The Bar Code Rebellion

by Suzanne Weyn

  She waved them inside and then met Kayla with a heartfelt hug, which Kayla returned. It was so good to see her old friend again. When they separated, Allyson glanced at Kayla’s wrist and her eyes widened in horror at the sight of the fake bar code tattoo.

  Kayla mouthed the word fake, and Allyson instantly relaxed.

  Jack, who had been hanging back by the door, stepped forward, and Kayla introduced him. Allyson shook his hand but looked worried. “Where’s Mfumbe?” she asked.

  Kayla told her what had happened. It was a story Jack was hearing for the first time, too, and he listened with rapt attention.

  “Poor Mfumbe. He must feel so trapped,” Allyson sympathized.

  “Right now he is trapped,” Kayla agreed. “He’s trapped by the injuries he suffered and by his parents. Dusa and I brought him there because he was badly hurt, but now I’m not sure we did the right thing.”

  “If he was spitting up blood he most likely had internal bleeding. That’s serious — you did the right thing,” Allyson said.

  “The worst of it is the bar code tattoo they forced on him,” Kayla told her. “I’ve been in touch with him and he’s really depressed.”

  “I guess August was depressed after the march, too, even though he wasn’t caught,” Allyson said. “I wish I’d been in closer touch with him.”

  “I wish I had, too,” Kayla agreed, feeling again the sting of guilt about not having been more aggressive in her efforts to contact August.

  “I can’t believe that out of our whole group, you’re the only one of us left who isn’t bar-coded,” Allyson pointed out sadly. “I guess I really owe you an apology. When you first came to our resistance meeting with Zekeal, I thought you were nice but I also assumed you were this ditzy, artsy girl who would get a bar code as soon as things got rough. I figured you were just after Zekeal. But as it turns out, you’re the strongest of us all. Look how you’ve managed to keep ahead of G-1 and how you’ve been brave enough not to give in all this time.”

  Kayla had never thought of herself as strong, or even particularly bright or brave. In her own eyes, she was just a girl, more average than anything else, doing her best to figure things out and keep going.

  “She’s amazing,” Jack chimed in.

  “You guys are nice,” Kayla said, brushing them off. Wanting to get the focus off herself, she walked farther into the room to the computers and printers. “What is all this stuff?” she asked.

  “We’re studying biological applications for nanotechnology — nanobiotechnology,” Allyson explained, and gave them a tour of the research facility. “We’re working with our infometrics department to —”

  “Infometrics?” Kayla interrupted. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a field of study that merges genetics with computer analysis,” Allyson explained. “All these computers and printers are gathering and reporting on every bit of available data on government and private genetic experimentation in the field of genetic engineering. We have the most advanced equipment here.”

  She pointed to a board with dots of colorful lights on it. “That’s a machine that constantly runs a DNA microarray and projects the results onto a screen. The DNA microarray has been around since 2001, but this computer streamlines the process, running the tests and reporting results instantly. It can tell us what genes are active in an organism and give us a visual snapshot of the cell’s genetic script.”

  “You’re losing me,” Kayla warned, with a self-conscious laugh at her own lack of scientific knowledge.

  Allyson smiled. “All you really need to know is that it helps us compare the genetic contents of a healthy cell with that of a diseased cell. When it first came out, this thing helped researchers to understand how the AIDS virus replicated. Through the years it’s become more and more sophisticated.”

  “What are all these printouts?” Jack asked.

  “Dr. Gold is searching for information that will enable him to put his new virus-fighting nanobots to their best use.”

  “How much access do they have?” Jack asked.

  “They’re searching worldwide data banks for information, but it’s been difficult since these global companies aren’t always eager to share what they know.

  “I call this main computer Helen of Troy because she’s capable of launching a thousand programs,” Allyson said with a grin. She then took a step closer to them and bent her head away from the other researchers working in the room. “I’d like to show you guys something I’ve uncovered. I’m so glad you’re here, because there’s no one else I would trust with this.”

  Her words sent a chill through Kayla, who looked around the room to check if they were being observed. Everyone appeared to be going about their business, uninterested in the three of them.

  Allyson stepped away again and took on a more normal attitude. “Here are the keys to my apartment. I’ll be there as soon as I can and we’ll catch up. I live off campus. I’ll write down my address.”

  Kayla took the keys from her as they walked back to the door. “It’s so great to see you,” she said animatedly, leaning in for another parting hug.

  As they embraced, Allyson whispered into Kayla’s ear. “I have another set of keys for myself. Keep the door locked and don’t let anyone in.”

  The swing-lo’s built-in global positioning tracker made it easy for them to find where Allyson lived. “Where will I park this thing?” Jack wondered as they hovered outside the low apartment building just minutes from the institute.

  “Park it on the roof,” Kayla suggested.

  Jack eyed the three-story climb nervously. “No,” he decided. Hitting some buttons, he tilted the craft until it was nearly at a ninety-degree angle and sent it forward. Kayla gripped its sides anxiously as he drove it through a narrow opening between the building and a chain-link fence, quickly coming out to a grassy yard behind the apartment. “This will do,” he said, climbing out.

