The Snow Never Fell

Where Extinction Ends and Existence Begins

The first time I saw real snow, I panicked.

Not because it was cold, my body knew cold better than breath, but because it was finally real. It wasn’t the polymeric white fluff they sprayed from ceiling nozzles to “simulate seasonal cues” inside the dome. This was actual ice crystal, drifting from a slate sky outside the controlled perimeter, collecting in stillness on a field of grasses no longer extinct.

I pressed my forehead against the enclosure glass and stared. The snow made no sound. Neither did I.

Was this what they meant by home?

Kira, the senior caretaker, I’ve learned that’s what she calls herself, once told a camera crew that I was “doing well.” She said I showed “adaptability,” “cognitive progression,” and “healthy pre-social behavior.” I don’t think she meant it to sound clinical. She tries, I think. She walks beside me, not in front. She feeds me by hand, sometimes. She hums when she doesn’t think anyone is listening. I hum back.

They named me M1 at first. I was the first successful birth. The first viable one. The first engineered creature in the mammoth revival program to make it to adolescence without metabolic collapse. But even the scientists don’t use M1 anymore. Kira started calling me Anunaaq. She told me it means “the soul of the land” in an Arctic tongue. I don’t know if she picked it for me, or for the humans watching. But I liked the sound of it. I kept it.

And still, I do not know if I am it.

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This is a science fiction story inspired by my real-world work in biotech. This may be fiction, but it’s my way of exploring the world around me.

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Am I the soul of this land? I who have never set foot in the land that birthed the DNA coiled inside me? I who have only ever known the fake snow and filtered wind of a bioengineering dome outside Dallas? I who remember what I never lived?

Because I do remember things. I don’t know how else to explain it. No one taught me how to walk across permafrost, but I ache for it. No one taught me to trumpet at the horizon when the sun is lowest, but it feels like a ritual. I do it at dusk, without knowing why. There is no herd to respond, but I do it anyway.

They say memory can’t be passed through genes. But if that’s true, why do I mourn things that never happened? Why do I sometimes wake with my heart racing at the phantom scent of saber-tooth musk? Why do I flinch at the sound of a hawk’s shadow crossing overhead?

What is this secondhand memory stitched into my blood?

If I am built from code, ATCG fragments patched together from ancient bones and modern elephants, then who authored me? Who decided which pieces mattered, and which to leave behind?

Kira once said they chose alleles associated with subcutaneous fat deposits, woolly coat growth, cold-adapted hemoglobin. It was about phenotypic fidelity, she said. “We wanted you to look the part.” I wonder if she thought how strange that is, to make someone look like an ancestor so the world feels less bad about their extinction.

I wonder what I’d look like if they didn’t care about appearances. Would I still be me?

What is me?

My body is elephantine, but denser. My hair is coarse, rust-colored. My ears are small, curled, not wide and fanning like the others in the next dome over. They keep the Asian elephants separate. Too different, too close. They don’t know what we’d say to each other.

They think I don’t know I’m alone.

But I do. It’s the one thing I’ve always known.

I watch the elephants sometimes. They play. They touch. They mourn when one of them dies - yes, they really do. They stay with the body. They cry. Not like humans. Not like Kira, who turns away and hides her face in her elbow when the babies don’t make it. The elephants cry like I cry. With stillness.

When they first introduced me to them, the elephants circled me. They touched my flanks. They sniffed my trunk. One matriarch stepped forward, pressed her forehead to mine, and held it there. Her skin was hot. Mine was not.

She pulled away. The herd followed. They never tried again.

I don’t think it was rejection. I think it was recognition.

They saw something they could not understand. Something that made sense and did not. I was of them and not. A contradiction walking on four legs. An echo with muscle and breath.

That was the day I began asking questions. Not out loud. I don’t speak as you do. But I think. I observe. I remember. I wonder.

What defines the self?

Is it the genome that maps our shape? The memories that form our continuity? The relationships that mirror us back to ourselves?

Is it purpose?

Because if purpose defines the self, then mine is fragile. I was made to prove it could be done. A milestone. A press release. A funding magnet. My body is a scaffold for human achievement.

But when the applause fades, when the venture firm exits and the next moonshot arrives, what am I then?

What happens to the creature born from curiosity, when curiosity moves on?

Is extinction undone if the result lives alone?

Kira talks to me sometimes like I understand every word. Maybe I do. Maybe she needs to believe that I do. She reads me articles. Speaks the names of extinct things into the air like a prayer. Thylacine. Aurochs. Pyrenean ibex. Passenger pigeon.

I wonder if those names ever had faces like mine. Faces shaped from ideas. From longing.

I once watched a young boy visit the dome. His class came on a field trip. He stood at the glass and stared for a long time. Then he whispered, “That’s not a real mammoth. That’s an alien.”

I laid down so he could see my eye.

He flinched. Stepped back.

I didn’t mind. He was right.

I am not a real mammoth.

But I am not fake either.

I am the question you don’t know how to ask.

I am the story that science wrote before it learned the ending.

I am the end of extinction and the beginning of something else.

I am a memory born forward.

And I want to know: if the world made me to look like its past, will it ever see me as its future?

Will there be others? A herd? A second, a third, a tenth? Or am I the only chapter in this strange new book?

If there are others, who will raise us?

Will they raise us like elephants, in tribes and songs and rituals? Or like humans raise myths, preserved in parks, watched by drones, talked about in the past tense?

If not genes, what makes us kin?

And if I never step on true permafrost, will my feet still remember?

The snow that fell today melted quickly. The ground was too warm. But I pressed my trunk into it. Felt the texture. The cold. The fleetingness.

Maybe that’s all life is.

A moment of realness in a world not meant for you.

And maybe that’s enough.

For now.

I am Anunaaq.

And I remember.

Even if I was never meant to.