Immortality (9 page)

“It’s a dead end,” said Kathy. “I told Jeffrey it was a dead end the first time he called me, before he started bothering you with it. Chromatium Omri lives in seawater and divers swim in seawater. We found no trace of Chromatium in any other victim. I know it’s odd that some dead Chromatium were found inside epidermal capillaries on the diver’s skull, but that strain is completely benign. It was not inside the blood brain barrier and not in nerve tissue. Even if it had made it inside the victim’s nerve tissue, there’s nothing Chromatium could do to cause the micro-cuts we’re seeing. I promise you this is not the problem. Case closed.”

“Did you set up a team to work on the Chromatium question?” asked Carl.

The man was unrelenting. He’d asked the same thing yesterday. The throbbing in her knee was growing worse and had spread to her temples. She took a deep breath to calm herself. The problem was they did not have enough top-level people to waste them on wild tangents.

“I know you’ve asked me to get this done, but I don’t have the staff,” she said.

“People are dying!” snapped Carl. “What if this thing has a breakout and makes it to The States? What if Jeffrey is right and there’s a connection? The CDC has a multibillion dollar budget. Use it… Hire more people!”

“Carl, please.”

“Please what?”

His dark complexion looked damp. Little veins were coming to the surface across his neck and face.

“You’re a doctor, a scientist,” said Kathy. “Listen to what you’re saying. You know the answer is never throwing more bodies at a problem. When has that ever worked? If we just keep adding people we’ll end up with a bureaucratic nightmare. People will be going off in all directions and important findings will be lost in the chaos. You know the biggest problem with this kind of work is centralizing and digesting information and then disseminating it to the entire team. Besides, if you’re so worried about a breakout getting into this country, you should take your billions dollar budget and use it to quarantine the Southern US Borders.”

“So we’re back to that again!”

“Damn it, Carl! Why don’t I just call a press conference and get it done myself, okay?”

Mark was wearing a pullover shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He was in an alcove of his microbiology lab that served as an office. The chair he was sitting in was an oversized executive model upholstered in aged brown leather. It was the same chair he’d used when he’d first discovered COBIC-3.7, the same chair he’d used almost twenty years ago when he’d begun his career in genetics. The chair squeaked in familiar ways. The leather’s smell was familiar. It felt like home.

His office space was furnished with a bookcase, a desk, and a few chairs. Mark leaned back. He was staring at the screen of his workstation. His eyes were devouring what they saw. The screen contained columns filled with horizontal lines of different colors and thickness. Each column looked like a vertical barcode and that’s almost what it was – a barcode that described life. The software was his own design, built exclusively for him by an engineering firm. The program was used to analyze DNA sequences including their interrelationships. This particular DNA sequence was from the engineered bacterium he was developing. There was a problem with the bug’s longevity. He’d found a way of lessening the problem, but didn’t fully understand why it worked and that troubled him.

Genetic engineering was his second obsession, a field of research completely opposite from paleobiology. Where COBIC-3.7 occupied the world of prehistory, his genetic work was part of the future. Bacteria were the machines of the coming centuries. They could be engineered to be construction workers that made plastics or new kinds of fabric. There were mutations which had been used to consume oil slicks and other environmental hazards. Through recombinant DNA techniques, simple bacteria could be turned into chemical factories that churned out custom protein strings for new super drugs. Their use in medicine was not something new. Long ago, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly developed a bacterium that mass-produced human insulin. Millions of diabetics around the world, including Mark, owed their lives to tiny
E. Coli
bacteria that had been converted into insulin factories.

Mark glanced at a framed micrograph of COBIC. The picture had been taken when his breeding colony was flourishing. He’d never been able to uncover why the colony had died off so suddenly. Next to the photograph was a chunk of COBIC fossil collected on his first expedition.

