Out of Touch (8 page)

When his father died, a year after the government took over, James had tried to distance himself from that whole conspiracy. Contributions of his personal genetics stopped immediately. But recruitment spinners from homeland security kept trying to re-enlist him, to pressure him during his studies at MIT, even after he fled to Oxford. Could anyone from those years be trying to contact him? Could they imagine he’d care about their internal politics now that he worked for Thailand? Maybe someone wanted a conduit to pass information to the Thai government. Should he tell Alak about the note? But any call or email he sent could be intercepted.

The elevator arrived, and James had it to himself riding down to the conference floor. As the hand in his pocket rubbed the plastic covered note, he copied the motion with his free hand, stopping as the elevator stopped. He stepped out, meeting the eyes of scientists waiting to board. Those eyes all slid past him, as did their thoughts. He walked through the hall to the poster presentations. Keeping his head and eyes up, three colleagues nodded to him, but there was no special meaning behind the acknowledgements.

The poster section was a crowded mix of tri-fold poster boards, laptops, and gratuitous 3-D rendering. It was also a jumble of other people’s concerns.
Why use spotted arrays when the chip resolution’s so much better? Has this been replicated? Is that holographic display battery powered? They gave her a grant? What does he think I am, an imbecile?

James was quickly overwhelmed and couldn’t bring himself to look everyone in the face. He realized now how habitually he averted his gaze, how rarely he saw other faces directly. If he didn’t focus on anyone, didn’t interact, he could avoid this clamorous barrage of thoughts. Looking down, he noticed carpet fibers stuck in the black leather seams of his shoes. He stood as if studying a poster involving genetic correlates to low verbal intelligence in psychiatric patients with high visual/spatial intelligence. Taking a deep breath, he accepted that he was entirely unqualified to look for suspicious behavior or covert acknowledgments.
He didn’t even like being close to this many people.

He noticed someone looming behind his shoulder, glanced up, and met the eyes of a silent, serious, and rather pimply young man. His conference badge said, “Nigel Radford, Cambridge, England.”

For a moment James was caught staring at Nigel, not knowing what to do. Nigel wasn’t averting his eyes, but James had no idea what he expected. A Brit wouldn’t send him that note, would he? Surely the English wouldn’t send anyone who would give him information. Should he try to communicate telepathically? The British government already knew what he was, but if this man wanted to contact him, this would hardly be the place.

James’ gaze traced the lines of the high ceiling, finding a security camera in the nearest corner, mostly hidden by wavy, ornate molding.  Continuing around all sides, he noted old chandeliers refitted with tiny, corkscrew-shaped florescent bulbs, a track with adjustable spotlights for when there was a speaker at the front, and three more cameras. For symmetry, his eyes traced the same route back again.

Why would someone leave an unsigned note then approach him so openly?

Does he understand the analysis? Why doesn’t he say something?
Nigel thought, as he looked directly at James and smiled.

Nigel wasn’t a telepath. His mind wasn’t even silenced. James glanced at the intelligence correlates poster and the name “Nigel Radford” popped out. With a dry mouth James said, “Nice analysis.”

“Thanks,” Nigel bobbed his head. “It was my thesis work, but I added the cluster analysis and ran another set of data with the new groups.”

James tried to look at the analysis section of the poster. Tried to formulate an intelligent reply. He couldn’t, and he felt there was no air to breath. “Excuse me, I don’t feel well.”

“Maybe later.”

James left the room, hurried down the hallway, and up the stairs to the mezzanine, just to avoid a group milling around the elevator.  He stood with his back against a wall, breathing hard. The hotel, so traditional in every other way, had modern plastic sculpture jutting out from the wall around him. It was like standing amidst a display of Halloween masks from his youth.  A green swirly oval slanted out on his right. A dark face-like distortion seemed to glower from the left.

He had just made a fool of himself in front of, who, an English post-doc? Had anyone else noticed? Would Nigel Radford even remember the encounter? Why had his mind refused to focus on the puerile poster?

Had someone really ordered Brandenburg’s death?

August 9,
2024 – Bangkok, Thailand

“Alak, I have a question for you.” James held the note upright, still bagged, between his index and ring fingers.

The government man stood silently at the far side of the lab bench and nodded. He was a young, unremarkable bureaucrat of mixed Thai and Chinese ancestry. His face seemed chubby above his narrow shoulders and clinging suit. A navy blue briefcase bag weighed down his left shoulder, creating a disturbing asymmetry. James had never before seen a point to Alak dropping by after each foreign conference. As a scientific liaison, Alak was inadequate to understand the new research findings, as a government minder, he must be bored silly – until now.

James flipped the ziploc with the note back and forth between his fingers, used to the feel of it now, the uncertainty it represented. “I wasn’t sure what to do with this.”

James flipped the bag to a rhythm that might be his heartbeat, ten, twenty, thirty times. Surely an American functionary would have interrupted by now. “I think I’ve figured out what it means, but I need to know.”

“How can I comment until I see what it says?” Alak spoke softly, in a voice like a shrug of the shoulders, but without the shrug.

“But then, or later, you must tell me if you find out.”

“If you want to find out—“

“That’s your business not mine. I wouldn’t ask, unless I needed to know.”

Another thirty heartbeats, James flipped the note between his fingers. He almost hoped Alak would never tell him. Could he satisfy his curiosity and still imagine himself free?

He handed the note to Alak who kept it in the bag, read it, stared at it, then asked calmly, “You think you know what it means?”

“Joseph Brandenburg, who worked with my father, died on June 23 of this year.”

“And D?”

“My best conjecture is Davies.”

At that, Alak’s eyebrows rose, he slid the note into his dark bag. The bag was a hybrid of a purse and a briefcase and might look sporty, if it wasn’t always overfilled. James couldn’t stop staring at it once his note was inside.

