Ancestor (20 page)

“Turn off all room cameras,” Colding said. “Everyone but Jian.”

He watched as Clayton started flipping switches. “Done,” Clayton said. “Why leave Jian’s active? You like them big-girl peep shows?”

“I … no, Clayton, I do
not
like big-girl peep shows. Jian’s tried to kill herself before. She has to be watched at all times. And as soon as we’re done here, please go in her room and remove all glass, any mirrors. Take down the chandelier and put up a simple fixture, nothing she could hang herself from.”

For once, Clayton didn’t have a smart-ass comment. “I’ll make sure da room is safe,” he said.

“What about the hangar?” Sara said. “That covered, too?”

Clayton pushed more buttons. Multiple views of the hangar, both inside and out. He stopped when the screens showed the mammoth C-5. “There’s connections for cameras inside da big plane. Sara, your boys hook those up yet?”

“If it was on the fly-in checklist, probably.”

Clayton pushed more buttons. Monitors now showed Alonzo in the C-5 cockpit, Claus and Jian in the second-deck lab and Tim Feely in the veterinary station across the aisle from the crash chairs. Clayton changed the view to show Harold and Cappy walking from cow stall to cow stall, opening the clear plexiglass doors. The press of a button lowered the harnesses, putting the animals’ weight back on their hooves. The Twins led the cows out of the C-5 two at a time.

“Yep,” Clayton said. “They got it done. That’s all da coverage we got. No wireless, no cell phones, no Internet. Landlines connect to James’s place, Sven’s, my house, da hangar and every room in da mansion has its own extension. Only way to reach da mainland is da secure terminal.” He pointed to the small computer at the end of the desk. It was a duplicate of the one Colding had used at Baffin Island.

“That calls my son or Manitoba,” Clayton said. “We take care of each other out here, and we’re careful, eh? But anything goes wrong, help is three hours away at best.”

“I want to see the island tomorrow,” Colding said. “All of it. Will your Hummer take us all over?”

Clayton shook his head. “No way. A lot of swamp on Black Manitou. But don’t you worry, eh? Me and Da Nuge will show you everything?”

“The Nuge?”

Clayton nodded. “Ted Nugent. Da
Nuge
, eh?”

“Well then,” Sara said. “Slap my ass and call me Sally. If Deadly Tedly is involved, I’m in.”

Great. The last thing Colding needed was that woman tagging along again. “Uh, Sara, there’s no need for you to go this time. Just stay here.”

She shrugged. “Gotta go. It’s the
Nuge
, man.”

“That’s right,” Clayton said, smiling his bristly smile. “But no sleeping in, eh? You both have your asses on da front steps at 8:00
A.M
., got it?”

“Got it,” Sara said. “I have to check in with my crew. Drive me back to the hangar, Clayton?”

“I’d be dee-lighted, eh? Colding, your room is number twenty-four. See you tomorrow.”

Colding nodded, barely paying attention to Sara and Clayton as they left him alone in the security room. Whatever a “nuge” was, he’d see soon enough.

He moved to the weapons, checking the action on each and every one. His mind swam with possibilities, mapping out contingencies. Three hours to the mainland by boat, only there was no boat here. Other than Gary Detweiler and the Paglione brothers, no one knew they were on Black Manitou.
No one
. But, he reminded himself, that was the way it had to be if they wanted to complete the research, bring the ancestor to life and give hope to millions.

JIAN STUMBLED A little, but Colding’s strong arm held her up. “Mister Colding, I don’t want to go to sleep. We have more work to do.”

“Still not buying it,” Colding said. “Keep walking, kid, you’re turning in.”

He led her down the mansion’s hall. She, Rhumkorrf and Tim had finished implantation. Every cow had a blastocyst in its uterus. Those blastocysts would soon implant into the uterine wall, forming an embryo and a placenta. After that, more of her coding would force the embryos to split and form monochorionic-monoamniotic twins. Mister Feely called it
the blue-light special of genetics, two for the price of one
. Some might even split a third time, creating triplets. All of this, of course, assumed the immune response continued to accept the embryos as
self
.

