Oddlands Magazine: Genetic Demon, Memetic Angel by Robert L. Read
I had just nailed my extremophile homework and had dug back into my paper exploring the possibility of endosymbiotic evolution of the myofibril when someone knocked on my front door. Upon opening the door I could see immediately that he was either a Christian or gay, or more likely both, since he was extremely well-groomed.”I’m doing Christian service; I’ve come to spread the Good News,” he said.
I initially thought to say “Go spread it in a cow pasture where it belongs!” or to grab my crotch and say “Service THIS!” But he had a challenging glint in his eye, so I invited him in.
He extended his hand and said “Christoper R. Theophilus, but you can call me Rex. Oh, I see you’re a fan of science fiction,” he said, eyeing the heaps of books on my kitchen table. “Did you know that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle were devout Christians?”
“Don’t leave out Gene Wolfe. Of course, Heinlein, Herbert, and Asimov were not. Have you ever read them?”
He raised his eyes and made a quick gesture with his hand. “Perhaps a short story or something somewhere. I try to discern that which might cause me to stumble.”
Wow, I thought. He speaks Christianese like my Aunt Mitzie.
He continued, “But let me cut right to the chase. Are you, sir, saved? Are you going to Heaven, or Hell?”
That was not my favorite battleground, so I ducked and counter-punched.
“Buddy, do you believe in evolution?”
He smiled smugly. “The theory of evolution? It is an interesting theory, but no, I do not. I believe the world was created exactly as described in Genesis.”
I let go with a cross that should have rattled his brain: “Then you must interpret the book figuratively since Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 represent separate and inconsistent accounts of the Creation, which cannot both be literally correct.”
But he took the punch with no damage and replied, “No, they, I mean it, is literally and inerrantly true and completely consistent, and evolution is a hypothesis of which we have no need.”
Ahh, I thought, so he is guilty of the sin of pride, and considers himself well-read. I’m sure glad I don’t suffer from that.
I jabbed, “The sick and the lame, whose health and very lives depend upon medicine, and therefore upon an understanding of biology, which in turn depends on an understanding of Darwin’s theory, might disagree.”
He ducked and tried for an upper-cut. “Well, I see you are scientific man, perhaps even are called to medicine. Let me put the question to you bluntly: are there no holes in Mr. Darwin’s theory? Is there nothing that it fails to explain? May we have no doubt as to its truth?”
Time for a clinch. “As you have no doubt been coached, there are truckloads that it fails to explain. The purpose of a theory is not to explain everything, but to explain something. No scientist would claim that Darwin’s theory is true…merely that it fits the facts, and has tremendous explicative and predictive power. This is the test of a good theory, and the theory of evolution is as well-evidenced and valuable as it gets.”
He took a step back, but kept swinging. “Ah, a Popperian. But a good theory should be falsifiable, should it not? Is there anything that could disprove the theory of evolution in your mind?”
“I might ask the same of your theories. But, yes, I can think of three ways that it could be falsified, if we mean the idea that all life on Earth arose through evolution in one way or another.”
My eyes unfocused as I continued my own thoughts. “One, we could find a single organism that cannot be placed in phylogenetic relationship to others. That is, find a single plant, animal or fungus, or more precisely a single bacterium, archeon, or eukaryote that does not have DNA, or has DNA which is completely unrelated to any existing organism, and cannot be classified more or less sensibly on the tree of life, by which I mean the phylogenetic one, not the Edenic one. But none such has so far been found.”
“I suppose that rolling mop doesn’t count?” said my visitor, pointing at my pet English Angora rabbit, which was trying to play with the cat as usual.
“That, buddy, is Mrs. Phipps, evidence of the power of selective breeding. The second mechanism by which it could be invalidated, in terms of explaining terrestrial life, would be to construct a mathematical model of evolution which proves that insufficient generations have existed since the Earth solidified to explain the present, demonstrable, biodiversity. Of course, that would still leave the panspermia hypothesis, or cause us to question some basic factor, such as…mutation rate…”
I trailed off, but murmured a quiet “Thank you.” The missionary had led me to an idea that was fresh, at least to me, and that, due to my mathematical and computer skills, I might be uniquely qualified to explore.
