DNA

by Laurence Dahners

  Jamieson had been astonished when the guard hadn’t run the kid and his dog off. Sure, he’s just a child, but what kind of security team would let even a child into the house of the person they’re supposed to be protecting? What if the kid was carrying a bomb or something crazy like that? It wasn’t unheard of.

  He sat there unbelieving for fifteen minutes, then the front door opened. The kid, the dog, and the guard all came back out, just as friendly as they could be. The guard said something else quietly to the kid while Jamieson wished he’d brought a parabolic microphone to let him hear. The kid shook his head and he and the dog started walking back toward Jamieson.

  Jamieson slitted his eyes since they were one of the most recognizable features in camouflage. Again the kid walked right by without noticing Jamieson sitting there. Once again, Jamieson thought to himself, There’s something familiar about that kid.

  The kid had been gone for several minutes before Jamieson tumbled to it.

  That’s Donsaii’s kid!

  He brought up the video of the kid going by and went back and forth through it. Sure as hell! Fat, dirty blonde instead of reddish hair, he doesn’t look a lot like her, but it’s there… Then he realized, That’s why the guard was so nice!

  Suddenly Jamieson realized that he needed to know whether the kid actually came from the house back behind him. If he came from somewhere else and had just walked across the property like Jamieson had, Jamieson had to know that.

  He eased back through the bushes and started after the kid.

  Back in the guard’s outbuilding, Mary and the others frowned as they saw Jamieson pull back and start after Zage.

  “Dammit!” Steve said over the all-team connection. “Do you think he’s realized who Zage is?”

  Randy said, “He came in over the Kinrais property. Hopefully he’s just decided to leave and is going out that way.”

  “Immediately after Zage left that way? That’s too much of a coincidence!”

  Mary’d been switching the video feed from camera to camera over on the Kinrais property following Jamieson as he moved along. She sent the feed to the rest of them along with the map tracking Jamieson. “He isn’t following right behind Zage. He might just be leaving.”

  “He’s waited to leave until after dark the other times.”

  As Jamieson walked in the kid’s trail, he realized that if he was correct and this was Donsaii’s kid, the security team would have systems in place to watch this property as well as the “official” Donsaii residence. He may not think much of Donsaii’s security team, but he was very aware of how many times missions foundered on overconfidence. I’ve got to act like I’m not following this kid just in case they actually are monitoring me!

  He turned off to the side, heading for the border of the lot like he’d come in. The east border was closer to the house and the path the kid was following, so that’s the one he went for. Jamieson was still able to keep an eye on the distant kid as he and his dog loudly made their way through the woods. The kid even stopped to throw sticks for the dog a few times. Jamieson carefully stopped and stood motionless every time the kid turned around. As expected, the boy never noticed him.

  Jamieson fished in his bag and pulled out one of his PGR connected micro cameras. He pulled the sticky off the back and stuck it to the trunk of a tree with a view of the back of the house as he walked by, doing so without any excess motion to warn anyone of what he just done.

  Sure enough, the boy and his dog went into the house without knocking, confirming that it must be where they lived. Jamieson kept stealthily moving along the border of the lot and out to the road on the other side. On the way he left two more cameras where they’d have a view of the front of the house. When he reached the road, he worked his way along it, keeping to the shade of the trees until he got to where he’d stashed his motorcycle.

  Still on their open circuit, Steve said, “Okay guys, what you think?”

  “Looked like he just decided to leave in the middle of the day, don’t know why.”

  “Seems pretty fishy to me.”

  In a depressed tone, Mary said, “He left cameras on trees behind and in front of the Kinrais house.”

  “He did?!”

  “Aw, shit!”

  Barrett said, “Shall I go take ‘em down?”

  Ell joined the conversation, “No, leave ‘em there. If we take them down, he’ll know for sure who Zage is. At present, hopefully he just suspects. If we just keep on as we’ve been, hopefully he won’t get any more evidence to support the theory.”

  “And if he more than suspects?” Steve asked.

  “Then we need to be ready to deal with him if he does something,” Ell said, hard edge in her voice. “He hasn’t done anything but watch so far, and there isn’t a law against that. It does us no harm.” After a pause, she continued, “Believe me, I don’t like it! However, I think he should be treated as innocent until proven guilty. If he proves himself guilty, I want us to be ready to deal with it in no uncertain terms.”

  Mary said, “I think we need to have a three person team following Zage like we do you.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Ell said, “Yeah… we do. Steve? I imagine we need to hire more people, right?”

  “We can do it with the people we’ve got short-term. But if you want to do it long-term we need to hire some people.” His voice took on a warning tone, “It’ll be expensive.”

  “Money’s not an issue. Zage… and Shan’s safety is. Cover them both.” There was another brief pause, “And put a small team on my mother too. Hire as many as you need. Spend what you need to get really good people. I imagine the folks you’ve got might need to work some overtime ‘til we hire new. Pay them double-time for it.”

  ***

  That night at dinner, Zage looked up at his parents, “Did you know that Ell Donsaii’s our neighbor?”

