Ancestor

  Tim shrugged. “Apparently my brain isn’t really worth anything. I might as well explore new territories, like a good buzz and a high score.”

  “Oh come on. Your wallet should be embroidered with the words smart motherfucker. How did Rhumkorrf handle it?”

  Tim paused the game, took a sip of his drink. “Rhumkorrf is a douchebag, man. A real douchebag.”

  “I don’t see that,” Colding said. “He’s just an intense guy.”

  “He’d sell you out in a heartbeat if it got him what he wanted. He’d sell any of us out.” Tim and Rhumkorrf had clashed from the beginning. Tim did a good job of pushing down his dislike and playing his role. Mostly. “Know what really burns my ass?”

  “What?”

  “That Jian is doing the real work. So is Erika. But Rhumkorrf is going to get the lion’s share of the credit.”

  “You gotta let it go,” Colding said. “We’re here to save lives, change history. Not for glory.”

  “Hah. I’m in it for the money.”

  Colding felt a stab of anger, but he shoved it away. Maybe Tim was kidding, maybe not. Didn’t matter. As long as Tim helped make the project a success, he could have whatever motivation he liked.

  “Should I check in on Rhumkorrf?”

  Tim shrugged. “If you like being in the presence of a walking, talking asshole, that’s your business. He’ll be in the genetics lab, no doubt. But why do that when you can park your ass for a few and have a drink with me, brotha-man?”

  “I should check in on everyone first. Maybe I’ll have one later tonight.”

  Tim shook his head. “Naw, can’t do later. I’m … I’m kind of taking a break now, but in a few hours I’ll be locked down in here. Really getting into the research, you know? Tim needs his alone time. And before you ask, I checked on Jian and she’s fine. And also, before you ask, I’ll make sure she takes her meds in a little bit.”

  “Gosh, it’s like you have ESP or something.”

  “That or a basic short-term memory,” Tim said. “If you’re not going to get tanked with me, kindly move along so I can make Tetris my digital bitch.”

  Colding gave a half-assed salute, then walked out of the apartment.

  Just as Tim had predicted, Rhumkorrf stood alone in the genetics lab, staring at a wall-sized screen full of nothing but black squares.

  “What’s up, Doc?”

  Rhumkorrf turned, eyes tight with anger, but seemed to relax a little when he saw Colding. “I fear I am not in the mood for your cartoon references today, my friend.”

  “Sufferin’ succotash,” Colding said. “That bad?”

  “Yes, that bad. We’re at an impasse. I’m convinced we’re missing something relatively obvious.”

  “Did you try turning it off, then turning it back on?”

  Rhumkorrf glared, then laughed. “If only it were that simple. Is Bobby still here? I could use some flying time to forget all of this.”

  “Sorry, he had to take off. If it’s any consolation, he left four new samples.”

  The little man sighed. “Well, who knows. Maybe the answer is in one of those. Please ask Tim to process them right away.”

  “Tim is very busy,” Colding said. “Said he had a puzzling issue.”

  Rhumkorrf rolled his eyes. “You’re a horrible liar. Tetris again?”

  Colding nodded.

  Rhumkorrf rubbed his eyes. “Have Jian process the samples. The work is beneath her, but maybe she could use the change of pace.”

  “Speaking of Jian, Doc, her nightmares are getting worse.”

  “Oh? How often? More intense?”

  Rhumkorrf’s words came out fast and clipped. He even sounded a little excited. Colding often wondered if the man saw Jian as a person or as a set of symptoms, just another scientific problem to be solved.

  “Three nights in a row,” Colding said. “I can’t really say if they’re more intense.”

  “Any hallucinations?”

  “I don’t think so. Should you change her dosage again?”

  Rhumkorrf shook his head. “No, we need to let the most recent change run its course, see if it corrects the situation before we introduce an additional variable.”

  “But she’s sleeping less and less. I’m worried about her.”

  “You worry about everyone and everything,” Rhumkorrf said. “Trust me, I’ll make adjustments before she becomes suicidal again. We can’t lose Jian, now can we?”

  Colding chewed on his lower lip. Rhumkorrf was the doctor here, and he’d helped Jian before. Maybe the little man was right, maybe these things just took time.

  “Okay,” Colding said. “I’ll give Jian the samples and have her process them. How about you? Can I get you anything?”

  “Do you have a Nobel Prize in your pocket?”

  “No, that’s not a Nobel Prize, I’m just really glad to see you.”

  Rhumkorrf laughed again, then pushed Colding out of the lab.

  NOVEMBER 8: OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME

  THE FIVE PEOPLE in Genada’s plush meeting room made for quite the Fortune 500 photo op. Two men and a woman from America, one playboy Brit entrepreneur and one Chinese shipping mogul. Both of the American men had made billions in technology—one in software, the other with a search engine—while the woman had turned her family’s small line of hotels into the world’s second-largest chain.

  The shipping mogul was the biggest risk. If word got back to the Chinese State Council, Danté would have much to answer for. They expected to be the sole investor in this project. When it succeeded, the Chinese government would have a way to help its estimated 1.5 million citizens waiting for an organ transplant. With only about a hundred thousand potential donors annually, the People’s Republic was desperate to do something to help its populace. The situation was so bad that human rights organizations claimed prisoners were being killed to harvest their organs. China needed a solution. Rhumkorrf’s project was it.

