scientist she knows has.

[bestsir]

"I—I'm afraid I don't know what that is," he says. "That is to say—I see that word on many of these books—" he gestures at the shelf, "but it is entirely unfamiliar to me.

[alef]

Again, that strikes Rei as odd. But maybe it all makes perfect sense, if she considers everything together. The scientist seems a little uncomfortable, and humans tend to become uncomfortable when they have to admit they don't know something. He did say he was a scientist, past tense, so Rei concocts a scenario in her head in which this man has flunked... scientist school?

She'll work on it. But it's enough of an explanation for now.

"Genetics is the study of genes. Part of your DNA. The instructions a body gives to make living things. I was created through advancements in the field."

Among other things. But that's why it's important she reads this book, you see?

[bestsir]

It dawns on Goodsir that this must be some of that ... future science, for lack of a better phrase, ridiculous though it sounds.

"Ah. I think—this is very strange, and I don't pretend to understand it—I think that such knowledge is beyond my own time," he says. "By a hundred years or more, at least. And that is why it is all strange to me."