Ancestor (16 page)

SARA ENTERED THE lab to find Jian asleep on her computer desk, head and arms lying heavily to the left of a computer keyboard. Her glossy hair seemed to melt right into the desk’s black surface. She was asleep, but not motionless—the woman twitched and whimpered.

Rhumkorrf was sitting at a terminal across the lab, either ignoring Jian’s nightmare or oblivious to it.

“Doctor Rhumkorrf?” Sara said. “Is she okay?”

He looked up from his computer, then looked at Jian. He waved a hand dismissively. “She does that all the time.” He bent back to his work.

What an asshole. Sara gently shook Jian’s shoulders. The woman snapped up and awake, looked at Sara and flinched away as if Sara were some creature straight from the nightmare.

“Take it easy,” Sara said in a soothing voice. “It’s okay.”

Jian blinked, took a deep breath, held it, then let it out in a long, slow exhale. This chick was a total mess. Must have been a humdinger of a dream. Jian’s eyes suddenly darted to the right, to her multiple computer screens, then she twisted her body to look under the desk.

“Jian, what is it?”

“Did you see it?”

“See what?”

Jian looked around the lab quickly, eyes hunting. “I thought I saw one of them.”

“One of what, honey?”

The woman jammed her fists into her eyes and rubbed. “I thought I saw something. But nothing is there.”

Sara reached out and stroked Jian’s long black hair. “Just take a breath, kiddo. You had a nightmare, that’s all.”

Jian stared back with haunted, hollow eyes. “That all,” she said with a whisper, then laughed quietly. It was a high-pitched laugh. Had it been louder Sara might have mistaken it for a scream.

Jian turned to her computer, shoulders hunched, hair hanging in front of her face. She had the carriage of a woman who’d been beaten by her husband or boyfriend. And still, Rhumkorrf was oblivious.
Total
asshole.

“Miss Purinam, may I ask a question?”

“Don’t call me
Miss,”
Sara said, and smiled. “I work for a living. You call me Sara.”

Jian shook her head. “I use respectful terms only.”

“Okay, then, Sara it is.” Sara put a finger under Jian’s chin and gently lifted, tilting the woman’s head back. Bright red splotches dotted Jian’s neck, precursors to the already-forming dark bruises. “We need to get some ice on your neck.”

“I am fine, Miss Purinam.”

“Sara
. And when I get the ice, you
will
put it on. Now, what’s your question?”

“Where did you get such a plane? This is a flying lab, everything we need. It is amazing.”

“It’s a C-5B that once upon a time crash-landed at Dover Air Force Base,” Sara said. “Most of the plane was sold for scrap, which Colding
bought up through one of Genada’s dummy corporations. We got parts from two other crashes and new engines from a quiet contract with Boeing. Colding went to Baffin with you; my crew and I oversaw the reassembly project in Brazil. Pour in money, shake well, Genada has its own hot-rodded, big-ass flying lab.”

“You put pieces together to make a new whole,” Jian said, then nodded. “That is like what I do for Genada, but I do it inside the computer.”

“But you guys chop up cells and DNA, stuff like that,” Sara said. “You can’t do
that
on a computer, can you?”

Jian hopped up and waddled to a white machine. She looked relieved to have something to talk about, or maybe some
one
to talk to. She gestured at the machine like an auto-show model displaying a new concept car.

“This is our oligo synthesizer. When I make genomes in the computer, this machine creates DNA one nucleotide at a time, the same way you would build chain links, only on a much smaller scale.”

The device didn’t look that dramatic to Sara—waist high, mostly off-white plastic, bristling with orderly tubes and hoses and plastic jars. It didn’t look
that
sci-fi, but what Jian was saying … well, that was just
beyond
sci-fi.

“I don’t think I get it,” Sara said. “You’re telling me this is like a biological inkjet
printer?
It can make, I don’t know …
hot-rodded
DNA?”

Jian nodded. “This is the most advanced machine of its kind in the world. It can build full, custom chromosomes that we create and test inside the computer.”

“Holy shit. That’s amazing. Imagine the brain that came up with that one.”

“That brain is mine,” Jian said. She smiled proudly, an expression that seemed to crack a hidden reserve of beauty Sara hadn’t seen before. “I invented it. I call my computer the God Machine, so this oligo machine is like the hand of God. Isn’t that funny?”

No. It wasn’t funny. In fact, the name sent a chill down Sara’s spine.
The God Machine
. And right smack-dab in the middle of her plane.

Sara didn’t like it. Not one damn bit.

“Let me get some ice for your neck,” Sara said. “I’ll be right back.”

SARA GENTLY WRAPPED gauze around Jian’s neck. The gauze held a small ice pack in place over darkening bruises. Jian tilted her head to accommodate, but she never stopped typing. Her eyes flicked across her half hemisphere of screens. Sara couldn’t understand what the woman was doing—the only thing on the screens was an endless list of four letters: C,
G, T
and A.

“I know you’re smart and all,” Sara said, “but doesn’t the computer handle that coding stuff?”

Jian shrugged. “Sometimes I see things that give me idea. I tweak genome here, tweak genome there. I am hoping I can reload our latest research from the drive I brought onboard.” As if to punctuate her point, Jian called up a new window, typed in a few lines of code, then returned to the endlessly scrolling list of
A, G, T
and
C
.

The computer gave off a loud, single beep. Jian took in a sharp breath and held it. She stared at the screen with a spooky intensity. Jian reminded Sara of a hard-core gambler waiting for the dice to stop tumbling.

Jian clicked the mouse, and Sara saw actual words appear on the screen.