  Still, the shipping magnate hadn’t become one of the richest people on the planet by running his mouth about exclusive investment opportunities. He’d be fine. At least, Danté hoped he’d be fine.

  Danté greeted the billionaires, gave his most charming smile, then got down to business. “Genada has a cash-flow issue with a critical project. We need capital and we need it now. That gives you a window of opportunity. You’ve all signed nondisclosure agreements, so I’ll just cut to the chase.”

  He picked up a remote control and hit a button, turning on the large flat-panel monitor mounted on the wall. The screen displayed a chart with a rising, jagged red line.

  “The red line represents the growing number of people in the United States with terminal illnesses who are waiting for an organ transplant. Over a hundred thousand right now, up from eighty thousand just five years ago, which was up from fifty-three thousand a decade ago. A new name is added to the list every ten minutes. Only about fifteen thousand organs will become available this year, roughly fifty-five percent from deceased donors, the rest from living donors. In the United States, the average wait for a kidney is over fourteen months. The discrepancy between those needing an organ and available organs increases by about twelve percent each year. Roughly fourteen thousand Americans will die, this year, while waiting for an organ that will never arrive.

  “Those numbers are just the United States. Worldwide, some estimates range as high as 750,000 people who need a kidney transplant. That doesn’t take into account the need for hearts, lungs and livers.

  “Genada estimates the average fee for a replacement organ will be around fifty thousand dollars. That means an annual market of over thirty-seven billion. And that is the current market. With improving living conditions and medical care in India, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, we expect the number of people needing an organ transplant to double in the next ten years. Do I have your attention thus far?”

  The five investors’ heads nodded in unison.

  “Several companies are trying to solve
this shortfall by a process known as xenotransplantation—transplanting the organs or tissues of one species into another.”

  “Animal parts,” said a small man with thick glasses and a mop haircut. He was one of the American software magnates, and by some standards, the richest man on Earth. “Baboon hearts, pig livers and the like.”

  Danté nodded and smiled. “With current technology, a xenotransplant can keep someone alive for a few days, weeks at most, and only then if the patient stays in a hospital the whole time. The human immune system, you see, usually attacks the organ. Defeating that immune response is the goal of most companies, but solving that issue leads to a larger, far more significant hazard.

  “Xenotransplantation opens up the possibility of a virus jumping species. When you introduce a foreign organ into a human body, you also introduce any viruses that are in that organ. Normally, these viruses die quickly, as they aren’t designed to attack a human host. But if those viruses adapt to infect human cells, we can get an infection against which humans have no natural antibodies.”

  “The H1N1 virus,” the shipping magnate said. “Swine flu, SARS, bird flu. Those are species-jumping viruses.”

  “Or like what just happened in Greenland,” said the lone woman. “This doesn’t sound like a valid investment to me. It sounds like a way to kill millions.”

  The comment caught Danté by surprise. The four men looked at the woman—they obviously hadn’t heard about Greenland, but their confidence slipped nonetheless. Apparently Genada wasn’t the only company with contacts in high places. Danté briefly wondered if Farm Girl might be selling the same information to other parties.

  “Genada has the solution,” he said. “We are perhaps the only valid investment in this area, because our process eliminates any possibility of a virus jumping from the donor species to humans.”

  He clicked a button on the remote. The picture showed a small creature perched on a rotting log, surrounded by exotic vegetation of some long-gone jungle. The creature had somewhat of a teardrop shape—thick in the middle, narrowing to thin hips and ending in a short, pointed tail. The rear legs stuck out at forty-five-degree angles from those slight hips, resulting in knees and feet farther away from the body than those of a cat or a dog. The front legs also jutted away from the body, but at less of an angle. A sparse layer of silvery fur covered the lithe little body. Although it showed some characteristics of a modern animal, particularly the long whiskers protruding from its pointy nose, it looked unmistakably primitive.

  “This is a Thrinaxodon, which lived some two hundred million years ago. It’s a member of a group of animals known as Synapsids, also called proto-mammals. Something like the Thrinaxodon gave rise to all mammals. That something is the ancestor of you, me, dogs, dolphins, every mammal species. That ancestor, my friends, is what Genada is re-creating, and it’s going to make all of you a great deal of money.”

  The mop-haired man stood up, a big smile on his face, his eyes alight with excitement. “So let me get this straight—you’re creating this ancestor creature so you can put its organs into people and save lives, and at the same time, eliminate the possibility of these dangerous viruses?”

  Danté nodded. “We will create an animal similar to the mammalian ancestor. Since the ancestor would be engineered from the DNA up, we can ensure the resulting animal will not carry any naturally occurring viruses that could adapt to infect people.

  “Cataloging and working with this computerized biological data is a science called bioinformatics. The Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics sequenced the entire human genetic code, right down to every last nucleotide, but humans were only the start. Scientists have sequenced thousands of mammals, storing the digital analysis in public databases like Gen-Bank. These genomes, combined with animals we sequenced ourselves, give Genada the complete genetic code of almost every mammal on the planet.”

