The Zen Gene (17 page)

He shifted uncomfortably on the bed because tears meant he said the wrong answer and he tried to think of a different word to say.

“Do you know what it means?” she said.

She spoke the words softly the question directed more at herself than to him. Did he know what it meant?

“Yes,” he said but this time he did not risk saying more words. Instead he took her hand and held it on his lap and opened her fingers one by one to show her the bottle cap she held in her palm. Then he looked into her eyes and held them for a long moment, “Yes,” he said.

He turned his eyes away from hers but not before she saw something in them which caused her to shiver. Her rational mind knew he did not understand what love means to a girl, to him it was the same word you said to your grandma, but her heart at least hoped it meant something more.

She was exhausted and emotionally drained. She squeezed his hand and said “You can watch TV now if you want I’m going to get ready for bed.” He did not reach for the remote and when she started to get up he did not let go of her hand. He gently pulled her back down beside him.

“Are you mad?” he said.

“Yes, but I’ll get over it,” she said and smiled.

“Me too,” he said.

She laughed and he laughed because she laughed and it made her feel a bit giddy.

“Sorry about the baby,” he said.

“It’s okay Ty,” she said.

“Gene,” he said.

“Gene?” she asked.

“The baby,” he said.

“You already have a name for our baby?” she said. She was amazed at how detailed his thinking was and she laughed.

“The baby is Gene,” he said.

“Don’t I get to pick the name?” she said playing along with him to see where he went with this.

“No,” he said.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“You can pick the next one,” he said.

“Next what?” she said confused trying to follow this weird conversation.

“Baby,” he said.

“You think there’s going to be two babies?” she said and poked him in the ribs trying to tickle him but he did not flinch. She gave up and started to rise from the bed to get changed.

“Brenda,” he said.

She laughed. The whole thing was crazy.

“You said I could name the next one,” she said.

“You waited too long,” he said and laughed.

She laughed and grabbed him and tried to put him in a headlock and they struggled a bit and then for some reason this time he let her.

Bad News

Mann held her as she sobbed he could feel the intense raw emotion radiating from her. After a while her tears subsided and he heard her say, “The Sergeant’s suit is shredded I had to cut it to get it off.”

The words she spoke were muffled as she whispered into his shoulder. He knew she was in shock from all that had happened but he was relieved to hear her say those words it meant she’d come to terms with the situation and made a decision.

“I think I can patch it,” she said.

“Hunter’s suit is small, not quite the right size for Tyler but it is undamaged,” he said, “it will be tight but I’m sure he can squeeze into it.”

He spoke softly into her hair and knew again what he knew the moment he saw her in Ralph’s. He loved her deeply, hopelessly, and always had.

“Promise me you will keep him safe, both of you safe,” she said.

He nodded his head and tried to let go of her but she would not release him. She held him fiercely to delay if only for a few seconds the storm she knew was coming.

“I know this all seems wrong to you but it is the only way to deal with this mess. I don’t think Western knows about the anthrax but as soon as things quiet down he will send another team into the old factory and it will be game over for us. For all our sakes we have to beat him and the police to it,” he said.

“Why? What’s in it for him?” she said.

“Something Hunter told me makes me think he wants the virus for himself. He seems to be working way beyond his authority. He doesn’t yet know how POrna works but he knows it does, he’s seen the results. He knows if he controls the virus he could conceivably make hundreds of millions of dollars.

The country that ends up controlling POrna virus would immediately create an anti-virus to inoculate their own soldiers against its effects. That country could then destroy the armies of any and all nations opposing them. Western would become obscenely wealthy by selling POrna to the highest bidder. I know Hunter will eventually tell Western what she heard in the motel room, if she hasn’t already, and her story will convince him even more to try and get it,” he said.

“If you manage to destroy the evidence in the lab that will take care of the anthrax problem but what makes you think it will stop Western?” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about this. The way I see it once the physical evidence is gone no one can legally tie anything to Tyler. It might not stop the authorities from trying but it is tough to prove anything in court without physical evidence. As for Western he can’t implicate Ty in the death of the street person because he would need to explain why the Canadian Military knew about the body and did not report it and why one of his vehicles exploded outside the crime scene and his people ran away.

Without physical evidence nobody will believe a sixteen-year-old kid failing grade eight could do any of this. I wouldn’t believe it if I had not talked with Tyler and seen the results of POrna myself. I’m hoping Ty is right about the virus being self-limiting and it will not continue to infect soldiers. If it’s true the virus will eventually die out and take the problem of its existence with it,” he said.

