Thirteen Years in a Box

"This box weighs more than I do," Maya said, dropping it on the floor with a thump that lifted dust into the lamp light.

"That's the one Aunt Priya said to keep," said Soren. "The rest go to recycling."

They pried back the flaps. Inside, paper. Stacks and stacks of green and white striped paper, the kind with the little holes punched down the sides, accordion folded so each sheet still clung to the next.

Maya lifted a fold. It kept coming. She backed across the room and it kept coming, one panel after another spilling out of the box like a paper tongue.

"What is it?"

Soren held a sheet under the lamp. Letters. Just four of them, over and over, in no pattern he could see. A. T. G. C. Lines and lines of them, no spaces, no words.

"A, T, G, C," he read. "That's DNA. These are the letters of DNA."

"All of it?" Maya was still walking backward, still unspooling paper. She had reached the doorway now. "Soren. I'm in the hall. It's still going."

Aunt Priya called from the kitchen without coming in. "Found my dinosaurs, did you? That's a printout from when I was a junior tech. We were so proud of those pages we couldn't throw them out."

"How much is here?" Soren called back.

"That box? Maybe a few million letters. A rounding error."

Maya stopped walking. "A rounding error of what?"

"Three billion," Aunt Priya said. "Give or take. That's how many letters are in one person. We printed a sliver of it, just to see it. Took the whole project thirteen years."

Soren wrote the number down. Three billion. He looked at the box, then at the paper trailing out of it across the floor and into the hall where Maya stood.

"Maya. This box is millions. And it's already in the hallway."

"So three billion is." Maya looked down the empty hall like she was measuring it. "That's a thousand boxes like this."

"More."

"A thousand boxes of paper to write down one person." She came back into the room, gathering the fold of paper into her arms as she walked, and it bunched up against her like a strange paper animal. "And it took thirteen years."

"And three billion dollars," said Aunt Priya, appearing at last in the doorway with two mugs of cocoa. "One dollar a letter, near enough. We celebrated for a week."

Maya was quiet. She set the bundle of paper down very carefully, the way you'd set down something asleep.

"Aunt Priya," she said. "How long would it take now?"

Aunt Priya smiled into her cocoa. "Now? A machine the size of that lamp does a whole person overnight. You'd have it back tomorrow morning. For less than a thousand dollars. The same machine that took thirteen years and a building full of people."

Soren stopped writing. "Overnight."

"Overnight."

Maya looked at the box. Then she looked at the trail of paper running out the door. Then she did something Soren had seen her do before, which was go very still and then say a number out loud.

"Thirteen years is about four thousand seven hundred days," she said. "And now it's one day."

"So," said Soren, catching it, picking it up where she dropped it, "the speed went up almost five thousand times."

"That's not the part," Maya said. "The dollars. Three billion to a thousand. That's." She stopped. "Soren, do the dollars."

He did the dollars. He wrote three billion, then he wrote one thousand under it, and he started crossing out zeros, and he ran out of room and kept going in the margin.

"Three million times cheaper," he said. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "It costs three million times less than it did when your aunt was young."

Aunt Priya had stopped smiling, not unhappily. She was looking at the paper on her floor like she had not really looked at it in a long time.

"We thought we'd done the hard thing," she said. "One genome. We thought that was the mountain. Turns out that was just the first one. The expensive one. After that the price fell off a cliff and never stopped falling."

"Why?" said Soren.

"Better machines. Better machines made better machines. Every year, faster and cheaper. Nobody planned for it to go this fast. It just did."

Maya was crouched by the box now, both hands on the printout, reading the four letters going by under her fingers.

"So this whole box," she said. "This whole heavy box that you couldn't throw out. The thing you celebrated for a week."

"Yes."

"Now it's a Tuesday. Now it's just a thing a machine does while you sleep."

"Now it's a Tuesday," Aunt Priya agreed.

Soren looked at his notebook, at the zeros marching off into the margin, and then at Maya. "Then the next box," Maya said slowly, "the one that's three billion dollars and thirteen years right now. The one we think is the mountain."

She lifted the paper and let a fold of it drop, and it whispered down onto the pile.

"Somebody our age is going to find that one in a box," she said. "And think it's a Tuesday."

Nobody answered. The cocoa steamed. Out in the hallway the last panel of printout settled against the wall, A and T and G and C, three billion of them somewhere out there in the dark, and the machine that would read them all by morning not even invented yet.

Soren reached down and started folding the paper back into the box, panel over panel, the whole heavy weight of thirteen years, until the flaps closed over the top.