Gene Mapper (15 page)

“Sixteen all together. I’ll be at my desk searching for matches. Please continue.”

“Your dogs made me feel better,” said Thep. “I have two things to report. First, look at this video from the camera array. We captured the moment of mutation.”

Thep put a video file on the table. The thumbnail showed a group of grasshoppers clinging to an SR06 plant. I recognized the hills in the background.

“I’m going to play this. Pay attention to the spot where their legs touch the leaf.”

Thep set playback at 3,000
x
and touched
PLAY
. The sun shot into the sky, peaked, and dropped behind the hills. The fields in the background started glowing faintly blue. The grasshoppers moved slowly and jerkily across the surface of the leaf. It looked like their legs were leaving a stain on its surface.

“See how the color changes? Look again, closer this time.”

She zoomed in on a single grasshopper and set playback at 100
x
. “Look at the mandibles. It’s not eating the leaves.”

I almost doubted my eyes. Wherever the grasshopper bit the leaf, it turned a dull green. The color change spread out as if a drop of ink had fallen on the leaf and was wicking along its veins.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Thep, “but the grasshoppers are changing the color of the living plants. Wherever they bite, the leaves start mutating.”

Now I knew why the grains in SR06 and the intruder were setting in the same pattern. SR06 was mutating directly into the intruder. But could a living plant mutate into another living plant?

Thep put two new photos on the table side by side. “These are microscope studies of SR06 cells before and after mutation. Can you tell which is which?”

The photos showed cells in cross-section, surrounded by thin membranes. Tiny fluorescent-green granules surrounded the nuclei of the cells in both images, but the cell on the left had objects like small, black strands scattered among the green granules. The strands were roughly the same size as the nucleus.

“The image on the right shows normal SR06 cells. The cells on the left have something new. They look like organelles, but no organelle is large enough to see at this magnification without staining.”

“What are they?”

“Don’t know, and I don’t have the gear to investigate further. I never thought I’d be doing detailed cell studies out at the site.”

“Ms. Thep, could you send samples of the intruder cells to the Central Research Lab?” said Kurokawa.

“It’s taken care of. They’ll arrive the day after tomorrow.” She pulled out another folder. “The cell studies were one thing. Now for the main problem.”

Yagodo looked up from his search for matches. “Shall I guess? The grasshoppers aren’t only going after SR06. They’re attacking plant species all around the site. Am I right?”

Thep’s expression hardened, then changed slowly to a smile. Her avatar’s Behavior Correction was searching for a straightforward way to reproduce her expression. A smile is the system default for anything too subtle—or inappropriate—to reproduce.

“I wish I could say you’re wrong.”

Yagodo shook his head and sighed. Kurokawa leaned forward, body tensed. “Ms. Thep, are you telling us that the vegetation beyond the perimeter is also mutating?”

She nodded, took several more images from the folder and laid them on the table. The photos showed a strange change coming over the vegetation.

The rice plants and the forest beyond the perimeter were a monotone green. Neither the deep green of mature foliage nor the yellowish hue of newer leaves was visible. Everything was the same dull green as the intruder. Even the red bark of the gum trees was dyed a dull green. It looked like an image processing error.

A closeup of the mutated foliage showed an even more ominous development. The plants were sprouting rice stalks with tendrils—genetic chimeras.

“The smaller the genetic distance between rice and the affected plant, the faster the mutation,” said Thep. “The angiosperms are changing too, though not as fast. Ferns and lichens are unaffected. As to the effect on non-plant life, we can only pray …” Her expression defaulted to a smile again as her voice faltered.

“You’ve got a biohazard.”

At Yagodo’s words, everyone froze. Kurokawa’s eyes widened with fear. His jaw trembled. Nguyen swallowed hard and stared at Yagodo.

“Who do you contact about biohazards, the World Health Organization?” I wondered out loud. “Takashi?”

“Can’t we … eradicate the grasshoppers? If we send a sample … to the research lab …”

He hadn’t even heard me.

“We’ve got to notify the WHO!” I heard myself shouting. If we were dealing with a biohazard, it wasn’t just a problem for L&B and Mother Mekong. We had to alert the Cambodian government and the international community.

“I just notified L&B and Mother Mekong headquarters,” said Kurokawa. “We’ll let them handle the notifications. I want to get a clear handle on the situation and find a way to keep this from spreading further.”

