Sci-fi adventure

 Chapter 2: The rise of integrals ( An oldie from an era past)

Rachel yawned and curled up into a ball and watched her kitten Maya do the same and close her eyes. Setting the best possible tone for the day, she jumped out of bed, and looked outside her window at the twilight sky. She loved having her home in the thicker part of the woods, with the larger tree canopies surrounding her isolated house. She looked at the right wall, and as her wall gave her the perfunctory blink and rattled off the morning news, she heard Ava rushing through the wooden skywalk through the house on the unicycle. Even from the sound of wheeling on the narrow planks of wood connecting the different boogies of the house, she heard Ava’s annoyance with the rather brutal and precarious entry into her room. As she burst into the room, flustered, Rachel welcomed her, and quickly sensed her fear and anxiety, though she didn’t know why. Ava took a breath and looked at her and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it right now’. Rachel made her a cup of her favorite Oolong tea and simply brought it to her, and the cup warmed into her hands to a set temperature, offsetting the hypothermia from her terrified palpitations. She felt better already. The lighting in the room turned from a light blue to a dull grey, a dead give way to her mood, but warming her heart, nonetheless.

‘So’, Ava said, ‘I just realized that it was indeed the single nucleotide polymorphism, a G-to-A change at that position, which may be altering the firing in those set of neurons!’ She beamed. She had been working on her research problem for a while, and it was exciting that she’d cracked another little puzzle. Rachel knew that this meant she was one step closer to knowing the truth about how synesthesia could occur. She only knew that Synesthesia meant a perceptual experience where sensory processing pathways became unusually cross-activated, like ‘smelling’ a color, or ‘tasting' a specific word. It was interesting that while there were naturally occurring synesthetes for life, it could also be induced by certain drugs, such as LSD. Rachel grabbed her nutrient gummy pill box and clicked the glowing Wednesday sign. She liked talking about her research, though she couldn’t wait to tell her about her date with an integral. This one had serenaded her in the voice of Elton John while making her the steak she requested from her favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. She did miss sharing that with someone who enjoyed it as much as she did, let alone never having heard about the restaurant before cooking it down to perfection! It was bizarre how more humans were choosing to be augmented that she’d imagined, and the incredible super skills they were acquiring from it. ‘How did you find out?’ She asked Ava. ‘Well, it looks like genotyping doesn’t lie. The variant at this gene locus turns out to be heterozygous in synesthetes, and homozygous for the reference allele in the non-synesthetes’, she said. Rachel pondered for a moment and said, ‘Does that mean that the synesthetes have one copy of this variant and one reference copy instead of two reference copies as the non-synesthetes do? but how does this cause the synesthesia?’ She asked. ‘Yes, they have only a single copy of the variant allele. By comparing humans that have synesthesia to those that did not, we see that there is a difference in the genetic sequence atthis location.’ Ava explained. ‘Though we don’t know how, this means that somehow this genetic variant may lead to a downstream effect where sensory-processing networks become unusually cross-connected, like actually smelling the odor of a rose when they see red or tasting something bitter when you hear the name John.’ She laughed at this point because she knew how much Rachel disliked John, her ex- boyfriend. Rachel scowled since she was still stuck living with him. Though they were cordial roommates, it had been a challenge to set boundaries. Of late he’d been even erratic in his behavior. Things that she thought he’d like annoyed him, like when he threw a fit when she gifted him with a mixed CD of his favorite dreams to replay, for those nights. Those dark nights, they’d all been having them. Ava laughed out loud at the annoyed look on Rachel’s face. It’s what she loved about her, her depth of love and her deliberate shallow focal plane of hatred. ‘Anyway’, Rachel continued, ’What’s interesting is that I looked at the same gene in some integrals, just for fun, and the variant did not seem to matter at all. Whether they carried the variant or not, their sensory perceptions seemed intact. None of them were synesthetes. They smelled odors and saw colors like we normally do.’ Rachel still did not know why Ava seemed afraid, but she kept going with the discussion. ‘Okay, but that’s not a bad thing?’, she asked. ‘No, but I noticed something else. When I brought the synesthetes in for the test, some of them seemed... well, mean, for lack of a better word. As I was hooking them up to the equipment, some of them seemed agitated. One of them went so far as to call me an ‘incompetent human’ when I dropped a pen and smirked at me, almost in a sinister manner. I was taken aback’. ‘That’s horrible!’ cried Rachel. ‘Yes, after that incident, I had a hunch and brought them all back into the lab a second time to secretly assess aggression and emotional regulation using a standardized behavioral test, while pretending to work on the experiment, and I found something.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘The ones that were angrier and violent were all homozygous for the same variant that the synesthetes carried in one copy among humans. This genotype correlated with dysregulated emotional reactivity rather than a change in sensory perception. It is somehow affecting amygdala-centered circuits involved in threat processing and aggression. This is alarming, because the same genetic variant would not normally be expected to produce such a dramatically different phenotype in integrals compared to humans. It's somehow changing the context of the bilogilical context in which the allele operates!’

Rachel looked at her, bewildered, trying to follow all of this.’ Are you alright?’ She asked, trying to figure out if this was why Ava looked terrified. ‘No, this is scary, but I have reason to believe we’re in grave danger right now, and I’m going to tell you something.’ She looked up at Rachel, dead straight into her eyes, ‘And we are going to need John’s help if we want to live’.