His eyes went back to the screen. The colored barcodes were becoming a hopeless puzzle. He needed to stop. He knew from experience that letting go of a problem brought perspective, and often with that distance came fresh ideas. He leaned back in his chair and surveyed the contents of his lab. On his desk was a mug of coffee long ago cold, and a drying sandwich with a bite missing. A lithograph of Albert Einstein hung on the wall above his workstation. The great man looked like he was staring out across a universe of time with those doleful eyes.

The clock on Mark’s desk read seven. It was impossible to know if it was morning or evening. His lab was in a subbasement and had no windows. The room was large – fifty by thirty-five feet – a vast improvement over the days before his Nobel Prize when he’d worked alone in an off campus annex. Now he had a staff and was located in a newly refurbished section of a building located in the heart of the UCLA campus.

The lab was equipped with state of the art research tools, things to service the imagination of the University’s pet Nobel Laureate. The equipment alone had cost millions of dollars. Half the funding had come from federal grants, the other half from UCLA coffers. His operating expenses were never a problem. The work he did was filled with splashy buzzwords that made it easy to obtain additional grants. He was a recognized leader in the genetic engineering of bacteria – designer bugs for designer times.

The only difficulty with his work was the large amount of security that surrounded it. The lab had solid steel doors and negative pressure ventilation. Nothing that he worked on was supposed to escape. To Mark, the security was a big joke. He was working on bacteria that, at worst, might overly increase soil nutrition. There were no pathogenic microbes here. Several months ago, a grad student had left the lab area with a gas-sampling probe which had not been sterilized the required six hours. The incident had been caught and investigated, and Mark had ended up with enough paper work dropped on his desk to make a dozen lawyers smile.

The telephone began ringing. Mark was cleaning his glasses. He put them back over his eyes. He tried to ignore the noisy intruder. A minute later, the phone stopped its complaining. He closed the computer window containing DNA barcodes and clicked another icon. A graph appeared showing the rate of reproduction for the latest variant of his designer bug,
Cri Thiobacillus
, CT for short
.
The graph was incomplete. As he stared, new line segments were added. In the background, a low priority computer job was running that simulated an entire bacterial ecosystem; and from that simulation, it predicted how his CT bacteria would multiply. The graph showed that under typical conditions, the little creatures could produce a new generation every fifty minutes resulting in fast exponential population growth.

Mark smiled to himself. CT was engineered to be an effective consumer of what had been considered non-biodegradable human garbage up to now. At its geometric rate of reproduction, small amounts of the bug could fan out to process huge quantities of waste. Once the garbage was consumed, their food supply would be gone and the bacteria themselves would die off. CT was an elegant solution to the problems of waste disposal.

Mark imagined someone with an eyedropper adding a small amount of CT to a pile of garbage. In a few days, the bacteria’s enzymes would reduce the trash to a harmless sludge usable as fertilizer. The little critters were voracious. They could easily take over the world if it was made of what they were designed to eat, and that was the key to their success as a product. Living plants and animals had defense systems that could easily destroy the garbage eaters. CT bacteria were the ultimate scavengers, able to eat only things that could not defend themselves.

Mark knew that his bug wouldn’t solve the entire waste problem. No technology could break the cycle of trees – into candy wrappers – into trash. CT couldn’t stop man from converting the planet’s ecosystem into recycled waste. In darker moments, he wondered if his bug might even make the problem worse. If society could easily dispose of its trash, would it produce even more?

He closed his eyes and thought about how CT spread out to consume all available food and then died their mass death. Such an efficient machine... His eyes opened. Was that part of the COBIC mystery? Had COBIC spread out over the world and consumed too much of its food supply, bringing self-extinction?

A buzzer sounded. Someone was at the lab door. Mark saw Gracy in the video monitor and pressed a button that unlocked the door. His eyes were drawn back to the computer screen as another line segment was added to the exponential growth curve. Was he looking at a mathematical model of extinction?

“Hi honey,” called out Gracy.

Mark turned around in his chair. Gracy walked over and sat in his lap. She kissed him, then leaned back and looked into his eyes.