  Back in front, they used Allyson’s keys to let themselves in the front door. The building was old, from the early twentieth century, they guessed.

  “I’ve been thinking about the Helen of Troy computer,” Jack said quietly in the shadowy front hall. “You know those computer algorithms I was telling you about, the ones that might reveal what Gene Drake knew?”

  Kayla nodded. “Uh-huh.” The algorithms were the key to unlocking the information that would tell them what terrible secret was stored in the bar code tattoo, the secret so much worse even than the accumulation of genetic histories.

  “I want to talk to Allyson about the possibility of using Helen of Troy to hack into the G-1 files and get those codes,” he said as they climbed the narrow stairs to the apartment on the third floor.

  Kayla realized that she’d be alone there with Jack. Except when they had been together in the swing-lo or walking in the desert, this hadn’t occurred before. Now they were someplace private, and she was suddenly nervous about what might happen. She trusted him to respect her wishes — she just wasn’t entirely certain of what those wishes were. She was promising herself she’d be loyal to Mfumbe, and she was picturing herself with Jack at the same time. It wasn’t a vision of any kind, simply her imagination wandering into dangerous territory.

  The spacious, sunny, one-room apartment was at the end of a long hall. They entered and Kayla immediately sank into the soft futon couch. It had been a long time since she’d experienced any of the comforts of everyday life. Shutting her eyes, she let the softness of the cushion surround her. “Allyson must have a shower here,” she suddenly realized. After months of washing in streams, lakes, and public restrooms, a shower seemed like an unbelievable luxury.

  Jack tossed her a towel he found in a closet. “You go first. Then me.”

  Kayla washed her hair with Allyson’s lavender-scented shampoo and luxuriated in the flow of warm water down her back. As she soaped herself she was once again reminded of how hard her muscles had become and how calloused her feet were from the tough life she’d been livi
ng. When she was done, she threw her shorts, T-shirt, and underwear into the tub and watched the filthy water run into the drain.

  She was toweling her hair dry when Jack knocked. “One minute,” she called as she scrambled to wrap herself in the towel. It was barely tucked into place when he came in wearing only a towel around his waist.

  A moment charged with mutual attraction followed as they looked at each other. He stepped closer so that his face was only inches from hers. She ached to reach for him, to feel his lips on hers.

  “You’re not ready for this, are you?” he asked, realizing the moment was thick with possibility but that she was hesitant.

  “Are you?” she asked back.

  He smiled. “Just say the word and I’m ready.”

  She nodded, smiling at him despite her concerns. “I have someone special,” she said. “I wouldn’t like it if he went with someone else.”

  “He’s far away … and things change,” he said.

  The front door creaked as it was opened. “Hello?”

  “Allyson’s here,” Kayla said, realizing she was relieved that the moment had been broken by her friend’s arrival. Pulling her towel tighter, she went out to greet her, leaving Jack in the bathroom.

  Allyson tossed her jam-packed bag on the futon and grabbed a bottled iced tea from the refrigerator. “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Just showering,” Kayla replied, taking an iced tea from her. “I didn’t think you would mind.”

  “Not at all. Are you still with Mfumbe?”

  Kayla smiled but sighed with exasperation. “Yeah.”

  “He’d be pretty hard to resist,” she commented, nodding toward the shower sounds coming from the bathroom.

  Kayla rolled her eyes and laughed. “He’s a good guy, too. I’m hanging tough, though. After everything Mfumbe and I have gone through together, I owe him that much.”

  “Loyalty is important,” Allyson agreed, “especially nowadays when you don’t know who to trust. But you and Mfumbe haven’t made any promises, have you?”

  “No. It’s just understood,” Kayla replied.

  Allyson shrugged. “Fortunately — or unfortunately — right now I don’t have to worry about those kinds of problems. I have other things that are obsessing me.”

  Allyson took a billowy sundress from her closet and tossed it to Kayla. It hung like a tent on Kayla until Allyson directed her to a belt in the top drawer.

  The shower stopped, and in a few minutes Jack emerged, dressed just in his shorts. “That felt good,” he commented with a smile. “What is it you were going to show us, Allyson?”

  Without answering him, Allyson moved purposefully toward the back wall of the apartment. Kneeling, she dug her fingertips into a thin groove in the hardwood floor and easily pried up a plank that had clearly already been loosened. A satisfied smile spread across her face. “This is what I wanted you to see,” she said, peeling off an e-chip taped to the plank’s underside.

  Digging in her purse, she took out her handheld computer and loaded the chip. “I don’t know if anyone realizes it, even Dr. Gold, but his data-collecting computers are almost too powerful. They were designed by a real genius, a student in the infometrics department, and when they encounter a program they can’t open, they act like hackers, breaking into systems that are heavily password-protected.”

  “I wish I’d invented that,” Jack said, his voice oozing respect.

  “Tell me about it,” Allyson agreed. “And get this — the real reason I call that main computer Helen of Troy is because I think it might even contain a Trojan-horselike program that collects log-ins and passwords as it runs. Helen of Troy gains root access to other computers in a way I’ve never seen. Somehow it even got into a file protected with both voice and radio frequency identification systems.”