“Shouldn’t we alert the WHO directly?”

“The first thing they’ll do is shut us out of the process. We should let people like Barnhard handle them while we stay close to the problem on the ground.”

“But—”

“Listen, Mamoru. We have Ms. Thep. She can get us front-line data. We have Isamu’s experience and knowledge and your talents as a distilled crop engineer. We could tell the world right now, but the only thing anyone can do immediately is quarantine the site. Until agencies like the WHO are ready to take over, we should collect all the information we can.”

“I agree.” Yagodo was paging through a red folder as he walked over from his desk.

“This is it. We have a confirmed match—an heirloom rice species. It’s called Purple Dusk. The cultivar was typed at an agricultural testing station in Niigata in 2003. This mutation didn’t come from mishandling genetic material. Purple Dusk itself is unremarkable. The grasshoppers … the grasshoppers are no accident, I think.”

We stared at Yagodo, half knowing what he was about to say.

“This is terrorism.” He sat down and tossed the folder on the table. “Purple Dusk was discontinued twenty years ago for its lack of resistance to red rust. It never had much of a following anyway. The idea of a grasshopper chewing on an heirloom cultivar and triggering a mutation has no basis in science.” He pointed to Thep’s cell studies. “This is no accident of nature.

“I’ll need more time for analysis, but I bet those large black structures are nanomachines with one function: embryo printing. Two hundred gigabytes of information would be more than enough to include all the design data for a nanomachine in the genome itself, and who knows what else. The grasshoppers propagate the nanomachines. Their role is to act as a pathogen vector for the intruder, like mosquitoes for malaria.”

I remembered Yagodo’s huge molecular model. He described it as virtual nanomachines with code-breaking functions, but it was basically a thought experiment. Nanomachines that could insert DNA data into embryonic cells and “print” them with new characteristics were something different. If machines capable of rewriting the DNA of living organisms were loose in the environment with a dedicated vector …

My mind wanted to deny the possibility, but Yagodo’s hypothesis was the best fit to what we were seeing. Someone—acting on some unknown motive—had created nanomachines to convert plant species into heirloom rice plants and was somehow propagating them with grasshoppers.

“Do you have any pesticides on-site?” Yagodo asked Thep.

“No. For Full Organic certification, we’re not even supposed to poison the cockroaches in the offices. One of my people brought a can of insecticide from home and tried it on one of the grasshoppers. It didn’t even seem to notice. Yet when we brought one back from the field, it died almost immediately.”

“Pesticide resistance. I’m not surprised. An insect vector for nanomachines would not be an ordinary insect.”

I had seen the infestation with my own eyes. Any plant bitten by the grasshoppers would become a chimera with two sets of DNA, one shared in common with other chimeras. If we couldn’t kill them, they could transform all the vegetation in Southeast Asia into heirloom rice.

“Mamoru, when did Kaneda say he’d have the DNA data for us?” Yagodo asked.

“Tonight. Wait—he sent me a message.” I opened the message in my workspace. It was marked Normal Priority, which was why there hadn’t been an alert.

MAMORU: I’M SORRY. THE CELLS FROM YOUR GRASSHOPPER CRASHED MY SEQUENCER AND WORKSPACE. I DON’T THINK I CAN GET THE DATA OUT TODAY. I’LL PING YOU AS SOON AS I KNOW MORE.

“Nothing tonight? If we at least knew the species, we might be able to order an effective pesticide. Bad luck.” Yagodo’s look was dark.

“He also says the cells took down his sequencer and workspace.”

“That’s what happened to us.” Thep shook her head in surprise. “We put grasshopper cells in our sequencer and it malfunctioned.”

Every attempt to identify the grasshoppers led to a dead end. Even Kaneda had been defeated. Things were starting to feel less like a run of bad luck and more like someone’s plan.

“Then we’ll have to spend the rest of the day working on what we can.” Yagodo stared at the ceiling and sighed. “I’ll search for Purple Dusk farmers. They might lead us to the person who turned the grasshoppers into a vector. Ms. Thep, I think it would be helpful if you could find out how far the grasshoppers have spread and how fast the vegetation is mutating.”

“I’ll get on it. The sun won’t be up much longer. I hate to do it, but I’ll see if the nature addicts have anything useful.” She stood up. “I just hope the grasshoppers don’t bite
me,
” she said and logged off.

