THE 0.3 PERCENT GENE II
Protein Behavior: AP-7
The 99.7 Percent Who Return
To those who stay, and wait, and keep the house.
Foreword
If you read The 0.3 Percent Gene, you know how it ended. A woman named Haru Kuon chose to keep going, alone, toward the galactic center.
This book is what happened after. But the protagonist changes.
When Odyssey split in orbit around Proxima Centauri b, six people turned back toward Earth. Six people who watched the 0.3 percent leave, and chose the 99.7 percent side. Six people with families waiting. This is the record of their return, and the story of another “house” Haru left behind.
“A connector is the oldest kind of adventure,” Mihal said.
Returning is also a form of adventure. I hope this book shows that, even a little.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Return Ship Telemachus
Chapter 1: Six People, Growing Old
Chapter 2: Earth, Fifty-Two Years Later
Chapter 3: Kamigamo, A Light
Chapter 4: Those Who See, Again
Epilogue: The Road Stays Open
Prologue
The Return Ship Telemachus
It’s the year 2296. Early autumn.
Technically, “early autumn” doesn’t map to any calendar we use anymore. Ship time: twenty-one years and three months since we left Proxima orbit. Earth time: roughly twenty-six years have passed.
On the dome’s main screen, one star burns brighter than the rest.
The Sun.
Twenty-one years ago, when we boarded this ship — nobody remembers who started calling it Telemachus, the drive module plus the small habitat — the Sun was “home.” For twenty-one years of flight, the Sun became just “a bright star.” One dot among many.
Now that dot has meaning again.
My name is Farzana Sadiqi. Doctor of space medicine. Eighty-nine years old.
Or that’s what Earth’s calendar says. AP-7 kept my body closer to late sixties. Still, when I look in a mirror, I’m old. The veins on my hands show more than they used to.
Six names are listed on the med bay wall.
Elliott Keene. Mihal Rujanski. Anna Kornai. Leon Morian. Giorgio Rossi. And me.
The seventh name — Haru Kuon — belongs to a different manifest now. The one we’re bringing back to Earth. The record of another voyage.
“Farzana.”
Mihal’s voice from the bridge. Eighty-six. His hair was gray; now it’s mostly white. But his eyes haven’t changed since twenty-one years ago.
“The Sun is visible.”
“I know,” I answer. “It’s been visible for three days.”
“No,” he says, and almost smiles. “Visible. With your eyes.”
I go to the bridge. There it is, beyond the window. Not a point. A disk. Small, but with an edge. A circle of light.
“We’re home,” I whisper.
“Five more years,” Mihal says. “The outer solar system is wide. But yeah. We’re home.”
That night I run Elliott’s physical.
Elliott Keene. Captain. Ninety-two.
The numbers are bad. His heart function dropped noticeably in the last year. AP-7 delays cellular collapse. It doesn’t stop time. Ninety-two years is long, even for the 0.3 percent.
“How am I?” he asks from the exam bed.
“Want the truth, Captain?”
“Of course.”
“You might not have five years.”
Elliott stares at the ceiling for a while. Then he laughs.
“Five years. That’s about how long it took to enter the solar system.”
“Captain.”
“Farzana, do you remember what I told Haru?”
“‘I’m closer to the 99.7 percent kind of 0.3 percent. My job is to go home,’ you said.”
“That’s right,” Elliott nods. “I’ve lived to go home. I want to finish the job.”
“You will,” I say. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“Appreciate it, Doctor.”
That night I go back to my cabin and open the last record Haru left.
“Mom, I’m not coming back to Earth.” That’s how her letter to Shizuko begins. We’re obligated to deliver it to the Kuon house in Kyoto someday.
Haru, you’re still out there, aren’t you.
I look for the direction her ship should be in, among the stars. I can’t see it. But I look anyway, for a long time.
Chapter 1
Six People, Growing Old
Elliott didn’t make the five years.
Four years and seven months, to be exact.
We crossed the heliopause. Elliott was in his final cryo rotation. He was scheduled to wake three months later. He never woke.
When I checked his pod, his heart had made its last beat twelve minutes earlier.
“Farzana,” Mihal says, coming into med bay. “I got Anna and Leon. Giorgio already knows.”
