She hadn’t completely realized that there was a friendship building up until she’d noticed how often Toshikazu was “coincidentally” turning out to have the duty when she was staying particularly late. Since that time, they’d frequently talked over coffee or meals, and shared jokes around the lab — the butts of which were often the other humorless members of the workgroup.
I bet they think we’re lovers, Toshikazu and I, Nikki thought with a smile. She was sure the same thought had occurred to Toshikazu. On occasion, he’d made some double entendre remarks that were guaranteed to get the others thinking. Prying minds want to know. Let them wonder.
As it was, they were only friends. Not that Nikki hadn’t wondered about the possibilities of the alternative. She just wasn’t comfortable initiating something that might eventually break up their friendship and their work relationship. Ah, well, she told herself, if it’s supposed to happen it’ll happen.
The call light next to the elevator came on as she and Toshikazu came within a yard of the door. Something to do with the identification badges all Nagara employees had to wear, she figured. The badge was about the same size and thickness as a credit card, with a three-dimensional holographic photograph of the wearer —a neat trick, that, she thought. It wouldn’t be too hard to build a tiny microchip into the card, she figured, designed to broadcast the wearer’s identity to sensors in the area. The only time she knew it actually did something was when it automatically called the elevator — convenient sometimes, particularly when her arms were full, but hardly worth the effort and cost of setting up the system. Presumably it must have some security function, like opening certain doors only for authorized personnel, but it never affected her day-to-day life one way or another. Putting it on her lapel before she entered the building in the morning was just one more ingrained ritual.
As they waited for the elevator to arrive, Nikki heard a footfall on the polished floor behind her. She turned quickly.
It was one of the corporate security guards. A big man, wearing semi-rigid body armor, in the blue-trimmed white color scheme of Nagara, with the symbol of the origami crane on the shoulders. The surface of the armor was shaped into the contours of over-developed muscles — in much the same way that Roman-style leather breastplates were, Nikki recalled — adding considerably to the guard’s intimidating presence. His mirror-finished helmet visor was down, totally concealing his features. When Nikki looked into his face, all she could see was a curved and distorted reflection of herself and Toshikazu.
On impulse, Nikki flashed him a smile. No response, none at all. Might as well smile at a statue, she thought. Or one of the security robots she sometimes saw cruising the basement hallways late at night. The guard watched them impassively, his hand resting near the large pistol on his hip, until they’d stepped into the elevator and the door had closed behind her.
“I don’t even think they’re human,” Nikki muttered as the elevator started down. “Why do we need them anyway? They just scare the hell out of people.” Toshikazu shrugged. “It’s not like Nagara’s a bank,” she went on, “there’s nothing here to steal.”
“I suppose the people at Tomita Technologies I bought the same thing,” he said quietly, naming a company that Nikki remembered from the news. Tomita was a small electronics company based in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. During a weekday evening, ,i week or so ago, unidentified gunmen had broken into the Tomita facilities. They’d ranged freely through I he building, killing anyone who got in their way, and stealing the back-up tapes from the company’s mainframe computer, before planting enough explosives to blow the computer system into shrapnel.
Tomita Technologies effectively ceased to exist. The best of the company’s engineers and designers were hired away by Zamftech Computers, while the rest drifted away to other employers. The owner and CEO of the company, Ryuki Tomita, had been found dead in his home two days ago. (He’d committed suicide in the traditional manner, Nikki recalled with a shudder. Seppuku: he’d sliced his belly open with a large knife.) The official conclusion by the police was that the attack had been the action of “wreckers,” according to Tokyo urban folklore, vandals dedicated to the destruction of the happy and productive Japanese corporate way of life, and hence the ultimate traitors to society.
“Are you expecting wreckers here?” Nikki asked sarcastically.
Toshikazu snorted his derision. “Wreckers. Garbage.”
Nikki nodded in agreement. It was obvious to both of them that the people who’d attacked Tomita Technologies had something more on their minds than just interfering with the Japanese way of life. (Maybe Zamftech Computers had something to do with it, Nikki had speculated at the time. They were the ones to gain most by it.) There was no doubt about it: neither she nor
Toshikazu believed in wreckers.
But most people did, she knew — or pretended to believe. The corporations and even the government pushed the “wreckers” story hard. And why not? she asked herself. Wreckers are a convenient fiction.
It was good to have Toshikazu to talk to about things like this, she realized. Everybody else in Group Five — in fact, everyone else she ever talked to — seemed to fully accept the “party line.” Only Toshikazu seemed interested in making the effort to think things through for himself. She poked him gently in the ribs. “Are you sure you’re from around here?” she asked with a smile.