I realized my visitor was waving his hands in front of my eyes. How long had I been thinking?
He moved toward the door. “Well, I can see that my witnessing has started you thinking, perhaps even raised a doubt or two. That is quite unusual, I don’t mind saying. Most people have such closed minds! May I call upon you next week to continue this discussion?”
#
Fifty-seven sleepless hours later, the little letters on my computer monitor seemed to float constantly upward, but never get any further from the bottom. It seemed that I had made the scientific discovery of a lifetime: biodiversity as we know it could not be explained without positing wide variability in mutation rate. Oh, sure, occasionally interspecific recombination creates some mulish hybrid. But recombination only gets you so far—you still have to have mutation, the raw engine of evolution.
My proof was conclusive, as far as I could tell without sleep. There must be a gene that controls the chance of mutation, and this gene must become active in small populations under stress to allow them to mutate away from maladaption. We can observe normal mutation and viability rates. Edgerton had in fact noticed an increase in mutation among isolated populations, ascribing it to environmental factors…but the increased mutability ain’t malnutrition, and it ain’t maladaptive. It is, in fact, God’s plan… did I say that? I better go to bed…
#
I woke up and stumbled over the empty energy drink cans to change Mrs. Phipps’ water. I looked over my proof, but it didn’t seem so compelling now. It was like the Drake equation—everyone would just argue over the values of the variables. I could probably get a PhD out of it. But the real prize, (the Nobel prize?), the game-changing move, was yet to be found. All I needed was to find the gene, or the complex, that controlled mutation rate.
Okay, this wouldn’t be too hard, I thought. The gene complex controlling the mutation rate had to exist in most multicellular animals. It must be concerned with the transcription apparatus. Should be notable in isolated populations. I had a good LISP compiler and the computerized public-domain genome databases, the dictionary of life, right on my desk. Almost every organism on earth naked and nailed to the table.
It took less then 12 hours to find the three-gene complex. Right there if you know what to look for, chromosomally linked to the homeobox complex in mammals. Theoretical data matching empirical data…tiny populations, such as the ghost and remnant species at the brink of extinction, have the mutation rates fifty times higher than the thriving weed species.
To construct the actual activator of the gene complex took 36 hours and a case of micro-brew given to some graduate students with access to a sequencer. I now had five grams of a serum that, when injected into any animal, would temporarily turn on the mutation sequence. The organism would be susceptible to every kind of mutagen, and no genetic damage would be repaired. Even a simple accident of digestion could cause contamination. But why be so crude, when we have modern technology at our fingertips? Why not deliver the contamination directly, to be overtranscribed? Finally, the supreme point was that the process should in theory be reversible, like restoring a damaged software file from a backup.
I remembered an inspirational fortune-cookie message that came up on my computer:
“Human cardiac catheterization was introduced by Werner Forssman in 1929. Ignoring his department chief, and tying his assistant to an operating table to prevent her interference, he placed a ureteral catheter into a vein in his arm, advanced it to the right atrium [of his heart], and walked upstairs to the x-ray department where he took the confirmatory x-ray film. In 1956, Dr. Forssman was awarded The Nobel Prize.”
But Dr. Forssman ain’t got nothing on me for using himself as a guinea pig, oh no. I simply mixed the mutation activator with some recombinase and reverse transcriptase to form what you might call a “Mr. Hyde” serum. Mixed with the DNA of any selected target organism and then injected into a host, it would turn on mutation while splicing in the target organism DNA, the “contaminant”, into the DNA of the host. All I needed now was a careful choice of a target organism and the Hyde serum, and I could make Dr. Forssman look like a chump. Or chimp.
Let’s see—a bear? Perhaps not. A whale? Danger of bloating. What would really grab the scientific world by the short hairs? Something that would get me a dinner-date with the Queen of Sweden and convince all the fundamentalists simultaneously. Then, it hit me. A bat. I would turn myself into a man-bat. Batman. Fangs. Wings! Finally, my brother would have to admit I had beaten him at something. This was going to be great!
As a precaution, I made up a batch of Hyde serum and mixed it with unfiltered blood from Mrs. Phipps. I injected half of it into the cat. After only 24 hours, he seemed perfectly healthy, was much hairier, and decidedly less aloof in his behavior. He hopped around, nibbling on the house plants. I considered that a sufficient test, and neglected the other half of the serum.
