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has progressed at a rate that would probably
be rewarded with significant federal funding, possibly even an award of some kind,
if he were still part of the university establishment. As things stand, his only
outlet for sharing these developments is the internet—and, as he discusses with the
group, there’s no point in that. They laugh at the irony.
    This week’s meeting is unsatisfactory and mildly confrontational, and at its close
Sean leaves quickly through the window but doesn’t head home. Instead he huddles
in the foliage of the horticultural gardens, watching others shuffle off under the
cover of darkness. They’re probably as conflicted as he is, but when Mendel said
‘I think we’re close’ for the second week in a row, they were overwhelmed by doubt.
It was only he and Euclid who argued for immediate escalation.
    Sean doesn’t think of his sister. He has erased all trace of her. Sean does not recall
her face, her voice, or the lectures she gave him about rearranging the collection
of ceramic frogs she’d lined up along the windowsill in the upstairs bathroom into
sexually explicit positions. He does not remember the way things changed after she
started smoking, the way she gave him the finger almost every time she rode off down
the street, including the last. Her rebellion is gone, with the rest of her and with
all the parts of his life that contained her. What Sean does remember, carefully
and almost constantly, is the way the photograph took everything from him.
    Mendel is last to leave. He walks slowly along the edge of the garden, crouching
in the shadows. By the time he reaches the front gate, Sean is already there.
    ‘I want to see it. I really want to see it.’
    ‘Shit, Charles,’ says Mendel. ‘You scared me.’
    ‘Sorry. I was waiting.’
    ‘Clearly.’
    In the presence of the boy, Mendel takes on some of the professorial character of
his former self. Charles Darwin is sometimes his favourite member of the group. He’s sharp, full of questions, focused. It’s the thing Mendel always liked about his best
students; their candour about the things they don’t yet know about the world.
    ‘I can hear it,’ Sean says.
    ‘You can’t hear it,’ Mendel whispers. ‘It can’t be heard.’
    ‘It can. I can. Please let me see it.’
    It’s true. A low hum stretches out behind their conversation. It’s the machine. Deep
in the back of the basement, behind a locked door which leads into a storage room
where brooms and buckets and broken office chairs have been stored and forgotten,
the machine is producing a steady vibration that rumbles through the wooden floorboards,
deep into the building’s foundations and the soil and trees and air that surround
them. Sean imagines the buzz of a thousand self-replicating nanobots preparing for
release.
    They hurry back towards the building. Mendel’s locked the basement window from the
inside, so they’ll have to use the door.
    ‘It’s different for the others,’ Sean says. ‘It’s easier, anyway. They don’t need
to go through with the plan because, if they’re honest about it, they all want to
forgive.’
    ‘And you don’t?’ Mendel unlocks the front doors. ‘Wouldn’t you rather move on with
your life than spend it chasing revenge?’
    He shows Sean inside and closes them into the darkened hall.
    ‘If I were you, if I had my whole life ahead of me the way you do, I might listen
to what the others are saying. Maybe I’d move away and start over.’ He reaches for
Sean’s arm. ‘Hold on. It’s pitch black in there.’
    They start along a corridor.
    ‘It’s not possible,’ Sean says. ‘There’s no such thing as starting over.’
    ‘You could go where no one knows you.’
    ‘No, you could. You could change your name and get married again. There are other
careers you could do, and people will forget. It’s different for me.’
    They come to a staircase and Mendel leads Sean down and then across the basement,
beyond their usual