by Ted Kosmatka
“I’m going to need some time … to analyze this,” she said.
“How long?” Silas asked.
“A whole career.”
“You don’t have a career.”
“I do now. This is going to take a while.”
CHAPTER NINE
Silas concentrated on his footfalls. The morning was cool and dry—perfect running weather—but the last quarter of a mile was always the most difficult. There were several regular morning runners at Helix, and he’d gotten offers to partner up, but he preferred to face it alone. He lengthened his stride, determined to eat the remaining distance as quickly as he could. There had been a time when running relaxed him, but those years were behind him now. At forty-three, running still relieved tension, but it left him more exhausted than tranquil. He wasn’t able to stop thinking about the project, but after five miles, he didn’t have the energy to care, so running still served its purpose.
He rounded the last bend in the path and began the final stretch to the compound general. In the distance, in front of the lab, he could see the flag waving colorfully at the top of its pole. He could see the five interlocked rings. It was silly, he knew, but his eyesight was something he was proud of. He’d noticed, over the years, that most of his colleagues had developed the need for reading glasses or surgery to correct weakening visual acuity, but his own vision had remained strong. He’d read once that myopia was a disease of modern living and could be traced, in many cases, to a childhood spent too much indoors, where the eye focuses almost exclusively within a distance of ten or twenty feet. Silas had spent much of his own youth outside. Eyes ever on the horizon. A portent, perhaps, of the man he would become.
He sprinted the last hundred yards and did his cool-down walk to the elevator. Back at his office, he took a long, hot shower, being careful not to get water in his bad ear, and did a quick shave in the sudsy steam. Then he toweled himself dry and put on fresh lab whites. After a quick stubble check in the mirror, he looked at his watch. It was time for Vidonia’s report. V-day.
He stepped into Vidonia’s lab, knocking twice on the open door. She turned, and her face was unreadable. She motioned him in and continued spreading the sheets out on the table. He’d made a point to stay out of her way for the last two and a half weeks. She’d been pulling all-nighters, so he knew she wasn’t in need of any motivational speeches on his part. He only needed to stay out of her way. She wanted to understand this thing as badly as he did, if perhaps for different reasons.
He waited for her to speak.
“I’ve done a complete workup on the specimen—well, as complete as I could in the amount of time I’ve had. I’m just going to shoot straight with you on this; there’s still a lot I don’t understand.”
“That’s fine. What do you have for me?”
She turned on the underlighting and touched the first plasticine page lying on the glass. “Enough to keep me awake at night.”
He looked down, and the image on the dark sheet was nonsense to him.
“As far as I can discern,” she said, her fingers wandering across the image, “these are the primary digestive organs: the pancreas, gallbladder, and liver. The stomach, here”—she pointed—“is multicompartmental. I think this specimen will be able to digest some pretty tough foodstuffs if the need arises. The intestine is medium-length—typical omnivore. The lung capacity of the organism is enormous. As is the blood volume pumped out by the heart. You’re going to have quite an athlete on your hands.”
“I’ve been thinking about that heart,” Silas said. “The specimen, as you like to call it, isn’t built along avian lines. Too big, too heavy. But if something like this were to actually take flight, it would probably need some outsized cardiovascular equipment to fuel the wing muscles.”
“It certainly would.”
“The six chambers?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, Silas. It could be a flight adaptation. It could be a practical joke that worked out well. All I can tell you is that the heart is strong, and the pectoral muscles have an unusual striation pattern I’ve never seen before.”
Silas rubbed his eyes, then looked down at the transparency again. “So do you think it will fly?”
“I doubt it. But there are some interesting modifications here. Anything is possible.”
She took a step farther down the table, pointing to a different sheet. “And the sharps at the end of the digits are anchored to the bone—they’re true talons, not just heavy-duty fingernails.”
She picked up another sheet. “The sense organs were the most difficult to evaluate, because there is no way of knowing how the organism experiences the world around it. But certain inferences can be made, and I’ve gone to exhaustive measures to see to it that my evaluations are accurate. If I have erred, it is on the side of caution. With that said, I have to admit that the eyes gave me pause. There is a distinct tapetum lucidium across the retina, and the cone configuration confirms that the specimen has nocturnally adapted vision.”
Silas couldn’t think of a response. It was getting crazier and crazier.
“The visual resolution is better than my ability to test. The hearing, too, is off the scale, but I noticed several peaks in acuity.” She handed him a sheet. “The largest was at three thousand hertz, well out of the human range of hearing. The second-largest peak was at one hundred twenty hertz, the average frequency of human speech.”
“So it’s a good listener.”
“It does more than listen.”
“You ran an oscillogram?”
“I had a hunch, so I went with it. I figured it had that bipolar auditory acuity for a reason, and when I tested its vocalizations, I found I was right. Half the waveform was above three thousand five hundred hertz.” She slid another transparency under the light. “As you can see from the waterfall spectrogram, there is a clear distinction here”—she pointed to a flat spot within the three-dimensional range of peaks and valleys. “Everything on this side we can hear; everything on the other side, we can’t.”
“So this means what?”
