Free Year Zero by Jeff Long Page B

were flared and black, his skin slick. He had lips, human shaped, but bleached of all colors. His teeth were a mess, crooked in gums too weak to keep order, broken from chewing on bones, rotting. The scalp wanted to grow, but his frog genes stunted it, and the result was pimpled follicles. Half in, half out of the ice, he reached for the lobster and started nipping away the shell. He burrowed into the viscera and took it like a string of spaghetti. All the while, he pretended not to be studying them.
    “Hello, Winston,” said Miranda.
    His ear stubs rotated.
    “How’s my little prince?”
    The monster spoke. He didn’t bark or hoot. His sounds were very close to human speech, a series of garbling and glottal stops. The string of wet noises marched on. He was talking about something with great consideration.
    “It’s real language,” she informed her father. “If you listen carefully, now and then, you can make out certain words. Almost in English. I think his hyoid bone is malformed. He can’t shape sounds. But he definitely has things to say. And he understands me.”
    “You’ve built yourself a pet. A parrot. You taught him words.”
    “That’s the strange part.” Miranda looked back at her father. “The day he was born, he already knew how to speak. He came out of the incubator with a full vocabulary.”
    “Enough,” her father snapped.
    “That’s what I said. I didn’t believe it. But it kept happening.”
    “What,” he demanded.
    “He kept remembering things.”
    He snorted. “Miranda.”
    She went on. “Old things. Things from my past.”
    “Stop.”
    “Memories. My memories. I brought a box of my toys from home. I mixed them with stuff from the Goodwill. He sorted out what was mine.”
    “You’re saying memory is hard-wired into our genetic code?”
    “Or soft-wired. Why not? Genetic diseases are. They become part of us at the cellular level. Metabolic circuitry. Cellular wiring. Whatever you want to call it.”
    “Memory is a genetic disease?” he scoffed.
    “That’s a cynical way of putting it,” she said.
    “I’ve had enough of this.” He turned away.
    “What’s my name, Winston?” she suddenly asked. Her father paused.
    The monster looked up from his lobster. His green eyes were bright and happy. “Mirn-dot,” he said.
    “And him? Who is he?” She pointed at her father, who shook his head sadly.
    Winston had that one all figured out. “Da-da,” he said.
    “Tricks,” her father declared. “You showed him my photograph.”
    Miranda faced her father. His jaw was set. He could stop the bad things that were about to happen with a word. Instead he was going to unleash whoever they were lurking in the forest. Her little Winston was history. They would poison the pond or shoot him or sedate and cage him. She had failed her creation. The old coldness settled into her heart.
    “One big problem with that explanation,” she told her father.
    He waited.
    “I don’t have photos of you to show him.” She went for the jugular. “I threw those out a long time ago.”
    He retreated behind stone eyes. Not a wince. “I’m sorry this hurts you so much,” he said.
    It did. It hurt. Then it did not. Love was no use. Its bonds were false. So she did not say goodbye to her creation. She turned so that her father could not see the tear in her eye, and walked away into the woods.

3
The Descent
    T HE H IMALAYAS
M AY
    G od!” Nathan Lee’s hand twitched. It was watching him, the white face crowning a mass of fur.
    The telephoto jiggled. He lost it. His yeti.
    Metoh-kangmi, the Tibetan refugees had called it, Sherpa for dirty or wild man. The Chinese term was yerin. From the beginning there’d been a chance that this was a wild goose chase, that even if there was a body, it would prove worthless, one more lost yak herder or refugee or frozen ascetic. But it was real. In that single glance, he’d seen something elusive and radically primitive.
    Trembling, Nathan Lee scoped the