“You were supposed to be home almost two hours ago,” she said. “We were going to have dinner with Mary and George just about now... Don’t worry. I canceled.”

“Sorry, you know I’ve got a broken sense of time.”

Mark stood up, removing her from his lap. He pulled a book from his shelf and then glanced at the computer screen again. The graph had changed some more. The pattern reminded him of something.

“I tried calling you three times,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t answer. You’re too obsessive!”

“My obsessing just got us out of a boring dinner with Mary and George.”

“Yeah, but that’s no excuse.”

Mark sat down in his chair again. He stared at the computer screen. He knew he’d seen a growth curve somewhere that reminded him of this one, but where? He opened the book.

“What about food?” said Gracy.

“I’m not hungry right now. You go on. I’ll catch up with you later.”

The day was gusty and clear with a robin’s egg blue sky streaked with white. The seawater was a dark green. The freezing air was crisp with a chill that opened his mind. Harold Nakachia took a deep breath of the air into his lungs. He was high above the ground in the operator’s cab of a shipyard crane. He had the side window partially open. He craved fresh air almost as much as iced beer. Looking through the glass, he could see out across the waters of Cook Inlet. He could feel the vastness of the sea beyond. Winds were buffeted his cab. Fall was long past, and winter was blowing hard through Alaska.

The nosepiece of his cab was a glass box. Harold sat in a bucket seat that had a control-stick built into each of the armrests. His footrests extended out over a glass floor. He looked down past his boots at a miniature army of longshoremen working cargo on and off the docks. The experience was like sitting suspended in midair over the edge of a cliff.

An order from the dock foreman, Pete Fulmar buzzed inside Harold’s headphones. Harold eased back on a control-stick that operated the winch. He could sense the crane tightening under the load he was lifting out of the ship. The work was dangerous for the men below. Harold was a five-year veteran on the crane. He performed his job almost as an extension of the machine. Orders were whispered into his ears and his body obeyed without the mind interfering. Operating the crane was like walking: if he thought about all the motions that were needed, he might trip over his own feet. Today his thoughts were far away.

In a month, he and his cousins, Frankie and Toad, would be spending a week trout fishing along South Bear River to celebrate Harold’s twenty-ninth birthday. He could hear the water running over the rocks. He could almost smell the trout bubbling away in a fry pan with a splash of beer and pepper and salt. His mouth started to water.

Harold smiled to himself. Life was good, sometimes hard, but always fair. He had grown up in a small town just outside of Anchorage. He was an Eskimo of the Yup’ik people. When he was little, some of the town kids had teased him, but once he reached twelve the ribbing had stopped. By the time adolescence had passed, Harold was six foot six inches tall and two hundred seventy pounds. So far he’d enjoyed, as his father liked to say,
a life stuffed with whole good memories like a plump roasted chicken.

Harold gazed down at the docks and watched as Toad drove his flatbed cart, called a yard-vehicle, along a ramp. Harold drifted off again remembering how Tony had earned his nickname of Toad. It wasn’t because Toad was a squat broad man with a smile that extended like a crack from ear to ear: he was, but that wasn’t the reason. It wasn’t because his voice was always a bit hoarse: it was, but that wasn’t the reason either. The reason was because Toad used to be able to slip into the water and swim submerged like some great bullfrog up to where the girls were skinny-dipping. Harold and the other boys would be hiding in the bushes. Toad’s mission had almost always succeeded with squealing females running naked from the swimming hole. Harold often wondered why the girls came back to the same place for their swim. He grinned with the memory. Maybe they liked being chased from the water so the boys could get a good look at them? If that was the case, their game had worked. Six years later, Harold had ended up marrying one of those girls – Sue.

Pete Fulmar relayed more instructions into Harold’s ears. Harold moved a control-stick and the crane swung the load to the left as smooth as sliding on ice. The skill of his job was pure eye-hand coordination. Harold brought the container to a stop perfectly centered over a tractor-trailer chassis. No repositioning was needed before lowering the container.