“It hears us fine, but we can only pick up about half of its vocalizations.”
Silas nodded and picked up the fifth sheet, holding it up to the light. A dark oblong shape in a case of bone. He didn’t have to ask her what it showed. “How large?”
“Cranial capacity is probably nineteen hundred ccs.”
Silas whistled softly. “That’s a lot of gray matter.”
“Larger than an average human brain.”
“This thing isn’t full-grown yet,” he said. “What kind of brain-to-body mass index are we talking about?”
“Top-heavy,” she said. “The numbers aren’t as meaningful at this stage of development, but the specimen certainly seems likely to surpass our index. The study of the heart could take one career; the study of the brain could take another.” She pointed at the dark image captured in the plasticine. “The cerebral cortex is highly folded and highly specialized. Both the telencephalon and corpus callosum—if those terms even apply, which they may not—are unusual in their association to the other parts of the brain.”
“I’m not an anatomist, doctor.”
“The brain is huge, and I don’t understand the way it’s organized. About all I can say is that the structures responsible for the higher functions appear to represent a large percentage of the overall mass. I’m shooting in the dark here, but I think this specimen has the potential to be very, very intelligent.”
She put the last sheet of plasticine down on the table. “What the hell is this thing?” she asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“No.” She touched his arm. “What is it? I can’t do my job effectively if I’m working in a vacuum. This doesn’t make sense. The night vision, the hearing, the wings. None of these things could help a gladiator in the arena. You need to level with me. Where did this thing come from?”
Silas sighed. She was right. He pulled out
a stool and sat. “How much do you know about computer theory?”
“Theory? Not much. The basics, I guess.”
“Ever hear of the Brannin computer?”
“Rings a bell. It’s the new super, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of research on it over the past several months, and the Brannin isn’t just the latest thing in computer tech. It’s a long step sideways in a direction nobody had ever thought to look before. I don’t think the Brannin should really even be called a computer. There’s very little to it that you can reach out and touch with your hand. Most of it exists in deep VR, and because of that, it’s not limited by physical size. Inside itself, it can be infinitely large or small. Instead of bytes made of zeros and ones, the Brannin uses light, on or off, and that’s the speed at which it computes. Something like six trillion floating-point operations per second, give or take.”
“Who’s counting?”
“You’d be surprised how seriously that record is taken.”
“And you’re going to tell me that the computer helped design the gladiator?”
“No, the Brannin didn’t just help. It did the design almost completely on its own. That’s where the original nucleotide base-pair sequence came from. Helix just provided the nuts and bolts.”
“Can’t you just make the inferences you need from the base-pair sequence?”
“It doesn’t work that way. The nucleotide map translates directly into an amino-acid map, but it gets sticky after that. Protein conformation is more important to protein function than the exact nucleotide read, and conformation is one of the hardest things to pull out of the raw data. Development is too interconnected to itself, and timing plays an important role.”
“Still, you should be able to cross-reference to other species.”
“No, we tried that. There were no matches. But a match might not have helped us much, anyway, unless it was exact. A single base-pair substitution that changes the shape of the resultant protein molecule can completely alter the expression of that gene. There are hundreds of examples of this. And beyond that, enzymatic function is more important even than conformation, and each enzyme is itself under genetic control, so the complexity exists in a feedback loop.”
“I’m beginning to understand. It’s like an algebra problem with a hundred variables.”
“Millions. At this point, it’s still impossible to make the leap from novel nucleotide sequence to resultant gene to physiological expression. It may always remain so. There’s too much structural noise between the three.”
“Well, you still have the computer. It designed the creature. Why do you need me to tell you what it already knows?”
“Because I think the computer has gone crazy.”
“Can computers go crazy?”
“The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
CHAPTER TEN
Evan stepped into his office and closed the door against the stares of the techs in the anteroom. His filing cabinets were overturned, his desk inside out, his stacks of digilogs scattered. Baskov’s men had gone through everything, leaving his office in complete disarray—in short, slightly more messy than usual.
He righted his swivel chair and slid into its familiarity. Only this time, the wailing of its overburdened hinges was missing. It had been so long. Much had changed.
How many weeks? Seven, ten; he didn’t know. But he had been sure that he would never leave that hospital, never be free from the injections, or Baskov’s questions. He looked down at himself and saw half the man he had been.
The drugs they gave him made him too sick to eat, and he had lost whole chunks of himself. He felt naked without the slabs of fat that had cloaked his body for so many years. He was exposed, vulnerable, too small for his baggy skin, which now drooped and sagged around him. Maybe it had been longer than ten weeks. Maybe much longer.
What had they told his techs? He had no friends or family that would require an explanation for his absence, but what about the institute? What had they been told?
He glanced out the window, and the sky was darkening, fading to gray. He didn’t know whether night or a storm approached, but he welcomed either. He welcomed the darkness and wanted to lose himself in it. He looked around for the light switch on the wall but couldn’t find it. The lighting panels had activated automatically when he entered the room.