  His mom said, “Um, yeah, the real estate agent mentioned that when we were buying the house.” Zage noticed that his parents glanced at one another before she answered and decided that for some reason they would rather that he didn’t know. He pondered this for a few seconds but then his mother interrupted his train of thought, “How was your first day of kindergarten?”

  Zage blinked at her a couple of times, then said, “Pretty boring.”

  His mother looked unhappy and his dad looked irritated. Zage had a feeling that they disagreed about sending him to kindergarten, but if so they never disagreed about it where he could hear. No one said anything for a second, then his mother said, “Did you make any friends?”

  “It’s just the first day. Everybody’s getting along pretty well so far.” Zage shrugged, “I haven’t figured out which ones are bullies and which ones are targets yet.”

  His parents glanced at one another again, but didn’t say anything in response to what he’d said. “How about your teacher, Ms. Binder?”

  “She’s really nice. Really busy though.” His parents didn’t say anything for a minute, so Zage continued, “Did you tell her that I’m just there to socialize, not to learn?”

  Zage’s dad barked a little laugh and his mother bit her lip for a second as if she wanted to laugh too. She shook her head, then said, “No, we’re hoping you can have a chance to be just a normal kid for a little bit.”

  Zage tilted his head, “Why? I’m not a normal kid.”

  His dad said, “The rest of the kids in your school are gifted too.”

  Zage shrugged, “But they’re nothing like me.”

  “We still think it’d be good for you to have the experience of being a normal kid.”

  “How can I ‘have the experience,’ when I know I’m not the same as the others?”

  His dad sighed, “Maybe you can’t.” He pursed his lips, “But we think we should… at least try to give you that experience. Put you in the situation and let you have a feel for it. You should have some idea what other kid’s lives are like, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve read
a lot about it. Can’t I just study it instead of having to go to school and live it? It really seems like a huge waste of time.”

  “I hope you don’t talk this way to other people. If you imply that their lives are a waste of time—even if in your mind that’s true—they’re going to hate you.”

  Zage frowned, “I know better than to talk that way to them… wait, are you saying that I can’t talk about this kind of stuff to you? That it makes you angry?”

  His mother looked stricken, she slid out of her chair and knelt beside him to give him a hug. “No! No, we love you no matter what! We know you’re… astonishingly smart and it makes us very proud. We just don’t want you to lord it over the other kids and have them despise you.” She pushed him back out to arm’s length, “And, we’d like you to know what their lives are like so that you don’t hurt their feelings by saying something offensive out of a lack of understanding.”

  Zage shrugged, “Okay. I still think it’s a waste of time, but I don’t hate it.” He consciously decided not to mention how he spent most of the class time researching other topics on his HUD. However, it brought up a question he’d been wondering about, “How come Osprey is so much better than everyone else’s AI?”

  His parents exchanged another glance, then his mother said, “You mean because you have a contact with an HUD in it? That’s because they developed them down at Quantum Biomed which is a subsidiary of D5R. Since I work there I was able to get one for you before they came on the general market.”

  Zage said, “Well, that too. But, mostly I was wondering about why my AI is so much more capable. I’ve seen the results of other people’s queries and Osprey finds things they’ve missed, does better analysis of what he finds and his graphic displays are way better.”

  Again, his parents looked at one another. This time his father answered, “When you started asking so many difficult questions, we decided we should invest in a high end AI for you.”

  “Oh, okay.” He smiled broadly at them, “Thanks!”

  ***

  That night, after Zage had gone to bed, Shan turned to Ell, “What if the kid thinks to ask Osprey just how ‘high end’ an AI he is?”

  Ell shook her head, “I don’t want to try to tell the AI to lie to the kid. AI’s aren’t very good at it.”

  “And if he asks, and the AI tells Zage that he’s got one of only three AIs in the world currently powered by Kylen supercomputers?”

  Ell sank back into the couch, staring into the distance. “Maybe I’ll tell him that Ell Donsaii found out how smart he was and she offered to buy it for him.”

  “Even though she’s never met him?”

  Ell shrugged, “She’s met his mom. She’s rich and felt charitable towards Raquel’s genius child?” Ell’s eyes turned up towards where her son’s bedroom was located in the floor above. “Or,” she said sadly, “maybe that question will be the turning point after which we should tell Zage about our little secret.” After a moment, she continued, “I need to tell you about a little incident we had today. The security team is going to start following you and Zage as well as me.”

  She described the incident to him. Shan’s comment started with, “Aw crap…”

  ***

  Heading home for the evening, Turner stopped on his way through the lab, “Vanessa, sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you about the paper. I thought you’d already sent it in, so I just now got around to your message. Good thing you read through it one more time and found that math error. Those other citations were good too. That last paragraph though…” He shook his head, “You’ve had some amazing ideas for further work. While I congratulate you on those, we don’t want to give a roadmap to all the other labs out there. Some of the bigger research groups might beat us to some important results with you pointing the way so elegantly.” He shrugged, “Essentially, the only change I made was to cut some of that last paragraph to keep it from giving away so much.”

  He turned to go, but then turned back, “I really should congratulate you on those ideas. You keep having insights like that and you’re going to go a long ways in this field. Good job.”