It didn’t take long to procure a few grams of vampire bat blood; there are some weird people in this town. I designed my own tetrapod-inhibit-ase to promote the transformation to a six-limbed body-plan. With the right equipment, and a little selectivity of the chromosomes, I was ready. I drew a few units of my own blood and put them in the freezer. Sort of backing-up the hard-drive. Can’t be too careful in the pursuit of science. Then I mixed up 1 gram of Hyde, 1 gram of essence of Dracula, and injected my bicep.
#
Twenty-four hours later, I had very small wings that I could wiggle. I was hairier. The sound of coins clinking together grated on me like a leaf-blower. I could hear the flight of mosquitoes about 30 yards away. My canines and ears had a definite pointedness to them that made me a bit shy of going out in the daylight.
The worst side effect was that my testicles had swollen to the size of pears. Now I ask you, how is it adaptive for a small creatures that flies to carry a disproportionate scrod like that? And the really galling part, the thing I just couldn’t stand, was that this increase in size was not proportional. In fact, the naughtiest bit of all seemed to have actually gotten smaller. This was intolerable.
I used another gram of the Hyde serum to make the adjustment that was most obvious. A gram of bull’s blood, with a hasty excision of those gene areas that seemed to relate to the mental apparatus of the bovine, and I was just about to shoot up, when I heard a knock on the door.
The missionary had come back.
“Notice anything different?” I said.
He eyed me warily. “You’re shorter,” he said.
“Not for long! But what about my ears? Do they seem longer to you?”
“Um…I didn’t notice them before, but yes, they do seem to be on the longish, and hairy, side of normal.”
“Look at this!” I opened my mouth wide below my pug nose. My fangs were quite prominent. There’s a lot of blood flow in the mouth, which drives the change faster.
He eyed me with frank disgust.
I’m afraid I gloated a little: “I win, I win! I am living, absolute proof of evolution. But I really must thank you, as you gave me the idea to explore the question: can known mutation rates explain observed genetic diversity? Look here,” I said, taking the test tube rack out of the fridge. “You gave me the idea of searching for the mutability theorem,and that led me to the mutability gene complex. I have constructed a serum that activates it. Mix it with a little blood and inject it into anything, and you know what you get? Thing One plus Thing Two! A perfect, and, so far, viable and mostly functional recombination. I have injected myself with blood from a vampire bat.”
I turned and peeled off my T-shirt. I wiggled my wings at him.
“You know what this proves? Evolution, once and for all. Seeing is believing. I am evolving into the Gothic blood-lapping nightmare of sexually repressed Victorians. No one will doubt once they see me! Your meme is finished!”
“You have proved nothing!” I was startled by his defiance in the face of my rather purple demonstration of the complete emptiness of his philosophy. “By your own admission,” he continued, “you are but a recombination of existing organisms. Such chimerical abominations prove nothing! New species cannot arise that way. You have not explained how life arose from inert matter without the Breath of God. You have just swirled two of God’s creations together; you might as well be stirring paint! And furthermore, you are hideous. Nobody is going to choose science if you are its poster-child.”
I held the syringe up and said, “Oh, yeah? We’ll see about that, buddy-boy.” I tapped it, and pushed out the bubbles until a little pink stream squirted out. “Watch me make an adjustment!” I jabbed the needle into my shoulder and pushed the plunger down. A little too quickly, actually; it stung like the dickens.
But when I looked up, my missionary had left.
It took me a while to realize he had swiped my serum.
#
I had grown an impressive set of horns. Although still pot-bellied, my musculoskeletal system had turned into a thick six and half feet of rock-hard muscle. I was fully furred in glossy black, and my wingspan was now 9 feet, at a full stretch. I could get up a pretty good breeze, although I had no hope of actually flying. The previous imbalance that had disturbed me had been imposingly, although impractically, corrected. I was starting to crave more fiber in my diet, thank God.
I was planning the press conference which would publicly launch me into the pantheon of great scientists when the front door imploded.
“He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. Mark 16:16,” shouted the proselytizer in rich voice full of stern indignation.