Kurokawa got up and shouldered his briefcase. “I’ll get the word out and work on a media strategy for Mamoru. L&B’s legal team is at our disposal, but they won’t be at work until the middle of the night our time, so I think I’ll get some rest. Be sure to wake me if there are any developments.” He performed his trademark flawless bow. “See you tomorrow, then.”

Kurokawa logged off the stage as he turned toward the door. Suddenly there he was, normal size. I hadn’t noticed it from his avatar, but his slumping shoulders bespoke a deep weariness. I wasn’t surprised. Only the day before he had been vomiting and convulsing.

Yagodo rose and picked up the red folder. “I’ll let Kaneda know things are urgent.”

“Thanks. I’ll reconfirm your ID of Purple Dusk as the intruder.”

“You’re going to be busier than any of us when we get that grasshopper DNA. You should probably get some rest.”

“Would you like to have dinner with me, Hayashida-san?” Nguyen was picking folders off the table and sorting them into some kind of order.

“Love to, but I better not. Who knows where World Reporting is lurking. I’d better eat at the hotel.”

Another missed opportunity, but I’d had enough of Sascha’s games.

The stubble under my jaw snagged on the collar of my terrycloth bathrobe. I was starting to think I’d never get used to hotel razors.

I stepped out of the bathroom, still rubbing my jaw, and reached for the closet door when I noticed something different in the air—a humidity that wasn’t from the air conditioner. I could hear traffic outside. Did I leave a window open?

“Nice physique you got there, Mamoru.”

A huge man sat on the couch under the windows. He was wearing a khaki work uniform under a climbing harness studded with carabiners.

“Mr. Kaneda? What are you doing here?”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I have to be discreet. I don’t trust the net, so I brought you this in person.” He held out a scrap of paper with a matrix bar code.

“Here’s your data. Dry off. You’ve been spending too much time in Isamu’s office. It’s freezing in here.”

“How’d you get in?”

“He gave me your room number. It was an easy climb. All these windows need is a little help and they pop right open.”

“Why didn’t you just call me? I could’ve picked this up.”

“Yeah, but hotels at least try to keep out the riffraff. The city is crawling with camera crews, and I don’t like being photographed. I hear World Reporting is after you.”

He had a point. Who knew where the skinhead and her crew might be lurking. She would have the hotel staked out by now. A secret meeting with a shady-looking Kaneda would play right into her hands, and he’d end up getting the same treatment I got. I could see the headline:
GENE MAPPER’S SECRET RENDEZVOUS WITH UNDERGROUND BIOCHEMIST.

“I swept the room for surveillance devices while you were showering. It seems clean. Your window looks out on the river. Isamu knew what he was doing when he put you here. It’s hard to spy on.”

I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and sat on the bed. “Okay, what’ve you got?”

“I was going to give you this tomorrow in an easier format, but Isamu said it was urgent, so I had to improvise. Anyway, here’s your grasshopper.” He slapped the paper into my palm. “The server’s on the local network. The URL is untraceable. Just be careful with this. Be
very
careful.”

“Why?” I smoothed out the paper and studied the bar code. Kaneda brought his face close to mine. His sandpaper voice whispered in my ear.

“It’s classified military. A new bioweapon straight out of DARPA. I don’t know which branch of the military it’s for, but I don’t think it’s more than a year or two from deployment.”

He sat back. “Naturally, I didn’t know any of that when I loaded the data into Gene Analytics the first time. If you don’t open the genome with the right template, it turns around and bites you with a mil spec virus. Crashed my workspace before I could stop it and took the sequencer with it just for fun. Whoever designed this was very thorough.”

“So how did you extract the data?”

Kaneda grinned and formed a key with his index finger. “I have the template. Got it from an old pal who deals in that sort of thing. Unfortunately I was a little lax about my security. I don’t think the transaction was traced, but I’m going to disappear for a while. Your plant samples were dirty too. Two hundred gigabytes and no mistake.”

“It looks like we’ve put you in some kind of danger. Can you take care of yourself?”

“Don’t worry. Isamu’s got my back.” He stood up, pulled the window wide open and climbed onto the ledge. “That’s it for me. Remember: open it with the template in the folder,
off-
line.” He clipped a carabiner to a rope dangling from the roof. “Good luck.”

He kicked off and disappeared into the darkness.

