The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

And Evrim was also the inspiration for, and the target of, a series of hastily implemented laws that made his presence, and the creation of any further beings like him, illegal in most of the governing structures of the world, including every country under UN Directorate Governance. Evrim himself (herself? themself?)—Ha was irritated by her brain’s gender provincialism—was illegal in most of the world. Evrim’s existence had shaken the globe with riots. Ha remembered the gunmen storming the DIANIMA headquarters in Moscow, the bombing of their offices in Paris. DIANIMA’s vice president of engineering, blown up by a DNA-targeting flying mine on their yacht in the Caribbean. Ha remembered an image on the screen of a hotel ceiling of a man burning himself alive at the gates of the Vatican. A man burned himself alive, simply because you exist. How must that feel? What was most unsettling about Evrim to her, Ha realized, was that her brain was trying to slot them into a category into which they would not fit without distortion. If only she let go, pulled away from that desire to slot Evrim like a child’s peg into a shaped hole in a board—to resolve them into a gender. Ha had been working internationally with other scientists. She had fallen into the habit of speaking (and thinking) in English—and to using the antiquated English third-person pronouns of “he” and “she.”