“Lee, I don’t understand how any of this could happen. He has been with me his whole life, I knew he was interested in science and experiments, you only have to look at his bedroom to know that, but how does a kid go from playing around with science to creating POrna?” she said.

He sighed and kissed the top of her head; it felt so normal and right to be holding her again.

“Well, like I said before, you can forget your worries that Ty might be mentally challenged, clearly he is not. In some respects the focus of his thinking is narrow but in a fundamental way I believe his intelligence redefines the definition of genius.

He is not aware of any of this and if he was I don’t think it would interest him. I believe, though he’s had no formal training, he represents a type of natural scientist,” he said.

“I don’t understand. Can someone who is a disaster at school be a scientific genius?” she said.

“What I am going to say may sound simplistic because, frankly, it is. His intelligence manifests in ways which make him appear to be intellectually challenged. Most people operate within well-defined social structures from which they evaluate others by observing their behaviours . Ty doesn’t recognize the accepted social conventions. I’m not sure if he is like someone with autism who can’t detect social cues or if he is so advanced social cues are detectable but meaningless to him. Either way I am counting on society’s continuing ignorance of him; ultimately that is what will save him from prison.

There are maybe a dozen Ph.D. geneticists on this planet who could perhaps start to comprehend what he has achieved and I know for an absolute certainty, knowing what I do about POrna, that I could not convince a single one of them it exists and that is what I am counting on to get him out of this mess. Have you ever heard the term ‘savant’?” he said.

Andi nodded her head. Most people have heard of those rare disabled people with a single incredible but often useless ability.

“I think Ty is a kind of savant but without the associated disability. It is true he has few social skills but there are thousands of engineers and scientists exactly like him except his deficits and talents are more extreme. From observing him I believe his mind naturally operates on multiple discreet levels; one level has an intuitive ability to identify connections between unconnected things but at an extreme level of connectedness. Another level has a ravenous appetite for raw scientific data and a computer-like ability to retrieve and make sense of it.

While I was talking to him in his room he was reading new research on glial cells on his computer while at the same time watching The Simpsons on part of the monitor with the sound off and using ear buds to listen to some God awful music. I questioned him about glial cells and I found he had a post doc level of understanding of the material.

When I asked him he clearly knew what The Simpsons episode was about though I suppose he might have seen it before.

My point is he is ingesting and learning vast amounts of information all the time. I do not believe much, if any, of this learning is conscious on his part. I don’t think he is saying to himself, ‘today I will learn bio-synthesis.’ It is more like the way a baby acquires language. He is not actively trying to learn anything he is simply absorbing information from exposure to it.

These discreet brain functions along with his ability to focus on several things at once are, individually, extraordinary traits but to possess all of them is unprecedented.

He is able to combine these talents and make the kind of connections and intuitive leaps needed to come up with something like POrna. I know he is developmentally and emotionally immature; he obviously lags behind his peers socially but I believe he will eventually overcome this. Imagine him as an adult with his gifted agile mind and a mature intellect.

Given access to the right resources think of what he might achieve. He could potentially eradicate disease as we know it or reform the human genome so we live for hundreds of years. There is no limit to what his brilliant mind could come up with,” he said.

She was listening in silence her feelings ranging from fear to pride to hope and all the while holding on tight to him.

“Another piece of this puzzle is what spurred him to create POrna in the first place. As unlikely as this might sound it was something Zen said to him.”

“What on earth did she say?” she asked.

The look of surprise on her face made it clear she didn’t think anything Zen would say could be that important.

“She told Tyler her father died in a war,” he said.

Andi’s brow wrinkled with confusion. “What? That’s not right. Her father, if you can call him that, was a drug addict. He died living on the street in East Vancouver. Ellie told me all about him.” She leaned back and looked at him and asked, “Why would she lie to him about that?”

He leaned back from her and looked at her with a raised eyebrow and an indulgent half smile.

“Her dad was a drug addict who died on the street. Why do you think she lied?” he said.

“Oh,”

“Anyway the truth doesn’t matter. He picked up on the emotion or the pain she felt when she said it and it had an impact on him. At the age of ten, because of his strong connection to Zen, he decided to fix the main problem with the human race. It is ironic he developed POrna because of a lie she told but that does not make it any less amazing,” he said.

He put down his beer and took her hand while he was talking and he was holding it tightly with both of his when she looked him in the eyes and said, “I have some iron-on patches that should seal up the suit.”

She got up from the couch. He watched her turn to go to get the patches but stopped when she saw something move past the window. She turned back to him with a quizzical expression on her face. She was about to ask him if he saw it when there was a deafening bang and the front door disintegrated.

