Page 70 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Ark Two

made his presence known in certain larger circles by going those
outer-space origin myths one better with his concept of planetary
telomeres. For him, publishing such ideas had no benefit other than
stirring up a hornet’s nest of irritated opponents who predictably felt
he had been poking about where he didn’t belong. That was manifest
in letters published in obscure journals, and Vosky’s replies in self-
defense—I had to read them all in preparation for meeting the man.
The display of dueling nutcases must have tickled Al Magnus, leading
him to place the sky-watcher on his list of worthy cases.
The furor, such as it was, had long since died down. What Kile
Vosky had done was meet the pseudo-creationists on their own
unstable ground with an equally bizarre hypothesis. Why, he wrote,
should any purported genesis be limited to simple biochemicals?
Suppose the master plan for the entire complex of air, land and sea
enabling life to exist came as a package? The barely-understood
phenomenon of how Earth’s present soil, water and atmosphere
evolved in concert with billions of years of increasingly-complex flora
and fauna—tagged with the name of a Greek goddess, Gaia—could
just as easily be following an extraterrestrial blueprint as blindly co-
evolving from scratch. The designer, presuming one existed, might
further have encoded a suicide gene in his plan. Given the element of
chance, multiplied beyond calculation through the enormous
duration of evolution’s progress from protozoa to something as
dangerous as Homo sapiens, building in a fail-safe mechanism
forcing biospherical self-destruction would seem prudent. Without
such a precaution, that putative Great Tinkerer would not be able to
prevent the rise of an uncontrolled intelligent species able to infect
the universe, ultimately threatening the entire exogenetic enterprise.
And Vosky invoked another lady in the Attic pantheon to bear
this terrible function: Atropos, last in line of the Three Fates
spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of each person’s
predestined lifespan. Just as a cell’s DNA contained the recipe for
apoptosis—self-replication fatally switching to self-termination—to
be activated if and when that cell went haywire, becoming an out-of-
control mutagenic rogue, threatening the rest of the body; and again,
as that DNA also was capped at its ends with redundant coding, the
final repetition of which was snipped off each time the cell
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