Sitting in Muddy Water, Staring Up at Where the New Moon Should Be
"Flowers are clever things. Even if it looks like they've vanished, they never really go away, you know? Just like a pack of wolves. As long as there's a moon, flowers will never die... and neither will us wolves." - Zali, Episode 6
"Bang." - Spike Spiegel, Session 6
A/N: A little late Friday the Thirteenth homebrewed holiday special for my readers, here. This has been growing and mutating in the back of my head like leftover lobster left too long in the fridge. I have nothing to my name but a copy of the Wolf's Rain manga, a couple microbiology textbooks, and a father who is obsessed with NASA. Yes, the science is simplified and skimmed over here a little, but if this fic encourages you to learn more about retroviruses, it gives you a good excuse to watch Cowboy Bebop, right? (All somatic vs. genetic confusions aside, because you can do transgenics that way on embryos, but not so much on grown animals yet, you gotta love the monkey business when it includes arias about lymphocytes. Yeah, Warg. Science geek. The terms are interchangable, but then you already knew that if you've read "It's Too Perilous" or "Paradise Blues.")
Yes, this is the same fic as "Staring Up at Where the New Moon Should Be" under Cowboy Bebop. Because sometimes, you gotta share the love. And the nerdy fancrack. But mostly the love.
If you were looking for Faye and Tsume swapping fashion tips and slight-of-hand tricks, Quent and Jet topping each other's tales of their respective days on the force, Toboe taking saxophone lessons, Hige and Radical Ed rustling up some grub, Blue and Electra tracking down the bad guys, or Leara and Vicious going birdwatching together, I'm afraid you're looking at the wrong fic. (Maybe later I could do something with Jaguara and Punch, but I've got more than enough crackbunnies on the brain...) That said, does it tie in with "Paradise Blues?" Hecksy freakin' yeah. You don't need the "in Paradise" trilogy to understand this, but this will help you understand "Blues."
"Experts predict a sixty-eight percent chance of rock showers within the northeast quadrant of the providence today, so all nonessential personnel are encouraged to stay in a secure shelter and take proper precautions if you do go outdoors…"
The only one to hear the newscast from this particular television failed to heed the warnings. Instead of remaining in a fallout shelter, it wandered among the ruins of crumbling, impacted houses, searching for anything the residents may have left behind: food, abandoned pets, corpses… To a starving member of a dying species, it didn't matter, so long as it was edible.
The wolf had been scavenging through this neighborhood and others like it since the day the moon fell. Its pack had scattered, many of them killed by the meteoric lunar shrapnel that burned its way through the stratosphere, but when the humans moved away as well, this creature learned to show little fear of the moon rocks that still peppered the earth's surface.
As Earth's gravity slowly dragged more of its broken satellite back to its ground, the humans began to drift away from the lands they had once conquered. Most of them took to the sky, leaving the planet of human origins for Mars, Venus, and the terraformed moons of Jupiter. That was how they had destroyed the moon, so why change their course of action now? Others who lacked the money for interplanetary transport attempted to bring a bit of technology designed for Mars back to Earth, hoping that the domes designed for holding in the delicate Martian atmosphere would stand up to the vengeance of the moon. Those who were too poor to even afford a haven within the domes were forced to do as the wolves did: move underground and pray that the impacts did not drop the ceiling onto their heads.
As the first of the predicted rocks began to streak down across the sky, trailing an orange glow from friction with the air, the wolf ran for the nearest building, lowering its ears as it cowered in the tumbledown ruins. The meteor struck, sending dust and shrapnel flying. The wolf endured a few scratches along its back, but they were not the first to mar its thick pelt. Slowly, it rose and sniffed at the still-glowing rock. Perhaps something had died during the impact, so that the wolf might eat. It had never bothered the animal to ingest bits of dirt with its food, whether the dust came from earth, or the broken moon, tainted from the portal between space and hyperspace.
Its pups, however, might feel differently.
When humanity had first landed on the moon, the returning astronauts had spent weeks in a specially quarantined containment center, fearful of "moon germs." It had been the first time any creature from Earth had made physical contact with another planetary body, and even more than a century later, scientists and dreamers alike still had hope for extraterrestrial life, no matter how tiny and virulent. There were lifeforms found only on Ganymede, now, and plants unique to Venus, but everything down to the viruses had either been genetically engineered or evolved from Earth stock. The lifeless moon offered nothing to fear.
