Gene Mapper (5 page)

Kurokawa laughed cynically. “No one wanted that except Barnhard.”

“Sorry, I’m off topic. I’m grateful for the materials, but this won’t tell me what caused the mutation. Without knowing the nature of the intruder, there’s nothing we can do.”

“ ‘Intruder’? I like it. Let’s call it that until we know what we’re dealing with. No one expects you to come up with the answer right away. There’s something more important.”

Kurokawa put the envelope under his arm and steepled his fingers. He peered at me intently.

“Mamoru, one thing we’ll probably be discussing tomorrow is the investigation team. Sorry, but I need you to clear your schedule for the next month. Can you do that? I’m authorized to offer you at least twice your standard rate. You can push back the work on the SR06 sites in Hangzhou and Wakkanai till we’re through.”

“A month? You think we’ll be finished that soon?”

“There’s only a month until the first harvest takes place. If we don’t pinpoint the cause and figure out a solution before then, Mother Mekong’s five-star project will be a failure. SR06 will be discredited and discontinued. L&B itself could be threatened. Prototype SR06 sites are already being constructed in Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. If those go …”

“Barnhard’s head will be on the block.”

“This is no time for complacency. Did you forget that your name is in the credits?”

I felt suddenly dizzy. My avatar would not betray the effect this reminder had on me, but it knocked me back physically.

“I guess I’d be finished as far as this industry goes.”

“Let’s do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. My job is on the line too.”

“Okay. Now I’ve got something for you. I need to salvage some data from the Internet. Know anyone you could recommend?”

I explained that the intruder was a legacy cultivar with no resistance to red rust blight. As a first step to figuring out how to deal with it, I needed to salvage information buried on the Internet and compare it with the Mother Mekong data.

“A salvager? I’m sorry, I can’t help you there. All I can suggest is to go to CoWorkingNet and make a backchannel offer. Internet salvage is strictly for freelancers. I don’t mind if you handle it yourself. You’ll be dealing with public information, so just cut an OpenNDA with a reasonable use-by date.”

A faint shadow fell across the grainy “movie” table. Someone said something I couldn’t make out.

The waitress was peering over my right shoulder, pitcher in hand. In Private Mode, she would see an alias avatar instead of the “real” me.
More water?
was probably what she said. The alias waved her away with the practiced gesture of a stage actor. The shadow of its “hand” transited the table.

“If that’s it, I’d better be going,” said Kurokawa. “If I don’t get some sleep, I might doze through the meeting tomorrow.”

“Take it easy, Takashi. Get some rest.”

He stood up, bowed, and disappeared. He must have logged out from within Private Mode. The film grain effect dissipated and the surrounding conversational buzz faded in gently. Kurokawa’s alias was still sitting across from me. Zucca’s selling point was its AR stage. It wouldn’t do to have customers vanishing abruptly.

The alias gestured invitingly toward the cake cart, stood up, and melted into the foot traffic on the avenue. I had no reason to stay now that the meeting was over, but I decided to write my recruiting ad then and there.

One month. It wasn’t much.

I guessed that Thep would collect the second sample carefully. Even if she hurried, I’d be waiting a few days. That would use up a week, more or less. If she was such a hotshot, I figured I should go ahead with the data I had to see what I could get.

First I had to find a salvager.

My call tone beeped again. It was late afternoon of the following day. The sun was turning the rear wall of my “conference room” a warm gold. The next appointment was a salvager who went by the handle of Ya-God-Oh. His screen name was an attempt at Japanese, at least.

My call for salvagers generated a few dozen responses. I winnowed the field to five after checking track records and specialties. All the candidates used handles, unlike the mappers I was used to dealing with. I didn’t care what they called themselves if they could do the job, but this morning’s conversations with Bull’s-eye and Jackpot 7 had pretty much wasted my time. I’d had more than enough hacker bullshit for one day.