The nincompoop was up to his old tricks, but with a new attitude. He was seven feet tall, tawny with gold and black accents, and covered with down and fur. His wings were real beauties, although obviously unwieldy. The were wedged against the door jam; I hate it when that happens. He yanked them through the door, with some obvious discomfort, and stood with them pressed against the sheetrock of my foyer.
I was impressed. “Wow, not bad. Would you like to join me in my press conference? How close are you to flying? What kind of bird did you use?”
“…they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. 2 Samuel, 1:23.”
“Ah, well, that could be a problem…eagles don’t need to be very intelligent. Lions, like all cats, have very smooth brains and very small neocortexes. If you didn’t filter out the wrong genes, their genes might have unwrinkled your cerebrum. Have you had any loss of mental acuity?”
He had a great beard that thinned as it reached his lower eyelids. It glowed golden and fine like the hair of a blond child on a summer morning. Moving from his chest outward to his extremities, the fur gave way to feathers. He radiated fervor as he said: “And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, … both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Revelation 19:20.”
I tried to calm him down. “Ee-ee-easy, killer. Let’s not get hysterical.”
His arms and hands, like mine, were mostly unchanged, except for the claws, and his were velveted. He lifted his left foot level with his huge amber eyes and my beady black ones. I leaned forward to examine it. The heel-to-toe foot bones were greatly lengthened as in birds, and he in fact stood on his toes. Impressively covered with a mixture of feathers and fur, the toes themselves were like a huge elongated cat’s paw, though a bit scaly, like the foot of a pigeon, at the ends. Suddenly four-inch long claws popped out of the toes, and he brought them down in an arc that ripped open the skin and fat on my belly. Luckily, they got no purchase on my abdominal muscles themselves, which were now very thick and as hard as a gargoyle’s gut.
“Hey! That was totally uncalled for!” I yelled. My voice sounded like the clanging of a dumpster lid. He raised his right foot to rake me again as the left one clattered onto my floor. This was just unacceptable. I couldn’t show up to my press conference covered in bandages. I put my head down and charged. My horns were wide enough that I hit him in the chest without hooking him. I knocked him out the door, although his wings caught on the doorframe and broke his fall. He rolled over backward onto his feet, and spread his wings. He beat them once, and I was quite pleased to see that they helped him leap back a few feet.
“Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil! Ephesians 6:11.” He ran, like a gigantic chicken, to an old pickup that was parked there, and pulled a strange contraption out of the bed and hooked it over his shoulders between his wings.
“What the heck is that?” I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone for a bovine; something told me this was dangerous, but my conscious mind couldn’t identify it.
“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. Genesis 3:24.”
A jet of flaming gasoline hit me in the chest. It hurt like nobody’s business! I leaped upward and my wings spread reflexively. I should have come down, but I didn’t—I had some serious hang time. My fur was burning and creating the most godawful stink; the smoke blinded and choked me.
Instead of blasting me, my enraged opponent leveled the nozzle of his flamethrower and spewed flames into my house though the portal that was once the front door.
Luckily, I have a yellow belt in Aikido. The one thing that master Bob taught me is this: when in doubt, give your opponent a hug.
I landed on the nincompoop and his hardware. The flamethrower clattered on to the asphalt as I embraced him. I pressed my belly and chest against him, both to smother the flames and to keep him from being able to rake me with those talons.
He grabbed hold of my horns and twisted, but I was bull-headed, and my neck seemed to be stronger than his arms. He lifted himself by my horns and spread his legs, wrapping them around me. I hoped the neighbors weren’t watching. Just then I felt his talons sink into my gluteus maximus. I had forgotten that the tibio-tarsal articulation of birds bends ventrally, rather than dorsally. I arched my back, like a parody of a little boy after a swat with a paddle, breaking his grip on my horns. But his talons were still embedded in my hiney. His mass swung downward, slowed by his widespread wings. When his head hit the asphalt, I was able to yank his talons out of my bohunkus.
My fur was no longer in flames, but my house was. I ran into the burning building and grabbed Mrs. Phipps’ cage and the gymbag holding some of my early experimental apparatus, and hurtled through the sliding glass doors into the backyard. I hope the cat got out.
