She had him on a bunny rug in the middle of the lounge room floor. Playing at swinging a small pendulum, encouraging him to reach for it. “Well done.” She lavished praise on him as he reached a little further. He was only a few months old but his hand-eye co-ordination was already astonishingly good. Doc had confirmed that the little boy was progressing rapidly, well past what was normal for a human. Adin had been the last of the humans in the town to take the retrovirus. Jnarn had wanted to be very sure that the baby wouldn’t suffer any ill effects. In the end it had gone smoothly. Jnarn by then had perfected a single dose inhaler that sent the virus straight to the lungs without the side effects of seizures that had come from the injections most of the townsfolk had suffered. Being a baby had been an advantage too. The telomeres in his genes hadn't had much time to shorten. He was healthy. There was little for the repaired DNA strand to fix, except for replacing the tiny bit of miscoding that had doomed not only humans but most life on the planet to unnaturally short lives.
