The Mother Code

by Carole Stivers

  Standing up, the general signaled the end of the meeting. “On his way to Langley as we speak. We’ll need you there to greet him.”

  * * *

  IN THE SMALL, brightly lit conference room, James Said hunched over the table, the Fort Detrick reports displayed before him on dimly lit screens. His fingers scrolled the pages steadily, his thin lips moving in silence.

  With his lank frame, his black hair carefully oiled and plastered over flecks of premature gray, Said looked little like the militants whom Rick had encountered during his years under cover in Pakistan. Still, Rick felt his fists clench involuntarily as he sat across the table, waiting. He remembered wresting a sawed-off rifle from sinewed arms in an abandoned hovel outside Karachi. The pungent smell of cumin mixed with sweat. He remembered the searing pain, shooting up into his gut. The trip back home, without his leg—without Mustafa, the trusted interpreter he’d vowed to protect.

  But this man smelled only of a nondescript American aftershave. His rumpled clothes were those of a middle-aged academic, on his way home to California for the Christian holidays. Gripping the back of his own neck with one hand, Rick willed his mental state down from orange to yellow, from yellow to all clear. The general had assured him: Though James Said’s family history was suspect, the man himself was not.

  Sitting back, Said shifted a pair of reading glasses from the bridge of his angular nose to the top of his high forehead. The look on his face was unreadable.

  “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  Rick stared across the table. Said was obviously put out at having to curtail his vacation. Once the fear had worn off, he’d been understandably outraged. But now that the chips were on the table—was this really the time to start a game of twenty questions? “Are the findings sound?”

  “The DNA sequence found in the archaebacteria is the same as that in the NAN. The archaebacteria are capable of making and secreting active NANs. It’s right there in the reports.”

  “Then we need some ideas.”

  “About what?”

  Oh, my good God. “How to respond, of course.”

  “If this really did happen—”

  “And you just told me you agree it did—”

  “If all of this is true, then you’re asking me to solve a monumental problem with about as much forethought as you gave when you unleashed this thing in the first place.”

  “Listen.” Rick stood. Ignoring the pain of a thousand needles from a leg that no longer existed, he circled the table to stand at the doctor’s side. “I didn’t unleash anything. I’m just the poor sap who needs to figure out a way to clean it up. And I’m asking for your help.”

  “I’m sorry.” The doctor looked up at him, his expression only briefly telegraphing something resembling sympathy. “Really. It’s just that I’d expected to be home now. With my parents. But instead I’m sitting here with you, and you’re telling me these things. It’s . . . a lot to process.”

  “If it helps any,” Rick said, “we don’t expect anything to happen tomorrow.”

  “How long do you think we have?”

  “Detrick consulted the database at Argonne National Lab. Retrospective data on the natural spread of DNA for this type of desert microbe population yielded a few models. Possibly as long as five years before it breaches the region. Possibly less . . .”

  “And we know that the DNA is currently only found in the one species of archaebacterium?”

  “So far, yes.”

  “Okay.” Said rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “I suppose I don’t have any say in the matter, now. I know too much, as you say . . . We’ll have to get to work right away.”

  Rick leaned forward. “What do you suggest? Some sort of vaccine, maybe?”

  “A vaccine won’t work.”

  “No?”

  “A traditional vaccine helps the body mount an immune response to a foreign agent. But IC-NAN is designed to masquerade as nonforeign. What we need is a snippet of DNA that can short-circuit its action. And we need a method by which to deliver it to the human body. Genetic engineering on an unprecedented scale.”

  “We can’t just eradicate the source? Kill these things?”

  “Living, these microbes are acting as factories for that toxic DNA that you . . . that our government so wisely spewed out into the biosphere. They’ve already replicated it far beyond the dose dropped by your drones. And as they die, they are apparently capable of excreting the DNA in its original infectious form. Kill them on purpose, and you’d most likely only accelerate the release process. Quite simply, you’ve created a monster.”

