Mad Professor (24 page)

Veruschka smiled, slitting her cobalt-blue eyes, and leaned over to fetch her Pumpti. She placed it on a stained paper napkin.

“All we need is venture capital!”

“Um, what's it made of?” wondered Janna.

“Pumpti's substance is human DNA!”

“Whose DNA?” asked Janna.

“Yours, mine, anyone's. The client's.” Veruschka picked it up tenderly, palpating the Pumpti with her lacquered fingertips. “Once I worked at the St. Petersburg Institute of Molecular Science. My boss—well, he was also my boyfriend . . .” Veruschka pursed her lips. “Wiktor's true obsession was the junk DNA—you know this technical phrase?”

“Trust me, Vero, I'm a genomics engineer.”

“Wiktor found a way for these junk codons to express themselves. The echo from the cradle of life, evolution's roadside picnic! To express junk DNA required a new wetware reader. Wiktor called it the Universal Ribosome.” She sighed. “We were so happy until the mafiya wanted the return on their funding.”

“No National Science Foundation for you guys,” mused Janna.

“Wiktor was supposed to tweak a cabbage plant to make opium for the criminals—but we were both so busy growing our dear Pumpti. Wiktor used my DNA, you see. I was smart and saved the data before the Uzbeks smashed up our lab. Now I'm over here with you, Janna, and we will start a great industry of personal pets! Wiktor's hero fate was not in vain. And—”

What an old-skool, stylin', totally trippy way for Janna to shed her grind-it-out worklife! Janna and Veruschka Zipkinova would create a genomic petware start-up, launch the IPO, and retire by thirty! Then Janna could escape her life-draining servitude and focus on life's real rewards. Take up oil painting, go on a safari, and hook up with some sweet guy who understood her. A guy she could really talk to. Not an engineer, and especially not a musician.

Veruschka pitchforked a glob of quiche past her pointed teeth. For her pilgrimage to the source of the world's largest legal creation of wealth in history, the Russian girl hadn't forgotten to pack her appetite.

“Pumpti still needs little bit of, what you say here, tweaking,” said Veruschka. The prototype Pumpti sat shivering on its paper napkin. The thing had gone all goose bumpy, and the bumps were warty: the warts had smaller warts upon them, topped by teensy wartlets with fine, waving hairs. Not exactly a magnet for shoppers.

Stuffed with alfalfa sprouts, Janna put her cutlery aside. Veruschka plucked up Janna's dirty fork, and scratched inside her cheek with the tines.

Janna watched this dubious stunt and decided to stick to business. “How about patents?”

“No one ever inspects Russian gene labs,” said Veruschka with a glittery wink. “We Russians are the great world innovators in black market wetware. Our fetal stem cell research, especially rich and good. Plenty of fetus meat in Russia, cheap and easy, all you need! Nothing ever gets patented. To patent is to teach stupid people to copy!”

“Well, do you have a local lab facility?” pressed Janna.

“I have better,” said Veruschka, nuzzling her Pumpti. “I have pumptose. The super enzyme of exponential autocatalysis!”

“‘Pumptose,' huh? And that means?” prompted Janna.

“It means the faster it grows, the faster it grows!”

Janna finally reached out and delicately touched the Pumpti. Its surface wasn't wet after all, just shiny like super-slick plastic. But—a pet? It seemed more like something little boys would buy to gross-out their sisters. “It's not exactly cuddly,” said Janna.

“Just wait till you have your own Pumpti,” said Veruschka with a knowing smile.

“But where's the soft hair and big eyes? That thing's got all the shelf appeal of a scabby knee!”

“It's nice to nibble a scab,” said Veruschka softly She cradled her Pumpti, leaned in to sniff it, then showed her strong teeth, and nipped off a bit of it.

“God, Veruschka,” said Janna, putting down her coffee.

“Your own Pumpti,” said Veruschka, smacking. “You are loving him like pretty new shoes. But so much closer and personal! Because Pumpti is you, and you are Pumpti.”

Janna sat in wonderment. Then, deep within her soul, a magic casement opened. “Here's how we'll work it!” she exclaimed. “We give away Pumpti pets almost free. We'll make our money selling rip-off Pumpti-care products and accessories!”

