Chapter 18
We land in
My cell phone, of course, is burning a hole in my pocket. Beyond the atrocity of losing so many family members in such as short span of time, a disturbing pattern has emerged among the SOJ’s latest victims: After Lucian, they’re all 1st Gen.
Statistically, that doesn’t make sense. Combined, there are twice as many 2nd Gen and 3rd Gen Nephilim as there are 1st, and many thousands of Veingels as well. Plus, on a merely practical level, 1st Gens like myself are exponentially more elusive and dangerous targets than our offspring with their diluted DNA. Generations two and three are only one-fourth and one-quarter angel, respectively. In mathematical terms that makes a 2nd Gen’s prowess equivalent to: human1.25, and likewise, a 3rd Gen’s is human1.125.
Now, at first glance, my 1st Gen, 1.5-exponent-advantage over the Garden of Eden variety human might not seem significantly greater than the 2nd or 3rd Gen’s…until you crunch the numbers…
For example, a 2nd Gen—even if they never drank blood to maintain their youth—could live a maximum of 1201.25 years, or 397 trips around the sun, give or take. For a 3rd Gen, it’s 1201.125 (218 years). But the same math applied to a 1st Gen Naphil yields a natural age limit of 1,314 years (the age, in years, of the oldest living human, raised to the one-point-two-five power).
And these Power-Law-governed-advantages apply for most human traits.
Take running speed: A human can manage 15-miles-per-hour on average; a 3rd Gen Naphil is good for 21-mph; a 2nd Gen, 30-mph; and a 1st Gen 58-mph.
Or vertical jump: A rather freakish leap of 3.5-feet for a human is easily bested by a 3rd Gen’s 7-foot capability; a 2nd Gen’s 11-foot vertical; or the dunk-from-the-three-point-line, 27-foot high vertical a 1st Gen can muster.
Sensory perception as well: What a human can make out at twenty-feet, a 3rd Gen sees at twenty-nine, a 2nd Gen at forty-two, and a 1st Gen at almost ninety-feet. Ditto for auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic, and gustatory acuity…
So for the SOJ to kill five 1st Gens in the course of a few hours—no small feat. Even knowing that they’ve deciphered our language and hacked our databases, it’s hard to get my head around the fact that they’ve killed twenty-six 1st Gens in a single day, when in the 3,000-plus years previous, they’ve only managed twenty kills.
I step onto one of those conveyor belts so I can keep moving toward the departure gate while I satisfy my curiosity. I put the battery back in the phone, turn it on, and launch the inbox. It occurs to me, too late, that I should have waited the forty-five minutes longer it would take to be ‘safely’ onboard my next flight, ‘secure’ behind a locked cabin door, ready to taxi down the runway. If an SOJ geek were to connect-the-dots from LaGuardia to Lambert they’ll have a slick little vector pointing West. They might assume I’m onto their translator and put Whitmore into hiding. But after seeing the five pics in LaGuardia, I can’t help myself. It’s like a waitress warning you that your plate is hot: you feel compelled to touch it anyway. So I read the text on the LCD screen:
inbox (56) >> messages (56) >> photos (56)
I don’t even know how to respond to that. I’m an endangered species.
Screwed1.5.
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