  “Couldn’t we just . . . burn them up?”

  “You can try. But I can’t imagine you’ll meet with success. We’re talking billions and billions of infected microorganisms, by now most likely spread over miles of terrain, borne on the wind. And it’s quite possible that over time, new microbial species will be infected. I can’t think of a surefire way to destroy all that infectious matter . . .” Said stood up, his fingers splayed on the tabletop, back stooped and head down. Rick had to strain to hear what he said next. “No. We’ll have to find some way to modify the human body to live with this . . . this monster on the loose.”

  Rick sat down heavily. He’d prayed for better news, some sort of amazing fix. He didn’t like Said—his defeatist attitude, his seeming arrogance. But he couldn’t expect a miracle.

  And what the man said was true. They both knew too much to turn away. “Do you know why you were chosen?” he asked.

  “Chosen?” Said looked up, his expression blank.

  “You were picked for this project for the same reason that I was. You have no family.”

  “I have my parents—”

  “No wife, no kids. We can’t trust people to look at this rationally, if . . .”

  “Look,” the doctor replied, his pale brown eyes flashing amber, “I don’t think anyone in his right mind could look at this with complete detachment. But I’ll try to be as rational as I can.”

  4

  JAMES GRITTED HIS teeth. It was difficult to believe that only a few weeks had passed since his first meeting with Colonel Richard Blevins. Bundled in a Biosafety Level 4 positive-pressure suit, he felt trapped, claustrophobic. Bright overhead lights glinted off the surface of the transparent plastic surrounding his head, blinding him. The short walk down the narrow hallway toward the Fort Detrick maximum containment lab was exhausting, the sweat tracing down the side of his face in an exasperating trickle.

  “These suits used to be worse,” Rudy Garza said. The smaller man’s voice, muffled in James’s earpiece, was almost inaudible over the hiss of air through the coiled tubing tethering them to the low ceiling. “At least now we have decent peripheral vision.”

  James had never dealt with containment at this level—it wasn’t required for the type of work he did at Emory. But Rudy’s current work involved a contaminated archaebacterium sample harvested from Afghanistan. And if James was going to help challenge this beast, he wanted to meet it face-to-face.

  Passing through a second airlock, they approached a biosafety hood across a small interior room. The tiny organisms at the heart of the problem had been classified as members of the phylum Thaumarchaeota, of the domain Archaea—a classification that included some of the most ancient organisms on earth. As James had soon learned, the archaebacteria were not bacteria at all. They were in a kingdom unto themselves—not susceptible to common antibiotics. Naturally drought tolerant, spore-like in their resilience, archaea like these were present in all environments, harsh or otherwise.

  So far, human victims confirmed as infected with IC-NAN had been limited to two mountain villages within ten miles of the deployment site. The archaebacterial isolate under study here had been recovered from the uniform of a doomed army reconnaissance specialist. James winced, remem
bering the classified videos he’d been shown: women and children lying on the ground in poorly equipped medical tents, coughing blood into the sand; the young American soldier, prostrate in a makeshift ventilator—unable to come home, even to die. The problem was that no one was yet sure how far IC-NAN would spread.

  Along one side of the hood, tubes of cloudy agar sat in neat rows of racks.

  “These are our hosts,” Rudy said. The remnants of Rudy’s Mexican accent, coupled with his quick, sure movements as he manipulated a robotic arm to retrieve a smaller rack from the back of the sealed hood, reminded James of the capable technicians who operated the hemp harvesters alongside his father in Bakersfield. The robot picked a thin slide from the smaller rack. “These archaea are known to be capable of transferring genetic traits among one another in the wild. I’ve been trying to determine whether or not this infected thaumarchaeon species can transmit its new NAN synthesis capabilities to other species of archaea.”

  “Am I supposed to be able to see something on that slide?”