  Vanessa stopped him with his hand on the doorknob, “Um, Dr. Turner?”

  He turned back, a questioning look on his face.

  “Zage made those changes.”

  Turner looked like someone had punched him in the stomach, “What?!”

  “That last paragraph, it came from the Kinrais boy.”

  Turner shook his head, “I don’t believe that! Somebody must’ve helped him. His dad’s, what, a mathematician?”

  Vanessa nodded.

  “What’s his mother do?”

  “I don’t know. She works out at D5R and I know they do some biomedical research, but none of it seems to be microbial or to have much to do with the gut. When I asked the kid, he didn’t seem really sure what his mom does, but he seems to think she’s some kind of a gofer for Donsaii. Apparently the mom spends a lot of time going here and there troubleshooting things for the company.”

  Turner stood for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “I think you better ask the kid who helped him. We don’t want them coming after us later claiming they should’ve gotten credit.”

  Vanessa shrugged, “I’ll ask him, but…”

  “But, what”

  “He really is that smart,” she said quietly. “He came in the other day and sequenced his own DNA to look for viral gene insertions.”

  Turner’s eyes narrowed, “He’s using our sequencer! He shouldn’t be doing that, besides, who’s paying for it?”

  “His dad deposited some money into the research account for his expenses.”

  “And is it enough to cover repairs when the kid breaks the sequencer?! For God’s sake, Vanessa, we can’t have some grade school kid in here playing with our lab equipment!”

  “Kindergarten. I make sure he knows what he’s doing with equipment before he uses it but…”

  Turner broke in, “Geez! That’s right, he’s in kindergarten! A kid that age can’t know what he’s doing. I don’t care…”

  Vanessa interrupted this time, “Dr. Turner, before he came in, he’d read the entire manual for the sequencer. I swear he’d committed it to memory! He knows more about how the sequencer works than I do. When I was trying to show him how to use it, he corrected me on a couple of minor procedural things. Things I’ve been doing wrong because I learned them that way from Ralph when I first joined the lab. Unfortunately, I never bothered to read the manual myself.” Seeing the alarmed look on Turner’s face, she said, “Don’t worry the errors won’t have affected our final results.” She grimaced, “We might have gotten cleaner results with fewer runs though.”

  Stunned, Turner stood staring at Vanessa for a moment, then he said, “Maybe I’d better talk to this kid myself next time he’s in here.” He pulled the door open and walked out.

  Chapter Three

  Ell said, “Allan… Let’s have another look at Virginis 3. Have you seen any other evidence of intelligent life? Especially anything moving around?”

  Allan said, “With the improved optics on the new orbiter, I’ve found what looks like roads or paths between some of the city-like structures.”

  “Roads?” Ell said as Allan zoomed the view in on two relatively close-together “cities,” as she thought of the hexagonally gridded areas on V3. She could see something passing between the two cities, but it was relatively meandering. It seemed to be following the landscape rather than blowing through it like modern human roads do. It also looked quite narrow. Some animals appeared to be ambling along it, so maybe it really was just a trail formed by the passage of various creatures. She said, “How wide is that road?”

  “About three meters.”

  The width gave her some perspective. If it’s three meters wide and not very straight, Ell mused, you wouldn’t be able to travel very fast. Maybe it’s more like an animal trail or a country lane that might have arisen on what was originally an animal trail.
She asked Allan to pull back so she could stare at one of the cities again. Maybe this is what primitive cities on earth looked like? She thought about that for a moment, then, Well, maybe this was how they were laid out. The structures still appeared to be covered with vegetation and she doubted that earth cities looked like that until after their civilizations had collapsed.

  She had Allan bring up some maps of primitive cities on earth including the downtown area of some modern cities like London that still had streets laid out like they’d originally formed—haphazardly. Those old cities on earth were often quite irregular though some sections almost always seem to be laid out rectangularly to some degree. The “cities” on V3 seemed to be both more regular, yet less. There’d be an area of hexagonal cells with some of the hexagons divided into six small triangular cells. Rows of the hexagons often gave way to apparent roads in the three directions that lay perpendicular to the flat walls of the hexagons. Ell’s impression was that there were small lanes or passageways around most hexagons, but that major traffic could follow the larger paths along the three major directions that lay at sixty degrees to one another. Occasionally, some small areas were laid out rectangularly. Rarely did she see a section that just seemed to be wedged in between other segments like she saw on many of the old Earth city maps.

  Ell saw animals moving and big birds flying about here and there, both within and without the cities. The animals seemed to be many different sizes and shapes and, other than the fact that there seemed to be more of them in the areas she thought of as cities, she never saw what she thought of as crowds.

  In fact, she never saw large numbers of any kinds of animals that looked similar to one another. No herds of meat animals, no congregations of beings that might be meeting in conclave because of their intelligence. She had the distinct impression that she was looking at an ancient city, overgrown with vegetation, and populated by the animals its masters had once kept as pets or food. She couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the people who built the city. Or could it be that one of the “animals” I’m looking at is the race that built this city? And, of course, that they happen to like having all their buildings covered with vegetation.