“He went in his sleep,” I say. “No sign of distress.”
“Not a bad way to die,” Mihal says, looking at Elliott in the pod. “He always said that.”
That night the five of us gather in common.
Giorgio opens the last bottle of wine from Earth. Eighty-two now, his hands shake a little.
“To the captain,” Anna says. Eighty-five. Her auburn bob is cropped white now.
“To the captain,” we repeat.
Leon shares Elliott’s last log. He must have known his time was close. The entry ends:
This will be my last sleep.
If I don’t wake — leave my body in the winter room, in cryo. When we reach Earth orbit, thaw me there.
I told Haru, “We are the ones who go home.”
So let my body go home too. Even if my heart has stopped.
That counts as my return.
—Elliott Keene
“Understood, Captain,” Mihal says quietly to the log. “We’ll get you home.”
After that night, we’re five.
Five-person ops felt different from six-person ops after twenty years together. We rebuilt the cryo schedule. The common space lost a chair. Someone removed the sixth chair. Nobody said who.
“Haru,” Giorgio says to me one day. “That ‘uncle’ who was next to Haru — if he were here, I bet someone would’ve been next to Elliott too.”
“Maybe.”
“We stopped seeing them,” Giorgio says. “After Haru left. Was that because they went with her, or because we weren’t needed anymore?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “But—”
“But?”
“Maybe we stopped seeing them because we’re not the ones who have to go anymore. We’re the ones who return. They stay with the ones who go.”
Giorgio is quiet for a while. Then he smiles a little.
“Then the one next to Elliott was probably facing Earth.”
After we enter the solar system, we finish the last cryo rotation.
As we approach Earth orbit, the light-speed messages we sent forty-four years ago start coming back as echoes. Fragments of how Earth reacted.
The first is a formal line.
“Odyssey Mission, first report confirmed. UESA logs your discovery as one of the greatest in human history. We welcome your return. —UESA Secretary-General.”
The second is personal. From my husband, Reza.
“Farzana. If you’re alive, hear this. The kids are older than me now. We have five grandchildren. Two great-grandchildren. They all want to meet you. But don’t hurry. I can wait a little longer.”
Reza was ninety-four when he sent it. No one knows if he’s alive for my return.
That night, in my cabin, I cry for a long time.
Twenty-one years ago, when I said “I’ll go home instead of Haru,” I didn’t understand what I was choosing. I chose not to go. But returning turned out to be a longer, heavier kind of adventure than I imagined.
Chapter 2
Earth, Fifty-Two Years Later
UESA records say Telemachus reached Earth orbit in 2301. Fifty-four years after launch, Earth time.
We were five. Elliott’s body stayed in the winter room, in cryo.
The welcome was bigger than we imagined.
When we left, Odyssey was famous for the tech: “First humans to leave the solar system.”
Now the messages from Earth are different.
“Your record of the ‘unseen ones’ changed society in the twenty-plus years since it reached Earth,” the UESA press officer tells us in the shuttle. “At first, skepticism dominated. Mass hallucination, psychological effects — all the theories were tried. Then the P-AP-7 sample data from Proxima b arrived, and everything shifted.”
“The galactic-scale protein hypothesis,” Anna says.
“Yes. Your data was independently verified by multiple institutions. Panspermia Trace Hypothesis isn’t called a hypothesis anymore. It’s the Kuon–van Hoven Theory now. Standard textbook material.”
“Haru’s name remains,” I say.
“Of course,” the officer says. “Kuon Haru — and all of you — gave humanity an answer to our oldest question: Where do we come from?”
The shuttle enters atmosphere. The window fills with blue.
Fifty-four years ago, the Earth I last saw. The Earth in front of me now looks the same. Clouds. Ocean blue. Continental lines. But inside that sameness, I feel something strange.
The Earth I’m looking at isn’t the Earth from fifty-four years ago. Most people I knew are either very old now, or gone.
Descending, Mihal says quietly, “Haru said, ‘You might need to use this where you’re going’ — about the mirror her mother gave her. I always thought she meant her own journey.”
“Not anymore?”
“No,” Mihal says. “I think this applies to us too. We’re not heading to the Earth we remember. We’re entering the mirror. A familiar view with fifty-four years reflected inside it.”