“I’ll pass this along.”

“And tell me what you find.”

Alak bobbed his head in either agreement or a pretense of respect. He left, and James missed the feel of the note between his fingers.

On the day Alak confirmed Davies’, now President Davies’, involvement, James gave himself a dot on his calendar. Then he added the new encryption software to his pilot. Alak stood by, but James wouldn’t let anyone else touch the old machine. A later palm pilot series offered half the weight with five times the memory. But his could hold complete genetic profiles for 300 subjects, plus annotations, and it was the physical home of his personal calendar for the last seventeen years, the only other data set he wanted accessible locally at all times.

So when James returned to his latest hotel room, head aching from his presentation and the not quite on-topic questions he’d had to field, he just picked the new note off the beige Berber carpet and pulled out his pilot. As soon as the machine and the new encryption routine were ready, he used the hotel LAN to transcribe, encoded, for Alak:

“Minerva to buy 6Y14P294 rights for D’s scheme.”

He decided the interpretation was too obvious to explain. James hit send and lay back on the tidy hotel bed, sucking in the smell of bleachy over-washing. His right foot thumped against the bed frame; so he thumped his left twice and his right again.

Minerva was a states-based biotech company. 6Y14P294 was the identifier for a bipolar correlate James had patented in 2015. That was the year the WTO Special Conference on Genetics decided no one could patent an actual DNA sequence, but you could patent reading an understood sequence with any known chip, pore, gel, or other techniques. So, effectively, he’d patented the ability to easily scan for that bipolar sequence, but not the exclusive right to interpret it when looking at a patient’s full genome.

Financially, it had not been one of his hotter discoveries. When the new laws triggered a clinical diagnostic gold rush, James was well positioned to specify several recently interpreted sequences. His current Thai biotech empire was built on past patents for single recessive depression, addiction susceptibility, and immune system irregularities. They sold test kits to medical providers and took samples by mail from concerned parents or spouses who didn’t want to involve their national
health systems.  The bipolar correlate wasn’t something anyone tested for separately, and it wasn’t needed to rapidly screen a large population. It was just one of several sequences that increased a person’s risk for bipolar disorder. What would it have to do with the “schemes” of a new American President, particularly one who killed Brandenburg?

James needed to arrange an exchange for more psychiatric population samples. He’d noticed a couple of open-minded types at his talk today. Maybe one of them would like to collect some patient samples for a collaborative arrangement. If there was a reason the Americans wanted those rights, James should be able to discover it in lab.

Approaching new people was asking a lot of himself right after a talk, but he tucked both feet against the bed frame and pulled himself up. 

Downstairs he drifted for half an hour, listening, planning an approach. Just as he was about to corner a junior professor from Bulgaria, he saw Nigel Radford hovering by his new poster. James had read it earlier. It analyzed immune system peculiarities in subjects with various affective disorders, and seemed cleanly done, if a bit basic. James knew exactly how he could test his pseudomonas spliced retrovirus idea and use the gamma globulin interference to rebalance immune responses in one of the psychotic sub-populations Nigel studied.  But he didn’t want to discuss the idea with Nigel. Not only was he embarrassed from their first encounter, but he knew the English followed America’s lead in not working with him or Thailand, so there was really no point.

At that same moment, Nigel spotted James and waved for him to come over. Enduring embarrassment like heartburn, James walked toward him. Nigel smiled brightly. He wore a peppery red sweater and his acne had cleared significantly since the last conference.

“How’re you doing, Dr. Morton? I hope it wasn’t my poster that made you ill last time.”

James tried to laugh, guessing he was supposed to. “If so, this one’s safer. I read it this morning with no ill effects.”

Nigel nodded.
Now what does he think?

“Actually, your work is quite good.” James made a quick decision
to give away his pseudomonas insight, demonstrate a bit of cleverness this time. “In your analysis you mention several drawbacks to gene therapies targeting the immune system, but have you considered using part of the pseudomonas genome, spliced into a safer carrier virus, to alter gamma globulin production in this sub-population?” James pointed to the poster to show just which group he meant.

Nigel seemed stunned for a moment. James was used to such reactions when he tossed out ideas this way. He couldn’t help judging people by their recovery time, and Nigel made a quick recovery.

“Linsky’s talk in Zurich! You’re working from their problems with gamma globulin, but does anyone know which sequence triggers that?” Nigel’s mind raced forward loudly, mapping out steps he’d take to identify the sequence and test its usefulness. His enthusiasm was magnetic and drew James to tell him more.

“I have a suspicion,” James said, and he pulled out his pilot to explain.

Several minutes later, James had a chance to test his own recovery speed after an unexpected suggestion. “You’re part of the Academie Suisse, aren’t you? They’re funding my current study of schizophrenics, and I could send you samples without violating confidentiality. You could test the pseudomonas splice yourself, at least in culture.”

James was officially part of the Academie Suisse, as were most of the speakers at this conference. But he’d always considered it a token position within a grant writing agency. He knew why the U.S., Thailand, and to some extent China preferred genetics conferences held in Switzerland. He wasn’t sure how many Swiss understood the triangle balancing the three countries, but he knew they kept certain hotel staff suitably discreet, and of course, the directors of the Academie Suisse.

Nigel’s mind was now loud with ideas for new experiments. In the mix James heard,
In five minutes he shared more insight than my advisor has all year.

James sighed, wondering if Nigel’s advisor was just aloof, or if he was consciously protecting unpublished ideas from broadcast. But if he
knew, why send Nigel here without protecting his thoughts? James wanted to wash his hands, feeling grimy for the ideas he could steal, even though he knew he wouldn’t do it. Still, he couldn’t give up the offered samples.