I raced around to the front. The missionary was jammed into the pickup, with one wing hanging out the window and the other filling the cab. The sound of his bald tires squealing was like a railway spike in my head. The acrid burning rubber made me dizzy, but I put my head down and charged after him. I was gaining until he got into third gear.
#
I’d rather not explain everything that happened before night fell. Life is hard when everyone is afraid of you and the cops stop you just for walking down the street. Now I know how black guys feel. But once night fell, it was easier to pretend I was in costume, and once I got to the Goth club I was okay. The dim light suited my eyes. They let me bring Mrs. Phipps inside, which I’m sure was against their policy. They didn’t even ask for my ID.
I sat in the back and ordered a pitcher of beer and had a little think. My house was destroyed. All of my research notes were destroyed. My press conference would have to be delayed. I was trapped in a body fit for Asmodeus himself. My blood samples were destroyed; maybe that was what the missionary had wanted. All in all, I can’t say that his action showed much Christian charity.
For the first time in my life, I was grateful that my brother and I were identical twins. I could, of course, make more Hyde serum, if I could get to a lab without being incarcerated. But I was feeling a definite loss of cognitive ability. I did not remember the exact gene sequences in question, although I could, at least at the moment, visualize how to recreate them. With the Hyde serum and my brother’s blood, I could return to humanity. I had wanted my brother to see me triumph on TV, not see me slink up to his back door begging for his blood.
Looking at the club patrons, I realized that I was having bestial thoughts about them. My fear at my transformation mounted. As the waitress in the black vinyl pants brought the third pitcher, I could hear her heart beating. My sense of smell was unpleasantly heightened. She used Irish Spring soap and a baby-powder based deodorant, she had eaten a cheesburger before she came to work, and she smoked unfiltered Camels on her breaks, but her hair smelled like cloves, from somebody else’s habit. I could smell other parts of her, too, and although a gentleman such as myself should not allow himself to descend into unseemliness, there were certain physiological reactions that made me think it was perhaps best to get back to a more human state as quickly as possible.
To do that, I needed two things: my brother’s blood, and some Hyde serum. It would take a week or more to make the Hyde serum, and the chance that I could do so without getting hauled off to the hoosegow seemed remote.
No, I would have to pay a visit to Mr. Christopher Rex Theophilus first, to see if he had any of the serum left. Of course, he might not want to part with the serum. He didn’t seem to have minded using it; his transformation was as deep as mine. He was probably an ex-junkie or something. Of course, he had almost certainly not filtered out any of the chromosomes or gene sequences. His side effects could be a lot worse than mine; he was obviously dangerous and bird-brained. Of course, that might not be a change. But how to find him?
Well, its a small town. How many Theophili can there be? I borrowed a computer from some drunk old poser who was falling off his stool but I was stunned to find no relevant search results for “Theophilus”. As slowly as grass grows, a thought formed in my quasi-bovine brain. Christopher Rex Theophilus. Beloved-of-Christ, King, Lover-of-God. A pseudonym.
Technology had failed me. Who was I kidding about being a gentleman? To find him, I would have to call on my inner beast. Anger at this degradation welled up inside me and burst out in a bellow that rattled bottles above the bar and sent the club patrons running for cover. What an embarrassing loss of self-control!
Before the bouncers could recover their poise, I left carrying all my worldly possessions: Mrs. Phipps and my gymbag, which in addition to some junk from my first experimentation, held a beat up copy of Dune. A line from that book came back to me: “A feint within a feint within a feint….” But I figured with Mr. Theophilus, a single feint would be enough for me to achieve a final, if only symbolic, victory. I hopped five yards onto the biggest Harley out in front of the club and kicked it to life while jimmying the ignition with my index claw.
I rode to where the tire marks began and parked the bike. I could still smell the truck and its tires, distinct from all other traffic odors like a red thread in a white cloth. Whenever it had slowed I quailed. Part of me was reacting to the cow-terrifying musk of a male lion. Well, I am much more than just a cow, big-boy.
I detoured to pay a little visit to a pawn shop to borrow a shotgun and a hacksaw.
#
When I walked into the nincompoop’s house, he was busy painting a Bible verse on the ceiling, Revelation 4:7. He actually glowed with a warm, golden aura. He must of swallowed a firefly when he first used the Hyde serum. (We scientists are good at thinking of hypothetical explanations like that.)
