Xeno Sapiens (10 page)

“
Beautiful,” Ingrid whispered.
“Beautiful,” The model pulsated with blaring, psychedelic color.
The silky-hiss of the furnace kicking into life blew the few loose
hairs which had tumbled from beneath her cap. The lights above her
buzzed like nascent insects.

“
What is it?” she asked, never looking
away from the screen.

“
A retinal gene from none other than
Alex Clifton,” Sunners said. His mask hid his grin.

“
How did you manage that?”

“
We let the computer track it down,”
Sunners said. “Clifton has about the best eyesight of anyone we’ve
run across. Those glasses he wears are just for show. He thinks
they make him look wiser. We thought we’d map his genes, but we
never believed we’d get a usable trait. Notice anything different
about the bonding?”

Ingrid looked more closely. In a
moment, after the projection completed another rotation, she saw
it.

“
There’s an extra hydrogen bond on the
substrate.”

Sunners raised his eyebrows,
impressed.

“
Boy, that’s sharp. The computer ran
down ten thousand different triplet combinations before it came
across this thing. The extra hydrogen keeps the triplet from
unraveling during replication, We constructed a chain from your
average retinal gene and aged it chemically. After two days, the
Arginine lost a side group and was replaced by Proline. Merrifield
almost shit his pants. We might have found what causes eyesight to
diminish. Alex can still read a book two inches from his nose,
which most people can’t do after they turn six years old. We always
thought it was because the lens lost its elasticity. This chemical
change may be what produces a less elastic protein.”

“
What did you use for a
control?”

“
We used Clifton’s Gene for a
control,” Sunners answered, slightly surprised.

“
What happened?”

“
We built a chain,” he said dreamily,
“and had the computer trace it. The Arginine in Clifton’s chain was
bonded covalently at the carbon. We tried to break it loose with
enzymes like we did with the other one, but it wouldn’t budge. That
sucker’s on there to stay, and so is the above average
vision.”

“
Did it replicate?” Here was the very
thing Ingrid needed to know to make her decision on whether to
synthesize the chromosomes or cut them from specialized
subjects.

“
We removed the retinal gene from a
chromosome and replaced it with Clifton’s retinal gene and waited
to see if it would split to RNA.”

“
What kind of cell did you
use?”

“
I suggested we use an epithelial cell
and deactivate the rest of the chromosome. If it did divide and
invade the ribosome it would already be in the proper synthesis
tissue.”

“
Did it work?”

Sunners slid his chair back from his
console and flipped a switch. The holograph winked out.

“
Let me show you something pretty
incredible.” Sunners gestured to the door.

They walked down the corridor to the
pathology lab. Sunners removed his mask and let it hang at his
throat. With his mask down, Ingrid could see his freckles, so
profuse that he looked like the kid who had swallowed a ten dollar
bill and broke out in pennies. Ingrid removed her own mask. She
reached into her lab coat and pulled out a pair of surgical
scissors. She pulled the mask from around her throat and absently
trimmed some loose threads.

“
Do you always carry your scissors
with you,” Sunners asked.

“
Huh?” Ingrid looked up. “Oh, the
scissors. Just a habit. Back where I was going to school, the
biology department couldn’t afford the tape with the squiggly
edges. I couldn’t tear the straight kind, so I got on the habit of
carrying my snippers.”

Sunners looked at her mournfully.
“Jesus.”

“
What do you want to show
me?”

“
When I suggested we deactivate the
chromosome, I had some freaky idea we would have an eyeball growing
in a culture dish. We didn’t get that, exactly, but we got
something we could grow on, no pun intended.”

They reached the pathology lab and
Ingrid and Sunners both replaced their masks. Jimmy punched in the
entrance code and the airtight doors hissed back.

The lab was staffed with a dozen or so
technicians of varying degrees of brilliance goggling at video
screens, drawing fluid through pipettes, or standing sentry over
centrifuges.

Sunners led Ingrid to an obscure corner
of the lab. He pointed at a covered Petri dish in which a grayish,
rubbery-looking sheet of slightly curved tissue floated in the
nutrient bath. It was very thin and looked like a slice of dead
skin.

“
What you got there, boss, is your
basic, no frills retina.”

Ingrid peered closely at the
innocent-looking tissue. It wasn’t very impressive.

“
Doesn’t look like much,” she
commented. “It doesn’t even have any blood vessels.”

Only Sunners’ eyes were visible, but
they appeared to be hurt.

“
Like I said, it’s a no frills
package. We would have to trace down about ten thousand codons to
get an entire eyeball. We’ve only got a little over a thousand in
that thing.”

Ingrid did some quick math. If the
computers had to trace down the codons for every triplet
combination for every specialized gene, the project would take far
too long. It might be best to take the genes themselves and let the
computer determine the best recombination for tailor-made
chromosomes. Just on the off chance, she asked a
question.

“
How long did it take the computer to
find the codons?”

“
This one?” Sunners sounded defensive.
“We had never done it before, so it probably took longer than it
will in the future.”

“
Come on, Jimmy,” Ingrid demanded.
“How long?”

“
About ten seconds.”

“
Did you say ten seconds?”
Sunners
flinched.

“
We can do better with practice,” he
protested weakly.

“
How many codons do you need for an
eyeball?”

“
About ten thousand,
but...”

