by Greg Bear
He shared a lab space with Hazel Overton, as meticulous and clean a researcher as could be imagined. Hazel would miss him least of all. Perhaps it was Hazel who had penetrated his file—she was no slouch on the computers and she might have gone looking for something to get him into trouble. But he had no evidence for that, and there was no sense being paranoid.
The lab was dark as Vergil entered. Hazel was performing a fluorescent scan on a gel electrophoresis matrix with a small UV lamp. Vergil switched on the light. She looked up and removed her goggles, prepared to be irritated.
“You’re late,” she said. “And your lab looks like an unmade bed. Vergil, it’s—”
“Kaput,” Vergil finished for her, throwing his smock across a stool.
“You left a bunch of test tubes on the counter in the share lab. I’m afraid they’re ruined.”
“Fuck ’em.”
Hazel’s eyes widened. “My, aren’t you in a mood.”
“I’ve been shut down. I have to dear out all my extracurricular work, give it up, or Harrison will issue my walking papers.”
“That’s rather even-handed of them,” Hazel said, returning to her scan. Harrison had shut down one of her own extracurricular projects the month before. “What did you do?”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be alone.” Vergil glowered at her from across the counter. “You can finish that in the share lab.”
“I could, but—”
“If you don’t,” Vergil said darkly, “I’ll smear your little piece of agarose across the floor with my wingtips.”
Hazel glared at him for a moment and surmised he wasn’t kidding. She shut off the electrodes, picked up her equipment, and headed for the door. “My condolences,” she said.
“Sure.”
He had to have a plan. Scratching his stubbly chin, he tried to think of some way to cut his losses. He could sacrifice those parts of the experiment that were expendable—the E. coli cultures, for example. He had long since gone beyond them. He had kept them as memorials to his progress, and as a kind of reserve in case work had not gone well in the next steps. The work had gone well, however. It was not complete but it was so close that he could taste success like a cool dean swallow of wine.
Hazel’s side of the lab was neat and tidy. His was a chaos of equipment and containers of chemicals. One of his few concessions to lab safety, a white absorbent mat to catch spills, hung half-off the black counter, one corner pinned by a jar of detergent.
Vergil stood before the white idea board, rubbing his stubbly beard, and stared at the cryptic messages he had scrawled there the day before.
Little engineers. Make the world’s tiniest machines. Better than MABs!
Little surgeons. War with tumors. Computers with hu-capac.
(Computers=“spec” tumor HA!) size of volvox.
Clearly the ravings of a madman, and Hazel would have paid them no attention. Or would she? It was common practice to scribble any wild idea or inspiration or joke on the boards and just be prepared to have it erased by the next hurried genius. Still…
The notes could have aroused the curiosity of someone as smart as Hazel. Especially since his work on the MABs had been delayed.
Obviously, he had not been circumspect.
MABs—Medically Applicable Biochips—were to be the first practical product of the biochip revolution, the incorporation of protein molecular circuitry with silicon electronics. Biochips had been an area of speculation in the literature for years, but Genetron hoped to have the first working samples available for FDA testing and approval within three months.
They faced intense competition. In what was coming to be known as Enzyme Valley—the biochip equivalent of Silicon Valley—at least six companies had set up facilities in and around La Jolla. Some had started out as pharmaceutical manufacturers hoping to cash in on the products of recombinant DNA research. Nudged out of that area by older and more experienced concerns, they had switched to biochip research. Genetron was the first firm established specifically with biochips in mind.
Vergil picked up an eraser and rubbed out the notes slowly. Throughout his life, things had always conspired to frustrate him. Often, he brought disaster on himself—he was honest enough to admit that. But not once had he ever been able to carry something through to completion. Not in his work, not in his private life.
He had never been good at gauging the consequences of his actions.
He removed four thick spiral-bound notebooks from his locked desk drawer and added them to the growing pile of material to be smuggled out of the lab.
He could not destroy all the evidence. He had to save the white blood cell cultures—his special lymphocytes. But where could he keep them—what could he do outside the lab?
Nothing. There was no place he could go. Genetron had all the equipment he needed, and it would take months to establish another lab. During that time, all his work would literally disintegrate.
Vergil passed through the lab’s rear door into the interior hall and walked past an emergency shower stall. The incubators were kept in a separate room beyond the share lab. Seven refrigerator-sized gray enameled chests stood along one wall, electronic monitors silently and efficiently keeping track of temperatures and CO2 partial pressure in each unit. In the far corner, amid older incubators of all shapes and sizes (gleaned from lab bankruptcy sales), stood a buffed stainless steel and white enamel Forma Scientific model with his name and “Sole Use” scribbled on a piece of surgical tape affixed to the door. He opened the door and removed a rack of culture dishes.