“By the blood! A devil comes to assault the Angel of the Lord!” said the missionary in a deep, melodious, and well-modulated voice.
I started fast-talking while walking into the kitchen. “Uh, Hi. Look. I really need some of the serum you stole from me. I’m starting to have dangerous thoughts. Is it in the fridge? It should be kept cool. If you have enough for both of us, we can both go back.”
He intoned, “Why should I wish to quit being an Angel of the Lord to be a sinful man once again? Behold, I can fly: And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. Psalm 18:10.” He hopped up and down a few times. Obviously, the bird-plus-cat essence wasn’t working out for him.
I walked over to the freezer and opened it. Sure enough, there was a blood bag.
I took the offensive now. “You burned down my house, set me on fire, and almost killed Mrs. Phipps. I figure you intended to destroy my blood-backup, my computer, and my notes, and with it my research and my chance to get back to myself and announce my discovery of the mutation control complex.”
He jabbed in defense. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, Exodus 22:18.”
I ignored it and began a long flurry. “Whatever. Now, what do you expect me to do with this blood? I am, after all, part vampire bat. But I know your cerebrum has smoothed out. That’s the kind of thing you have to expect when you mad religious types meddle in forces beyond your understanding.
“That sounds a little arrogant, doesn’t it? Look, I have been a bit of a jerk, and I figure I deserve the blame for a lot of this. I told you all you had to do is mix it with blood, but that was an oversimplification. I left out a critical step, and I’m afraid that has unhinged you a bit. In truth, I still owe you a great debt—you were the itch that caused me to scratch in the right spot. I doubt this will work, but let me try to teach you a lesson.”
I placed the bag back in the freezer, and looked straight into his eyes and spoke emphatically, as if to a child, “Thou shalt not kill. Exodus 20:13.”
I opened the fridge. On the top shelf was my test tube rack. One vial left. I heard a knife whistling through the air. My right hoof shot out and caught Mr. Theophilus in the belly as I tossed my head. The knife-blade wedged into my horn, like an ax stuck in a green hickory tree.
I reached into my gymbag and pulled out the 12 gauge I had liberated from the pawn shop and sawn-off. “See this, buddy? This is my extended phenotype. Now, I don’t intend to hurt you, I just want to get out of here with my property, okay? You just back up, and let me get to the front door, and I’ll return in a few days and make you some nice serum to fix you up good as new, what say?”
The huge pupils of his golden eyes dilated as he looked at me. He slowly retreated. I backed him to the front door, and reached for the knob. Just then he sprang forward and grabbed the barrel of my scattergun. We wrestled over it, but then he raked my belly again with his talons and I dropped the gun and fell to my knees. It was time for the rope-a-dope.
Reaching behind me, I smashed the door door open and got ready to run. The bastard aimed the gun right at my face. I had him now.
He thought my guard was down. He moved in for the KO. “Righteousness keepeth him that is upright in the way: but wickedness overthroweth the sinner. Proverbs 13:6.”
I feinted by swallowing my pride. “Have mercy! I beg you, in the name Our Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!”
The click of the hammer falling on the empty chamber sounded like thunder to me. The bastard actually would have killed me, can you believe that? I grabbed the syringe from my gymbag and jammed it into his thigh, driving home the plunger with my thumb.
I rose, smirking. His pupils dilated to the size of silver dollars, but the golden light they reflected dimmed.
I began my final flurry. “I’m taking back my Hyde serum. I need to pay a little visit to my twin before the sun comes up. I’ll be back in a couple of days, when my brain is fully functional, and help you get back to normal.”
“What hath God wrought?” he asked.
“Well, I can’t speak for God, but I’ve proved that genes are more mutable than memes. I’ve added additional weight to the dreadnought-mass of evidence for the theory of evolution. I’ve shown that you are a hypocrite, and don’t take the idea of mercy very seriously. Moreover, I have injected you with the Hyde serum mixed with the unfiltered blood of a particularly gentle female Angora rabbit. I hope you can keep from killing anyone for the next 48 hours, because by then you will be decidedly cuddlier.”
Then I ran like the devil.
