Her job, she decided, was to be lively and forthcoming enough so that he didn’t get bored of her continuing existence, while at the same time stringing along his ignorance of what she was up to until the ship departed.
Whenever Shaun disappeared, to do whatever it was he needed to do, she worked on her new project. He didn’t seem to care that she kept working, or wonder why someone in her position would. To be honest, she probably would have kept busy anyway, even on the stupid protein apples, just to distract herself from the imminent void. But after she’d made the decision about how to proceed, it became an obsession.
For the past several weeks, between Shaun’s sporadic visits, she’d worked feverishly in the lab, pausing little to eat or sleep. She didn’t even look out the window anymore: it was too depressing, watching a sky devoid of birds, the sidewalks devoid of people, the parks reduced to barren soil, the abandoned Bainbridge Island ferry and a small flotilla of other empty craft drifting further and further off course. Soon terrible storms began to rage, bristling with lightning, and it might have been her imagination, but it seemed that the city below was slowly corroding away in the chemical onslaught.
She was building on the prototype genome she’d begun for Paul’s NASA project. The plan had been merely to deliver one type of synthetic bacteria that could survive in primitive conditions and produce oxygen, in turn supporting any future life that a hypothetical expedition would bring along with them. But there wasn’t going to be any expedition. Fortunately, Shaun had let slip that they weren’t taking everything. The quip about the Pacific Ocean had been a joke — the ethics board hadn’t allowed the oceans to be drained beyond a few meters, or all of the rocks or gases removed. There would be enough, and in the right combinations.
So she needed to encode as much as she could into one seed. The cyanobacteria-like microbe was a good place to start, but how much more could she pack in given the limits on her time and on the space constraints of the seed itself?
Think about the viruses, she told herself. How would they do it? Answer: they’d maximize their genome with alternatively coded reading frames, differential splicing, forward and backward reads. They’d keep each stage dormant, for as long as needed, until it was time to open up like a flower, delivering each phase at the appropriate time. She couldn’t allow any oxygen-requiring life to emerge until the first bacteria had laid the groundwork — so she had to engineer in regulatory codes that would not be activated until some proxy signature of an oxygen-controlled process was detected. And so on, each particular problem solved in a particular way — part received wisdom, part intuition, part a quick search of reference material — part a mixture of all three.
After she’d solved the oxygen divide and started working her way up the evolutionary ladder, the genetic details got easier, but the decisions became agonizing. Just as in the greenhouse, there was only enough room for a limited number of species: a few hundred, maximum. Entire branches of the phylogenetic tree had to be eliminated. Fish or fowl? Tulip or turtle? Mushroom or maggot?
Forget Michelangelo: she was Noah, and the waters were rising.
Playing God wasn’t all bad, she discovered. She felt only mildly guilty when she decided that Earth 2.0 didn’t need spiders — she had always hated the little bastards. On and on it went, until she got as far as primitive mammals. Time had run out on phase 1, but she decided that wasn’t such a bad thing. Let evolution do its worst — if the dinosaurs didn’t win this time around, maybe chance would come up with a kinder and more sensible caretaker.
When she was finally finished, she filled up a sterile glass vial with the precious genetic material and went down to the greenhouse, ducking under vines and pushing back fronds in the jungle section on her way to the propagation area. She was aware of the dripping sound of water, as soothing as a sedative. Taking a dish from the incubator and putting it under the microscope, she focused on the sea of apple ovules she’d prepared earlier, glistening on the agar surface. Using the microinjection apparatus, she impregnated about two dozen of the small pale bodies with her engineered genome. Then, with infinite care, she tucked each into its own synthetic capsule and planted them into the rich black soil.
***
What are you doing now?
It was about a month later — her life was now timeless, but she sensed it was nearing the end. Shaun had appeared in the greenhouse, standing next to her as she knelt by the small sapling. She’d grafted the most promising seedling onto a more established tree, and watched anxiously as it had flowered — the most beautifully pink and delicately scented flowers she’d ever created. Several flowers set, but — after an agonizingly tense series of days — only one primordial fruit had survived. It was still tiny, a green knob about the size of her fingernail, but she could tell it was going to make it — if time allowed. In the right light, it glinted like a dull emerald.
Just looking after my most recent protein apple, she replied. I have a good feeling about this one.
So you think you solved the nitrogen bioavailability problem?
They slipped into one of their discussions. Lack of sleep was taking its toll, and she was starting to feel paranoid. Surely Shaun must realize that such a rudimentary project wasn’t exciting enough to warrant her near-constant supervision of the tree. He must have noticed that she had taken to sleeping in the greenhouse, curled up in the grass in the orchard section. The grove was a gradual progression of apple trees from oldest to youngest: stately specimens whose canopy brushed against the top of the dome, down to the weediest sapling, all left to grow out of sentimentality more than necessity. Her orchard, populated by a life’s work, culminating in her final swan song.
But then again, Shaun wasn’t human. Perhaps it never occurred to him that she would behave otherwise. Or maybe he just recognized the familiar obsession of a fellow scientist.