Or so it had back in 1969. Now, in 2087, rumors of unchanging, never-aging immortals and speaking dead surrounded the blackened remains of the body that had once sheltered the planet from meteor impacts. People rushed to collect fragments of the moon that had made their way to landfall, cherishing them for the chimerical tales associated with the dark, lumpish "Sunstones." The richer, foolhardier, and more spiritually inclined from across the galaxy traveled to earth to study the stones, trying to unleash their potential as a small crew of bounty hunters was said to have once accomplished. That had been in deep space, but who would notice if another chunk of the Earth exploded? The facilities that housed such experiments were never safe to stand around, but they certainly piqued the public's interest.
Besides physical explosions, the most dangerous element of these early alchemical experiments was their ability to draw out objects from hyperspace. Normally, once an object had entered the gates to hyperspace, it could no longer interact with objects in the usual four dimensions until it passed back out another of the man-made wormholes. The explosion of Earth's original gate, however, had transformed the moon into an imperfect entryway between dimensions, awaiting only the input of a certain type of energy in order to open the rift.
It was mere coincidence that allowed students of the Sunstones to reach out and touch hyperspace just as something resembling a clothed, dead great ape traveled through the planet's atmosphere on its futile quest towards nowhere. While most of the researchers were wearing protective clothing, they had not taken the proper measures to thoroughly quarantine a retrovirus.
When a pack of wolves came through, used to preying off of human folly for generations, they found themselves with many more apes to hunt down and eat.
There is an interesting thing about retroviruses: instead of using DNA, the blueprints of genetic programming, the virus contains RNA, a secondary product, and then uses a mix of its own proteins and the resources of the infected cell to force its host to make first the DNA equivalent to the virus's genetic plan, and from that, create more retrovirus. This is the genetic equivalent of trying to design a home based on the ruins of a house you once saw, and then forcing someone else to build it for you, killing the builder in the process. There are so many places for mistakes: in the creation of the viral DNA, a process completely foreign to the host cell, in the translation back to RNA, which turns off many of the few proofreading devices the cell uses to translate its own RNA into something usable, and the creation of proteins from the RNA into the new generation of retroviruses. Each of these mistakes can lead to but one thing: mutation.
Although this particular retrovirus was tailored to affect only humans, it would not accomplish exactly the minimal impact on other species that its eco-terrorist creators had hoped it would. What enabled its kind, including everything from HIV to influenza, to survive so long and bring down so many different types of prey was exactly why it was so poorly suited for its task. The virus might have been designed to attack the base pairs that separated humans from apes, but there were only four possible pairs that all species used in a multitude of variations. The same pattern that coded for a defining feature in humans would not be all that different from one that coded for a different part in another animal. And the retrovirus changed. Quickly. Unlike the humans, it did not turn the wolves that had consumed it into chimpanzees. The moon dust they and their ancestors had consumed activated portals to hyperspace within their bodies, and the retrovirus that had adapted to hyperspace had more than enough to work with, transforming wolf after wolf before their immune systems finally corralled it away and destroyed it.
It was too late, however, as the virus had already attacked their gametes. This pack would live and breed and survive, but Canis lupus as humanity knew it was extinct. Though never referred to as werewolves, there was no denying what the remaining wolves' hyperspace projections resembled: the greatest of the great apes.
Even the Ape Flu was not enough to entirely halt studies of the Sunstones. Fearful of their star-fairing kinsmen, the people of Earth moved to cut off their hyperspace gate, dragging enough debris from the broken moon into it to turn the gate into a practical rock magnet. With but just a little push from the alchemists who worked the Sunstones, the gate was closed off physically and swept the remaining fragments of the old moon from the sky, combing with the gate and cast-off human satellites to create a new moon that reflected the light of the sun reassuringly, even if on certain nights, the reflection was much ruddier than the old moon's had ever been. It also released low levels of hyperspace radiation to boost the potentials of all else that had been touched by the gate: Sunstones, an odd plant with delicate white petals called a lunar flower, and the surviving wolves.