Bacteria in each dish had developed uncharacteristic colonies—blobs of orange and green which resembled aerial maps of Paris or Washington D.C. Lines radiated from dusters and divided the colonies into sections, each section having its own peculiar texture and—so Vergil surmised—function. Since each bacterium in the cultures had the potential intellectual capacity of a mouse, it was quite possible the cultures had turned into simple societies and the societies had developed functional divisions. He hadn’t been keeping track lately, involved as he had been with altered B-cell Lymphocytes.
They were like his children, all of them. And they had turned out to be exceptional.
He felt a rush of guilt and nausea as he turned on a gas burner and applied each dish of altered E. coli to the flame with a pair of tongs.
He returned to his lab and dropped the culture dishes into a sterilizing bath. That was the limit He could not destroy anything more. He felt a hatred for Harrison that went beyond any emotion he had ever felt toward another human. Tears of frustration blurred his vision.
Vergil opened the lab Kelvinator and removed a spinner bottle and a white plastic pallet containing twenty-two test tubes. The spinner bottle was filled with a straw-colored fluid, lymphocytes in a serum medium. He had constructed a custom impeller to stir the medium more effectively, with less cell damage—a rod with several half-helical Teflon “sails.”
The test tubes contained saline solution and special concentrated serum nutrients to support the cells while they were examined under a microscope.
He drew fluid from the spinner bottle and carefully added several drops to four of the tubes on the pallet. He then placed the bottle back on its base. The impeller resumed spinning.
After warming to room temperature—a process he usually aided with a small fan to gently blow warmed air over the pallet—the lymphocytes in the tubes would become active, resuming their development after being subdued by the refrigerator’s chill.
They would continue learning, adding new segments to the revised portions of their DNA. And when, in the normal course of cell growth, the new DNA was transcribed to RNA, and the RNA served as a template for production of amino acids, and the amino acids were converted to proteins…
The proteins would be more than just units of cell structure; other cells would be able to read them. Or RNA itself would be extruded to be absorbed and read by other cells. Or—and this third option had
presented itself after Vergil inserted fragments of bacterial DNA into the mammalian chromosomes segments of DNA itself could be removed and passed along.
Every time he thought of it, his head whirled with possibilities, thousands of ways for the cells to communicate with each other and develop their intellects.
The idea of an intellectual cell was still wonderfully strange to him. It made him stop and stand, staring at the wall, until he jerked back to attention and continued his work.
He pulled up a microscope and inserted a pipette into one of the tubes. The calibrated instrument drew up the dialed amount of fluid and he expelled it into a thin circular ring on a glass slide.
From the very beginning, Vergil had known his ideas were neither far-out nor useless. His first three months at Genetron, helping establish the silicon-protein interface for the biochips, had convinced him the project designers had missed something very obvious and extremely interesting.
Why limit oneself to silicon and protein and biochips a hundredth of a millimeter wide, when in almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?
Genetron had not yet made the connection, and Vergil had long ago decided he didn’t want them to. He would do his work, prove his point by creating billions of capable cellular computers, and then leave Genetron and establish his own lab, his own company.
After a year and a half of preparation and study, he had begun working at night on the gene machine. Using a computer keyboard, he constructed strings of bases to form codons, each of which became the foundation of a rough DNA-RNA-protein logic.
The earliest biologic strings had been inserted into E. coli bacteria as circular plasmids. The E. coli had absorbed the plasmids and incorporated them into their original DNA. The bacteria had then duplicated and released the plasmids, passing on the biologic to other cells. In the most crucial phase of his work, Vergil had used viral reverse-transcriptase to fix the feedback loop between RNA and DNA. Even the earliest and most primitive biologic-equipped bacteria had employed reverse transcriptase as “encoders,” ribosomes as “readers,” and RNA as “tape.” With the loop in place, the cells developed their own memory and the ability to process and act upon environmental information.
The real surprise had come when he tested his altered microbes. The computing capacity of even bacterial DNA was enormous compared to man-made electronics. All Vergil had to do was take advantage of what was already there-just give it a nudge, as it were.
More than once, he had the spooky feeling that his work was too easy, that he was less a creator and more a servant…This, after having the molecules seem to fall into their proper place, or fail in such a way that he clearly saw his errors and knew how to correct them.
The spookiest moment of all came when he realized he was doing more than creating little computers. Once he started the process and switched on the genetic sequences which could compound and duplicate the biologic DNA segments, the cells began to function as autonomous units. They began to “think” for themselves and develop more complex “brains.”
His first E. coli mutations had had the learning capacity of planarian worms; he had run them through simple T-mazes giving sugar rewards. They had soon outperformed planarians. The bacteria—lowly prokaryotes—were doing better than multicellular eukaryote! And within months, he had them running more complex mazes at rates—allowing for scale adjustments comparable to those of mice.
Removing the finest biologic sequences from the altered E. coli, he had incorporated them into B-lymphocytes, white cells from his own blood. He had replaced many intron strings—self-replicating sequences of base pairs that apparently did not code for proteins and that comprised a surprising percentage of any eukaryotic cell’s DNA-with his own special chains. Using artificial proteins and hormones as a method of communication, Vergil had “trained” the lymphocytes in the past six months to interact as much as possible with each other and with their environment—a much more complex miniature glass maze. The results had been far better than he expected.
