Out of Touch (49 page)

Chapter 31

July 28, 2025 – Bangkok, Thailand

The morning of July 28th was ordinary. James came into his office around 9 AM. He leafed through his paper correspondences and turned on his primary terminal. Triaging email, nothing required an immediate reply. Checking his calendar, the only meeting listed was the summer soirée at the Johnson’s house.

Four times a year the Johnsons invited an eclectic group of friends over to discuss current events and political trends. At first, James thought they invited him just to fix him up with women. But since the conversations inevitably turned to invasion of privacy issues in the U.S., which often involved genetics or at least medicine that James could explain, he’d developed his own niche in the group. He wondered if he should go today. What had Knockham’s last note meant? Was some event about to happen or was someone coming to see him personally? He set up windows on his computer to monitor breaking world news and a science discussion group. He thought about staying in his office all day, then realized someone trying to meet him might use the soirée.

The food at the Johnsons’ was excellent, as always. There was a meat appetizer cleverly bound up in banana leaves and a quiche with something not quite like spinach in it. But James had trouble sitting still. There was no one here he hadn’t met before. Maybe he should have stayed in his lab.

“James, what do you think of the finger prick ID legislation in the U.S.?” Ida asked, probably being a good hostess.

“The challenge on behalf of government employees? They have no chance in the current Supreme Court. Now if private employers try to require DNA matching, that will probably fail. So far genotype privacy has held, even in the U.S.” No need to suggest why to Ida, but most of her guests weren’t teeps, so that was that.

“Do you think they’ll really use it, have automated blood draw machines at the entrances to important buildings?” a young woman in a speckled orange sari asked. Her mind was silent and James wondered if she worked for the government.

“No, just an excuse to increase their database. Even if someone designed a machine that couldn’t be tricked and posed no disease risk, most people aren’t ready to trust it.”

James felt the fingers on his right hand begin to tap up and down his glass. He discretely mirrored the movement with his left hand then tried to keep still.

“Why don’t they just use cheek swabs or retina scans?” the citrus clothed woman asked, tilting her head and perturbing a wave of long black hair. Could Ida be planning to fix him up with her?

“The legal precedents aren’t as strong. Courts lag behind science by at least ten years. Or maybe they think it’s harder with a blood test to substitute someone else’s sample.” But even as James spoke, he realized the finger prick could also collect a sample of skin parasites to be tested.

During the slight conversational pause, an older woman in a flowery dress, Mrs. K-something from the university literature department, approached Ida. “Oh Ida, where’s Emma-dear, I brought her a book.”

“You’re too kind. I’m afraid Emma’s exploring adolescent sulking.”

“Is it a boy?” the woman cooed with a smile, while thinking that Emma was a good girl and mothers always worried too much.

Ida’s expression changed not a bit as she said, “No, just some friends of hers moved away, and she’s blaming us. Let me call and tell her you brought something.”

“I have her number on my cell.”

“Oh, it’s changed. She has a PAD now. Costs her four times as much, but her friends use them; so she thinks they’re de rigur.”

James wandered by the dessert table and selected a mango tart before heading across the courtyard and calling a taxi.

He hadn’t noticed the music from the taxi’s radio until it was interrupted by a man speaking in English.

“I’m Doctor Leonard Knockham . . .”

James leaned forward, gripping his hands on the front seat as the message he’d been waiting for came through. When the radio station regained control, after the phrase “symbiotic organisms,” the driver muttered “crazy farang.” James wanted to ask him to try another station, see if the message was still breaking through somewhere. But he could hear the driver’s mental skepticism in Thai. Without understanding all the words, James picked up the cabby’s disbelief, mixed with some reasonable fear.

He sat back and examined his own fears. What if a mob came pounding at the lab door as he furiously tried to delete files? If they gave him a chance to talk, what could he possibly say? Would he be hearing horror and fury from a mob of minds the whole time?

Society had accepted tetrachromats and men with extreme pheromone sensitivities, would telepathy be so much harder? He imagined posing that question to a non-telepath, and the devil’s advocate part of his brain shut up.

What if society required anti-telepathy treatments? James knew it was possible genetically. He’d discovered a couple mechanisms himself, but as germ warfare they would have been tricky. With a modern legal and medical system involved, it could be done, and there might be even easier fixes involving the parasites. James imagined himself voluntarily stepping forward to give up telepathy. How often had he wished not to hear people’s thoughts? How many friendships and activities had he scorned because he couldn’t stand eavesdropping on the people involved?

His fingertips began to tap rapidly against his palms, excited at the thought of giving up his teep. But was it only wishful thinking? He might be even less socially competent without some outside input. Was there any place left for him in the normal scientific community?

Then he thought about Sarah. He imagined a mob chasing her down, beating her to a pulp. He imagined her hurting someone in self-defense and hating herself for it, or just having to give up telekinesis. Wasn’t what she could do useful to society? But wasn’t it even more frightening than telepathy?

James hadn’t prayed in fifteen years, but in the back of the Thai taxicab, he folded his hands together and made what was either a wish or a prayer.
Just let people get through the next few days, and don’t let them hurt Sarah or anyone like her.

Back in his office, James retrieved the day’s broadcast and data from the web. It was so much more than he’d figured out on his own. He checked his samples with the new data while he monitored scientific reaction on his preferred discussion groups.

