Six hours have passed but nothing changes. The patient is still alive. Even after the massive excision of parts of his brain, there is no reduction in the levels of substance X in his blood. The surgery ends with his death, as has been the case with those treated earlier in the same manner. No one has been able to establish an internal feedback mechanism regarding this substance. Short of removing all an individual’s internal organs, no one seems to know what else to do. Yet, people are dying by the minute. An urgent solution is obviously crucial.

Professor Nana and her colleagues have been working more intensely on the problem since the declaration of a state of emergency three months prior. Their goal is to identify its cause even as they try to find its solution. Things have moved beyond cosmetics now. The politics of exigency no longer holds. The consensus is not to continue to dichotomize the public, which even with nationality uncontested positioned petulant platforms.

Subterfuge seems only to sire the undesired. It is as if a programmed response activates to perpetuate their existence. This belies their equally mystifying tendency to thrive even apparently in a void, given the deprivations they endure. It is clearly useless to tread a path to nowhere worsening their plight. In fact, the media has recently been explicitly emphasizing an outcome so doing many consider moot, some still bent on a scorched-earth approach that no doubt portends calamity. This is more so given the faith in numbers to which most now cling, an irony with the death toll increasing daily but not for the deprived.

The race to save the majority is thus apace. The question is how. Since the official inquiry zeroed in on its target, subjects not to mention, witnesses have thinned. With no one prepared to risk being ostracized, not even ethical guarantees help. The costs in personal and social terms with an ancestry linked to the target seem enormous, the dichotomy engendered, even inherent political cannon fodder in the recent past. The reluctance now though is more personal. It is about survival, more than anything else. Yet, everyone must be praying for some kind of resolution to the crisis, even as some openly ask how it became one to start with.

There is ample reason to deduce systemic failure being the undercurrent of an insidious process that spans generations, but not enough to consider ingenuity, even compromised by hubris, as profuse. Professor Nana has print-outs of fifty-year old news clips in one hand, and in the other, a steaming cup of coffee, as she chats with her assistant on progress regarding the matter. She gives her assistant the clips. The lab reports soon arrive.

“It’s just a rock, isn’t it?” Her disdain is evident.

Her assistant is clearly perplexed. “I wonder how it all came to that.” His voice is quivering, and as he just said, he is becoming slightly indisposed.

“Yeah, complete with fireworks.” Professor Nana starts to tap her table every few minutes. She swirls her chair between partitions of the semi-circular contraption, jotting notes, checking specimens in test tubes and jars, and making numerous phone calls.

“Now we have the octagons.”

“Octagons,” the assistant echoes, his tone a cross of query and alarm, his eyes, momentarily in tandem. The phone rings again. This time, it is the genealogist.

“Confirmed?” Her voice is hurried, her anxiety unmistakable.

“Yes, Prof” Moments later, she is on the phone to the chief of defence. Everything seems to be pointing in the same direction, for the very first time. Not even the break seems to thrill Professor Nana, though. On the contrary, she is patently upset. She tells her assistant to go home and take care of himself. They have been working nonstop for over twenty four hours. Now she seems ready to go on alone. “I need to put it all together by tomorrow.” This would not surprise anyone, let alone her assistant. Professor Nana’s tenacity is renowned. Her assistant also must know why she is upset. Her complaint of intrigue being rife among her colleagues and of the pervasive prying by vested interests is perennial. She mutters something before he leaves. She then gets back to work.

Now that the origin of the problem is known, its potential outcome seems stark. The indictments that follow are legion, even with the accused, long dead. From why no one thought of something different, to mishandling, and even auctioning the rock as souvenirs, the levity addressing the matter is evident. Others blame ignorance that dependence on primitive technology fostered. For a generation that first explored space, the verdict is indeed, crushing.

When, years back, Professor Nana suggested an entirely new element in the rock being responsible for the problem, her colleagues openly mocked her. The lab analyses have now confirmed her hunch. Meanwhile, no one knows what to do about substance X, which additional lab results indicate is a metabolic by-product in those who carry the genes of the mutations triggered by the rock in the individuals originally exposed to it.

The state of emergency soon becomes that of war, the fronts, several. “The octagons are coming,” scream media headlines. The truth of course is that they are already here. Not even extreme views now contemplate a pogrom. With the majority projected to being octagons in less than a decade, and everyone else in another, how to reverse dented adaptability etched in atavistic hubris remains a mystery. The octagons do not carry arms, but they are undeniably aware of their evolutionary edge as heirs to the planet. The war seems inevitably won barring any revelations on the inner workings of the rock.

As the war of attrition continues though, even the octagons must know that they are warriors too, speculates mainstream media, ostensibly in resignation. They no longer have to worry about their “polygon heads” being as hitherto acclaimed by others, obscene. They need no more be afraid of being attacked in street corners by gangs, intent on wiping them out. They must also know that they need to be wary of meteors and their ilk, and remain adaptable on a planet changes to which could render them less so, or perhaps even prompt their cosmic neighbours to invade it surreptitiously. The list is endless and manifestly palliative, even contrite.