  “Have a seat,” Rudy said. The arm placed the slide onto a micrometer stage, which then moved dutifully toward the eyepiece of a deep UV fluorescence microscope set into the glass sash of the hood. “Please, fit your mask here.”

  James brought his face toward the eyepiece, doing his best to peer through the transparent plastic of his suit. To his surprise, the soft rubber grommet surrounding the eyepiece conformed easily to his mask. “We can actually look for NANs? Aren’t they too small?”

  “Each NAN is only about thirteen nanometers in diameter. But when they are labeled with my fluorescent probe, we get something large enough to be retained on the filter in this slide, and bright enough to see.”

  James squinted. The image looked like an old crossword puzzle, with some square segments completely dark, others glowing bright yellow. “What am I looking for?”

  “Each segment of the grid represents approximately one hundred organisms, each a different archaebacterial species. These organisms were each grown up in a culture medium that was previously used to grow the infected thaumarchaeon species. The question was whether there would be some sort of genetic transfer from the infected species to the new species. As a check, we’ve also included some regular bacteria—gut E. coli, soil Pseudomonas species, and the like. On each slide, we can see the results for fifty different organisms.”

  “Which ones were affected?”

  “The segments that are illuminated by the fluorescent probe represent organisms in which the NAN has reassembled well enough to capture and visualize at this magnification. Fortunately, none of the common bacterial isolates we tested seem to have picked up the ability to make NANs. But quite a few of the archaebacterial isolates did—most notably including some from the mainland U.S. That one on the lower right is from the Argonne collection. It was harvested just outside Chicago.”

  “Which means . . .”

  “We have identified a mechanism by which this trait could make its way around the globe. It might be only a matter of time before we have species here in the U.S. that can make IC-NAN.”

  James felt his heart racing. He wanted—needed—to have faith in this man, the only person he’d met since joining the project who seemed both willing and able to face the enormity of the task before them. But he also needed better news. Lamely, he pursued the same line of questioning that Blevins had subjected him to on their first meeting. “But . . . can we kill the current hosts before they have a chance to infect other species?” he asked.

  “We must keep trying,” Rudy replied evenly. “But we have few options for cheaply available decontamination agents that are not also toxic to humans. These organisms laugh in the face of agents like bleach. And we cannot simply set fire to regions that are heavily populated . . .”

  James nodded. He’d already seen it on the nightly news vids—footage of military bots applying flaming torches to an apparently lifeless expanse of desert. The press was all over it, and speculation was rampant as to what might be going on. But the lid was on—no answers were forthcoming.

  “To make matters worse, the Argonne Lab data indicate that these archaea can spread through air currents, the jet stream, and so on. And by now, they could already have been carried outside the region on military vehicles and equipment. All we can do is continue to try and contain the spread, continue to build on the existing models, to predict where they might pop up next.” Rudy again manipulated the controller and the robot retracted the eyepiece, then placed the slide carefully back into its rack. His shoulders slumped, he headed back toward the entryway. He raised his gloved hand to activate the airlock, then turned to face James. “What did you tell Colonel Blevins?”

  “I told him we need to figure out some way to change the target cells in humans. To modify their DNA. An antidote of some sort, administered continuously and to every human on earth. Most likely another NAN.”

  “What did he say?” Rudy asked.

  “Nothing, yet.”

  Rudy sighed. “It is strange how one thing leads to another . . . Years ago, my thesis adviser recommended that I stay in Mexico and pursue an academic career. But instead, I chose a postdoctoral at Rockefeller in New York. Afterward, I wanted to stay in the U.S. . . .”

  “Why?”

  “A girl, of course . . . another thing that did not go as planned. She broke our engagement, but only after I had accepted a job.”

  “You came to Fort Detrick.”

  “Working for Detrick offered me a fast track to U.S. citizenship.”

  “But why did you stay after that?”