Movement.

Over there, to her left. Jian looked fast. Nothing. Had that been a streak of orange?

“Jian,” Colding said. “Are you okay?”

She stared for a second, but there was nothing there. “Yes. I am fine, Mister Colding.”

They walked on. Colding was really her only friend, the only true friend she’d had since the government decided she was a seven-year-old genius. That’s when they’d removed her from her home in the mountains, taken her away from her family, put her in special schools.

It hadn’t taken her long to show even more promise, outstepping her colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At age eleven, she published her first genetics paper. By age thirteen, she was speaking at conferences, and her face was all over the news as the poster child for China’s scientific ascendance.

Then two things happened. First, she started to see the bad things. Second, she discovered computers.

At first, those
bad
things were really just
strange
things. Shadows at the corners of her vision, things that hid when she looked for them. The visions
grew worse. Sometimes they looked like little blue spiders. Sometimes they looked like big orange spiders. Sometimes they crawled on her. And sometimes, they
bit
her.

Even when she showed people the marks on her arms, no one believed her. They gave her the drugs. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t. What almost always did help, though, was the computer. Jian was among the first people in the world to truly exploit computers for digitizing gene sequences, to understand that the world of silicon and electrons could mimic the submicroscopic world of DNA. And when she was lost in the code, she saw nothing
but
the code. No spiders.

Years had rolled on, some worse than others. Medicines changed. The spiders went away for a while, replaced by green, long-toothed rats, but then the spiders came back and the rats stayed as well. When four-foot purple centipedes joined the spiders and the rats, that was the first time she tried to end it all. People stopped her. Stopped her and put her back to work, but it’s hard to work when the spiders and rats and centipedes are biting you. Eventually, her bosses ceased asking her for work she couldn’t complete. They left her alone to explore her computerized world of four letters:
A, C, G
and
T
.

Somewhere along the way, she wasn’t sure when, she started producing papers again. Most focused on a theory of digitizing the entire mammalian genome, creating a virtual world that would show how species interconnect. There was no real commercial or medical benefit, so her bosses just let her write more papers. If nothing else, her genius showed the glory of the People’s Party.

And then one day her bosses told her she was leaving. They’d sent her to Danté Paglione and Genada, to work with Claus Rhumkorrf.
Keep playing with the computers
, they told her,
if this works, they will build statues of you
.

She started with the human experiments, putting her computer-created genomes inside the wombs of volunteers who really didn’t know what was going on. Jian had known it was wrong, but when you can’t sleep because there are a dozen hairy spiders crawling on your face, right and wrong don’t matter all that much.

Those experiments had ended badly. Some of the results were even
worse
than the spiders and rats and centipedes. Jian tried hard to forget those results.

Then Danté hired Tim Feely and P. J. Colding. Colding made Genada stop the human experiments. He made Rhumkorrf prescribe new medicine for Jian.

And the spiders went away.

“This is your room,” Colding said. “Do you like it?”

She touched the maroon wallpaper, feeling the texture of the velvet patterns. A plastic light fixture looked out of place on the high ceiling, as if another fixture had just been removed. A beautiful, wooden, four-post bed awaited her, its thick white comforter calling to her like a lover.

Most important of all, of course, was another seven-monitor computer desk. Just like the one in the C-5, just like the one back on Baffin Island. Danté understood. He always made sure Jian could work no matter where she was.

“This used to be a hangout for the rich and famous,” Colding said. “That’s what you’ll be soon. Rich and famous.”

Jian sighed as she crawled onto the mattress, marveling at the softness of the thick down comforter. She laid her head on the pillow. Colding pulled the comforter up around her shoulders.

She looked up at Colding. “You like Sara, don’t you?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Mister Colding, she is very nice. You should date her.”

“But I can’t date, Jian. I mean, my wife died only …” His voice trailed off.

“Over three years ago,” Jian said, finishing his sentence for him. “That’s a long time, Mister Colding.”

“Three years,” Colding said quietly, as if trying the words on for size.