             
There came a knock at the door and Alak strode in, mindspeaking,
“So you’ve heard? Are these other types legit?”

             
“Probably, but I need time.”

             
“We have no time. We may need weapons and defenses.”

             
James didn’t even look up from his computer.
“I’ll work fastest if you leave me alone, and send me any relevant information.”

             
Alak left quietly and James barely noticed. He was halfway to what might be a discovery. Using Lenny’s simplest notation, Sarah was indeed a mover and had two of the rarer alleles where just one would suffice (BB 11 23 M). The other two movers in Thailand were BB 11 2 M, which made sense.

The problem was, James himself should be a mover according to the new data. He was BB 11 2 M. Would he be a mover without zootochloro interferoid? Why could the others function despite the new zoots?

He checked the relatives of his known teeks, but none of them had the 2 M or 3 M which should make them teeks. He searched his whole database and found two other teeps who were 2 M like him. He started searching for how they were like him and unlike the teeks.

In minutes his analysis gave a simple answer, a single region of DNA. Was this a factor Knockham had missed? Was it only necessary for BB telepaths to express telekinesis also? Or was it a false lead hiding a more complicated answer?

James checked and the paranoid schizophrenics with what he’d called “precursor telepathy” or what Knockham labeled “AA” also had the sequence he lacked. He tentatively labeled it “4” and looked to see if there was a way to contact Knockham. He found none and wasn’t surprised.

Then James began to wonder if his father had been BB 11 2 M without the 4, if he’d been spreading teek genetics without knowing he was almost a teek. He didn’t have access to his father’s genome, but he could try to find out if Sarah was his child or his father’s. That might give a needed clue.

He punched up the analysis and wondered why he hadn’t checked before. The answer popped out. Sarah was almost certainly James’s child, not his half-sister. So that didn’t tell him anything new about his father’s DNA. Carefully, he erased all of Sarah’s records from the machine. Her genotype was in his pilot and his results could be recreated trivially, but at the moment, he was a little more worried than usual about someone breaking in. Wherever possible, he safeguarded his data. Then he went back online to study the reactions of the scientific community.

Two groups of parasitologists, one in Johannesburg and one in Oslo, were releasing articles on zootochloro interferoid they claimed journals rejected for reasons they hadn’t understood at the time.

A well-respected German researcher was the first to report his lab had partially confirmed Knockham’s data. A grad student had supposedly checked his own records, found he carried the sequence for telekinesis, and stepped forward to be a test case. When someone raised ethical objections, the young man had threatened to hire someone to bury him under dirt if his colleagues were going to waste the opportunity. An hour later the lab had sequenced his DNA, isolated both new and old zoots from initial skin samples, borrowed a suitable pressure chamber across campus, taken more skin samples showing only old zoots survived, and conducted a telekinesis demonstration in front of cameras and witnesses. Skeptics were still trying to debunk the demonstration, but the lead scientist had good credentials and had verified his own identity on camera and by web signature.

Meanwhile, several non-scientist were posting their own evidence of diseases mitigated or abilities triggered through various pressurizing experiments. Some radio enthusiasts were trying to detect transmissions from the zoots, but James couldn’t find anyone respectable posting on that topic. Mostly he found a lot of confused people posting questions that were answered accurately or not by people who thought they understood genetics. James kept careful track of his preferred sources, but most of them had no means to replicate such results quickly, and researchers in many countries were keeping diplomatically quiet.

             
Eventually, James realized he was falling asleep while reading. A glance to the corner of his screen told him it was past ten. He stood up from his desk and stretched, pops along his spine proved he'd been still for too long. One side of his neck cracked and he tried to elicit the same reaction from the other. Failing that, he stretched to each side again, in reverse order, and paced out into a silent hall to look for coffee.

             
There wasn’t any brewing in the break room at the end of his floor. So he started microwaving some water and stared silently out the window. It was a view he never looked at, not liking to linger in what was often a busy space. This was later than he usually stayed, and the quad below was dark, with only a few people walking by. One couple stopped across the way, facing each other, and James was surprised to identify Lisa kissing a short Thai man. He was even more surprised when that man stepped back and turned out to be Alak. James supposed he should be happy for them, but instead he felt a bit queasy. It must be the smell of old coffee in the break room.

             
As Alak walked away, James realized Lisa was heading up the steps of his building, probably to his lab or Robert’s, both on this floor. He spun away from the window, hit the stop button on the microwave, and raced back down the hall. He hunched quickly at his desk and brought forward the window with the science discussion groups he’d been monitoring. After a couple minutes his heart stopped racing, and he decided Lisa was checking in with her brother after her date. He felt a little silly remembering the cup of water he’d left in the microwave.

There was a knock on the lab door. Lisa blew in before James could speak, and he decided it was even sillier to think she’d be meeting her brother here after a date.

“Good that you’re awake. We need you to test a genotype and check for old and new zoots.”

“We?”

“I’ll explain as we go.”

“I’m not really set up to test for parasites.”

“Their DNA is on the web. Can’t you just scrape some skin and run it through your machine?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Dr. Yu said you could do it.”

“Dr. Yu is a fine physician, but he is neither a geneticist nor a parasitologist.”

“Oh come on, James, as a favor to me?”

James paused wondering why he let Lisa speak to him this way and if he really seemed so easy to manipulate, but he gathered the materials he might need and followed.

In the car, Lisa did not explain. She said,
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”