Human Genome
By
Everyone
Hello, my name is Jorge Luis Borges. For my first in a series of book reviews, I would like to appraise the human genome.
The fact that one book has almost 7 billion authors might have overwhelmed me when I was alive. No longer! Alas, considering how abrupt the ending is, the whole thing now seems much too short. With a great sense of Irony, it ends with the sun still shining brightly, perhaps too bright. But I don’t want to give away the ending just yet! In fact, I may not want to give away the ending at all. Well, let me put it to you this way. If you are reading this in the year 2531, you may want to put off having children.
It is interesting that the book contains over 3 billion characters. This is quite a slog for the average reader. With 7 billion versions moving through time, it can be difficult to keep track of of everything. For this reason, I prefer the restrained elegance of chromosome 12 on the single genome still going in the year 2532.
AGGGATACTTACTTAGAGGGATCCTTCTAGACTACTTATGCTGAGAACACTCACACTACTACATAADACATADTCA AT
It is a remarkable piece of writing, not simply because it conferred resistance to the killer virus, but because it allowed one individual experience the loneliness of being the last man on earth. How incredible it is that a single letter–the third ”G” in the sentence above–allowed this man to experience something so profound.
I wrote a story once, about a man who remembered everything. Mistakenly, I believed this man to be unique. It occurs to me now that this last human genome on earth also remembered everything. It rattled around with the contents of a billion years, encased in cells. Truly, it is like the Library of Babel, the millions of salt water hexagons called “cells”.
Indeed, this is a strange and beautiful book that can be read in many ways. You are studying it at this very moment with the tiny reading machines inside your cells. It is a mirror broken into three billion letters, and we each decode its mysteries.
