***
“— sons?” Rollie knows it by heart. He always asks for more details but he never understands them right. How can she make him see that scene the way she’d seen it: a big-screen TV with a still of Leni pointing at a slide, frozen in motion, and in front of the screen two identical guys in identical T-shirts that said Back off, I’m doing science! which they purposely wore, they explained, for their closed-circuit TV “science seshh”…
Rollie is sprawled out on the couch opposite Lenora, idly tying, untying a knot of his jumpsuit’s sleeves over his belly button. The side of Rollie she gets to see is nothing like Roland Benes the Federal Secretary for Information and the man who controls one of the biggest fortunes worldwide — the face the rest of the world is used to seeing. And that is what makes Lenora so ill at ease.
How different he is from his… parents. “Yes, that’s what your father had said.”
Rollie stops fumbling with the sleeves and gives her a stare. “Do sins of the fathers visit upon the sons? Or is the slate wiped clean with every generation?”
He is quoting from her talk, as Paul was quoting then. She chooses to react to it as if it weren’t a question. She smiles. “I was young and cocky.”
***
“The Lamarckian adaptive inheritance,” Paul continued, “Oooh, the heresy!” He flicked his hands in a half curly-quotes, half voodoo gesture. Leni couldn’t yet understand if he joked or challenged her. Paul concluded, “Good stuff. So thick, you can stir it with a stick, right?”
“Um, sort of,” she said. “But when people say something is a heresy it implies there is a dogma. We don’t really have dogmas.”
They smiled like one. “We don’t either.”
She smiled back. Her headache was receding. “We just have things that we understand better, or less well, or not at all. And things that we suspect but can’t yet prove, because we don’t have either the tools or the conceptual groundwork. Like way back when, everybody could observe electrolysis in water but no one could explain it for almost a century. This had to wait till they started thinking in electrons and protons. Same here. We all see that the information about one’s important or enduring life experiences gets transferred to one’s progeny. Systemic starvation or even psychological stress in fathers does result in altered physiologic and behavioral traits of children — this has already been observed. It makes sense too: if our environment triggers a persistent condition, we better respond, learn, adapt, and pass the lesson down the line, right? The point is we just don’t know yet how it happens, exactly. What the mechanism is.”
“But you have the tools,” Paul said.
“Getting there.”
“And the groundwork,” said Yric.
“We do now.”
“And it is?”
“The discovery of small noncoding RNAs that latch on to our DNA.” The brothers looked like she needed to explain. “Noncoding means they don’t get translated into proteins. They have other important functions. It’s like if the DNA is a letter of the law, like a constitution, these RNAs are like the practice of it, they are suggestions and interpretations, they are memos on how to apply the law on a case-by-case basis. More — or less — stringently. Making exceptions — or not. Sorry,” she said, responding to their faces, “seems like the research we do just begs for all these… loaded metaphors. I mean, they are just that. I am popularizing.” None of this qualified as a good pitch, she thought with alarm.
They laughed. “No, it’s cool,” Yric said. “We get the difference. Go on. What is your groundwork?”
Her cheeks felt hot and her heart raced. This was it, make it or break it. “I… well, to continue with the metaphor, imagine a law that is interpreted and practiced a certain way for a while. Then one day you go look up the actual letter of the law — and you find that it had changed in accordance with the practice. The act of practicing it changed it in the book, you see? That’s my groundwork. I know how to look for the RNAs that are the practice of the law, and I have caught a few in the act of tweaking the actual law on the books — in the DNA. But that is your RNAs acting on your DNA, not on the DNA of your future next generation, the DNA that is sequestered in your germline. Now. If I am able to continue my work, I will provide a gold standard proof of intergenerational inheritance. This is how. Step one: I will induce a specific RNA into existence. Step two: I will satisfy the necessary and sufficient criterion: that I can isolate this RNA and transfer it from one individual to another. Step three: I will demonstrate that this RNA tweaks the DNA in the germline and in the next generation.”
***
Abruptly, Rollie springs up and heads for the pool. Lenora finishes telling her story to his bare back, “I explained my research to Yric and Paul. They played back my talk, which they recorded, and we went over it in detail. They had good questions, and were so fast at grasping things. Terrifically smart. And we talked like equals. They were always very… egalitarian this way.”
