During the flood season, three thousand four hundred sixty two years ago, sisters living within sight of what today we call the White Nile, found a stranded yellow kitten. The girls named their foundling "Pokie," and it lived with them in their father's artisan's hut for more than four years. While stalking mice under the hut's reed roof, Pokie, the cat, became infested with fleas. The flea is among the smallest of animals, a tiny, ugly, humpbacked insect. Like all fleas, the ones infesting Pokie lived by sucking blood. Like us, the flea had intestines, and in their intestines, as in ours, are microscopic bacteria which digest the animal's food. Within the miniscule gut of one of the miniscule fleas being nourished from the yellow cat's warm blood was a single miniscule bacterium in which there was an even more miniscule life-form, a virus. In our day, the virus would come to be called P23RT, but, of course, in the ancient Egyptian days of the artisan's daughters, they had no concept of flea guts or bacteria or viruses. They did, however, understand the regal cobra. Just as Pokie was hunting for a mice meal among the reed roofing, so was a cobra. Within moments of the cat being infested, with the flea which itself was infected with the P23RT virus, the animal was fatally struck by the startled, hissing cobra. The girls found their pet dead when they returned from helping one of their father's wives. Lovingly, they wrapped their yellow cat in a linen and awaited the arrival of their esteemed father. The artisan was a stone finisher. He was working at that time on the tomb of a wealthy district official. I'll call the artisan Tom Laske, but his name was something in Egyptian which I can't begin to pronounce. It just sounded something like Tom Laske. Like all skilled Egyptian artisans, Tom was well paid and well respected. He was a slave, of course, because the whole populous was slaves, at least in theory. They were the property of the king, some ethereal being which neither the artisan or his family had ever seen or expected to see. The next dawn, Tom took the yellow cat to the embalmer. She was working with her helpers embalming bodies at the same memorial complex where the stone finisher was employed. The cat had died by the venom of the uraeus, the sacred cobra, so it was regarded as pure, a pet suitable for the after-life. In consequence, the animal was mummified, attentively wrapped and sold for a handsome profit (payable in leeks) to the local minister who's tomb was under construction. The little feline mummy was laid up in the man's grave. A year went by and then ten years. Then a hundred years went by and then a thousand. It was almost time for Christ to be born. Still the yellow cat, wrapped and mummified, rested snuggly in the now buried tomb. Amid the bright strands of its fur there was the preserved carcass of the flea. Within the flea's petrified gut, within the remains of a desiccated bacteria, was a virus, the P23RT virus. As you may know, a virus is not like other living things. Sometimes it is and sometimes it's not - living, that is. It's not like a mule or a robin. It's not like poison ivy or a willow bush. Those things are either alive or dead and once dead, they can't act like Dracula to come back to life. A virus is different. If you give it a few molecules of water and put it inside some living host such as a flea's digestive bacteria, it will be alive, eat, drink, move around, grow and reproduce. Take away its world and it dies as dead as a fistful of sand. But, then if you give it water again and a host, there it is, moving again, having baby viruses and eating like a horse. And the virus is very clever. Yes, it's tiny, but it's smart, smarter than a mule or a robin and maybe as smart as you or me. The trouble being a virus is you've got no mouth or hands or pencils, so how do you show anyone that you're a genus? Maybe you're psychic. So, the cat mummy was buried until someplace folks were building the Great Wall of China and more time slipped past. People invented Italy and France and England, but time kept dripping away. Someplace somebody was deciding what an ocean was and then discovering America and slaughtering Indians and then exploding atomic bombs and visiting the moon. During all those days and nights the yellow cat and its flea cargo nestled in the dry darkness until a beggar girl fell through the crumbling roof of the buried grave. Fortunately, the girl wasn't badly injured, just a few scrapes. As she brushed herself clean and her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the feline mummy blanketed beneath centuries of dust. It was a great discovery for the child and meant sure money and years of decent meals. The girl who was ten, but too poor to have been given a proper name, so she was just called by a number: "Fourth," wrapped her treasure up in her robe and smuggled it home to her mother. Her mother carefully cleaned up the elegant wrappings and offered the antiquity to a dealer. The proprietor of the shop, a young man with a knife in his belt, offered her a hundred dollars. The woman tried a different shop where she was offered more than two hundred dollars. At last she sold the ancient treasure for seven hundred dollars, American. That wasn't all. Fourth bargained for and received a thousand dollars, that's a fortune to an Egyptian beggar girl, just for showing an American man where the tomb was located. The mummy of the yellow cat was promptly sold to a collector. He smuggled it home to Canada. It was then donated to a university in Pittsburgh where it was put onto a shelf in the cellar and forgotten. After thousands of years and thousands of miles, the yellow cat languished unnoticed until Corporal Timothy Greenwater found it. A corporal is somebody