Cutting Orders

September

7:00 AM

Patricia Hunter paced stiffly around inside Western’s office. She was agitated, she did not want to sit, the skin under the tape wrapped around her ribs itched like hell and she wanted to get the hell going. Her next assignment was in Paris she would be happy to get out of Victoria. Things went very wrong at the old factory and she was worried a disproportionate amount of the blame would stick to her if she hung around.

Sergeant Nichol was in a stage three coma and not likely to survive. The blast cost her twenty-five percent of her hearing in her left ear and ten percent in her right. She did not mention that to Major Webb at the Canadian NATO Mission in Paris when he requested her services.

“What did they say?” she asked when he hung up the phone.

“He is non-responsive; they are still buying the motorcycle story at least for now. That was good thinking on your part. I hope they never go looking for…what was the name you gave them?” he said.

“Sandra Lockerbie,” she said.

They looked at each other with sad resignation. It was not easy losing a colleague even one you barely knew. They both lost friends over the years soldiering is a dangerous business and losing people was never easy.

“I’ve cut your transport orders. You leave for Gatineau in two hours and at ten o’clock Quebec time you leave for Ipswich. It’s all in the printout. You’ll be sleeping in the airport, what else is new. You all right?” he said.

It was not actually a question it was simply something he felt he was supposed to ask as commanding officer. He knew she would never admit it if she was not okay that is not how the military works.

“What’s going to happen to Dr. Mann and the kid and his mom?”

“They’ll be okay. All they need to do is shut up and play dumb,” he said.

Western’s phone rang again and he grabbed it. He listened for a few minutes then said “Fuck” and hung up.

“That was contact at the RCMP they found something incriminating on the kid’s computer. He has maps showing population densities and dispersal rates for pandemics. It is the kind of information terrorist organizations use when planning a strike. The RCMP believes there were terrorists behind our exploding van and they were planning to use anthrax for some kind of domestic attack here in Victoria.”

“Anthrax?” she said.

“It was all on the kid’s computer how to genetically modify it to become a weapon and how to disseminate it. There are plans and layout maps on his computer for spraying it on travelers in the departure areas of Victoria International Airport,” he said.

She was shocked. What was the little shit planning to do?

“Do they know about his virus?” she said.

“No. They think he was working on anthrax,” he said, “which is bad enough.”

Hunter checked her watch and looked towards the door. “I have to get going how do we leave things?” she said.

“There is nothing to leave. You weren’t there it never happened and Nichol is another brain dead soldier, end of story. You need to cultivate some amnesia to go along with your hearing loss,” he said.

She looked at him and wondered how he knew about it but then realized it was his business to know. Her medical files would be a simple thing for a man like Western to access.

“I’m sorry sir what soldier was that?” she said.

She waited a beat for the tiny smile of acknowledgement then she saluted him and left his office.

When the door closed behind her he turned to his computer screen and called up an encrypted file. It contained the phone numbers of contacts he collected over the last twenty years for back-channel communications all over the world. He found the number he was looking for and it was ringing now somewhere in the Pentagon in Washington DC.

He was calling a man he met in South America a long time ago. Arne might know some way they could cash in on this virus and now more than ever he knew it could not wait. If the cops grabbed the kid first it would be game over. Arne answered on the third ring. After the niceties were over he began.

“The best way to describe this thing is a genetic weapon,” he said. He chose his words carefully.

“What does it do?” Arne said.

The man on the line was a few thousand kilometers away in Washington DC but Western could hear the interest in his voice.

“That part is hard to explain but here is the most important aspect of this weapon. Once it is deployed against a hostile force it incapacitates their ground troops,” he said.

“You mean it kills them?” he said.

“No, I mean it renders them incapable of engaging in armed combat,” he said.

There was a long moment of silence on the line and he could almost hear his old friend thinking.

“We should meet,” he said.

“Yes good idea come to Vancouver and I’ll take you to watch the Canucks lose a hockey game,” he said.

“This is a serious deal right?” he said.

“It could not be more so,” he said. “But we need to move fast because the whole thing is beginning to unravel.”

“I’ll call you when I get to Vancouver,” he said and hung up.

He went to the window of his office and gazed out at the distant mountains on the US coastline. He wondered what it would be like to be rich. Maybe he would buy a BMW convertible to celebrate. He was not worried about the Americans not paying for this because if they did not want it the Chinese certainly would. He was too old and jaded to worry about national loyalties.

One way or another he was going to cash in on this thing. All he needed to do was figure out how to deliver the product without getting caught or dead. Once he has the kid under his control he will start at fifty million and see who makes the highest bid.