Distant Ancestors
by Jennifer Thomas
I twist the collection tube around in my hand, undecided. I’m loathe to help populate a DNA database, given its potential misuses. But I’m looking everywhere for answers.
Like so many moms, I suffered through pregnancy dreams about birthing monstrous non-human creatures. Then Yasmin arrived with her shock of black hair, her searching gaze, all the requisite fingers and toes: perfect. She turns three next month, and she’s outwardly normal in every way. But the way she experiences time, that’s far from normal.
“We can name the cat Bootsie,” she says one day.
We don’t have a cat. That is, not until a week later, when a straggly stray with four white paws wanders into our yard and adopts us.
Yasmin wakes up screaming one night. “Daddy’s on fire!” she sobs, and I crawl into bed with her. She’s never met her father, a Navy pilot; I haven’t yet told her about his helicopter crash in Lebanon. I was nine months pregnant when he died.
Could DNA anomalies explain Yasmin’s prescience? Unlikely, but I take the leap. We make a game out of collecting a lot of her spit to fill up the collection tube. She glances at the box as I seal it up to mail the tube.
The ethnicity results we get back are unsurprising: ancestors mostly from England and Wales, a smattering from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. No worrisome health markers, thank God. But the unusual exchanges continue.
“Talk about Jeanie, Mama?” Jeanie was my best friend in junior high school. I’m reading her obituary when Yasmin queries me.
Emails from the DNA testing company occasionally chirp into my inbox: “Yasmin Hughes, join now to learn more about your traits and connections! Book a trip through our partners to your countries of origin!” I ignore those.
Out of the blue come new messages marked “Personal and Urgent.” Uh-oh. I read the most recent one, which requests an in-person conversation. I reply to the message, listing some dates I’m available to meet. Then I play whack-a-mole with my anxious imaginings, waiting for the agreed-upon meeting.
A week later, in the middle of story time with Yasmin, the doorbell chimes.
“It’s the gene people, Mama.”
How does she know that? Does she sense who’s outside the door? Can she tell what’s about to happen?
I open the door. Two people occupy my porch: androgynous, youthful, expressionless. “I’m Rosalind, and this is my colleague, Nettie,” says one. “We’re here about your DNA.”
I whisper to Yasmin to go to her room. She peers at the visitors, then trundles away. I motion the pair to sit.
“Thanks for meeting with us, Ms. Hughes.” says Rosalind. “We realize our cryptic emails might have alarmed you.” She nods toward her colleague. “Nettie is our outreach specialist. She can explain.”
“Do you know how ancestry tests work?” asks Nettie. “All humans have about 99.9 percent of their DNA in common. No point in analyzing that. Commercial tests focus on DNA markers where people tend to vary from one another.
“But Ros here, a genomics scientist, decided to look beyond those markers. What she found in some of the samples — including the one you sent, Ms. Hughes — was out of this world. Literally. No adenine, cytosine, guanine, or thymine. The nucleotides she found have never been detected in life on Earth.”
The hair on the back of my neck prickles. “What are you saying? Aliens?”
“Yes, extraterrestrial DNA. We’ve exhausted every other possibility,” says Rosalind. “So we’d like to ask you a few questions.
“Did any of your relatives — grandparents, great-grandparents, even farther back — have experiences suggesting alien interaction? Lost stretches of time, unexplained scars, levitation-related complaints?”
There’s that story involving cows on my grandfather’s farm, told to general hilarity at family gatherings. Was it true after all? I shake my head.
“Can you tell us about your daughter? She’s adorable, by the way! Does she show any unusual behaviors or traits: psychic abilities, precocious interest in adult matters...”
My mother-bear instinct rears up on its haunches. I interrupt, hoping to throw them off the trail. “She’s only two.”
Rosalind and Nettie exchange a glance I can’t decipher.
Rosalind keeps talking, telling me my family is not alone, there’s strength in numbers, it’s a new day for humanity.
Do I want to know all this? Well, I guess that cow has left the barn. “Listen, you’ll need to come back another time. This is a lot to process,” I tell my guests.
“We understand,” says Nettie. “We’ll be in touch.” On their way out, she hands me a business card: a QR code nestled inside a double helix on a background of stars. I sink onto the couch, scan the code, and pull up a manifesto.
For millennia, people have wondered: are we alone in the universe? We now have proof we are not. That proof has emerged, not in the form of strange beings or flying objects, but as code within our very bodies.
While we celebrate this wondrous development, we also expect resistance, denial, and suppression. Some will use our discoveries to sow fear and division. The xenodiverse community can show our fellow humans: there is nothing to fear, and so much to learn.
Will you join us?
I close my eyes. I thrill to the thought of star-pocked maps locating our ancestors not just on Earth’s continents but in distant, beckoning galaxies. My stomach lurches as if I’m escaping gravity’s bonds.
Wondrous, yet... those glorious starry maps could relegate people with alien DNA to less-than-human status. Like the “one drop” rule kicked some not-so-distant relatives across the color line. There go my neck-hairs again.
“Will you join us?”
How can I decide? I tiptoe to Yasmin’s bedroom. Curled up on her bed, she eyes me for a moment, then speaks: “Say yes, Mama. I want to find my friends. They’re waiting for me.”
Copyright © 2024 by Jennifer Thomas