I sat down at the desk and sent a text message to Kurokawa with copies to Thep and Yagodo, telling them I had the grasshopper genome and that it might be weaponized.

Now to ID the grasshopper. It was going to be a long night. I faced the desk, blinked twice, and read the bar code into my workspace.

Download complete. Shall I open the folder?

Kaneda’s folder held four files: the grasshopper genome, the template, and genomes for the intruder and the mutated SR06. I guessed that the last two files were identical. I decided to look at them later.

“Gene Analytics. Off-line. Open the insect genome with this template.”

A bar appeared on the wall above the desk and started filling in with color-coded data—genome header, patents, compression codes, and a huge library of documentation. The genome itself was almost all artificial code.

“Holy shit. It’s a designed animal.”

When Kaneda told me the grasshopper was a bioweapon, I assumed we were dealing with an insect designed for pest resistance that could function as a nanomachine vector. But the data unrolling from Gene Analytics went way beyond anything I’d expected. This grasshopper hadn’t been selectively modified with natural genes. Like SR06, it was a full-scratch, artificial life-form.

I felt the cold from the ceiling vent blowing on the nape of my neck. The hair on my body was rising into goose bumps.

A few, very simple members of kingdom
Animalia
had already been full-scratched. Everyone knew about the terrestrial corals that secreted sustainable cement. Universities and corporate labs were using worms and other unsegmented animals to transport nanomachines, but designing a viable organism as complex as a grasshopper was a staggering achievement.

Gene Analytics started flagging each color-coded data segment with drop-down index cards. Scrolling through the cards, I felt a new sense of unease. The genome itself was less than half the file. The rest was documentation and development tools. Release builds of distilled crops never went out the door with more than bare-bones documentation.

“It’s almost a debug build. No—it’s the whole developer’s kit.”

L&B’s kits came with a ton of documentation and a complete toolbox. The non-genome section of the file I was looking at was just about the right size.

“This is hilarious. All we need is a Read Me file.”

Shall I open VB01G-X W/E READ ME?

“No shit … Do it.”

The file started off with boilerplate terms and conditions, followed by a summary of the documentation. Stuff like this never went out with the final deliverables. I was starting to understand what I was dealing with.

“Tutorials, by any chance?”

VB01G-X W/E Developer Tutorials is found. Shall I play them in order?

A green rectangle faded in above the desk. A deep, resonant voice began speaking.

“My Rifle: The Creed of a United States Marine. By Major General W. H. Rupertus, USMC.

“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

“My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

“My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will …”

US Marine Corps? Kaneda said this was a DARPA project, but he’d also said it was close to deployment. The narration ended, and the green rectangle was replaced by an image of a physical manual cover.

The next page was a table of contents.

1. WARNING

2. BOOT, STOP, RESUME AND HALT

3. INSTALLATION AND OVERRIDE

4. TUTORIAL

4.1 GENE TRANSPORTATION

4.2 COMMUNICATIONS

4.3 SUICIDE

4.4 MORE …

It looked like I had the whole kit. The manual didn’t just cover basic operations like deployment and withdrawal. There were even sections on instinct plug-ins to engineer new behavior.

I was still regretting not paying enough attention to the emotion settings in that biochem suit tutorial. This time I was determined to start at the top with
WARNINGS
and read through everything.

This first section was long. It started with a recitation of the dangers of using designed organisms. Luckily none of the content was over my head.

IF THE MISSION IS CANCELED, HALT VB01G-X BEFORE LEAVING THE ZONE.

There were links to
DEACTIVATION
and
FORCED DEACTIVATION
.

“There you go. Isamu, you just saved our collective asses.” I sat back and sighed with relief. The solution was somewhere in this manual. But what came first? Should I look for information that would protect L&B from World Reporting or forget that and concentrate on stopping the grasshoppers?

I was about to skip to
DEACTIVATION
when a dot appeared in my field of vision. It was a meeting request from Kurokawa.

“I read your message about the genome. Thanks for keeping me posted.” Kurokawa popped in next to the sofa.

“I thought you were sleeping. It’ll be a few more hours before anyone’s on deck at L&B headquarters.”

“I’m half asleep.” Kurokawa put a raised index finger against his forehead and swept it to the right. That half of his brain was in sleep mode. With his conscious mind replacing the functions of his autonomic nervous system, I couldn’t imagine what sleep was like for him.

