Interlude 2: Reunion

"The crisis was an accident.

"At first glance it seemed like nothing more than a smear of organic matter on a dead lump of rock, barely living itself. Seven million viruses, nothing much by the standards of epidemiology. And a thousand-some years later, under Shinra microscopes, it looked like nothing special. A strand of DNA, a protein cover to keep it safe from the elements, and a hypodermic tail to inject it into the host cell.

"The host cell…

"Anyway, Shinra had it all covered. We knew the structure of the protein coat, we had the genome already published by the time the Project came around. In the preliminary briefing I remembered looking over the geometric scaffolds of molecular diagrams, picking out familiar pieces and structures like any other molecule: hydride, amino, benzoic, triacyl. The biologists had their names, too: Type IV infectious agent, possible species-specific mutagen. We had lists of fancy terms, like the incantations to keep the demons of ambiguity away.

"We thought we knew what Jenova was.

"As it turns out, we had no clue. No clue at all.

"I had plenty of time to figure it all out, although I didn't have much to go on-flashes of light and sound and feeling, words in foreign languages that I somehow understood, without knowing how. I never took that much time to turn things over, come at them from all possible angles. I was a man of action and quick, decisive thoughts. But Jenova changed all of that."


"This is what I know.

"The meteorite, with its coating of Jenova viruses, crashed near a settlement of Ancients. They lived all over the planet back then, but their capital was in the north, not too far from the crash site. The meteorite hit a spot the Ancients called the Knowlespole-which meant magnetic and energetic north. Magnetic they only cared about to align their maps; energetic was much more important to them. They lived and died according to the flow of Lifestream. And this Knowlespole, they believed, was the spot where a dying person's life force would sink into the ground to join the Lifestream. They called it the Promised Land too, the place where the departed could become one with the Planet.

"That's another thing Shinra got wrong…

"The meteorite crashed into the Knowlespole, which was itself a huge trauma to the Ancients. And then the sickness came…They didn't call it 'Jenova', which was a Shinra-spun translation, and a damn hopeful one at that. Only Shinra would be blind enough to call this thing 'New God'. The Ancients' name for the virus was Sephirisena, 'crisis from the sky'.

"The disease brought on by Jenova caused a strange kind of sickness. The first victims didn't suffer much; in fact, they barely knew they'd caught a bug during their pilgrimage to the Knowlespole. But as the virus spread through the rest of the population, the mild disorientation and dizziness turned to confusion, then reports of 'voices'. All of the Ancients with the Sephirisena disease heard voices, and as more and more of them became infected, the voices became stronger and stronger. Within a year, three-quarters of the Ancients' capital had gotten sick, and their 'voices' had become full hallucinations. Some believed they heard the voices of the dead, others believed that they had gained the power to read minds. All could hear the Planet, amplified beyond the Ancients' natural power; and in the first years after the meteorite struck, its cries of pain were deafening.

"All of this they saw, right in front of their eyes—or in their ears, really—but the virus, meanwhile, did its true work out of their sight. Shinra got that part right; the virus could change things. Normal viruses just take over a cell, tell it what to do for a while, long enough to churn out a few million more viruses. But not this one. It changed their bodies, cell by cell, from Ancient into something else, something part human and part alien. It was invisible so far, and undetectable. The Ancients never knew what really happened to them. They were preoccupied with the mind, with the voices that drove them to insanity. They never knew what the virus really did.

"Most of the Ancients died from the madness. Some threw themselves off the high cliffs outside the city. Many found what they thought to be a nobler sacrifice, in the Lifestream well in the center of their capital.

"And a few…damn them…went back to the Knowlespole."


"The rest Shinra knew, although I wouldn't put it past that little bastard to rewrite all the books. The civilization had died by then, lost to the virus or scattered through the world, some living like recluses in the corners of the world to hide from the virus, some slipping into mundane society despite their glowing eyes. For all intents and purposes, the Ancients were dead, and with them went the virus, Sephirisena, Jenova.

"And then Shinra came along.

"They found them, of course; practically the only preserved bodies of infected Ancients left on the planet. They dug one up and tested it and decided it wasn't human, wasn't Ancient, and called it alien. Superhuman. They gave it a name, Jenova, 'New God.' They looked up the few books they cared to keep on the Ancients' history and threw together a half-baked story or two. Some thought that this thing was Sephirisena, the crisis from the sky; they thought that a creature had somehow survived the burning entry into the atmosphere and the impact of landing on the planet. It had a romantic ring to it, really. But it was wrong.

"Some thought that it was a dead Cetra…sort of. These were the high-end researchers, Hojo and Gast. They saw that the cells had been changed by something, but they weren't sure how, or what. They found no traces of viruses or bacteria in the body itself; it seemed to have disappeared. So they figured that, after infection, mutation, and distribution, the virus lived long enough to kill its host and then just died out. So they sectioned the body they found, grew its cells in test tubes all over the labs of Junon and Midgar. They thought that these cells had mutagenic properties, that they would turn whatever they touched into more of themselves.

"So, of course, they thought they could mix these cells with human cells and recreate what they found in the first place: an Ancient. Their ticket to the Promised Land.

"But it isn't that simple. I know that now more than anybody.

"I don't know what it does, in the end. I think it just keeps changing, warping the cells more and more, until finally…finally…it's something much more, or less, than human.

"I'll find out someday, I guess.

"I wish I could say I wasn't afraid."