  “That’s crazy, final level,” Jack murmured, obviously very impressed.

  “No kidding. When I saw the file I’m about to show you, I knew it had to be highly classified. I grabbed it before anyone else saw it. I’m not sure why, exactly.”

  “When you do things instinctively it usually seems to be the right thing to do,” Kayla commented.

  “I guess so. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m not sure what Dr. Gold’s politics are. So much research here has Global-1 backing, even though they hide behind the smaller companies they own. A lot of the time the scientists doing the research don’t even realize they’re working for Global-1.”

  “You got it all on an e-chip?” Jack questioned.

  “Two e-chips,” she said. “It’s a massive file full of subdirectories. I loaded the subs onto a chip that I have hidden somewhere else. I thought it would be best to keep them separate.” She flipped on the speaker. A robotic voice read out loud the words that appeared in the monitor window.

  “Wait until you get a load of this,” Allyson said as the robotic voice began.

  Kayla and Jack listened, spellbound by what they were hearing.

  REPORT ON GLOBAL-1 NANOBIOTECHNOLOGY PROGRAMS

  Global-1 has been in the vanguard of cloning advances since the turn of the century when it became the majority shareholder in every major biotech company in the Western world and large parts of Asia. Its two main branches are known as AgroGlobal and GlobalHelix.

  AgroGlobal was largely responsible for exerting the influence needed to shift the world’s food supply over to 100 percent genetically altered produce by the year 2018. GlobalHelix was originally founded in 2006 as an adjunct to AgroGlobal. Its stated purpose at the time of its creation was the genetic enhancement of livestock for consumption as food and for breeding. It relied heavily on the pioneering cloning techniques of Dr. Ian Wilmut in the previous century.

  GlobalHelix later became a pioneer in the field of splicing genes to create transgenic animals. These were first developed using mice, through a microinjection of DNA into the nucleus of the egg. The ability to add genes to an organism has been instrumental in the study of human disease. It also has other practical applications. For example, the milk of livestock can be genetically altered to contain large amounts of pharmaceutically valuable proteins such as insulin or factor VIII for treating sick humans. A human gene such as that of insulin when expressed in the mammary glands of a sheep was found to be a breakthrough treatment for diabetes patients in 2014.

  This biotechnical therapy was quickly rendered obsolete by the development of insulin-releasing nanopores in 2015. Advances in molecular-size robotics created this breakthrough wherein specially programmed nanobots were injected into the bloodstream where they released insulin at regular intervals. The financial blow this dealt to GlobalHelix proved temporary since GlobalHelix was able to acquire the company responsible for the insulin-issuing nanobots. From 2015 on, GlobalHelix has invested heavily in nanobiotechnology research and development.

  Another major area of interest for GlobalHelix was the development of transgenic animals for organ transplant into humans. They were the first to successfully splice human genes into pigs to create organs for human transplant. Problems of organ harvesting were eliminated by using pigs as donors, and the problem of organ rejection was overcome by splicing human genes into pig organs. This scientific breakthrough enabled GlobalHelix to have laws prohibiting cloning and gene splicing overturned by the beginning of 2020.

  GlobalHelix has moved rapidly into the exciting world of human cloning since 2020. Its worldwide companies — Global-2 in Japan, Global-3 in Brazil, Global-4 in Mexico, and Global-5 in France — have been able to circumvent U.S. restrictions on human experimentation by moving their research to countries with less stringent laws.

  Ongoing programs being carried out by the Global-1 parent company and its offshoots are listed below. These links can only be opened by radio frequency authentication and eye scan, followed by voice recognition.

  Nuclear Transfer Cloning for Livestock

  Potential Applications in Cell-based Therapies

  Pre- and Perinatal Mortality in Cloned
Organisms

  Applications of Nanobiotechnology (see further links below)

  Production of Identical Sextuplet Humans During the First Cell Cycle of Nuclear DNA Transfer

  “What’s going on with the nanobots?” Jack asked.

  “Smart! You zeroed right in on it,” Allyson commended him. “As you know, to call something nano means it’s measured in billionths of a meter, which is just about the same size as a molecule. Since the mid-1980s, scientists have talked about constructing self-replicating nanomachines that could assemble atoms into molecules. It’s the same thing that living cells do naturally.”

  “So they’re mechanical cells?” Kayla asked.

  “Basically, yeah. Cells are like living nanobots. Nanobots are similar in size to molecular proteins and DNA. They can be engineered to have specific or multiple functions. If you inject a person with a nanobot, the bot could analyze a cell’s contents and send the information back to a microarray machine like you saw today. It could also deliver drugs or destroy a cancerous cell.”

  Kayla’s father had once shown her an old Pac-Man game from his childhood. Kayla remembered the aggressive dot gobbling up everything in its path and imagined it was a nanobot destroying living cells it didn’t approve of.

  “This is the part that bothers me,” Allyson said as she activated the Applications of Nanobiotechnology link. Several subheads appeared under a heading marked HIGHLY CLASSIFIED.