Fractals

He shakes his head, grinning from ear to ear." Nature is fractal. Life is fractal. You're fractal." He wears the look of a religious convert. "And the image compression stuff is nothing. There are implications for meteorology, or—wait a second, let me show you what I'm working on for the medical centre."

I wait while Cheung fiddles with his machine. Voices from his radio fill the lull. A phone-in show; some woman is complaining to the host about a three-car pile-up in her front yard. Her neighbour up the hill used a garden hose to wash the snow off his driveway this morning; the water slid downhill and froze the road into a skating rink, tilted twenty degrees.

"They come in from Hong Kong, they think the climate is just the same the world over," the caller complains.

The host doesn't say anything. How can he? How can he sympathise without being branded a racist? Maybe he will anyway. Maybe he'll call a spade a spade, maybe the editors and the censors haven't quite crushed him yet. Go for it, asshole, it's what we're all thinking, why don't you just say it—

"What an idiot," Roy Cheung remarks.

I blink. "What?"

"That's actually pretty minor," he tells me. "That's just some moron who never saw ice outside of a scotch on the rocks. We've got these neighbours, a whole bloody family came over from Hong Kong a couple of years back and we've had nothing but trouble. Last summer they cut down our hedge."

"What?" It's very strange, hearing Cheung betray his own kind like this.

"My wife's into horticulture, she'd spent ages growing this hedge on our property. It was gorgeous, about fifteen feet high, perfectly sculpted. Came home one day and these guys had paid someone to come over and chainsaw the whole thing. Said the hedge was a home for evil spirits."

"Didn't you sue them or something?"

Cheung shrugs. "I wanted too. Lana wouldn't let me. She didn't want any more trouble. You ask me, I'd gladly ship the whole lot of 'em back overseas."

I collect my thoughts. "But didn't you, um, come from—"

"Born here. Fifth generation," he says.

I'm only third.

And suddenly I recognise the kinship behind those strange eyes, the shared resentment. How must it feel to go through life wearing that skin, that hair, these artifacts of a heritage left behind decades ago? Roy Cheung, guilty by association, probably hates them more than I do. He's almost an ally.

"Anyway," he says, "here's what I wanted to show you."

The moment passes. There is something new on the monitor, something reddish and amorphous and somehow threatening.

It's growing; a misshapen blob, sprouting random pseudopods, covers half the screen.

"What's that?" I ask.

"Carcinoma."

It doesn't surprise me.

"Cancer is fractal too," Cheung says. "This is a model of a liver tumour, but the growth patterns are the same no matter what kind you're talking about. We're finding out how it grows; you gotta know that before you can kill it."

I watch it spread.

***

Baboons. There are baboons running around in our TV, courtesy of National Geographic and PBS. We more civilized primates sit and watch at a discreet distance. Sean, hyperactively four, bounces around on the carpet; Joanne and I opt for the couch. We peer over a coffee table laden with Szechuan take-out, into what's left of the real world.

There's just been a treetop coup somewhere in the forests of central Africa; a new alpha male struts around. He goes through the troop, checking out the females, checking out their kids.

Especially the kids. He goes to each one in turn, running his big hairy hand over their heads, sniffing their bodies with that gentle paternalism, looking for some sign of familiarity, some telltale scent that speaks of his ancestry in those tiny bodies—but no, none of my genes in this one, and WHAP the infant's head snaps back and forth like a bolo-ball and SNAP those matchstick arms bend in entirely new places and the Big Man on Campus tears the little carcass away from its screaming mother and pitches it out, out and down to the forest floor twenty meters below.

Sean is suddenly entranced. Joanne looks at me doubtfully.

"I don't know if we really want to be watching this during, er, mealtime..."

But life isn't always so intolerant, the narrator hastens to tell us. That same male would die defending those bastard children against an outside threat, against a predator or a rival troop, against anything that was less related to him than they were.

Loyalties are concentric. Defend your kind against others.

Defend your kin against your kind. Defend your genes against your kin. In absence of the greater threat, destroy the lesser.

And suddenly, with an almost audible click, the whole world drops into focus. I look around, surprised; nobody else seems to have noticed the change. On the surface, nothing has changed.

My family is blissfully unaware of the epiphany that has just occurred.

But I understand something now. It wasn't really my fault.

Go down far enough, and we're all running the same program.