Claudia became obsessed with the whole thing, convinced that the Feds had merely changed the signal phase to separate the confiscated devices from the few still implanted. She suspected the military had reassembled the rest of the network, to try to duplicate the effect. Ogden shared her obsession. We’d have to see if they ended up sharing anything else, but I think they’d bonded a bit during all the excitement. I knew personally how powerful that could be.
As word spread about the immunity virus, people who had never met a chimera went out of their way to do so. For the most part, people with splices were good sports about it, especially once it came to light that this was all part of Dymphna’s plan, and that she was, essentially, the mother of chimeras.
Pictures showed up in the news of chimeras taking shifts standing on street corners holding up signs that offered FREE HUGS AND HANDSHAKES.
There were, unfortunately, a few incidents of assault, of chimera-haters figuring they could have contact with chimeras by punching and kicking instead of hugging and shaking hands. But, whether it was because of the immunity virus or the fall of Howard Wells or the fact that a bunch of chimeras had saved the world—with a little help from their nonk friend Jimi—people largely moved past the whole chimera-hating thing.
As more non-spliced people got to know chimeras—and began to understand the many reasons a person might choose to get spliced—they learned to respect chimeras for the individual humans they were. Just like I had done, less than a year earlier.
Humans for Humanity all but disappeared, except for a tiny core group. The same was true of The Church of the Eternal Truth. Their membership and attendance collapsed, and within a few months they had to sell their church and move to a tiny storefront more befitting of their hate-spouting fringiness.
In a nice twist, the church property itself was bought by St. Peter’s Church, where Reverend Calkin had been the pastor. The congregation renounced their opposition to people with splices and their affiliation with H4H.
Within a few months of the shutdown, the Genetic Heritage Act was overturned in the courts. It had become so widely reviled that no one even appealed the ruling. All the similar state and federal proposals were quietly abandoned and allowed to die, with the focus diverted to regulating splicing, making sure it was safe for those who wanted to pursue it.
During that time, Doc Guzman initiated an appeal process to get his medical license reinstated and was optimistic about the outcome. He was also hired by the University of Pennsylvania medical school to resume his research, teach a course, and maybe, down the road, create a department on chimeric medicine—which he hoped would become part of a global movement in the healthcare industry to acknowledge that they had abdicated their responsibility and failed people with splices, and that they needed to expand their expertise and their openness to treating everyone, regardless of splices or spikes or whatever other flavors of transhumanism were coming down the pike.
With Cronos gone, CLAD withered and died, as well. I think even the people who agreed with everything CLAD had tried to do ended up distancing themselves from the group.
Chimerica, similarly, found itself without a leader—and in their case, also without a secret mandate. The governing council issued a statement saying that they were going to spend the next year re-visioning, determining what their mission was going to be, and inviting all those who had been a part of Chimerica, or supporters of it, to weigh in. I spoke briefly to Martin before he headed back to Canada, and he said they would be meeting with facilitators and organizational experts bimonthly for the foreseeable future. Better him than me.
Weather wise, that summer ended up being the worst on record for brush fires, droughts, and superstorms. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was partly the wake-up call of Wells’s plot and the realization that if the smartest and most powerful person in the world was ready to take such drastic action, however crazy, maybe the rest of us could get together and finally come up with a plan that was a little more sane, but by the end of the summer, the United Nations announced a new round of talks, and the twelve countries with the largest economies in the world issued a joint declaration on climate change that committed to zero carbon emissions, a tripled investment in remediation, and a trade embargo on all countries that did not join them.
Who knows, maybe this time it would work. And maybe it wouldn’t be too late.
By the time we were done with all the interrogations and investigations, it was mid-October. Even with everything else going on, including the start of senior year, I managed to put in my hours with DeWitt after school and I continued to learn a lot from her, as a lawyer and as a person.
I’d applied early to Temple University and got in that month, pre-law. I was looking forward to living on my own, but I decided I would probably commute from home for the first year or two. Campus housing was expensive, and it wasn’t like I’d be getting an athletic scholarship, like Kevin. More important, though, I knew I’d put my mom through a lot over the past year, and I figured she might want to have me close for a while.
By then she might be just as excited about me moving out as I was.
I was shocked when Rex told me that he had been accepted by Temple, as well. I didn’t know he had even applied, or that he’d taken and passed his General Educational Development test, which was equivalent to a high school diploma. He was delaying his admission for a year, so we could start together in the fall.
There was a time when Del and I had planned on going to Temple together. I was touched that Rex and I would be going together, instead, but also careful not to put too much pressure or expectation on it. A year was a long time, and we were young. But I was optimistic. For the life of me, I couldn’t see myself getting sick of Rex or growing apart from him, ever. He assures me he feels the same way about me, and I believe him.
Don’t get me wrong, there were some adjustments to be made. For the first time, we were free to let our relationship progress and deepen without the constant backdrop of crisis and drama and secrets. I went to school and did my homework. Rex worked for Jerry and read voraciously. And we spent a lot of time together, just being.
Sometimes I’d get antsy, expecting something crazy intense to happen, to sweep us up. But it didn’t, not right away. And that was really, really nice.
In late October, Camden County finally released Del’s remains. With Stan dead, there’d been no family to claim him, but it took a while because there were jurisdictional squabbles between the federal and local agencies that had been trying to track down Cronos. It wasn’t that they wanted his body—they didn’t—but they didn’t know exactly how to process it. It was a bit of a mess.
Luckily, Mom took it on herself to negotiate all the red tape, so I wasn’t actually aware of the details until much later. She thought they would be painful for me, and she was right, they would have been. Del had dealt with so much trouble during his life, and even months later, I found it really upsetting that trouble seemed to follow him in death, too.
Mom paid for Del’s cremation, too, and she and Trudy helped me decide what to do with the ashes. It took a while. I wanted it to be somewhere he’d been happy, but Del hadn’t been happy anywhere in a long time—except maybe at our house, our kitchen table, our sofa. With that in mind, I briefly considered just keeping the ashes, but I decided that was morbid.