“You go see Sara right now. You go to her room, talk.”

She waved him away and was already asleep before he made it out the door.

A KNOCK AT her door. Sara’s pulse quickened. Maybe it was P. J.
Peej
. Come to give her a proper apology. She wanted to hate him, but riding with him in the Hummer had been a mistake. It made her remember why she’d wanted him in the first place, two years ago.

A glance at the clock showed 11:15
P.M
. She quickly checked herself in the room’s full-length mirror. According to Stephanie, Marilyn had been a frequent visitor to Black Manitou, always stayed in Room 17 and had used this very mirror many times. But Marilyn probably hadn’t had bags under her eyes, or worn a rumpled flight suit or been all dirty and sweaty from a long flight.

What did it matter? Sara wasn’t going to sleep with Colding. She could control her hormones. Colding was a user, and that was that. She wasn’t interested in his brown eyes. Or the way he kissed.

Knock it off, idiot. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, go fuck yourself
.

She took a deep breath, then walked to the door and opened it … to see the leering face of Andy Crosthwaite.

“Hiya, toots. Still wanna confiscate my gun?”

Sara felt a combination of revulsion and disappointment.

“Andy, it’s time for bed.”

“Ex
actly,”
he said, and started to slide through the half-open door.

Sara Purinam hadn’t risen to the top of a man’s world without learning a thing or three. She blocked the door with her body. The motion brought their two bodies together, so close they could have kissed. Andy’s leering smile widened.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

“Last warning, Andy. You should walk away.”

He laughed in her face.

Sara brought her knee up fast, catching Andy square in the nuts. She could have done it much harder, but she only wanted to stun him a little, not put him in the infirmary. He let out a little
whuff
and half doubled
over. She put a hand on his head and pushed. He stumbled back two steps, enough for her to shut the door and lock it.

She peeked through the peephole. Andy stared at the door. He wasn’t leering anymore. Now he looked like someone who might bomb a government building for shits and giggles. Even through a locked door, Sara felt a small flutter of fear.

Then Andy stood and smiled. He knew she was looking. He turned and walked down the hallway, right hand still on his testicles.

Implantation +0 Days

AS THE GENADA staff slept, the experimental creatures moved to the next stage. Inside each of the fifty cows, the implanted blastocysts had floated through the void of the uterus until they brushed softly against the uterine wall.

At the contact point, cells rapidly changed into trophoblasts. The specialized trophoblast cells divided, penetrating the uterine wall, almost like anchors diving into the soft seafloor. The process was common to all mammals—except no mammal, not even the smallest mouse, went through the process that fast. Trophoblasts linked up with the cow’s cells to begin creation of the placenta, and also spread around the rest of the blastocyst to create the amniotic sac, a membrane that would surround the embryos and contain a fluid to protect its contents from shocks and bumps.

Less than three hours after that delicate landing, another set of cells distanced itself from the trophoblast. This set of cells, the
embryoblast
, would become the ancestor itself. When the embryoblast separated, a piece of Jian’s coding caused it to cleave in half. Inside the amniotic sacs, halves quickly started developing into individuals.

Blue-light special, two for the price of one.

And the cows’ immune systems? No response. Nothing at all.

Once upon a time, a man named Roger Bannister shocked the world by running a mile in less than four minutes—a feat that experts had declared “impossible.” Jian’s process was a biological equivalent of that feat, or would have been, if Roger had run his mile in thirty seconds flat.

Less than twenty-four hours after the enucleated egg first fused with the artificially created DNA,
gastrulation
occurred. In human pregnancies, gastrulation does not occur for two weeks.

Gastrulation
is a fancy word that means that cells stop being copies of each other and start taking on the specialized functions of tissues and
organs. From a ball of undifferentiated cells, three distinct cell layers form: the ectoderm, the endoderm, and the mesoderm.

The mesoderm becomes the structure of the animal, including the muscles, bones, circulatory system and the reproductive system. The endoderm eventually grows into the digestive and respiratory systems. The ectoderm generates skin and the neural system—that includes the brain.