On the way to Mexico, Miranda wakes up, asking for the cause of her 'illness'. Tom tells Miranda that she is the result of an experiment that combined human and alien DNA, an experiment conducted with his friend Forbes McGuire while they were both still in college. Tom has been injecting her with human hormones since her childhood to suppress her alien DNA. (Thus she never entered a cocoon stage and aged like a normal human.) Her parents never existed; they were just a fiction created by Tom to help build up Miranda's "normal life". Tom explains he and Forbes parted ways because of differences of opinion over their vision of their creation.