“Were they,” Rollie mutters. “And then they gave you the money.”
“Not right then. When we parted they thanked me for explaining the science so they finally understood it. A letter came in the mail a month or so later.” She has never told Rollie about her “the letter and the practice of the law” metaphor, and she thanks her lucky stars for that omission. For quite a while now, that metaphor has seemed ominous to her.
Standing on the edge of the pool, Rollie drops his French terry jumpsuit, steps out of it, buck naked, and dives in. Splatters hit Lenora on the face. She sighs. “Roland, what’s troubling you? Can I help?” She hopes the words do not come out as rehearsed as she feels they are.
“Not now,” he responds.
“How is your father doing?” This is genuine.
Rollie is entering a program into the pool’s panel. “Daddy Paul?” he remarks between key punches. “His nurse reports he is saying he is Yric.”
As if on cue, Lenora’s stomach feels like it clenches into a fist and pounds the bottom of her diaphragm, then recoils, aching. She suppresses a cringe: Rollie glances her way, appraising. That’s it, she thinks. That is why Rollie has summoned her. Another poke under the diaphragm. Then: could it be? Then: how hopeless, ridiculous, pathetic of her to even consider this! She knows it can’t! All the while, she does her best to appear unaffected. She mustn’t be dismissive but she can subvert, undermine. “Well, in his state such claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Don’t you think?” She wants Rollie to reply but he doesn’t. This means he will revisit it on his own terms.
“Daddy Paul” Benes is eighty-three and has Alzheimer’s. She hasn’t seen him in years. A billionaire recluse to all, but Rollie may well be keeping him locked away somewhere: image control. Rollie slams a button on a pool’s panel; the water in the pool rolls into motion, Rollie swims against the stiff current, staying in one place. He shouts over burbling water, “Which one did you like better, Yric or Paul?”
Yric, always Yric, she tells herself while pretending she did not hear the question. It works. Swimming distracts Rollie. “Don’t you want to get in the pool? Go ahead, jump in!”
So much water, clean, warm water. She does want to swim in the pool, oh, she does — but not like this. “Thank you, not now.”
***
She and the twins… with time they became as close to friends as it was earthly possible. There was that feeling, like being on the same page, more, standing side by side before a work of art only the three of them could fully admire and appreciate. They had get-togethers that they called “brainstorming in our think bowl.” With time the twins became decent experts in her field but they still communicated in metaphors. When Leni discovered that her noncoding RNAs were secreted in exosomes — tiny bubbles that traveled the bloodstream from one bodily organ to another — from brain to gut, from liver to heart — Yric called them messages in a bottle, and sang her a few lines from an old song by the Police, in a startlingly true voice. It was one of those moments when it seem
ed to her that… And she pored over A Message in a Bottle lyrics like a teenage girl, as if some romantic clue, some hidden thrill was contained there… Ah, embarrassing to recall. Stuff it, lock it, throw away the key. Nothing ever happened. Years went by. She’d never ever even seen Yric by himself. Always with Paul. She wondered why the brothers would not marry — maybe it was the twin thing. The tie that feels freaky to people who do not know how it is to co-exist with an identical copy of yourself. Maybe she’d always feared to even go there because there was always this thought: what if she had to date them both?
***
Rollie again, between backstrokes: “So that was in 2014, the conference? And when did they build you an institute, again?”
“In 2017. It wasn’t just for me.”
“But you were the director.”
“A deputy director. I was never good at anything other than doing bench science.”
“I hate fake modesty!” This is bellowed amid puffs and spatters: Rollie is doing a butterfly stroke. “Sick of those clowns on the Senate committee —”
This she knows, at least, this she is used to. Rollie calls her up when he is feeling conflicted, and her part is to offer — therapy, of sorts. She’d like to think she is his tether. She only wishes her stomach would stop hurting.
“— If a fucking law is not applied at all or is practiced with a big fat discretion it should just — disappear from the books! Poof! Gone!”