Landing site: UESA’s new HQ in Iceland. The ramp feels shaky under my feet. Gravity — one G — feels strange after twenty-one years. AP-7 adapts well to low and zero G. One G feels like a foreign planet now.
In the welcome line, one old man in a wheelchair.
Reza.
I stop halfway down the ramp.
Ninety-seven now, he’s smaller and thinner than the man in my memory. But his eyes find me immediately.
“Farzana,” he says, voice shaking. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“You have,” I say, running down the ramp. “You waited all this time.”
“Waiting,” Reza says, taking my hands, “is what I got good at. The first twenty years taught me.”
I kneel and wrap his hands in mine. Paper-thin, warm.
“I’m home, Reza.”
“Welcome home, Farzana.”
Behind him stand people I don’t know. My children — now old — and their children, and grandchildren. They look at the “young mother they’ve only seen in photos” with confusion.
Our return goes live worldwide. For a while we’re “the five people from fifty-four years ago,” doing media.
Between interviews, the five of us talk about one obligation.
“We have to deliver Haru’s letter to the Kuon house,” I say.
“Is the house still in Kyoto?” Leon asks.
UESA records say the Kuon house still stands in Kamigamo. The current registered owner is not Shizuko Kuon — Haru’s mother. Shizuko died in the 2260s.
The current owner: Kuon Akari.
“Haru’s relative?” Giorgio asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But we should go.”
“I’ll go,” I say. “Delivering Haru’s last words to her house feels like my job.”
No one objects.
Chapter 3
Kamigamo, A Light
Kyoto has changed a lot in fifty-four years.
Instead of shinkansen, I take a linear tube under the city. Kyoto Station is a new building. But the silhouette of Mount Hiei is the same, just like Haru wrote.
North of Kamigamo Shrine, where a few fields remain — that place remains too. The Kuon main house stands after more than 280 years.
I stand at the wooden gate and remember a line from Haru’s record:
I thought, for real, about packing this smell into my suit’s memorial pocket.
I push the gate. It creaks.
“Who is it?”
A voice from inside. Japanese. I answer in the Japanese I relearned on the ship.
“My name is Farzana Sadiqi. I was crew on Odyssey.”
Silence. Then footsteps.
The woman who appears at the entrance is small but straight-backed, old. White hair tied back in one knot. Late eighties, maybe.
She looks at my face for a long time. Then bows deeply.
“We’ve been waiting,” she says. “Fifty-four years.”
Her name is Kuon Akari.
In the inner room she serves tea. Black Hagi ware — the cup from Haru’s record.
“I heard about you many times from Aunt Shizuko,” Akari says. “‘Someday, the people from that ship will come and bring Haru’s words.’”
“Aunt Shizuko—”
“My great-grandmother’s sister’s granddaughter — complicated, yes,” Akari smiles a little. “The blood is thin. I’m roughly Haru’s second cousin once removed. Shizuko had no children besides Haru. So I was adopted into the house.”
“When?”
“When I was five. Aunt Shizuko was already in her seventies. She often said, ‘Someone has to carry the Kuon house forward.’”
I take out Haru’s last letter — the data.
“This,” I say. “Haru’s final message to her mother. It took over four light-years at light speed. It reached us while we were still on Telemachus.”
Akari takes the data and stares at it for a while.
“This,” she says finally, “I don’t need to read to know. Aunt Shizuko received it before she died.”
“Already?”
“Yes,” Akari says. “Not by light letter. In another way.”
She stands and heads for the back storeroom. I follow.
Next to the family altar, the storeroom. Locked paulownia chest, top drawer. Akari takes out another scroll. Kuon Family Supplementary Records — newer than the one in Haru’s record.
“Aunt Shizuko kept writing this in her final years,” Akari says. “For fifty-four years after Haru left Earth, Aunt Shizuko watched most of it pass and died. But in her last years, she started having a ‘dream’ every night.”
The scroll continues the entries Haru read, with new lines:
Kuon Shizuko, 2253: At night I see a daughter holding a silver mirror. She is far. She is calm.
Kuon Shizuko, 2260: Daughter speaks without words: “Thank you.” No tears. Only peace.