  “At Detrick, there was no need to worry about funding—I had all I could use. All the lab space, all the equipment . . . I was promoted to team leader. And I worked on so many interesting projects.” Rudy looked down, examining his gloved hands. “I must admit that it was frustrating at times. So many investigations, so many reports that languished on the desks of people like Colonel Blevins, only to be shelved. I took heart that most of them were directed at defense against bioterrorism—a worthy goal, I believed.”

  “But you had to know that the IC-NAN project had nothing to do with defense . . .”

  “When I was put in charge of the project that created this . . . I thought that it was just like all the others—just a feasibility study. A chance to work with something outside of my expertise. I felt sure that it would be put aside. In fact, I was counting on that.” Rudy’s eyes pleaded from behind the plastic of his mask. “James, I did not know that they would actually deploy it. My only solace now is that, with your help, we can find a way to stop it.”

  Once more, James felt the sweat breaking out at his temples, a new wave of claustrophobia. “Do you think we can . . . stop it?”

  “I cannot be sure of much. But each day I am more sure of one thing. How do you say it? The time . . . it is ticking.”

  James closed his eyes. He’d been trying to think about this thing as just another project, just another scientific hurdle to be surmounted—because thinking about it in any other way only clouded his mind. It was all he could do not to succumb to panic. But he didn’t have time for that. He would find a way to protect humans from this horrible threat. He had to.

  5

  JUNE 2060

  KAI COULD FEEL the morning heat spilling through Rosie’s hatch cover, flooding his cocoon. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, his fingers touched the small bump on his forehead, the rough place where the chip was embedded just under the skin.

  “Your chip is special,” Rosie had told him. “It is our bond.” It was how they knew one another, she said. It was how she spoke to him—except during his speech lessons, she never used her audible voice.

  He reached out to touch the smooth surface of the hatch cover in front of him. Where his fingers made contact, the transparent surface became opaque. An image appeared—a group of men with sun-weathered skin
, colorful woven robes draped over their stooped shoulders.

  Rosie had been teaching him a lesson about people who lived in the desert—a desert much like his, but on the other side of the earth and very long ago. The men in the image, Rosie said, were the keepers of the scrolls, ancient writings like those unearthed from caves over a hundred years before the Epidemic. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to one of the men. Perched atop the man’s forehead, a small box was supported by a thin leather strap.

  Rosie’s familiar soft buzz and click filled his mind as she accessed the required information. “These were called tefillin. Each contained four tiny scrolls, on which were written passages taken from a book called the Torah.” Beneath her console, her servo motors whirred gently. “This book described a set of beliefs that they lived by.”

  “You teach me through my tefillin,” Kai said, pointing to his own dusty forehead, the chip encased there. “Are you my Torah?”

  Rosie paused. She was thinking, compiling her answer as she often did when he asked a difficult question. “No,” she said. “The information that I provide is based purely on fact. It’s important to separate beliefs from facts.”

  Withdrawing his hand from the screen, Kai watched the image disappear. He peered through the hatch cover, once more transparent. Outside, the familiar rock formations surrounding their encampment stood firm, their massive red fingers pointing skyward. They were strong, like Rosie, undaunted by wind and heat.

  He had names for all of them—the Red Horse, the Man with a Big Nose, the Gorilla, and the Father, who balanced his plump, round rock baby forever on his giant knees. Rosie had taught him about how humans used to live. She was his Mother. He supposed, then, that the rocks were his family—the guardians who, along with Rosie, had kept watch over him since the day of his birth.

  He pressed the latch to his left, the sun’s heat assailing him as the hatch door swung open. He scrambled down over Rosie’s treads to reach the ground, coming face-to-face with his own reflection in the pocked mirror of her metallic surface. His skin was tanned and freckled, streaked with dust. A cloud of reddish-brown hair framed his head, and blue eyes twinkled from beneath heavy lashes. Somewhere, Rosie said, there were other children. Others like him, but different. Rosie couldn’t tell him how many there were now. But in the beginning, there had been fifty. When the time was right, they would find them.