Arthur Vance stood before the three-space-folding projection well of the Project Genesis end-post, his mind reorganizing every foundational concept of beast taming and rift progression he had learned since arriving in this world. The cold blue light of the light-projected display lit up the sharp, focused planes of his face. Beside him, Valerie leaned against the granite console, her arms crossed over her armored chest. Her face was pale as the philosophical and medical reality washed over her.
“If the rifts are world-size immune lesions,” Valerie said, her voice shaking slightly against the steady drone of the cooling fans, “then every tamer who tightened a beast... Every commoner whose hound developed a black glass bone coat or whose hawk grew solar feathers... They weren’t mutating by accident. They were being recruited into a global defense force.”
“Exactly,” Arthur replied. He pulled up a comparative histological diagram comparing a human granuloma to a land-wide rift zone. “when a foreign body—a splinter, a fungal spore, a tuberculosis bacillus—can’t be right away destroyed, the immune system forms a granuloma. Macrophages fuse into giant multi-nucleated cells, surrounding the intruder with a dense wall of stringy connective tissue and stone salts, isolating the pathogen to prevent systemic sepsis.”