Why did these guys spend so much time harping on the tools they used? The old Internet was fenced with cyber razor wire to keep it from contaminating TrueNet, but you didn’t have to be a genius to get onto it. What was left of it depended on which country or even which city you were in, but from Tokyo you could still reach old servers through any Meshnet wireless node run by Anonymous.

Bull’s-eye was completely full of himself. “Leave it to me, old buddy. Give me the search term and I’ll track down whatever it is you want. What was it again? Right, DNA. Find it for sure. For sure, no problem. Give me the model number or some unique ID. There’s a cache somewhere. I can get it for you. Just give me a week or so.”

If all I needed was to input search terms to a zombie server and fetch something from a twenty-year-old cache, I didn’t need a salvager. What I needed was a hell of a lot more complicated. I needed a specialist, not a script-kiddie.

Ya-God-Oh claimed to have some background in genetic engineering. I wasn’t sure what to believe, but he had to be better than the two guys I interviewed that morning.

“I’ve been waiting for your call. I’ll be recording, if you don’t mind.”

I was sitting across from a dog.

He had a red bandanna around his neck. Big and brown. Golden retriever? His front paws were on the table. He looked slowly around the room and smiled, if that was possible for a dog.

At first I thought,
This can’t be Ya-God-Oh
. An assistant? Maybe an agent. Still, I was amazed by the resolution. I go out of my way to make my stage presentable, but this dog made it look like a cheap video game. The rendering was astonishing. At first I almost thought I might be looking at an actual canine in RealVu, but the long golden fur, with the tip of each hair glowing in the sunlight, was waving gently in the breeze from the air conditioner. If the fur was complying with my physics settings, this had to be an avatar. Maybe a commercial setup like Zucca’s could hit this level of realism, but I didn’t know it was possible to render so many frames per second in my environment. If he was sending his assistant with an avatar this good, I wondered if my system would choke when
he
showed up.

The dog noticed the flashing
AGREE
button on the table and tapped it with a paw. He looked up and smiled.

“Nice to meet you, Mamoru. My name is Yagodo. If you want to tape, go ahead. Sorry for the unorthodox avatar. I hope it won’t be a problem.”

With their mouths open, dogs tend to look like they’re smiling anyway, but I had a feeling the man on the other side of the stage was actually grinning. So this was Yagodo’s avatar, and that’s how his name was pronounced. I’d heard about nonhuman avatars—animals, cartoon characters—used by some members of Anonymous and every one of the No ID fundamentalists who refuse to even connect to TrueNet.

I’d been hoping to avoid one of those types. It looked like I’d drawn another low card. This was worse than empty bragging about hacker tools. Yagodo was spoofing me—in a job interview no less. He had to be fake.

My avatar concealed my sigh of disappointment. Instead it motioned Yagodo to continue. Sometimes Behavior Correction does the opposite of what you want. Functionality comes with a price.

“I guess you’ve never chatted with a dog before.”

I froze. There was something wrong with my commstat bar. No information on where Yagodo was, which provider he was using, his nationality, nothing. Jackpot 7 used multiple cutouts to screen his identity, but on TrueNet you know your caller’s location, always.

Now the bar was empty except for
yagodo
, the elapsed time in minutes and seconds, and the charges, which were adding up way too slowly, it seemed to me. Maybe he
was
using RealVu, which costs almost nothing to deliver to an AR stage. Or was his avatar so cutting-edge that it was hogging system resources and slowing everything down? It was spooky.

“I’m sorry if I’ve unsettled you, Mamoru. Would I be right if I guessed you’ve never dealt with a salvager?”

The voice was fiftyish and seemed to be native Japanese. It had a professional tone that didn’t fit the nonhuman avatar approach.

“Yes, first time. I never needed to, until now.”

“First time. I see. Well then, welcome to the lost world of the Internet. TrueNet has its points, but I’ve been poking around the ruins of the Internet too long to leave it behind. Almost thirty years, in fact.”