He chuckled. “I’m that obvious, am I?” Then he grew serious. “Maybe I should be careful about that,” he added quietly. “We have an old proverb in Japan,
‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.’” *
In atmosphere, the lab that Nikki called “hers” was effectively the direct opposite of the cafeteria. Buried in the Nagara building’s first sub-basement level, out of necessity it had no windows. Its walls and its low ceiling were the spotless white of an operating room, intensifying the almost-painful glare of the overhead lights. The temperature was decidedly chilly — about 14° C, or 57° F—and the humidity was kept so close to zero that when she’d started working here Nikki had been plagued by nosebleeds. She knew well why temperature and humidity were important — some of the automated analyzers were as sensitive to environmental conditions as old-style mainframe computers — but the uncomfortably cold and dry air constantly communicated the idea that the “comfort” of the machines was more vital than her own comfort. Well, there was nothing she could do about it except wear warmer clothes.
The lab looked like a cross between a computer room and a chemistry lab. One half of the large room was taken up with marble-topped workbenches, all of them covered with an array of tangled tubes, flasks and retorts that might have been constructed by a mad glassblower. The other half was devoted to the analyzers: two rows of spotless white machines about the size of refrigerators laid down on their sides. The polished metal cases were totally featureless. The sockets into which technicians inserted the small glass vials containing the samples to be analyzed were concealed by access ports, and all the machines were controlled and monitored remotely, using a single control terminal I hat looked like a standard office microcomputer.
As soon as they’d returned from the cafeteria, Toshikazu had settled himself down in front of the control terminal and begun tapping away on the keyboard. Now he leaned back and stretched luxuriously. “Okay,” he said, “that’s got it.” He hit a final key, and the screen filled with a complex graph.
Nikki leaned over his shoulder for a closer look. She reached out and touched a particularly high peak on the graph. “That’s the lysine peak, right?” she asked. Toshikazu nodded. “Then what’s that?” She indicated another peak, next to the first and almost as high.
He shrugged. “It’s not lysine,” he pointed out. “Not quite.”
Nikki straightened up, rubbing her eyes. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool. Too many late nights, she told herself. “So this protein isn’t going to do the job?” she asked.
“Not a chance,” Toshikazu re
plied firmly. “There’s enough of this almost-lysine that it’s just not going to fold right.”
Nikki nodded. That sounded as though it made sense. Lysine was an amino acid, one of the major “building blocks” of proteins and enzymes, complex substances that all living cells used to control the vital chemical reactions that kept them alive. When the amino acids that made up the protein were strung together in the right order, attractions and repulsions between the individual molecules would cause the protein to fold up on itself in a very specific way, forming a particular three-dimensional shape that was characteristic of the specific protein involved. This three-dimensional shape had a great deal to do with the chemical activity of the protein. A protein that wasn’t the right shape simply wouldn’t do what it was supposed to do.
And this protein that they’d been analyzing had something wrong with it. In many places along its length, where there should have been a molecule of lysine, there was something else, a molecule that was something like lysine but, as Toshikazu said, not quite. Since this almost-lysine had different chemical properties, it wouldn’t exhibit quite the same attractions and repulsions as real lysine. Which meant that the protein wouldn’t fold up on itself exactly the right way, and would form a different three-dimensional shape. Which, in turn, meant that this protein wouldn’t work the way it was supposed to. Nikki guessed that any cell depending on this abnormal version of the protein simply wouldn’t be able to function and would die.
Nikki felt Toshikazu’s eyes on her, and shook herself free of her thoughts. He’s better at the theoretical side than I am, she reminded herself. He’ll have already figured this out. “So it’s non-functional?”
“Totally.” Toshikazu grinned. “The guys next door have blown it again.”
The guys next door. That was another thing that bothered Nikki a little about her job, she had to admit. “Next door” was the so-called Special Projects lab, a secure area that nobody in her department was authorized to enter. The “company line” was that the Special Projects group was working on a special initiative that had to be protected against industrial espionage. It .Seemed that all Nagara employees, apart from her and Toshikazu, of course, accepted this without question, and showed not one iota of curiosity about what was going on in the secure area.
Nikki, more than anyone else perhaps, had reason lo wonder what the Special Projects lab was up to, but also had the most background on which to make educated guesses. As it turned out, the major responsibility of her workgroup was to analyze material transferred to them by the Special Projects group. Sometimes it was a sample of DNA, other times — like tonight — a protein. Some of the time, Nikki’s group was tasked to determine something specific about the sample—such as the molecular weight—which made analysis easy. More often, however, she was given no guidance at all, no hint as to what the Special Projects people were looking for, and instructed to carry out an exhaustive analysis. That was the case with tonight’s processing run: Special Projects hadn’t told her anything about the sample —not even that it was a protein, for heaven’s sokes, she groused — and instructed to find out everything she could about it.