“
Jimmy, I could kiss you!” Jimmy
turned a deep red as several of the lab workers turned to
look.

“
How long would it take you to run
down the codons for the entire eyeball?”

“
We’ve already got them,” Jimmy said
warily. “The data entry techs have been jamming this stuff into the
computers for years. They’ve got specific genes for ten thousand
subjects cataloged right down to the codons in the database right
now. We didn’t know it was important.”

“
They’re already mapped and logged?
Where? Let me see them.”

“
All of them,” Jimmy asked, horrified.
A list of all the codons cataloged would fill about ten transfer
trucks full to the gills.

“
No, not all of them, you idiot. Just
the eyeball codons.”

“
They’re in the sequencing lab. On the
hard copies.”

“
Why are we here, then,” Ingrid asked.
“Let’s go.”

********************

Sunners went to a door in the far wall
of the sequencing laboratory. He muttered under his breath as he
struggled with the access code. He finally opened the door and they
stepped through, thankfully shedding their surgical masks and
headgear. There was a small, functional desk in the center of the
office, a computer terminal like a blank, all knowing jewel atop
it, a printer, and a set of electronically locked filing
cabinets.

“
I can’t believe it,” Sunners said, as
he looked up the combination to the files. “We had no idea you
would care about these preliminary sequences. We all thought you
wouldn’t even bother with the filed genes but make your own. If I
had known, I wouldn’t have buried them so deep in the mainframe
that I’d have to go to these files to re-key them.”

“
Just get the sequences,” Ingrid said.
“We can have the best of both worlds, now. The hard work’s been
done. If the genes are all mapped, all we have to do is find the
codons we want and string them together. Don’t you see? With the
codons from specific genes, we can let the ribosomes do the work.
We can literally build stem cell DNA molecules with the traits we
want from scratch and control their differentiation with
cytokines.”

Jimmy didn’t look as if he quite
followed all of that, but he reasoned that was why Ingrid was the
boss and he was a tech.

“
Bingo,” he said. The red light on the
files winked out and a green one came on. He rummaged through the
drawers until he found what he wanted and pulled it out.

“
There you are, you prick,” he
muttered. “I don’t mean you, Ingrid.” He handed the file
over.

The printout was six pages of type,
spaced as closely as the programming for a machine language
routine. It consisted of nothing more than ten thousand
combinations of triplet letters such as GGC, GGG, AGA, and so on.
The endless list of letters would be identical for every human on
earth but for maybe one half of one percent of variation. And that
tiny percentage of variation -the favorable variations and the
unfavorable- is what Ingrid wanted. It controlled everything from
eye color to susceptibility to cataracts. Defective protein codons
could be changed, excised, or recombined to eliminate disease
processes, change eye color, or even regenerate tissue.

“
How was it set for
linkage?”

“
Funny you should ask. They were all
on the same chromosome. Now that you mention it, I remember
thinking how easy it was to get the entire codon sequence. You see,
we got the entire sequence from a single section with only a couple
of nulls. That’s how we discovered that specific structures are
marked with specific haplotypes, almost like a bench mark or the
key to a map. Once we found that out, we programmed the computer to
look for those benchmarks. Boom, chains started linking up like
magic. Our biggest problem was figuring what haplotypes made what
structures.”

“
How long would it take you to cut
these onto a chromosome?”

“
All
of them?”

“
Yes. all of them.”

“
Well, jeez,” he said, scratching his
head. “I don’t know. It would depend on where you wanted to stop, I
guess. We’ve got everything but the muscles and the optic nerve.
We’d have to go to different chromosomes for them.”

“
You said the codons were already
logged, right? Just link them together and let the ribosomes do the
work. I want to see reams of DNA churning out in two
days.”

“
And a snowball might hit hell,” Jimmy
said.

“
Give it a try, will you?”

“
I’ll have to get professor Caudill’s
okay.”

“
Alan won’t say boo. Run three shifts
if you have to. I’ll brief him on what you’re doing.”

Her bossly duties performed, Ingrid
replaced her cap and mask, walked through the sequencing lab, and
back to her office. On her way, she stopped and chatted with two
workers, neither of whom she had ever spoken to before.

********************

Whoever it was hammered on Merrifield’s
door loud enough to wake the dead. He had been going over some
reports on the project’s progress and was pleased with the amount
of work already done. Ingrid had thrown herself into the routine
and the results were piling up at an eerie rate.

The pounding on the door
continued.

“
Alright, alright!” he shouted. “I’m
coming, goddammit. Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

He heaved himself out of his chair,
grumbling like an earthquake. He yanked the door open with a rush
of air that rattled loose papers.

“
What is it now? I’m a busy...” He
stopped cold. A blush crept into his cheeks. Ingrid stood there,
obviously excited about something. Even through his embarrassment
he noted with satisfaction that she was attired in her work
clothes, minus the cap and mask.

“
Are you going to let me in,” she
asked.

“
Oh, ah, of course,” Merrifield
blurted out. “By all means, please, come in.”

Merrifield’s office was a plush affair
with numerous framed degrees peppering the walls. On his desk was a
pile of official papers, a telephone, an intercom, and a cup of
pens and pencils. The office was paneled in dark, expensive wood
and there was not one but several of the comfortable, overstuffed
chairs used for entertaining prominent, visiting bigwigs, being
that they were large enough to allow their self-importance to
wallow with them.