The lymphocytes had learned to run the maze and obtain their nutritional rewards with incredible speed.
He waited for the sample to warm up enough to be active, then inserted the eyepiece into a video pickup and switched on the first of four display screens mounted in the rack over the counter. There, very clearly, were the roughly circular lymphocytes in which he had invested two years of his life.
They were busily transferring genetic material to each other along straw-shaped tubes rather like bacterial pili. Some of the characteristics picked up during the E. coil experiments had stayed with the lymphocytes, just how he wasn’t yet sure. The mature lymphocytes were not reproducing by themselves, but they were busily engaged in an orgy of genetic exchange.
Every lymphocyte in the sample he was watching had the potential intellectual capacity of a rhesus monkey. From the simplicity of their activity, that certainly wasn’t obvious; but then, they’d had it pretty easy throughout their lives.
He had talked to them on as high a level of chemical training and had built them up as far as he was going to. Their brief lives were over—he had been ordered to kill them. That would be simple enough. He could add detergent to the containers and their cell membranes would dissolve. They would be sacrificed to the caution and shortsightedness of a group of certifiable flatworm management-types.
His breath grew ragged as he watched the lymphocytes going about their business.
They were beautiful. They were his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they were busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on…
Like Washoe the chimp teaching her child to speak in American Sign Language. They were passing on the torch of potential intelligence. How would he ever know if they could use all their potential?
Pasteur.
“Pasteur,” he said out loud. “Jenner.”
Vergil carefully prepared a syringe. Brows knitted together, he pushed the cannule through the cotton cap of the first tube and dipped it into the solution. He pulled back the plunger. The pastel fluid filled the barrel; five, ten, fifteen cc’s.
He held the syringe before his eyes for several minutes, knowing he was contemplating something rash. Until now, he addressed his creations mentally, you’ve had it real easy. Life of Riley. Sit in your serum and fart around and absorb all the hormones you need. Don’t even have to work for a living. No severe test, no stress. No need to use what I gave you.
So what was he going to do? Put them to work in their natural environment? By injecting them into his body, he could smuggle them out of Genetron, and recover enough of them later to start the experiment again.
“Hey, Vergil!” Ernesto Villar knocked on the doorframe and poked his head in. “We’ve got the rat artery movie. We’re having a meeting in 233.” He tapped his fingers on the frame and smiled brightly. “You’re invited. We need our resident kludge.”
Vergil lowered the syringe and looked off into nothing.
“Vergil?”
“I’l1 be there,” he said tonelessly.
“Don’t get all excited,” Villar said peevishly. “We won’t hold the premiere for long.” He ducked out of the door. Vergil listened to his footsteps receding down the hall.
Rash, indeed. He reinserted the cannule through the cotton, squirted the serum back into the tube and dropped the syringe into ajar of alcohol. He replaced the tube in the rack and returned it to the Kelvinator. Before now, the spinner bottle and pallet of tubes had had no Label but his name. He removed his name from the pallet and replaced it with, “Biochip protein samples; lab failures 21–32.” On the spinner bottle he placed a label reading, “Rat an
ti-goat lab failures 13–14.” No one would mess with an anonymous and unanalyzed group of lab failures. Failures were sacred.
He needed time to think.
Rothwild and ten of the key scientists on the MABs project had gathered around a large-screen projection TV in 233, an empty lab currently being used as a meeting room. Rothwild was a dapper red-haired fellow who acted as a controller and mediator between management and researchers. He stood beside the screen, resplendent in a cream-colored jacket and chocolate brown pants. Villar offered Vergil an avocado-green plastic chair and he sat at the rear of the room, legs crossed, hands behind his head.
Rothwild delivered the introduction. “This is the breakdown from Team Product E-64. You all contributed—” He glanced uncertainly at Vergil, “And now you can all share in the…uh, the triumph. I think we can safely call it that.
“E-64 is a prototype investigator biochip, three hundred micrometers in diameter, protein on a silicon substrate, sensitive to forty-seven different blood fraction variables.” He cleared his throat. They all knew that, but this was an occasion. “On May 10th, we inserted E-64 into a rat artery, closed the very small incision, and let it pass through the artery as far as it would go. The journey lasted five seconds. The rat was then sacrificed and the biochip recovered. Since that time, Terence’s group has ‘debriefed’ the biochip and interpreted the results. By putting the results through a special vector imaging program, we’ve been able to produce a little movie.”
He gestured to Ernesto, who pressed a button on the projector’s video recorder. Computer graphics flashed by—Genetron’s animated logo, stylized signatures from the imaging team, and then darkness. Ernesto switched off the room lights.
A pink circle appeared on the screen, expanded, and distorted into an irregular oval. More circles appeared within the first. “We’ve slowed the journey down six times,” Rothwild explained. “And to simplify things, we’ve eliminated the readouts on chemical concentrations in the rat blood.”