When she completed her analyses, she simply turned the information back over to Special Projects, and that was the last she ever heard about it. No feedback as to the accuracy or quality of her analysis; no thanks or commendations; nothing. On one occasion—and only one — she’d asked her supervisor where her group’s analyses went and what would be done with them. To her surprise, the response to her idle curiosity was a harsh dressing down, and an official reprimand inserted into her personnel record. (Just like I’m in the army, she thought.) Nikki knew some of the people who worked in Special Projects, not strictly true; she knew of them and could recognize them by sight, but she didn’t know them on any personal level. They kept themselves very much apart from the other research personnel, rarely eating in the staff cafeteria, and when they did staying in a tight, closed grouping away from everyone else. They were arrogant — even more arrogant than the other senior researchers—and wouldn’t even deign to respond when Nikki said “good morning” to them in the hallway. They’re the elite, she told herself, or at least they think they are. She sighed. Maybe it was just another facet of security.
That made her smile. Security. She wondered how the big bosses would react if they learned how much she’d figured out about what happened in Special Projects. Probably have an aneurysm, she told herself with a grin.
It wasn’t that difficult, really. Just about anyone in Group Five, and probably others, could have figured out just as much. Of course, nobody else but she and Toshikazu had the necessary curiosity or interest. It was just a matter of picking up little clues here and there and putting them together, just like in a detective novel.
. The first clue was that Nikki was initially asked to analyze mainly pure genetic material — DNA. Recently, however, most of the samples sent over from Special Projects were proteins. At first, the DNA samples were just plain wrong. There was always some major anomaly, something significant enough that the DNA simply couldn’t have functioned in a living creature. With time, however, the size and the importance of the anomalies had decreased. Finally, most of the DNA samples seemed to be totally functional — or potentially so, at least.
At about this point the samples switched mainly to proteins, which are chemicals that are coded for by the DNA. At first, the proteins Nikki’s workgroup received were as non-functional as the initial DNA mi pies. But then, with time, the anomalies in the proteins had become smaller and smaller until the last couple of samples — apart from today’s disaster — were almost normal in structure and function.
Nikki could draw only one conclusion from all of I his. The Special Projects lab was working on some kind of new technique for genetic engineering. Initially, the technique had been so undependable that they couldn’t accurately or consistently create functional DNA. With experience, however, they refined the system until the DNA worked the way they wanted it to. Then they took the next step, testing the proteins coded for by the DNA they’d created. A much more precise way of checking for small errors than directly analyzing the DNA itself, the protein analyses had shown up errors in the original genetic code. But the errors in the proteins were becoming less and less serious, which implied that the Special Projects researchers were finally getting a real handle on their new technique.
So what did that imply about the Special Projects lab itself? Most genetic engineering — particularly anything to do with animals, and particularly anything new and experimental — gets done in specially secure labs. “Secure” in this case meant some kind of containment, not to keep potential industrial spies out, but to keep any potential mistakes in. They’d use, Nikki figured, something called P3 containment: a combination of hermetically-sealed rooms, airlocks, filters and sterilization techniques that should keep anything from getting out into the environment.
And just what were they engineering? Nikki didn’t know. Some things were obvious: the proteins she was analyzing didn’t come from bacteria, and she didn’t think they came from plants. Animals, then — but not from primates, like the great apes or mankind; she’d
have recognized them immediately.
So the Special Projects lab was using a new — and probably radically different — technique to genetically engineer animals of some kind. When Nikki had been at university, people were talking about the possibility of engineering pigs or cows so that they’d gain weight much faster than normal, without the use of steroids or other potentially harmful drugs, so that farmers could bring them to market much faster. But that talk was just speculation; nobody expected it to happen within the next five or more years. Could that be what Special Projects was working on? A more efficient beef cow? Considering the shrinking amount of land available to farms, a project like this made a lot of sense in Japan. And, considering the market situation, if Nagara could bring this off, the corporation could make billions.
With that in mind, Nikki could understand the need for security, to at least some degree. Industrial espionage did happen in Japan. (From some of the stories she’d heard on the grapevine, it seemed to rival sumo as the national sport…) But didn’t her bosses realize that the heavy-handed way they handled things prompted people to dig into what was happening? (Or some people, at least, she amended.) Ah, well, she told herself, management’s not my concern. That’s why we hire bosses. “So how are we going to write this one up?” she asked Toshikazu. ‘“Protein non-functional due to faulty tertiary structure?’”
After a moment, Toshikazu nodded. “Sounds good to me. Append the full analysis?”
“As usual.” Nikki grinned. “So they’ll know we’re earning our money.”
Toshikazu opened his mouth to reply… and the lab rang like a gong. The floor jolted once, hard, under Nikki’s feet, forcing her to grab onto the analyzer next to her to keep her feet. The overhead lights flickered
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