“Not so fast. I haven’t made my mind up yet. As the ad said, I’m looking for legacy crop plant data. Let me give you some details and you decide if you’re up to the task. How you respond will affect my decision. Are you sure you want to do this interview as a dog?”

“I know it complicates things, but I have my reasons. I just finished a job, and my new assistant told me there was an interesting project out there. I haven’t done any DNA salvaging for a while. Crops, is it?”

I gave him the basic details: I was looking for data on an unidentified contaminant infesting a field of distilled crops, and the bizarrely large DNA sample in my hands contained, among other things, a complete
Oryza
genome. I was careful not to mention Mother Mekong, L&B, or SR06. Even if I had, my avatar’s NDA filter would probably have kept Yagodo from hearing.

“I need to know what this intruder is. Almost all the data on legacy cultivars with susceptibility to red rust blight is somewhere on the Internet. For a start, I need you to find a DNA match with the intruder, and tell me the cultivar and where it was grown. Information on efficient ways to eradicate it would be a plus. Too tough? Maybe it’s over your head.”

While he was listening, the dog kept tapping his front paws rhythmically on the desk. I could hear his tail as it kept hitting the back of the chair. His face was mostly unreadable, but he didn’t seem upset by my skeptical attitude.

“Rice … hmm …”

The dog lifted his nose and puckered his lips—at least it looked like puckering. His paws were side by side on the table. Now he looked like a philosopher-dog. Yagodo probably had his arms folded.

“Rice, now there’s a hard one. With wheat, you could just pull the genome transcript and references from Cambridge Open Resources. Wheat wasn’t hit by a disease like red rust that made cultivar information irrelevant, so everything on the Internet is on TrueNet too, including DNA information for all the cultivars. It would be easy to narrow down the field by calibrating the genetic distance between what’s online and your intruder. For soy, with all the GMO variants, you could get modification location and sequencing data by accessing patents and academic papers. Then you’d compare them with the standard genome. You wouldn’t have to go Internet diving at all.”

This was not the bullshit answer I’d been expecting. No one without specialist knowledge could have tossed that off without prepping first. It also hit me that if Yagodo was as old as he sounded, he might have a better grip on the state of things around the time of the Lockout than even Kurokawa and I did. He also handled the terminology correctly from the point of view of managing a data search. Progress in synthetic biology had changed the meaning of “GMO” since the period Yagodo was describing, but he used the term correctly, the way it was used at the time. This sort of contextual awareness would be critical for the salvaging work I had in mind.

“Rice genome.” Yagodo’s avatar tapped his nails rhythmically on the table. He was probably using a keyboard. “Here’s something. The
Oryza
genome was decoded in 2004. It was a big MAFF project.”

A caption popped up below the dog’s muzzle.

MAFF: MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE,
FORESTRY AND FISHERIES

PRECURSOR TO MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENTAL PRODUCTION

Another extinct period term used naturally. This was no run-of-the-mill salvager. I thought Yagodo might turn out to be a real “jackpot.”

“But I don’t think this will help much,” he continued. “There are too many varieties. It would take a full day just to search for thirty or forty matches.”

“Hold on. All I need is a match to
Oryza sativa japonica
.”

“You don’t get it, do you? Well, I guess it’s no surprise. You’re young.”

The dog gave me a sidelong look and batted his eyelashes. Yagodo was probably grinning at my lack of background, but for some reason it didn’t bother me at all.

“You would have to search through rice cultivars on the books of agricultural research stations, farmer’s coops, organizations like that. We’re talking several thousand.”

“Were there really that many? But maybe that’s good. There should be collateral data from the allergen and toxic isomer reports.”

The dog shook his head. The beads on his bandanna tinkled.

“We’re talking twenty years ago, Mamoru. Registered cultivars were tested carefully, but farmers all over Japan were doing their own cross-breeding, cultivating mutated versions, you name it. And the kind of really detailed testing you’re thinking about—testing that covers the whole genome—wasn’t required until distilled crops came along.”

“So they weren’t monitoring for mutations?”

