Emergent

My name's Richard Blanc.

Decades ago, alien forces hit us swiftly and precisely.

To serve them better, they allowed us to retain all our infrastructure but not our most valuable commodity—knowledge.

Without it, we've become a vulnerable species—they destroyed every library, data center, archive, and all storage mediums. We lost our cultural souls. And we now depend on the aliens for the most valuable tool that sets us apart in all of nature—information.

Rumor has it a group of underground scientists hid essential bits of our people's knowledge, somewhere.

At least, that's what we believed until my genius friend, Joseph Sanders, had one of his typical revelations.

One late night, we secretly scavenged a laboratory for scraps ...

"Check this out, Joe."

"What did you find?"

"A journal! Can you read it, Joe?"

"Give it to me. Let's see what it says … It looks like a carbon-copy."

Joe skipped to the last page and read it out loud:

"Last entry... Our dominators are unaware of who we are. The pandemic flu virus we created didn't kill the alien invaders. But we subjected our genome to editing. We've encrypted all remaining human knowledge to be inherited by our descendants. Our victory through them shall be emergent.

"Our people are synergy. We can survive this cataclysm if we wait it out. Stay resilient, have children, keep our species alive. The chains of our captors will be broken in time ...

"Burn these pages; do not seek out our progeny till it's safe! Otherwise, you'll condemn our people to forever servitude. We've included a bio scanner in this box. Hide it well and destroy it if discovered. Good luck!—The Committee for Scientific Stratagem."

————

Joe made his usual analysis:

"This isn't anything new. The aliens already know about this, discovering boxes with duplicates of a journal and scanner floating around. They round people up regularly and subject them to excruciating experiments. But not without first testing their DNA to see if any are the same scientists or their descendants."

"Supposedly, and this is based purely on conjecture, the decryption's key can be found by combining the sequences of at least three of the scientists' DNA as listed in the journal. For the aliens, finding them is mission-critical."

————

Joe and I played around with the bio scanner. And he saw that it could scan our DNA. Of course, neither of us matched the scientists. But Joe pointed out a genetic mutation after the global flu virus.

"Rich, do you remember when we played hide-and-seek as kids, and I set up that dummy to fool you?"

"Oh, yeah, Joe, I still fall for your tricks, man. You're a great magician. The mirror one got me last time."

"So, Rich, I'm thinking... Maybe these scientists were magicians too."

"What do you mean?"

"Give me the scanner Rich. I wonder... If..."

Joe shuffled through the scientists' journal and mentioned seeing historical human genome charts with various flu test results they left behind—non-fatal to humans. Again, he scanned our DNA.

"Damn." Joe laughed. "Those guys were smart!"

"What?" I looked at him, puzzled.

"You see, Rich, they were magicians. Our DNA is changed, and it continues to evolve."

"How do you know that?"

"Look, at ours now compared to these control subjects before the flu."

"Oh, no, Joe! Are we mutants?"

"Sort of... But I don't think the aliens will ever find the hidden knowledge nor the scientists, or their so-called progeny."

"Why not, Joe?"

"Because Rich, the knowledge is in all of us, spread by the flu."

"What?"—I scratched my head.

Joe gave me a serious look ...

"You see, Rich. It's a hide-and-seek game. The key is in their wording. It's a puzzle to be rearranged and filled. I'll translate what the scientists really meant—

"Our people's DNA will naturally combine hidden knowledge as a synergy. Do not seek our progeny till it's safe—that's us, the mutants. We'll break their chains once it becomes a whole part of us. So we must stay resilient and keep having children for it—the knowledge—to become emergent."