Veruschka nodded, eyes shining. “If we're business partners now, can you find me a place to sleep?”

+   +   +

Janna let Veruschka stay in the spare room at her Dad's house. Inertia and lack of capital had kept Janna at home after college.

Ruben Gutierrez was a big, soft man with a failing spine, carpal tunnel, and short, bio-bleached hair he wore moussed into hedgehog spikes. He had a permanent mirthless grin, the side effect of his daily diet of antidepressants.

Dad's tranquil haze broke with the arrival of Veruschka with her go-go arsenal of fishnet tights and scoop-necked Lycra tops. With Veruschka around, the TV blared constantly and there was always an open bottle of liquor. Every night the little trio stayed up late, boozing, having schmaltzy confessions, and engaging in long, earnest sophomore discussions about the meaning of life.

Veruschka's contagious warm heartedness and her easy acceptance of human failing was a tonic for the Gutierrez household. It took Veruschka mere days to worm out the surprising fact that Ruben Gutierrez had a stash of half a million bucks accrued from clever games with his stock options. He'd never breathed a word of this to Anh or to Janna.

Emotionally alive for the first time in years, Dad offered his hoard of retirement cash for Veruschka's long-shot crusade. Janna followed suit by getting on the web and selling off her
entire Goob collection. When Janna's web money arrived freshly laundered, Dad matched it, and two days later, Janna finally left home, hopefully for good. Company ownership was a three-way split between Veruschka, Janna, and Janna's Dad. Veruschka supplied no cash funding, because she had the intellectual property.

Janna located their Pumpti start-up in San Francisco. They engaged the services of an online lawyer, a virtual realtor, and a genomics supply house, and began to build the buzz that, somehow, was bound to bring them major league venture capital.

Their new HQ was a gray stone structure of columns, arches and spandrels, the stone decorated with explosive graffiti scrawls. The many defunct banks of San Francisco made spectacular dives for the city's genomics start-ups. Veruschka incorporated their business as “Magic Pumpkin, Inc.,” and lined up a three-month lease.

San Francisco had weathered so many gold rushes that its real estate values had become permanently bipolar. Provisionary millionaires and drug-addled derelicts shared the same neighborhoods, the same painted-lady Victorians, the same flophouses and anarchist bookstores. Sometimes millionaires and lunatics even roomed together. Sometimes they were the very same person.

Enthusiastic cops spewing pepper gas chased the last down-market squatters from Janna's derelict bank. To her intense embarrassment, Janna recognized one of the squatter refugees as a former Berkeley classmate named Kelso. Kelso was sitting on the sidewalk amidst his tattered Navajo blankets and a damp-spotted cardboard box of kitchen gear. Hard to believe he'd planned to be a lawyer.

“I'm so sorry, Kelso,” Janna told him, wringing her hands. “My Russian friend and I are doing this genomics start-up? I feel like such a gross, rough-shod newbie.”

“Oh, you'll be part of the porridge soon enough,” said Kelso. He wore a big sexy necklace of shiny junked cell phones. “Just hang with me and get colorful. Want to jam over to the Museum of Digital Art tonight? Free grilled calamari, and nobody cares if you sleep there.”

Janna shyly confided a bit about her business plans.

“I bet you're gonna be bigger than Pokemon,” said Kelso. “I'd always wanted to hook up with you, but I was busy with my prelaw program and then you got into that cocooning thing with your Korean musician. What happened to him?”

“His mother found him a wife with a dowry from Pyongyang,” said Janna. “It was so lovelorn.”

“I've had dreams and visions about you, Janna,” said Kelso softly. “And now here you are.”

“How sweet. I wish we hadn't had you evicted.”

“The wheel of fortune, Janna. It never stops.”

As if on cue, a delivery truck blocked the street, causing grave annoyance to the local bike messengers. Janna signed for the tight-packed contents of her new office.

“Busy, busy,” Janna told Kelso, now more than ready for him to go away. “Be sure and watch our web page. Pumpti dot-bio. You don't want to miss our IPO.”

“Who's your venture angel?”