“Probably they were. On a sample basis, sure. But the approach was totally different from the designed—whoops, I guess it’s still ‘distilled’ in Japanese—the distilled crops you’re used to dealing with. Check digits to kill off mutated seedlings? Full scratch design, to define nutritional yield to the microgram? Not with legacy crops.”

So Yagodo not only had a handle on genetic engineering in the old GMO era, but he checked out with today’s tools. Up to the fourth generation of distilled crops, genetic engineers used natural plant DNA as a scaffold to hang new characteristics on. Full scratch design—synthetic biology—only kicked in with the fifth generation. Yagodo knew this, otherwise he couldn’t have corrected his own slip. I still didn’t know how he stacked up as a salvager, but in terms of genetic engineering and crop science, it didn’t look like I’d have to teach him much.

“I just picked up something interesting from the Internet. Take a look.”

The dog pushed a document across the table. It was something I hadn’t seen in a long time—an electronic document formatted for hard copy output, with page numbers at the bottom. A “PDF” file.

“That’s a summary of agricultural testing standards, 2012, salvaged from MAFF’s old website.”

“What, you mean now? Mr. Yagodo, you did what?”

I was so astonished I lost control of my tongue. My avatar repaired my broken sentence, but it probably couldn’t hide my startled surprise.

“Salvaged it. You can access the current version on TrueNet, of course.”

I flicked through the numbered pages. They looked like scans of an internal ministry document.

“Since 2022, all go.jp documents have been digitally watermarked to prevent tampering. You don’t see the watermark, do you?”

“You’re right, it’s missing.” If Yagodo had somehow altered the document to conceal the signature, there would have been a security warning. This was no contemporary document. Maybe he counterfeited it somehow, while we were talking?

“Very good, Mamoru. Never trust anyone.” My Behavior Correction setting wasn’t high enough to conceal my look of doubt. “But in this case, you can. I’ll even tell you where to get your own copy. Don’t worry, no charge for this one.”

The dog pushed a new file across the table. Under the “WebArchiver Pro” banner was a screenshot from what looked like an old web page. Parts of the image were blank and the resolution was grainy. On the timeline indicator “2012” was flashing. It looked genuine.

No one would have the skill to fabricate something this suited to the context while we were sitting there. It had only taken Yagodo seconds to pull it off the old World Wide Web.

“What do you think? A simple example of salvaging. I don’t usually recommend trusting a dog, but this is just a taste of what I can do.”

“I’m blown away. I looked into what salvaging involves before I posted that ad. I interviewed some salvagers too, and they told me what you just did would take days, maybe a week. But you did it while we were sitting here talking. I’m impressed, to say the least.”

“I’m glad to hear that, but it wasn’t that difficult, you know. Public documents aren’t hard to salvage.” The dog raised a paw and laid it over his eyes, a pose like one of those cat toys in Chinatown. Yagodo was probably scratching the back of his head in embarrassment, but the dog’s forelimbs weren’t flexible enough for that.

“If the genome for your intruder isn’t in some public corner of the Internet, finding it is going to take work. And I have a feeling you want me to do more than just find it.”

“You’re right. Identification is the first step. I need to know how it got there, figure out a way to get rid of it, and keep it from coming back. I’d like you to get started as soon as you can.”

I’d already made my decision. I could always keep looking, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t find anyone better. “If you went to work now, how much time do you think you’d need?”

“I’ll be honest—I don’t know. A standard search for public sources of matching
Oryza
DNA might take two, three days. If I don’t come up with it that way, it means going to a deeper level.”

“What deeper level?”

“Let’s just say a deeper level. Listen, I hate to sound like I’m dictating terms, but I have a request.”

The dog put his paws side by side and peered closely at me. I wanted to hear more about Yagodo’s “deeper level,” but I was more anxious about his request. We’d be operating on L&B’s dime, but I didn’t have a blank check. If he was expecting some outrageous fee, I’d have to pass.