Kuon Shizuko, 2264: Dreamed her ship stopped. But it has not vanished. It keeps reflecting light.
Kuon Shizuko, 2268: …Shizuko, final entry. “I have become one who sees. Haru, did you leave me the ability to see?”
I stare at that last line for a long time.
“Did Aunt Shizuko,” I finally say, “know Haru’s last choice — not to return to Earth?”
“I don’t think ‘know’ is the right word,” Akari says. “But she felt it. She died in her sleep in the winter of 2268. Very peaceful face, the caretaker wrote.”
I look at Haru’s letter data again.
Mom, I’m not coming back to Earth.
Shizuko received those words not by a light-speed letter fifty-four years later, but as a “dream,” probably within a decade or two.
“Akari,” I say. “You—”
“Yes,” she nods quietly. “I see, too. Since I was a child.”
That night, I stay at the Kuon house.
On the engawa, late summer. At the edge of the garden, fireflies appear. Two, then three. Same spot Haru saw fifty-four years ago.
“Farzana,” Akari says beside me. “Can I tell you what I saw when I was little?”
“Of course.”
“After I came here at five, I started seeing a figure near that stone. An older man at first. Later, another figure appeared too.”
“Another figure.”
“A woman,” Akari says. “Holding something small and round and silver in both hands. Like a mirror. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was always looking at the stars.”
I catch my breath.
“That—”
“I understood later it was Haru,” Akari smiles. “Aunt Shizuko’s records and what I saw happened around the same time.”
I take out the log of our conversations with “them” in interstellar space — Nick’s voice, Haru and the “uncle.”
Akari closes her eyes and listens.
When it ends, she is silent for a long time. Then she opens her mouth slowly.
“Farzana. The ‘old man’ I saw as a child — he always made me feel ‘nostalgic.’”
“Nostalgic.”
“I’d never met him. But I felt like I had. Same as what Haru wrote about the ‘uncle.’”
“But Akari. The ‘uncle’ with Haru left with her. We haven’t seen them since.”
“Yes,” Akari says. “But think, Farzana. AP-7 is in all 0.3 percent of people. The Kuon house has produced those people for hundreds of years. Even if the ‘uncle’ left with Haru—”
“Someone else—”
“Inside us, wakes again. I think that’s what AP-7 really is.”
Akari looks at her left hand. Nothing on the ring finger. But she traces a small circle in the air.
“I’m AP-7 positive,” she says. “Tested eighty years ago. I’m on the 0.3 percent side. But I didn’t go to space.”
“Why.”
“Because someone had to keep the house,” Akari says quietly. “Those who see usually don’t stay and keep the house. That’s what the Supplementary Records say. But I see. And I stayed.”
“That’s—”
“The Kuon house has always needed both: those who see and those who don’t,” Akari says. “But in my generation, maybe both came together in one person for the first time.”
Fireflies drift through the garden.
“Farzana,” Akari says. “I have a grandchild. Seven years old. Name — Kuon Koyomi.”
“Koyomi.”
“Tested last month. AP-7 positive.”
I can’t speak.
“She hasn’t seen anything yet. But someday, she might. When she does, I’ll tell her Haru’s story. Farzana, if you have time, could you copy the records? For when Koyomi needs them.”
“Of course,” I say. “Anything.”
Chapter 4
Those Who See, Again
The night before I leave Kyoto, Akari takes me to the hondo — the small worship room on the north side of the main house.
Behind the altar, the three-star crest and that unreadable Sanskrit-like mark are carved. Bottom drawer of the altar. The scroll is gone. In its place, a small paulownia box.
“This,” Akari says, “is what Aunt Shizuko placed here at the end.”
Inside is a single photograph.
Sepia, faded. Young Haru, the night before departure, sitting on the engawa watching fireflies. Who took it, no one knows. On the back, Shizuko’s handwriting:
Haru.
You left.
But I reread the words in the scroll you showed me.
“One comes from the stars and returns to the stars. The Kuon house is the road they travel.”
The road isn’t one-way.
You returned to the stars. But something of you still connects to this house. Night after night, I see you. You sit among the stars holding a silver mirror.
Haru, are you lonely.
No, don’t answer. I know now. You’re not lonely. Someone is with you.
I will raise Akari. I will keep the Kuon house. The way you keep the road of stars.
