The Jaysome Gene

“I need a drink.”

Normally, Anne would make a joke. I don’t drink; I told her why when she hired me. I barely escaped expulsion from university over a decade ago. My philosophy since then has been one of ruthless honesty about myself. I’m not a good person. I can be a good worker, an excellent researcher, but that’s all fluff.

AA doesn’t work. It’s one reason why they refuse to publish results of membership. I still go, even if I was never an alcoholic. I was on my way, once. I have family members who are drunkards. Observations, conclusions. I don’t like the hypothesis, in general: if you seek out to solve a problem, you’ve already worked out the solution you want to happen. It’s why I get sarcastic when religion pretends to be philosophy.

Instead, Anne goes to her desk, unlocks one of the file drawers, pulls out a bottle of Irish whiskey, two shot glasses and pours us each a drink. Her hands aren’t shaking. She hands me a glass. I gulp mine back, the burn barely touching me.

She pours us each another shot, and then a third.

“Jay.” She says nothing else.

I shudder a little. The boy who had entered the lab was eleven. Never mind that it made no sense that we were sure he was eleven, he was just there. We should have been scared, but his grin took that away and his enthusiasm was like I imagine the wild hunt was in those stories Grandma told me when I was a kid.

I pour myself another drink. “My grandmother told me fairy stories when I was younger. Now I can’t help but wonder at the roots of them. Jay boasted about being part of the science side of tumblr, and how jaysome could be a state of matter. And then he – he –.” I am almost twenty nine. My voice cracks.

“He said hello to dark matter. Which – said hello back, in his voice.” Anne’s voice isn’t as even as her hands as she finds two beakers, pours us each far more than a shot. “Dark matter is actually a stray part of an eleven year old boy who can – if his stories were true, it might be more viable to try and list things he can’t do.”

“I asked Jay about times he’d been hurt because power doesn’t prevent you from being hurt. It might give more options in how you deal and respond to it. He told me about losing his sight. About this Honcho leaving him. How do you not have PTSD, I wondered. Hah. You don’t have that, not when you are the trauma. Not that he’d ever see that. Not that he’d ever understand that.”

Amy pours herself another drink. “We’re not arrogant. We keep our minds open, ask questions. Except the ones we never think to ask. ‘What if dark matter is a deviation from the Standard Model because it’s not actually part of this universe?’ Can you imagine any journal publishing that?”

“He was so earnest too. ‘I’m part of the science side of tumblr now.’” I make a sound that tries to be a laugh. “Perhaps he is tumblr. If we’re going down rabbit holes. Remember Demar and his tulpa thesis? What if emergent AI isn’t going to emerge on the internet but in the real world? Each one born from our understanding of it. Walking around it it, convinced they are something else. That sounds like it makes sense. It shouldn’t.”

I pour myself another drink. The bottle is almost empty. I’m still sober.

There is a knock on our office door before it opens a moment later. Never mind that we’re in the third most secure facility in North America. Or that you need a keycard. The man who enters look ordinary enough, though with tired circles under his eyes.

“Jay told me about his adventure; I thought it best to find out how the recipients were coping with it.” His voice is calm and dry at once.

That, and the door that shouldn’t have opened. “You’re Honcho.”

He nods to me. “It’s Jay’s term for me, yes. The wandering magician, to others. Jay is – fond of adventures, and not the kind of person one can forget with drink.”

There is no judgement in the words. Somehow that makes it worse. Anne stares at him. “Why are you here?”

“Probably not for the reasons you think.” The magician’s smile is gently human. “I’m not about to do something crude like erase memories, and making you forget you met Jay would, to Jay, be a very rude thing to do. But I can dull the memories, take the edges off things. Let you return to your lives without falling away from them.”

“I knew Lew Saunders.” Anne’s voice is flat. “Almost no one talks about him. One day he was a genetics researcher, the next he came up with this theory that we’re a chrysallis out of which something else was meant to emerge, and wanted the funding to turn us all into gods. He killed himself two years later, long after he’d been run out of even the crackpot communities. I don’t want that.”

The magician nods. It’s strange to think that term. “People ask ‘why do we fall?’ but often it’s because we were pushed, and pushed so hard all we can do is fall instead of rising. The world is bigger than you want to know. It’s bigger than people can deal with and still be people. So part of what I do is protect from that. Help people find ways of coping with new understanding. Jay does as well, in his own way. But he was so eager to explain dark matter that it went – rather jaysome, I imagine.”

I nod.

“Trust me: you’re handling this better than most. A bishop once tried to an exorcism on Jay.” Anne’s laugh is sharp, surprised. The wandering magician grins. “Yeah. On the plus side, Jay was actually shocked speechless. On the downside, he decided to find approximations to demons to prove he wasn’t one. It took over a week to clean up that mess.”

“We’d be poor scientists if we hid from the truth, no matter how hard it seemed.”

“Jay isn’t truth. He’s – far, far Outside that, and not part of the universe at all.”

“To enter something is to become part of it.” My voice sounds funny even to me.

The magician stares at me for a long moment. “I know. I try not to think about that. You can’t fit Jay into things, but you can understand that jaysome is an outlier to everything. Science still is. The world still works according to the laws you know,” he says, and his voice is deep and soothing. “There are other ways it can work, intersections you might find don’t worry you as much as they used to. but the choices remain yours: to fall, to rise, or to remain?”

He offers no solution. But he takes the bottle and beakers gently, and they vanish. Transformed. Changed. He turns and walks back out of the lab.

“Jay would be disappointed if we didn’t keep doing science,” I say slowly.

“He would.” Anne nods, and we head back to the computers and the monitors.

Given the choice, we will stay and we will rise. Why do we fall? Because we are afraid, and there is so much more in the world than fear.