“Are you looking at the genome now?”

“I’m reading the user manual. The grasshoppers are designed animals.” I summarized what I’d discovered so far. Kurokawa was surprised to hear we were dealing with a designed animal but seemed to grasp everything quickly.

“As soon as you figure out how to stop them, tell me and Thep immediately. She’ll be handling the extermination.”

“Extermination?”

“Yes. I want to finish tomorrow morning if possible.”

I couldn’t believe it. “That soon? Are you authorized to do that?”

The question of terrorism hadn’t even come up until a couple of hours before. L&B was asleep, and Mother Mekong’s headquarters was closed for the day. It was too early to decide how and when to pull the trigger.

“I’m making the decision on my own authority as L&B’s representative on the ground. I’ll get Ms. Thep on board. I’ll talk to Barnhard in a few hours, but Mother Mekong will probably have to give us retroactive authorization.”

This was crazy. Kurokawa didn’t have that kind of authority, even if there was a biohazard.

“Hold on, Takashi. We’ve got to do something, but we can’t destroy evidence in the process. If the grasshoppers are all dead—and we don’t know if there’s a way to spare some of them—then it just gets harder to identify the mutation mechanism. All we’ll be left with is Purple Dusk—”

“Evidence is secondary. I don’t care about saving face for L&B and Mother Mekong. I doubt we can do it with pesticides. Keeping the mutation from spreading is more important than anything else.” Kurokawa had lost his gentle tone. His eyes burned into me.

“Taking action before everyone’s had a chance to weigh in will have consequences, but there’s no time. I alerted Mother Mekong about the biohazard. Unfortunately their reaction was not encouraging. They want to be the ones to notify the Cambodian government, but they won’t lift a finger until they’ve touched base with L&B.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

“Thanks. Do that, please.” Kurokawa bowed and logged off.

I couldn’t shake my discomfort with Kurokawa’s plan. His piercing stare had shut me down, but if we exterminated the grasshoppers, all we’d have left as evidence would be mutated vegetation. I still didn’t know our options for terminating the grasshoppers or how fast it could be done. It was almost as if his goal was to take out these insects before World Reporting or anyone else could show them to the world. Yet the ultimate goal was the same: to terminate the biohazard.

I shrugged and turned back to the workspace. If the genome was from DARPA, it was stolen, which made terrorism a possibility. There was no way of knowing how far from the site the grasshoppers would try to go.

They had to be stopped.

*   *   *

“What a masterpiece …”

I was green with envy. DARPA’s tools and GUI were absurdly user-friendly. After an hour reading the documentation and code for VB01G-X, I was almost ready to plan and launch my own operation. I could send swarms of insects to any location on a variety of missions with the full range of offensive and defensive measures and at any given time. I could use the grasshoppers to genetically modify food crops and starve out guerrilla forces in remote areas, or launch attacks from the air by combining their bioluminescent output.

I tried writing some code based on a few tutorials. One tutorial, named
HELLO WORLD!
, showed how to deploy swarms of grasshoppers in complicated, shifting formations. The coding sequences were far more straightforward than with SR06. The user had real-time control over complex movement. Mission parameters could even be reprogrammed on the fly, something that was structurally impossible with terrestrial coral, much less distilled crops. In terms of features and functionality, the whole approach was years ahead of any cutting edge I knew of.

But what really impressed me were the safety features. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that I was dealing with a bioweapon, but there were layers of protection against accidental deployment, with suicide codes for terminating the grasshoppers remotely. The user had a range of options: cell apoptosis, central nervous system shutdown, even physical disintegration. Any attempt to tamper with these modules instantly sterilized the insects to prevent further breeding. Breeding options were also strictly defined. The deployment area and the number of generations capable of breeding were limited. Extending the limits of viability required coded authorization from the president. It was a model of fail-safe design.

With so many safety features, I started to relax a bit. Even if we did nothing, the grasshoppers would die out long before they ravaged Southeast Asia. We were facing a genuine crisis, but the survival of humanity was not at stake.

I closed the documentation and studied the Gene Analytics data bar. The top line data was beautifully organized. DARPA’s engineers had created a work of art that was almost fractal in its detail. This wasn’t just the product of a big defense budget and secret technology. It was a labor of love. My first sight of SR06’s clean design had given me a similar feeling, but there was something almost ethereal about the design philosophy behind this grasshopper.