Inwardly, Lenora laments how the words Senate committee don’t even mean anymore what they used to mean in her day. She overhears more cussing from Rollie, words drowning in burbling and splashing water. “Rage! … Ugh, could just strangle the man! … Every one of these idiots has their heads screwed on straight — by me, no less — except this one fakey-modest bastard. Subpoena, my ass! You’ll be wiping shit off the walls in an insane asylum with your subpoena! …”
Not an empty threat, she knows that. She has to interject, show that she cares. That’s her job. She needs to start rerouting this conversation. But she fails to make herself do it, she wants to muffle her ears instead. All because of the news that Paul claims he’s Yric.
***
Leni didn’t want to leave academia. But being flush with Benes cash and having her lab stuffed with shiny new equipment when so many of her colleagues were holding theirs together with duct tape and chewing gum, hunting for hand-me-downs and scraping the bottoms of empty reagent vials — this was a recipe for strained relationships.
The Benes Institute for Epigenetic Inheritance grew and grew. The Benes Big Data farms plugged right into it, figuratively and literally. It was surreal, from Leni’s vantage point. By then she achieved Step One of her program. She created a certain, artificial, of course, life experience for lab mice. Like this: give a mouse a series of zaps while vanilla scent was in the air. She demonstrated that this experience gave rise to a certain RNA in exosomes — a certain message-in-a-bottle, in Yric’s words. This message meant something like (in Yric’s words, again), Life is bad if you smell vanilla! Full on stress! and it was sent from the mouse’s brain to all four corners of the mouse’s body. Now it was time for Step Two.
June 14, 2019, a Giants’ game. Leni threw a party for her whole lab, their plus-ones and kids. She booked a sky box. There was a smorgasbord of food, a rack of beers and wines, and a programmable ice cream machine that birthed multicolored baseball-shaped ice creams. The occasion? They had completed Step Two of the gold standard — intercepted a Life-is-bad-if-vanilla RNA message, pulled it from one bunch of mice, purified and amplified it, and sent it into the bloodstream of another bunch of mice. The study was blinded, controlled for every contingency. After several more months of work they un-blinded the sample IDs and there it was: the mice that had received the RNA had lost their peace with vanilla.
Midway through the game her phone rang. “Leni? We are next to you. Care to join us?”
She slipped out of her sky box and went into the one next to it, where she saw Yric and Paul, a bottle of champagne, a chocolate cake, three glasses, and a ginormous touchscreen/display, on which Paul drew a star-eyed smiley face, and then added beneath, What’s next? After the toast, settled in a cushy armchair, Leni said, “Next? Find out if our LIBIV, Life-is-bad-if-vanilla, that is, RNA tweaks with the DNA of the sperm, of course. Maybe it just makes an epigenetic bookmark on the DNA. Maybe it actually induces a DNA double strand break. Maybe it even hitches a ride — in the sperm — to the next generation — “ She floundered and stopped. Maybe it was because she’d used the word sperm and inadvertently looked at Yric. Maybe it was just the funny angle Yric sat at that made those insomniac’s shadows under his eyes so deep and blue.
Paul said, “That’s all well and good but we need to think bigger. You have one message — LIBIV. Shouldn’t there be a whole library of them?”
She refocused. “Of course there is a whole library, but one is all I need for the gold standard of proof to work. One word that I can control and follow around experimentally. LIBIV is as good as any.”
Outside, the whole stadium whooped as one at a homerun, and fireworks shot up, but the display in the twins’ sky box stared steadily with nothing but the smiley face.
“Okay but yet bigger, Leni. Dream, please?”
“Well, in the grand scheme of things we could eventually explain evolution of instinctive behaviors. Explain how spiders weave their webs and honeybees build their hives, and human babies refuse to crawl on glass tables.”
Yric meanwhile plopped giant pieces of chocolate cake on three plates and served them. He sat down and ate his portion, listening. Then he aimed a fork at Leni. “Bigger,” he said, “as in informationally bigger. Leni, you have at your disposal the biggest data crunching outfit there ever was, courtesy of your humble servants the Benes Bros, and you still think like a liberal arts and crafts college professor, beg your pardon. Seriously. We have the capacity to collect, decode and assign function to hundreds of messages-in-a-bottle. To hundreds of LIBs, Life-is-bads and LIGs, Life-is-goods. We can catalog every significant experience, every life’s lesson, every hard-knock and fist-pump, every oops and woo-hoo worth remembering and passing on. Why don’t we do that in addition to whatever else you want to do? And in humans, Leni, not in rodents or honey bees, for that matter.”