***
She had been so focused on the genetic details of the project that she had failed to properly consider the basic logistics: the apple would be useless if she couldn’t deploy it. But when she woke up and found Shaun standing over her, an embarrassed smile on his face, her heart lurched when she realized that time was up.
We’re about to leave, he said. You need to come with me.
But the apple, she stammered, still muddled from nightmares. Can’t I at least try it? It’s due to be ready today. She tried to keep the naked panic out of her voice.
Sorry, I’m afraid that’s not possible. Health and safety and all that. I’ve already taken considerable flak for letting you stick around at all.
She only looked back once as he took her hand and led her through the grove towards the dome’s exit, but her tree had already been swallowed up by intervening greenery. Heart as heavy as a dead planet, she followed him along the snaking corridors of the Institute and then through the back entrance to the parking lot, which flew open at his casual wave.
She braced herself for the caustic and unbreathable environment, but the air remained unchanged. She noticed then that their immediate surroundings were bounded by a sheen of sparkles. Beyond this protective bubble, it was night, as silent as a grave. The stars were pale and cold between the black rectangles of unlit skyscrapers, undisturbed by any aircraft.
He stopped a few feet outside. It seemed wrong to lock you inside for it, he explained. Like exterminating a rat.
She didn’t answer — her mind was still racing, trying to come up with a way to salvage things. It had all gone totally wrong. In the few meters of space between them, the air almost crackled with some sort of static as the sparking grew in intensity, accompanied by an almost imperceptible hum that seemed to be increasing in pitch as the seconds passed.
Well, he said, a bit awkwardly. This is it. Once I go up, you’ve got a few minutes to make peace with your fate, then we’ll press the button from space to sterilize the building and this circle of light. You don’t need to worry - you won’t feel a thing.
Thank you.
Just d
on’t leave the circle, he said. Believe me, it would be a much worse way to go.
I won’t, she said.
It’s been nice knowing you.
Same here. She knew he had become a friend of sorts, but she still didn’t want him to see her cry.
He paused, made a face. Oh, what the hell. What harm could it possibly do?
The apple appeared in his palm — flushed with vital pink and almost glowing in the alien light. As he hesitated, she was suspended in time, in space, the result of a highly improbable series of random events played out over the span of millennia, about to wink out.
Forever? Or only just for now?
Here, he finally said. Catch.
Afterword
Being a naturally curious species with a habit of self-reflection, we humans have always wondered where we came from. The scientific study of the planet’s early origins has a rich and varied history, and from its inception it’s been an interdisciplinary blend of biology, chemistry, natural history, cosmology and geology to name a few. More recently, analyses and comparisons of the DNA genomes of various bacterial species have shed light on what the “last universal common ancestor” — in essence, the first pre-microbe — might have looked like. Looking forward, scientists are also actively thinking about how knowledge of our ancient origins could help us to colonize barren new worlds, and how we might sculpt microscopic life forms and plants to make the job easier. We don’t have all the answers about the origins of early life and probably never will, but thousands of experiments over the past century have shed quite a bit of light on the subject.
Formed about 4.6 billion years ago, the Earth coalesced out of a spinning mass of space debris and gases. It was scorching hot (about a thousand degrees Celsius), bombarded repeatedly by asteroids and unable to cling on to light gases such as hydrogen and helium. But an atmosphere of sorts had formed by about 4.4 billion years ago or so, and eventually had cooled to below a still rather sultry 374 degrees Celsius, which allowed water vapor to finally condense and start filling up depressions to form lakes and seas. The composition of the atmosphere was very different to today: anaerobic (no oxygen), chemically acidic, full of methane and ammonia and other harsh compounds and buffeted by lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions. Numerous experiments tell us that the molecular building blocks of life would have been able to assemble spontaneously under those contemporary conditions. Though the air gradually neutralized, actual life wouldn’t have had a chance to gain a foothold until the asteroids stopped pounding us so regularly — that would have been about 3.7 billion years ago at the latest.
So it’s no surprise that 3.7 billion years is also about the same age as the first evidence of bacteria in the fossil record. Stromatolites are the remains of communities of cyanobacteria that form mat-like biofilms. These mats trap and cement sand between their layers and thereby become permanently enshrined in the rock in telltale patterns. We recognize them because modern cyanobacteria still create these formations in shallow waters. Cyanobacteria were the first pioneers, able to thrive in anaerobic conditions and — crucially importantly for us — make oxygen in return. They literally breathed life into our world, paving the way for the many millions of species that followed. And later, they invaded the earliest eukaryotic cells in a strange symbiosis, in the process giving plants the powers of photosynthesis and our cells, the means to create energy. The rest is history.
I came of age as a molecular life scientist in the early 1990s, in the midst of a genetic engineering revolution that was well along the way to completely transforming the profession. For the budding genetic engineer in those times, our ancient companions, the bacteria, were actually the workhorses of the lab, enslaved to make yet more copies of DNA, and providing the toolbox with which we could manipulate and alter these genetic sequences.
