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13
MARGO
Margo finished mixing the drinks, brought them to the coffee table, and went back to the kitchenette to look for snacks. "So, which one of you is finally going to tell me what's going on? You've been throwing out hints the size of boulders at me, but I still have no clue."
She had a feeling it would be Mia and not Frankie who told her, even though so far, Frankie had done most of the talking.
Mia ran a hand over her short hair. "I don't know where to start. There is so much to tell."
"Start with the girl," Frankie said. "Tell her what Lisa said about us."
"Lisa?" Margo remembered her. She was a relative of Tom, or rather Toven. "What does she have to do with any of it, whatever it is?" She found a bag of mixed nuts and another one of popcorn and brought them to the table.
"Lisa has a special talent," Mia said. "She can sense godly genes in people."
"Godly?" Margo burst out laughing. "Me?" She sat down next to Frankie on the couch. "I was drugged, but even when I was high, I didn't have delusions of grandeur or a god complex."
When neither Mia nor Frankie smiled, Margo frowned. "You are serious, aren't you?"
She'd heard about the god particle, although she didn't know what it was exactly, but she'd never heard about a god gene. Was there a connection?
Frankie looked at Mia. "Perhaps you should start with the gods."
Mia glared at her. "Do you want to tell the story?"
"I don't know enough to do it justice." Frankie crossed her arms over her chest. "You've been part of this world for a lot longer than me."
"That's true." Mia reached for her glass of mostly orange juice with a few drops of vodka in it and took a sip. "Bridget will be so mad at me for this." She put the glass down. "Okay. So, let's start with the gods." She looked at Margo. "You know how the mythologies of the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, and others are all similar?"
At least that was familiar ground.
Still a fantasy, though. Everyone knew that mythologies had been invented by people to explain the unexplainable. "I know that the Greek and the Roman pantheons are nearly identical, just with different names for the gods, but I don't know much about the others. Where are you leading with this?"
"They are similar for a reason. They are all based on real people, and the Sumerian stories are the original." Mia smiled. "After we are done, I'll send you a few digital books about Sumerian mythology, and you will see how much more robust and realistic their myths are than the later ones that were copied from them. Some of the copycats took tidbits of stories and combined them, while others elaborated and changed things to fit their cultures and agendas."
"It's like fan fiction," Frankie said. "Sometimes it can be better than the original, but in most cases, it's not."
"I wouldn't know." Margo took a long swig of her spiked cranberry juice. "I don't read fan fiction. But back to mythology, it doesn't matter if the original authors were better. It's still fiction."
Mia cast her a condescending smile. "It's as much fiction as what we learned in history class. The facts get twisted and embellished, and we all know that history is written by the victors, and myths are no different. The bottom line is that the gods were not invented by humans. In fact, it's the other way around. Humans were invented and created by the gods. They actually made us by combining some of their genetic material with that of our predecessors to create a leap in evolution. The thinking human would have eventually emerged without outside intervention, but it would have taken hundreds of thousands of years longer. The stories in the Bible are a simplified version of what actually happened. The gods came from another planet for reasons that we don't need to get into right now, and they needed workers, so they created humans. Many generations later, contact with the home planet was severed, again for reasons that we don't need to get into right now, and the gods who were stuck on Earth faced extinction because their genetic pool was too limited. They took human lovers, and the children born to them were immortals who possessed a weakened version of their godly parent's power. When those immortals took human lovers, though, the children born to them were human. Some of them had the godly genes in them, but those genes needed to be activated." She paused to take another sip of her juice.
Margo was still trying to process Mia's long monologue, but one item in particular stood out as needing further explanation. "Let's assume for a moment that everything you've said is true. How did they activate the genes?"
"We will talk about that later. I want to give you an overview first."
Mia had always been a good storyteller, and Margo wasn't about to interrupt her flow. Maybe her friend was venturing into adult books and was trying out a story idea on her?
Yeah, that was probably what was going on.
"It's an excellent story, Mia. Please, continue."
Mia frowned at her but then sighed and resumed her narrative. "Long after nearly all the gods were killed by one of their own, all that remained of them were a few immortal descendants and dormant carriers of the genes. Those genes kept on passing from mother to child, but with no one to activate them, they remained undetected. I was such a dormant carrier before Toven activated my godly genes. Now to the heart of the matter. Since Dormants and immortals feel a special affinity toward each other, and the three of us have been inseparable since kindergarten, we suspected that the two of you were Dormants as well. Lisa confirmed that when she came to see you. Frankie is already transitioning into immortality, which is why she's weak and needs a wheelchair while the transformation is taking place, and now it's your turn."
Margo clapped her hands. "Awesome story, Mia. You should definitely write it."
Mia groaned. "It's not a story idea, Margo, and I'm not pulling your leg. Everything is true."
Frankie nodded. "We would never invent something like that and try to convince you that it was real. You know us."