She considered it. It was so grand and sweeping, so beyond the nose-to-the-bench pace — yes, pedestrian pace — of her research. And it made Yric’s eyes shine.
She got on board. That was the inception of the LIGs and LIBs project. A grand effort to identify exosomal RNAs that meant Life is good or Life is bad in human beings.
***
“Made you heady with all this success, no?” Suddenly, Rollie stands in front of her, dripping water. Hunched over her hurting stomach, Lenora sees his bare feet on the tile, the water that pools in grout lines. She just shakes her head.
“Is that when you began your human experimentation?” she hears Rollie asking.
Before she knows it she’s jumped to her feet, she’s shouting. “Rolland, what the hell!” She can’t believe she’s yelling into his amused face, “How can you say that, you know this is absolutely not true! You know perfectly well what I did, you have no right to distort it. I told you time and again: I collected serum samples from properly consented adults to isolate EXOSOMES!” She shakes her shrunken fist with every syllable as if it is a slogan, EXO! SOMES! How pathetic she must look right now, a little old lady spewing nerdy-talk — but she can’t hold back this fury, this despair. “To isolate them and identify their RNA content! That’s it! That’s what LIGs and LIBs was, nothing more. None of that ‘unprecedented human engineering’ nonsense the media ran with. None! Just a small sample of blood, drawn for analysis. I did not tweak, inject, add, subtract, change, implant ANYTHING! I did NOT experiment on humans! … And for god’s sake, cover yourself already, I don’t have to stare at your junk!” She shoves a towel into Rollie’s abdomen.
Rollie shakes his head as if there is
water in his ear, steps back — but keeps, thank god, the towel at his navel, and is, thank heavens, wrapping it around his loins now. The next comes out with a touch of role-playing pretense. “Don’t tell me what to do. Mother.”
“I am not —” she snaps, startling herself, and Rollie is already snickering — bigger and bigger laughs burst through his curving mouth one after another as if in ever more rapid bubbles. As if some kind of hysterical water is beginning to boil inside him.
“— telling you what to do,” Lenora recovers. She laughs because she is distressed. Rollie looks at her almost admiringly. Suddenly he grabs her across the waist and hoists her body over his shoulder. He is a strong man and she is a diminishing senior, bones going feather-light. “Come on in, get wet, it’ll do you good.” She protests but it doesn’t matter.
He giant-steps into the pool, releases her into the parting-then-colliding waves of his entry. The current drags Lenora to the other end of the pool. She anchors herself to the pool’s edge with her forearm, wipes her face, sucks in air. Mutters shakily, “What the fuck.” She does not fear for her life. She has her other, bigger, twin fears, as she calls them.
She fears transgression. By Rollie. And she fears that Rollie will pick up his father’s vision and pervert it. These days, someone like him can find a way to force LIBs and LIGs on hundreds of unwilling, unsuspecting “volunteers.”
She starts talking just so Rollie doesn’t. He can dump her in his pool, fully clothed, but he can’t make her stop talking. “I am doing fine, thank you. Same old, same old, our little trials and tribulations. Our school’s corporate sponsor is mad at us because some kid put graffiti over their logos. Reads: Ignore the humans around you. Now the whole school has to suffer, the staff is fined, the lunch program is cut back. Kids have enough crap in their lives as it is. Cory’s uncle got copper poisoning from the shitty knock-off jacks he uses for his brain plug-in. Beth’s older sister signed up as a research subject for a cosmetics corporation, went in — and nobody’s heard from her ever since. Ela-Jo’s parents jumped on a new all-in-one utilities package, connectivity plus water. Didn’t read the fine print. Guess what part of the package took priority, the internet of course. Now they are down to a half a gallon a day for all three of them, because the package is called Communicating vessels, the poor idiots did not know what it means, could’ve looked it up on their internet, but, hey — they don’t use the internet to learn things. And as for myself? I can even water my petunias, thank you very much, Rolland… Rolland, I know you’ve done a lot for us, providing us with clean water and the rest, but… is it too much trouble to somehow communicate to our sponsor not to be so hard on the school?”
Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction) Page 27