After Chen started pointing out discrepancies in the data, Olympia wanted the disease carriers to more closely model the vectors that lived on geese. She’d had Gabe develop a colony of lice that were fed on the actual bodies of geese: geese that had been reduced to their motor function—lobotomized—that she intravenously fed. With the lobotomized geese unable to preen, Gabe could get the numbers of lice they needed from just an approximation of a flock—and the birds themselves wouldn’t feel any pain. Didn’t even need cages. Birds in aquariums. Every time Meadow came down here, the sight of them still triggered her gag reflex. Goose-shaped masses of lice, slowly expanding and contracting with the unmistakable rhythm of breath.

She’d come down to talk to Gabe about the liquid diet going through those tubes, but Gabe was nowhere to be found. Maybe she was in the john? Idly, she began looking at the labels—liquefied plant matter. But what kind? Olympia wanted both geese and lice on a ‘natural’ diet. But what was that? Meadow wondered, remembering adult geese that she’d seen back home, shepherding goslings. When they came to a road, the adults stopped and looked both ways—animals that had evolved to know how to cross streets. They began honking frantically, driving the small ones across as quickly as possible before continuing their peaceful grazing on the other side. Did Gabe need to include that road as part of their eating habits? Or the herbicides that the highway department sprayed along the road? Was that now part of their nature?

And hers? Since tons of debris from the tsunami had shown up in The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, she’d been checking in on it: she followed the studies of anthropologists who mined this Denmark-sized gyre of trash; some part of her stupidly kept hoping that she’d recognize a shoe, or maybe even Nico’s flute in one of the photos taken by marine biologist who monitored ocean life, documenting the way water skaters and other insects had begun laying their eggs on trash—a flip-flop or juice bottle—instead of floating seashells, or gull feathers, as they once had; she couldn’t help but think of rabbits carrying the genes of a fish; cows with the genes of a human; hens who’d had the talpid2 gene switched on, causing them to grow alligator-like teeth, and the Fgf8 and Lef1 genes causing the bones of their skulls to come together as dinosaur-like snouts instead of beaks, and the genes that tell the backbone to stop growing switched off so chickens would develop the tail of a theropod instead of a bird—the embryos growing up to be small neo-dinosaurs instead of hens—just as switching on other genetic switches allowed other researches to rewind the evolutionary clock on other animals, allowing the legs of alligators in the Cincinnati Zoo to grow to the long lengths of their dinosaur ancestors; allowing passenger pigeons, Galápagos tortoises, mastodons, and other extinct animals to fly, crawl, and swim again…. That is, she couldn’t help but wonder what Olympia meant, exactly, when she used the word ‘natural.’