Acosta:I’m Jake. I’m the sheriff of this region. In addition to myself, I have three deputies, but one is part-time, and he’s older than me, so I don’t know if he counts. (Laughs)
They pause as someone hammers loudly in the distance.
Rosita:Lots of construction going on.
Acosta:They’re getting ready to reopen the school in a few years. It’s a little early, but people are excited.
Rosita:Are you going to move your office?
Acosta:Eventually, yes. We had offices before, and they’re still there. We shared a building with the mayor, but he wanted—
(A time cut.)
Acosta waves his hand around the office.
Acosta:This was my classroom, you know. Before I became sheriff, I mean.
Rosita:I know you used to be a teacher. That’s actually why I asked to speak to you today.
He points toward the back of the classroom, interrupting her.
Acosta:I taught your mother when she came into the town along with all the kids in the southern settlements. Your mom and her sisters always sat right there in the back, all three of them swooning over your father.
The camera swings to show a corner of a room with several desks stacked up. The camera pauses for a moment upon Rosita’s face, and she appears stricken.
Rosita:I didn’t know that. I didn’t know she went to school here at all.
Acosta:It was supposed to be once a week, but they came in maybe once every two along with all the other kids from the south farms. She was smart. I’ll tell you that. Almost as smart as you. Your dad on the other hand…
He laughs.
Rosita:I actually wanted to talk to you about the Sickness.
Acosta’s humor fades.
Acosta:Why would you want to talk about that?
Rosita:Even today, a lot of people don’t really seem to understand what it really was. You were part of the team that helped figure out what was happening, and you were part of the team that came up with the solution that cured it.
Acosta:I only helped and just a little. It was all-hands-on-deck. There were thousands of us working on the problem and solution. And there was no cure. You can’t take the oil from the flour once the bread is already baked. We could only prevent it from happening again.
Rosita:Okay. Can you explain what the Sickness was?
Acosta sighs heavily. He steeples his hands and seems to think, as if he doesn’t want to answer. But finally he speaks.
Acosta:People called it the Sickness before we knew what it really was, so that’s what people call it today. But its real name is ERS, epigenetic rejection syndrome.
Rosita:Okay, what was it?
Acosta:It’s something in the planet’s electromagnetic field. The short answer is, it does something funny to babies when they’re still cooking in their moms’ bellies. The problem was, the change was so subtle, we didn’t even know anything was wrong until about twenty years after the first birth on planet, and then it took another several years after that to identify exactly what was happening. And then a few years after that to come up with the solution.
Rosita:What exactly is happening? And why did it affecteverybody?
Acosta:Not everybody. That’s how we figured it out. There’s a small subterranean settlement just west of Fat Landing that had three births with no sign of ERS. It turns out, the mothers never went aboveground and were shielded. Because of them, we figured out that if a woman gets pregnant on the surface of the planet, something about the planet messes with the DNA methylation patterns in utero. Like I said, the babies cook funny. There’s a specific set of genes that eventually express themselves incorrectly—not until the affected are about twenty-five years old.
Rosita:Okay, can you explain it again, but pretend like I’m a little kid?
Acosta grunts with sad amusement.
