How High We Go in the Dark

In the real world, people comfort themselves with ignorance, politics, and faith, but here in the domes only hard numbers matter.

We watched a rat injected with the virus inexplicably slip into a coma.

You saw a future of dead soil and dead oceans, all of us fighting for our lives. You had a vision of what life would be like for future generations and acted like the planet had a gun to our head. And

thirty thousand years ago

Two stab wounds. No witnesses outside his hotel.

Rigor mortis had curled her fingers. I imagined her asking for help—if her family had possessed medicinal knowledge of plants that could potentially redefine our knowledge of early humans. Ho

Annie and the other bodies contained incredibly well-preserved giant viruses we’ve never seen before.

Sometimes I wondered if her fantasy and science fiction magazines, her UFO phase, or how she dragged me to a Bigfoot convention in Sacramento had made her a better scientist than me—maybe it was the reason she saw things in the dirt that no one else could.

A lot of these gases are produced by bacteria that have adapted to the permafrost. Some even have their own kind of antifreeze.”

where she continued her work on native flora, particularly low-lying shrubs as crucial carbon sinks