who can't quite make it to sergeant. It's a minor military rank, but Corporal Greenwater was a prison guard, not a soldier. Prison guards don't do much, but they get paid a lot of money. They lock up citizens and idle to watch their imprisoned victims. Corporal Greenwater made a lot of money idling, but he spent more than he made. He couldn't keep a wife. They kept dumping him. You can understand why. Each time a woman got rid of him, he had to pay a fine called alimony, a kind of compensation for the wife having endured him. To make ends meet, the prison guard took a part time janitorial job at the university. That's where he found the mummy of the yellow cat. Nobody seemed to even remember that the ancient treasure was moldering on the basement shelf so, being a prison guard who figured that he was above the law, Timothy took some photos of the mummy and listed it for sale on an Internet auction. He pretended to be a scientist (prison guards are notorious phonies) and listed all the information and details which were included on and in the storage box in which the artifact was kept. Within a month, he'd gotten bids of five figures, almost enough to buy another wife. He gleefully sold the treasure to a Doctor Morgan James, a mad scientist from Penn State. The mummy was used for treatises for a pair of doctoral candidates. It was x-rayed, weighed, scanned, measured, analyzed, photographed, probed, sampled and eventually, it was very carefully opened to examine the embalmed animal. But, the yellow cat was not the only embalmed denizen within the wrappings. Looking for pollen, dust and other telltale debris, the two ambitious doctoral students carefully vacuumed the yellow fur. The air may seem dry to you, but it isn't. It's loaded with water. That's called humidity. It doesn't require much water for a virus, even a thirty four hundred and sixty two year-old one to wake up. Then Terry sneezed. Terry Hill the younger of the two graduate students, had been suffering from a cold. He wasn't one of your neater persons, even at the bestof times. Just as the investigators were sealing their vacuum samples, he sneezed. It was a herculean, explosive, head cold kind of a sneeze. The blast wafted away bits of the precious specimens so carefully collected from the ancient yellow fur including the crumbling exoskeleton of the Egyptian flea. The violent turbulence shattered the insect corpse as if it were a mere chard of glass. The P23RT virus burst joyously free from its encapsulating bacterial shell. Invisible, imperceptible, it danced happily through the laboratory, an alien in a strange universe. Almost at once, it was drawn up into the air filtration system, but the pores of a filter were no obstacle to a virus. They were like open garage-doors and the virus, now free and absorbing water, was like a mouse dashing through them. P23RT was spewed into the damp night air high above the summer campus. As it slowly settled in a dewdrop, Professor John Eppler and his lady-friend, an obese woman with ratty red hair and the aroma of boiled cabbage, passed below holding hands and chatting about buying stock in Amarillo Industries, the Texas makers of the Bush Family lethal injection apparatus, on the Nasdaq market. The P23RT dewdrop was inhaled into the fat woman's splayed left nostril. Before Diana Hollis, the Professor's date got home, P23RT had disembarked from the droplet and fallen into the inviting mucus of her oozing sinus. A virus is a strand of genetic blueprint, DNA, not unlike the stuff that fills the nucleus of each human cell. Human genetic materials are like tangled heaps of, unspooled recording tape packed into the nucleus. The human genes are something like miles-long knotted noodles of spaghetti; just a maze of opportunities. In your cell, each of the enormously long filaments of DNA is composed, like a zipper, of separate discrete chemical forks. The P23RT virus felt right at home. It fit right in. In moments it had invited itself not just into a cell nucleus, but it spliced itself directly into Diana's genetic identity. It covertly became part of one of her genes and so, part of her. Mrs. Hollis had the urge for chocolate. The woman imagined that she could smell it. She hurried home and baked a devil's food cake. Then, she ate it. She didn't know why she did it. Generally, she didn't like devil's food cake. Her husband liked it. That's the reason she never baked it. Like a garden variety wife, Mrs. Hollis did her best to make Jose, her husband miserable. During the night, Mrs. Hollis rolled her rotund bulk out of bed. She would have baked another devil's food cake, but she lacked the ingredients. Only half dressed, she ventured to the all-night market and bought three dozen Hershey bars, the plain, not the almond. She ate them; everyone. In the morning, the woman's nose itched. Otherwise, she was back to normal except she felt affection for Jose, her silly old husband. She even felt a bit guilty for cheating on him. Not guilty enough to stop, you understand, but it did cross her mind. It was a tad unnerving. It appears that our genes, that is, the colonies of our genetic materials, build and control us by cleverly manufacturing chemicals, mostly proteins. The substances brewed up by the genes make us look and behave like people instead of like robins or willow bushes. You don't really do what you want to do. You do what your genes whisper to you to do. You don't look the way you choose to look. You look the way your DNA builds you to look with only two hands and not very many heads. Pretty much, we are each just a big dummy manipulated by submicroscopic molecular zippers. It's all very involved and not very interesting, but one thing is that the DNA doesn't really stay put. It moves and reproduces. So, there