Janna shook her head. “That would be confidential.”

“You don't have a backer in other words.” Kelso pulled his blanket over his grimy shoulders. “And boy, will you ever need one. You ever heard of Revel Pullen of the Ctenephore Industry Group?”

“Ctenephore?” Janna scoffed. “They're just the biggest piezo-plastic outfit on the planet, that's all! My dad used to work for them. And so did I, now that I think about it.”

“How about Tug Mesoglea, Ctenephore's chief scientist? I don't mean to name-drop here, but I happen to know Dr. Tug personally.”

Janna recognized the names, but there was no way Kelso could really know such heavy players. However, he was cute, and he said he'd dreamed about her. “Bring 'em on,” she said cheerfully.

“I definitely need to meet your partner,” said Kelso, making the most of a self-created opportunity. Hoisting his grimy blanket, Kelso trucked boldly through the bank's great bronze-clad door.

Inside the ex-bank, Veruschka Zipkinova was setting up her own living quarters in a stony niche behind the old teller counter. Veruschka had a secondhand futon, a moldy folding chair, and a stout refugee's suitcase. The case was crammed to brimming with the detritus of subsistence tourism: silk scarves, perfumes, stockings, and freeze-dried coffee.

After one glance at Kelso, Veruschka yanked a handgun from her purse. “Out of my house,
rechniki
! No room and board for you here,
maphiya bezprizorniki
!”

“I'm cool, I'm cool,” said Kelso, backpedaling. Then he made a run for it. Janna let him go. He'd be back.

Veruschka hid her handgun with a smirk of satisfaction. “So much good progress already! At last we command the means of production! Today we will make your own Pumpti,” she told Janna.

They unpacked the boxed UPS deliveries. “You make ready that crib vat,” said Veruschka. Janna knew the drill; she'd done
this kind of work at Triple Helix. She got a wetware crib vat properly filled with base-pairs and warmed it up to standard operating temperature. She turned the valves on the bovine growth serum, and a pink threading began to fill the blood-warm fluid.

Veruschka plugged together the components of an Applied Biosystems oligosynthesis machine. She primed it with a data-stuffed S-cube that she'd rooted out of a twine-tied plastic suitcase.

“In Petersburg, we have unique views of DNA,” said Veruschka, pulling on her ladylike data gloves and staring into the synthesizer's screen. Her fingers twitched methodically, nudging virtual molecules. “Alan Turing, you know of him?”

“Sure, the Universal Turing Machine,” Janna core-dumped. “Foundations of computer science. Breaking the Enigma code. Reaction-diffusion rules. Turing wrote a paper to derive the shapes of patches on brindle cows. He killed himself with a poison apple. Alan Turing was Snow White, Queen, and Prince all at once!”

“I don't want to get too technical for your limited mathematical background,” Veruschka hedged.

“You're about to tell me that Alan Turing anticipated the notion of DNA as a program tape that's read by ribosomes. And I'm not gonna be surprised.”

“One step further,” coaxed Veruschka. “Since the human body uses one kind of ribosome, why not replace that with another? The Universal Ribosome—it reads in its program as well as its data before it begins to act. All from that good junk DNA, yes Janna? And what is junk? Your bottom drawer? My garbage can? Your capitalist attic, and my start-up garage!”

“Normal ribosomes skip right over the junk DNA,” said Janna. “It's supposed to be meaningless to the modern genome.
Junk DNA is just scribbled-over things. Like the crossed-out numbers in an address book. A palimpsest. Junk DNA is the half-erased traces of the original codes-from long before humanity.”

“From before, and—maybe
after,
Wiktor was always saying.” Veruschka glove-tapped at a long-chain molecule on the screen. “There is pumptose!” The gaudy molecule had seven stubby arms, each of them a tightly wound mass of smaller tendrils. She barked out a command in Russian. The S-cube-enhanced Applied Biosystems unit understood, and an amber bead of oily, fragrant liquid oozed from the output port. Veruschka neatly caught the droplet in a glass pipette.

Then she transferred it to the crib vat that Janna had prepared. The liquid shuddered and roiled, jolly as the gut of Santa Claus.