He picked a desk drawer from the scatter on the floor and flung it upward toward the fluorescent panels. The cheap plastic shield caved, and the bulbs popped in a shower of glass on his head. Picking up the desk drawer, he stepped beneath the next light panel and flung the projectile again. Again, a shower of glass. He moved throughout the room until all the lights had gone blind and he could see only by the dying glow outside the window.
He thought of Pea as night descended. He sat in the clutter and let darkness fold around him. And when he could hold back no more, he wept.
SILAS MET Baskov just outside the broad glass doorway. “Good afternoon,” he said, extending a hand.
Baskov shook it, nodded, then said, “I hear it’s a big day for our young Olympic hopeful.”
“Yes, it is. The trainer thinks it’s time for the first live meal. I thought it would be appropriate for someone from the commission to witness it, and frankly,” he added with a smile, “it will save me the trouble of writing a long-winded report about the event. Now you can report to the commission.”
“I’m sure the trouble will be more than worth it. I’m curious how it’s developing. My eyes and ears have been telling me some interesting stories.”
Silas led him inside and past the elevators. He hated the way Baskov always managed to mention his spies. He referenced them so casually, as if they were of no more interest than the weather. But Silas recognized the warning in Baskov’s informal banter: nothing could be kept secret.
“We’ve recently transferred the gladiator into its new pen,” Silas said, then couldn’t resist: “though I’m certain that your eyes and ears have already informed you of the move.”
Baskov glanced at Silas as they walked.
“It outgrew its old living space,” Silas added.
“I know about that because I signed off on the construction project budget. I don’t even want to mention how much it cost.”
They turned left at the end of the hall and made their way down the final long corridor leading to the rear dome behind the building. At the door, Silas showed his badge to the armed guard and they stepped through.
His nostrils were immediately assaulted by the warm smells of life. It reminded him of the cat house at the Los Angeles Zoo. Tangy, pungent; it was the smell of a predator.
Bright sunlight filtered through steel mesh openings in the roof sixty feet above. Just ahead, a shell of iron bars separated them from the enclosure beyond. Silas lead Baskov toward the group that had gathered. Ben, Vidonia, and Dr. Nelson nodded their introductions.
“Where’s Tay?” Silas asked.
“Last-minute problem with the goat,” Vidonia said.
“Well, I’d have a problem, too, if I was the goat that had to go in there.” Ben pointed between the bars.
Against the far wall, several large, roughly hewn trees leaned at forty-five-degree angles with wide platforms connecting them at varying heights from the ground. Large wooden poles lay scattered in the straw that covered the floor of the enclosure. Thick ropes ran in sagging parabolas between points on the wall and the wooden poles. It all looked like a playground for some very rough, very big little boy.
“I don’t see our little friend,” Baskov said.
“It’s in an adjacent pen, but it isn’t so little anymore,” Silas said. “We thought it best to introduce the goat first.”
There was a loud clang. Then, as if on cue, a small black-and-white goat was pushed unceremoniously through a hatch in the far wall.
It fumbled around in the deep straw for several moments. Slowly, its ability to wallow around in the stuff improved, and the goa
t made slow progress across the enclosure, jumping from spot to spot. Another clang grabbed the goat’s attention. It stopped, angling its head toward the sound.
The large metal door at the back of the enclosure slid slowly upward.
The gladiator lumbered in beneath it. The growth of the organism had been nothing short of amazing, and Silas couldn’t help but feel a wave of awe as the creature stepped into sight. Even hunched in a predatory stance, it stood easily six and a half feet tall—and it wasn’t done growing yet. The arms were thick with muscle, and the ears now stood round and erect atop the head, like a bat’s.
Only its eyes had not changed. Still large, gray, unreadable. Silas’s heart jolted in his chest when the gladiator bounded across the lake of straw and leaped to the lowest platform. There it sat, looking down at the goat, then out at the people, appearing for all the world like some fairy-tale monster come to life.
Its arms stretched wide from its body, and the wings unfurled from their hiding place against its back, extending twelve feet on either side. There was a rush of wind as the wings began to beat at the air. Silas felt the breeze on his cheek and turned to look at Baskov, who stood open-mouthed at the spectacle.
Silas turned his attention back to the creature in time to see it leap from the platform and drop, half gliding, to the straw next to the goat.
Bleating wildly, the goat sprang backward all the way to the bars. The gladiator’s wings snapped shut against its back as it took a long step forward. The frightened goat bleated again and tried to run past the gladiator on the right, but the gladiator flashed an arm out in front of it. The goat stopped just a half-dozen feet in front of Silas, pinned between the bars and the strange creature. The gladiator cocked its head sideways, looking at it. Slowly, it extended one taloned hand and touched the goat’s furry coat with its palm, almost a caress. The goat shrieked in fear and pulled away while the creature cocked its head in the other direction.
Much later, in the report he would have to write anyway, Silas would not be able to recount what happened next except to say that in one moment the gladiator was sitting near its potential prey, and in the next, after a flash of motion, the goat was somehow partially disassembled in the gladiator’s bloody hands. Bright loops of intestine spilled out from the forward half of the goat as the gladiator raised the carcass up and bit off the head in a single crunch of bone.