was a wee cell up Diana's nose which harbored the tiny P23RT virus. The virus was now attached to and controlling one of the red haired woman's genes, making it something completely different, completely new, completely unhuman. It's not really a mutation, but that's what I'll call it. After a little while, the cell divided and with it, the gene divided, duplicating the P23RT addition. Then there were two cells carrying the P23RT rider. The next day, both the cells divided again so that there were four mutated cells. Get the picture? Each day the mutants doubled. On the tenth day, you're up to the tenth power of two. That's 1024. On the twentieth day, it's the twentieth power of two. That's over a million. After a month, it's over a billion mutants. You can see why, by Labor Day, Diana was a sporting quite grotesque schnoz. She was incorrectly diagnosed as having cancer. The doctor, Craig Hoffman, a specialist from bustling Mount Union, Pennsylvania, cut off her face. He left her a bellybutton-like dimple for a mouth where she could suck cocoa. He also left the right extreme of her reddish mustache. She had a surreal, Salvador Dali, appearance. She nolonger had to scheme about cheating on her husband, or even worry about his coming home. She was not desirable. Oddly, she had a proclivity for the polka and crossword puzzles, the really difficult ones from the Times. While her tumor had been growing, Diana gorged herself on chocolate of very kind. She'd developed other strange habits, too. She composed limericks (mostly about railroad accidents) and was often nice to her husband even though he refused to kiss her good night. She had no idea why she developed these bizarre behaviors, but it was one of the effects of P23RT. She also sneezed. She sneezed often. She sneezed hard. With each sneeze, thousands or tens of thousands of mutant mucus cells gushed out. Most of them simply died, but a few thousands colonized new hosts and continued the process of taking over the world for the P23RT virus. Diana Hollis had a cat, a yellow one named Epidote. She sneezed on her poor pet perhaps a hundred times, until, sometimes the animal dripped. Each time the pet was further infected with mutated cells; in her ears, up her nose, on her modeled fur, even down her throat, into her gut, across into her blood stream, around to her head and into her pussy-brain. Cats aren't people and brain cells aren't sinus cells and being attached to this fragment of DNA is as different from that strand of DNA as dumplings are different from kangaroos, so you can't tell what will happen with P23RT in the cortex of Epidote's brain. In just the same way, you can't guess what the outcome may be when the viral agents were pumped around through the Yellow cat's arteries to her gonads. A yellow cat might think a limerick, but she had no vocal organs which would allow her to articulate it. A cat might conceive limericks, but she had no hands to hold the pen to record her ingenuity. How frustrating it would be to have the line. "Your wife did a back-bending stunt" and not to be able to couple it with the humorous rhyming words. It didn't trouble Epidote. She curled up on Diana's pillow growing smarter and more devious each time her cells duplicated. In the morning, she schemed ways to get chocolate. In the afternoon, she read minds. In the evening, she seduced tom cats. And in the dark of the night, she sent powerful thought messages out across the universe seeking kindred minds. By Valentines Day, there was a litter of kittens, well, they were something similar to kittens, but different. The P23RT fragment resided in each and every cell, making a new, never before kind of animal, a brand new kind of living thing. Do you suppose that this is how Adam got started? Epidote, now a kind of psychic genius, delivered her litter in a pit she'd constructed for the purpose beneath the porch. The humans didn't know that they existed. Epidote was smart enough to realize that humans are the enemy of all life forms, even themselves. Before there were weaned, the five cat-like creatures, plump, long necked, possessed of an elongated central toe and of the ability to grasp with their prehensile tails as if they were hands, were reaching out with their minds, reading the thoughts of their enemies, the humans. Like their mother, they were yellow and furry, unlike her, they were organized, deadly serious and smarter that your average rocket scientist. They had direct mental access to any of the thoughts of any nearby human minds. The kittens didn't have tools or dexterity or technology or cash enough to buy Hershey bars (plain, not almond) when they wanted them, but they had the superior gift which would give them eventual dominance of the planet. By spring, jointly, the yellow mutants worked out their simple and direct strategy. Don't compete with the humans, use them. Think for a moment about the good-old Lone Ranger and his trusty steed, Silver. LR could never have competed with Silver. Silver was massive and powerful and liked mares. But competition never came up. LR simply took charge of the mighty charger and utilized him for what he was good for. That's what the kittens did, too. It's a short step from reading people's thoughts to writing them, from reaping ideas to sowing them. The kittens simply planted the thoughts they wanted their human puppets to think. By summer, the human community was rebuilding the world as the kittens (they called themselves Helicoid) needed it to be rebuilt. It will take a while, but it's under way. The next time you're drawn to the candy counter or to the bakery counter by the aroma of a devil's foods delight, ask yourself: "why do I think I want that Snickers?"

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