Rhumkorrf’s head popped out from behind his terminal.

“Is it loaded?”

“Yes, Doctor Rhumkorrf,” Jian said.

He ran over.
Scurried
was a better word, because the fidgety man reminded Sara of a rat with glasses.

“Sara,” he said, “please go wake up Mister Feely. Tell him we need to prepare and run the immune response test, immediately.”

Sara saw Jian’s right hand move the mouse. On the screen, the pointer hovered over
YES
. Jian’s left hand stayed flat on the desktop—she actually crossed her fingers, then clicked the mouse.

A mechanical humming sound came from the oligo machine. The hand of God. Sara quickly left the lab, partly to wake up Feely, and partly because she didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing.

THE C-5’S INCESSANT in-flight hum filled the lab’s stillness, but Claus barely noticed it. All of his attention rested on the bulkhead monitor, as did that of Jian and Tim.

Once again, the grid of 150 squares. Black filled only nineteen of them.

131/150

They all kept checking watches, looking at the time counter on the monitor, even scanning for other clocks in the room. It had never gone this long—usually this far into the test, there were fewer than ten eggs left.

Another panel went black.

130/150

Three people held their breath, waiting for the inevitable cascade of black squares. A cascade that did not appear.

“Mister Feely,” Claus said. “Give me the time.” He could have gone by the clock on the screen, but he couldn’t let himself believe it. There had to be a mistake. Tim had the
official
time and that was what Claus wanted. Erika had kept the official time before, but she was no longer part of the project. Now her duties—all of them—fell to Tim.

“Twenty-four minutes, thirteen seconds,” Tim said.

Claus felt a flicker of hope. Maybe …
maybe
. He watched, waited. No more black squares appeared. The embryos vibrated as their cells split and split again, taking them well into the morula stage. In some of the squares, the lethal macrophages actually sat side by side with the morulas.

But no more attacks.

No one spoke. Claus suddenly noticed that the jet-engine hum was the only sound in the lab.

“Time?”

Tim started to talk, then gagged and covered his mouth. Erika had not only been the superior intellect, she also, apparently, could hold her liquor better.

“Twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds,” Tim said, recovering. “Mark.”

In square thirty-eight, an egg quivered: another successful mitosis. The macrophages moved around aimlessly.

Claus had done it. He had beaten the immune response.

His strategy had been risky—shorting Jian’s meds brought on her manic/depressive symptoms, but it also freed up her mind. Her most creative solutions had always come when she was on the edge of madness. Soon, perhaps, he could get her to her normal medication level, but not now, not when he needed her at her best. The implantation process came next. If that brought more problems, they would need fast solutions. They were on the run from world governments, for God’s sake—speed was of the essence.

Besides, Jian’s nightmares were getting worse but her hallucinations had only started recently. He probably had a week or so before she got suicidal. Maybe less. But that was the kind of gamble you took when immortality was on the line.

He counted off sixty more seconds, just to be sure.

No more black squares.

“It is a success,” he said. “We need to prepare the eggs for implantation.”

He wished Erika could have been here for this. Despite her horrible actions, she was a brilliant scientist. Oh well, she’d just have to read about it in the journals. Maybe he’d even leave her name on some of the lesser research papers.

Jian, however, would get full secondary credit. She’d earned it. He saw her fingering the bandage around her neck, the bandage covering the bruises Erika had given her. Women. They were
all
crazy.

“Jian, what changed?” Claus said. “What did you do?”

“The four new samples helped, Doctor Rhumkorrf, but I also had an idea, very simple, that we had not thought. We want internal organs, and we’ve coded to make those compatible with humans. The rest of the body, we were going piecemeal, replacing small groups of proteins at a time, trying to find the missing piece of the compatibility puzzle. Mister Feely gave me an idea.”

“I did?” Feely said.

“Yes. I realized that there was one organ unnecessary to our needs. I told the computer to swap out all DNA for that organ, then perform a hundred thousand generations of test evolution. It seems the DNA associated with that organ was the final immune response trigger.”

“But which organ …” Claus said, his voice trailing off. No. It couldn’t
be that simple. Could it? He had asked them to step back, think differently. Jian had done exactly that and found something they all should have seen months ago.

“Well?” Tim said. “What organ was it?”

“The
largest
organ,” Claus said, getting the words out before Jian could say them. “The integument. The
skin.”

Tim looked from Claus to Jian. “Really?”

Jian nodded, even smiled a little. “The ancestors will have cow fur.”

“And that’s it?” Tim said. “Problem solved?”

Of course that didn’t solve the problem. The boy wasn’t even
close
to Erika’s brilliance. “Don’t be stupid, Mister Feely. All we did was defeat the immune response. That allows us to implant, monitor, measure and modify as we go. We will probably lose all the embryos within a few days of implantation. When we cloned the quagga, we implanted over twelve hundred blastocysts before one survived to birth. That part of the quagga project was Doctor Hoel’s, Mister Feely. Now it’s yours.”

Tim’s eyes widened. “But, but I’m Jian’s
assistant
. We have to get someone else in here to replace Erika.”

“There is no one else,” Claus said. “We are isolated, we have to stay hidden. Congratulations, Mister Feely … you’ve just been promoted.”

“But, but … I can’t … she brought back species from
extinction
, I can’t—”

“You can and you
will,”
Claus said. “Time to grow up, Mister Feely. Millions of avoidable deaths now rest squarely on your shoulders.”

Tim blinked again. He opened his mouth to speak, but gagged, ran to a trash can and threw up in it.