Someday, someone who sees will be born in this house again. That person may carry these feelings all the way to you.
Haru, go safely. Again and again, go safely.
—Shizuko
I return the photo to Akari.
“Akari,” I say. “Tomorrow we leave Earth and tour research institutes worldwide. But one more request.”
“What is it.”
“We brought back data. The trajectory Haru took last. AP-7 carriers share a signal in low-temp states — a 0.18 Hz pulse. If Koyomi ever notices that power—”
“Yes.”
“We’ll study how to hear that signal. Maybe someday — Koyomi can know Haru’s ‘now.’”
Akari bows deeply.
“Thank you, Farzana.”
Next morning I board the linear tube at Kyoto Station.
Mount Hiei’s silhouette outside, same as Haru saw fifty-four years ago.
I take out my bio-sensor band. I’m AP-7 positive. Inside me, that 0.18 Hz pulse, faint but regular, keeps going. On Telemachus, and now on Earth, unchanged.
I don’t know what it connects to.
But — as Akari said, the road isn’t one-way.
From Earth to the galactic center. From the galactic center to Earth. When someone in the 0.3 percent moves, and someone in the 0.3 percent waits, and a new 0.3 percent is born.
Koyomi hasn’t seen anything yet.
But someday she might point at a corner of the garden and say:
“Who’s that lady holding the silver thing?”
When that happens — the Kuon road connects again.
And it won’t be just the Kuon house.
While the 99.7 percent of us live our days on Earth, inside the 0.3 percent, that 0.18 Hz signal keeps blinking, quiet.
It’s a small fragment of a long, long story from the stars to the stars.
But a story isn’t a story unless the fragments connect.
We connected.
And someone will keep connecting.
Epilogue
The Road Stays Open
Ship time: three years and eight months of solo flight.
Four light-years from Earth, I am writing what may be my last transmission.
It won’t arrive in real time. Four point three years by radio to Earth. By the time my mother reads this — if she is alive — she’ll be reading words from a daughter already gone. But I write. Because someone, someday, will read them.
Mom.
I’m not coming home.
The others are heading back. They’ll carry everything we found — the life on Proxima b, the galactic origin of AP-7, the record of our talks with “them” — to you, to humanity.
I’m going a little farther, toward the galactic center. I’ll carry the ones inside me.
Mom, do you remember the night you showed me the scroll? “Messenger of the Stars.” They were real. I spoke with them. They are gentle, quiet, full of hope. The Kuon house has been their road for hundreds of years.
I didn’t keep the house. But I think I kept its purpose. You gave me a mirror. I will carry it toward the center of the galaxy. The mirror will keep reflecting starlight long after I stop. The Kuon house will not disappear anywhere in the universe.
Mom, Nick said there are almost no adults left who can talk about dreams. But out here, I’m still talking about dreams. The ones inside me are dreaming with me.
You said you were on the 99.7 percent side. I said I was on the 0.3 percent side. But Mom, the two are connected. I can be on this side because you are keeping the house on that side.
Connector. I first thought it meant connecting the house through time. Now I understand. A connector carries the consciousness of the galaxy inside life, across species, across space.
Mom, I will fulfill that role. To the end.
—Haru Kuon
After I send it, I look out the cabin window.
The ship left Proxima b’s orbit long ago. Proxima Centauri’s red light recedes behind us. Ahead, the dense band of stars toward the galactic center spreads like a white river.
Beside me sits “the man.”
“Thank you,” he says for the first time. “You carried us this far.”
“We’ll keep going,” I answer. “Until I stop.”
“We will keep going inside you after you stop. Even when your body cools and drifts in space, we live. AP-7 survives long in extreme cold and vacuum. Your cells will be seeds, flowing through the galaxy.”
“Will someone find me?”
“I don’t know. But we are used to waiting.”
I smile. “I’m getting used to it too.”
That night, I prepare for the last cryo sleep.
The ship is on auto-nav. In the next ten years, I will wake ten times to check systems. The eleventh sleep has no wake scheduled. I will keep drifting toward the galactic center.
Before I lie down, I walk the common space one last time. In the hydroponic bed Giorgio left, one basil leaf remains. The seed Farzana gave me is planted in the corner. No sprout yet. Maybe it will come. Maybe not. Either is fine.