  “I do not understand,” the shipping magnate said. “You have genomes of modern animals, but not of this ancestor?”

  “Genetic mutation is the basis of evolution,” Danté said. “But not all genes mutate at the same rate. As species branch out from a common ancestor, some genes mutate faster, some don’t mutate at all. By using a molecular clock, so to speak, we can gauge which sequences have changed, and by comparing that gene to the same gene of another mammal, we can tell which sequence is older, closer to the original ancestor’s genetic code.”

  The woman smiled. “I’ll be damned. That’s such a simple concept, just use the lowest common denominator. You take out everything that’s unique, and you’ll be left with everything that’s common.”

  Danté nodded. They were getting it. The woman was the toughest sell. The software mogul was in, Danté could see that as plain as day, but if the woman invested the last three would follow.

  “Our staff created an evolution lab inside the computer,” Danté said. “This program statistically analyzes genomes based on the probable function of each gene sequence. The computer works with our digitized ancestor genome, predicting final form and function, then makes changes, predicts again, and measures probability for desired traits. It’s just like evolution, only in reverse and a million times faster than nature. We create the creature in the computer, one nucleotide at a time. Since it is created from scratch, we know—for certain—that it’s free of any viral contamination.”

  The Chinese man spoke. “But that animal on the screen, it is too small. You could not put its heart in me.”

  “Correct,” Danté said. “But that animal on the screen was created only in silica, only on the computer, to give us a baseline. We’ve already done that. From there, the computer added specific virtual genes coding for size and human organ compatibility. Our first living generation won’t be perfect, but we can analyze the phenotype—the size of the animal and what it looks like—against the genotype—the actual DNA coding. Once we have that, we keep modifying the genome until the animal’s organs are ideally suited for human transplantation.”

  The mop-haired man sat back down. “But if you have all this technology, why not just grow the organs individually?”

  “Some companies are working on just that solution, but it’s not yet possible. And when it is possible, growing an individual organ will require an expensive lab or manufacturing center. Short answer, the cost per organ would be astronomical. Genada’s ancestors, on the other hand, will be herd animals. Most importantly, they will be able to breed. All we have to do is put them out to pasture and feed them. Organ demand grows? We simply raise more animals.”

  “What about PETA,” the woman asked. “And what about the Animal Liberation Front? They’ve been targeting xenotransplantation research.”

  “We think we have the competitive advantage there as well,” Danté said. “The ancestors do not occur in nature. We made them, down to the last strands of DNA. We will even use that fact to insist other companies abandon research on pigs and primates. If Genada has already solved the problem, there is no longer a need for that potentially dangerous research.”

  The software magnate laughed. “You want a monopoly. A monopoly on human life.”

  Danté nodded. “Lady and gentlemen, nothing sells like life itself. When we succeed, we will be the only vendor. We will be able to charge whatever the market will bear. For the millions of people not quite ready for death, the market would bear quite a lot.”

  Within an hour, all five had left, and all five had given the same decision: yes. That gave Genada enough capital for at least one more year.

  Magnus would be so pleased.

  NOVEMBER 8: DOT-DOT-DOT …

  THE WRIST WATCH BUZZED. It wasn’t an alarm buzz, because for alarms, the watch beeped. The buzz only meant one thing.

  Contact.

  The buzz was a five-minute warning, a notice to go somewhere, be alone before the full message came in. There was no one else in the room. The five minutes passed very slowly.

  A tiny chip in the watch picked up certain heav
ily encrypted satellite signals. The chip decoded those signals, buzzing out the translated message in the simple dots and dashes of Morse code.

  After all this time, the command to act. How odd, when the project was so close to completion, close to extending life for millions of people. No, not when … the correct word was if. There was no guarantee they would ever overcome the immune response.

  And besides, who gave a fuck? Someone would figure this out eventually. As long as Rhumkorrf didn’t get the credit, it would all work itself out.

  It would be dangerous, true, but the plan was already made and it wasn’t that difficult. Quietly take out the transportation and communication to completely isolate the project. Then, destroy the data, both the live set and the backup. After that? Play dumb and wait for Colonel Fischer and his goons to arrive.

  At the computer, a few key taps brought up a private menu. Several prepared programs were ready to go, hidden inside a miles-long stream of archived genetic code. No way it was safe to hide the programs in a ready-to-use format, not with Jian on the island. That woman interacted with computers in a way that defied logic—if hacker programs were just sitting there, Jian would have found them somehow.

  These programs would cause some damage. How much damage depended on whether Jian was awake or asleep. She was the only real variable, which meant something had to be done about her or the plan might not work.

  Regardless, tonight it would all be over … one way or another.

  NOVEMBER 8: A SHOT & A CHASER

  A

  G

  C

  T

  OVER AND OVER again, the endless chains scrolled across the screen, some segments highlighted in yellow, some in green, some in red, other colors. The special language. The true language of life. A language that for some reason only she could really see, really understand.

  Biological poetry.

  “Jian?”

  She blinked. The poetry changed back to scrolling letters. She was in the bioinformatics lab. She looked up to see Tim standing in front of her desk.