The main aim of my PhD project was to understand how viruses evolve inside the hosts they infect. To study this, I amplified virus signatures from infected cat DNA using a relatively new technique called “polymerase chain reaction” (PCR) — nothing short of exotic then, but now a household acronym in any detective novel. Next, I’d pin down (“clone”) these fragments using “cut and paste” technology devised in the 1970s and 80s, Finally, I’d determine their genetic sequences using radioactive nucleotides and long, toxic, smelly slabs of gel to which I applied an electric current. Each day’s run would yield about 200 nucleotides, leaving a ladder-like fingerprint on large pieces of X-ray film, and I could sequence 12 samples at a time. Five years later, I had sequenced about a megabase (1 million bases) of viral DNA by hand, entering the G, C, A and T nucleotides into my computer manually. By the end of it, those four keys were so worn that you couldn’t read the letters on them anymore.
I am fond of telling my students that this entire sequencing project could probably have been be completed in a few minutes using today’s tech. For reference, you can now sequence a complete human genome (about 3 billion bases) for a thousand bucks in a matter of hours. Everything has escalated: not just sequencing, but also cloning, gene editing, knocking down genes at will, and the bioinformatical analysis tools and computing power needed to understand how various species are related. The smelly days are long gone — today we have sleek, beautifully packaged kits and much of everything is automated. Synthetic biology leaps ahead too, with researchers interested in creating bacteria that can eat waste, create energy, and of course, help terraform uninhabitable worlds.
To achieve a sequentially deploying ‘tree of life’ comprised of a couple of hundred different species within a simple apple seed (the later stages of which would have to lie dormant for a very long time waiting for the right atmospheric conditions) would be a pretty difficult job using today’s techniques and knowhow — it is probably impossible. But based on the advances that I have seen just in my thirty years in the lab, I predict it could be accomplished in a few decades from now by methodology that I cannot even imagine.
© The Author 2017
Michael Brotherton (ed.)Science Fiction by ScientistsScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-41102-6_3
Supernova Rhythm
Andrew Fraknoi1
(1)Los Altos Hills, USA
Eve clicks her wrist strip, and Scriabin’s late piano sonatas play through her implants. It’s the Ruth Laredo version, recorded almost 200 years ago, but still one of the best. She likes listening to Scriabin while the processors are doing her analysis; the music takes her out of herself.
The deep-space Supernova Network Telescopes discovered a new supernova in NGC 6946 last night, and this additional measurement might be just what she needs to decide what’s happening with that galaxy and its strange run of exploding stars. Her biggest fear is that she is being distracted by a chance run among data points. Are the patterns she has been following really there or is it just wishful thinking on her part?
Eve’s father is a professor of pre-digital music and it was he who introduced her to the music of Scriabin after her mother died. She remembers winter evenings, next to their virtual fire, listening to pieces performed on period instruments, and talking about the Russian composer and his eccentric vision. Scriabin felt his mission was to combine music and light, to offer synesthetic experiences to audiences — all leading up to a world-shaking performance of a work of color and music that he called Mysterium. His hope was that the combination would transform human consciousness.
Scriabin would never live to complete the work or see it performed. She wonders, not for the first time, if his ideas have somehow infected her research.
NGC 6946 is a relatively nearby spiral galaxy, roughly 10 million light years away. From Earth’s vantage point, it’s seen face on, looking down on its huge disk of stars. It is somewhat veiled from our view by a dusty region of our own Milky Way, but the infrared light that the Network detects gets through the dust even when visible light doesn’t.
On average, a spiral galaxy like this is supposed to have only one or two stars explode as a supernova
every century. But the supernova rate in NGC 6946 has been much greater ever since telescopes could observe it. And radio astronomers have reported an unusually large number of supernova remnants in the galaxy as well. Allowing glimpses even further into the galaxy’s past, their observations strongly hint that the rate of exploding stars has been high for much longer.
The light curve and spectrum of the new supernova begins displaying on Eve’s virtual screen, and she is happy to see that it’s a Type Ia explosion, just like the others she has been studying. She adds information about its location, estimated time of maximum, and the shape of the light curve to her data spreadsheets. The graphs display instantly. It fits! Suddenly determined, she clicks the scheduler to make an appointment with Professor Yates.
***
Yates, who supervises ten graduate students, among whom she is the most junior, regards Eve with little evidence of kindness. “Such a face-to-face meeting so early in a research project is highly irregular,” he begins. Eve interrupts, summoning her powers of diplomacy, “I know, Professor, and I am sorry. I wouldn’t have put a demand on your busy schedule if I didn’t need your help with a difficult problem that requires someone of your experience.”
Yates looks at her, puzzled; these days, most research issues are solved by using a different level AI or widening a search on Web 8.0. Eve continues, “I have a galaxy whose supernova rate has been, well…unbelievably high. And, surprisingly, they are almost all Type Ia supernovae, which are only supposed to be a fifth of the total.”
Of the main kinds of exploding stars, Type Ia’s tend to be more rare. They require two separate events — the collapse of a star at the end of its life into a star-corpse called a white dwarf, and the later “feeding” of that white dwarf by a companion star that has swelled up to become a giant. As the second star overflows its old boundaries and floods the dwarf with extra material, its instability increases until it explodes.
Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction) Page 5