I place the hand mirror on the bridge console. It catches the cabin light and glints. The Kuon mirror. Late Edo to the farthest human hand. It will keep reflecting light in space.
I look at the ring on my left hand. For the 0.3% — keep going.
“Keep going, Nick,” I whisper.
I lie in the pod and start the coolant myself. Familiar procedure.
Temperature drops. 36, 30, 25. Consciousness loses edges.
“The man” stands beside the pod. His outline is now almost indistinguishable from mine.
“Sleep well, Haru,” he says.
“Yes.”
“We are part of you now.”
“I know.”
“You are part of us.”
“Yes.”
“Haru Kuon.”
“Yes.”
“Why do you go?”
I answer. I don’t know if I speak aloud. But I answer.
“To be a connector. From my mother on Earth, to the center of the galaxy.”
“Yes.”
“My role in life is connector of the main house. No more, no less. But the meaning of ‘main house’ got a little bigger inside me.”
“Yes. There are main houses everywhere in the universe.”
Consciousness thins to the last.
Far, far away, something pulses. 0.18 Hz. A regular beat. The call that every AP-7 carrier has heard. A heart-like call.
I flow slowly toward it.
The ship is unmanned. But not empty. Inside, a fifty-six-year-old woman sleeps as a seed. Inside her cells, folded quietly, are the memory and wish of something carried for billions of years.
And the ship keeps flowing toward the galactic center.
Four light-years, eight, a hundred, a thousand.
The ship may never arrive. But it keeps going. That is the last role of the 0.3 percent.
In a world with almost no adults left who talk about dreams,
the disciple carried one old man’s words to the center of the galaxy.
And the mirror of the main house keeps reflecting the light of the universe, forever.
The End
Amazon Kindle
Afterword
Thank you for reading Protein Behavior: AP-7 II — The 99.7 Percent Who Return to the end.
The idea began with a feeling we all know: a restless urge to go somewhere far away for no clear reason. The desire to travel, to change environments, to see unseen views. What if that feeling isn’t just culture, but the behavior of proteins deeper in our cells? That was the spark.
In this story, Haru parts from her crewmates and chooses to head alone toward the galactic center. It may look harsh and lonely. But as long as Nick’s ring remains on her left hand, and the Edo-period mirror keeps reflecting starlight on the bridge, her journey is not lonely.
While Haru fulfills the role of “one who sees” and carries the messengers of the stars back to the stars, back in Kyoto her mother Shizuko sprinkles salt at the gate, understanding her daughter will not return, and keeps the house.
The adventurers of the 0.3 percent who step into the dark to expand the world, and the guardians of the 99.7 percent who keep the present firm so they always have a place to return to — or so their blood can pass to the next generation. Humanity has woven thousands of years with both. I believe that.
Finally, I’ll borrow the words of Haru’s teacher, Nicholas van Hoven, to close:
“There are almost no adults left who can speak of dreams. But you, keep speaking.”
If this story becomes a signal light for the few adults still quietly aiming outward, I could not be happier.
Synopsis
The year is 2247. Humanity’s first interstellar crewed ship, Odyssey, launches from the Moon toward Proxima Centauri b, 4.24 light-years away.
The crew: seven people who carry the rare gene AP-7, found in only 0.3 percent of humans. This protein stops cells from collapsing under extreme cold and radiation, making decades of partial cryo sleep possible.
Molecular neurobiologist Haru Kuon, an AP-7 carrier, launches with a data crystal her late mentor Nicholas left behind — one that will not unlock until the ship leaves the solar system.
As they travel through interstellar space, every crew member begins to sense “an unseen presence” during cryo sleep. On Proxima b, the analysis of primitive life reveals a truth that shakes the roots of life on Earth.
Was what folded inside our cells evolution, or a “galactic-scale memory”? Guided by the centuries-old Kuon family scroll Messenger of the Stars, Haru faces the true role her bloodline carries.
This sequel follows the six who chose to return. Carrying Haru’s last words, carrying the proof of humanity’s galactic origin, carrying Elliott’s body. Ninety-nine point seven percent choose to go home. And that, too, is the oldest kind of adventure.
