For you see someone–it is not entirely clear who, and it never will be–must have begun a kind of experiment long ago. They took the basic building blocks of life on our planet, amino acids, DNA, RNA, and crafted it into something as beautiful as it is horrifying. The resulting genome had over 1,000,000,000,000 base pairs, several orders of magnitude greater than a human at 3,200,000,000 base pairs. Like most other organisms, including humans, 98% of that genetic information does not encode for any proteins or other genetic expressions. But unlike humans–indeed, unlike any other organism–that additional information encodes something far different.

It is, quite literally, a genetic memory.

As near as we can tell, the data written into that genetic code contains internal and external sensory information, converted into base pairs through a mechanism that is thus far unknown. The amount of information thus encoded is incalculable, and it is passed on from organism to organism, accumulating more information as it goes.

Even more uniquely, the 2% of that massive genome is mutable. The organism reproduces by stripping out that part of its genome and creating what can best be conceptualized as a virus, which then ‘infects’ and copies the missing information, as well as the massive genetic memory, into a host. When that host reproduces, the resulting organism has its functional DNA but also a massive genetic memory spanning centuries if not aeons.

It’s that process, a sort of blasphemous evolution, that has guaranteed the organism’s survival to the present day.

It’s that process which has given it a human genome and the knowledge necessary to remake the world.

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