The Zen Gene

by Mains, Laurie

  Nothing felt the same anymore she thought as she dug into the box and found the item she was looking for. A rusty metal bottle cap the old-fashioned kind with the pointy edges and the faded word “Coke” on top. It was the kind you needed to have a bottle opener to remove. She turned it over and read the words printed inside.

  I LOVE YOU

  When she showed it to her mom she said it was probably from a contest or something. She never told her mom that Tyler gave it to her. It was summer and Andi was at work and she was babysitting him. They rode their bikes to the airport and they were lying together on the grass watching planes take off. She was dozing, half asleep in the warm sun, when he took her hand and placed the bottle cap on her palm and closed her fingers one at a time over it. He was eleven and she was thirteen.

  She was jarred from the memory by the sound of the kitchen door opening and before she could call out Tyler was standing in her bedroom doorway.

  “Are you upset?” he said.

  She looked at him and tears formed in her eyes. Yes, she was upset but he would not understand why so what good would it do to tell him?

  “No,” she said.

  “Want sandwiches?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  He turned to leave.

  ”Wait Ty I want to talk to you,” she said.

  He stopped and turned around and sat on her bed holding the tray of sandwiches on his knees. With one hand he started to fish around under the covers looking for her remote control.

  “No Tyler no TV I want to talk,” she said.

  She took the tray of food from him and set it down on her dresser. She turned around and stared at him and he looked uncomfortable like he knew he was in trouble.

  “Okay,” he said and immediately began fidgeting. He noticed her iPod on the floor but he did not reach for it like he normally would.

  “Why did you do that to me, give me that virus? It made me sick. I trusted you,” she said finishing with a chin-trembling sob.

  “For a baby,” he said thinking that was enough to explain it to her but then he remembered what Andrea said about not talking about babies and he risked a quick look to see what the word baby did to her face.

  “Do you even know what that means?” she said through her tears.

  He glanced up at her eyes again and then away. She sat down beside him on her bed and roughly pushed his shoulder toppling him over. He was not expecting it and he fell completely over but quickly righted himself and braced himself for more. He watched her stomach muscles to see if her weight shifted so he would know if she tried to do it again.

  “Tyler, you don’t even know what that means. You think a baby is like your stinky iguana. You think you can get one and then do whatever you want to it like some lab rat. It does not work that way. Babies are forever. You were a baby, I was a baby, and you can’t do weird stuff to a baby,” she said.

  Her voice was high and exasperated and he knew she was upset but when she said iguana he began thinking about the sequence of lizard DNA which coded for a tongue flick. He could see all of them in order in his mind but he read only the letters at the three end of sequence. This kept his mind busy as he tried to decipher why she was upset and the meaning of the words she said.

  She turned and looked at his face to see if he was listening to what she was saying and he flinched under her gaze.

  “Who would take care of it?” she said.

  “What?”

  “A baby.”

  She was trying to think of something meaningful to get through to him. She remembered he let his pet lizard loose in the field next door because he did not want to take care of it.

  “Andrea,” he said certain it would be a safe answer.

  “You’d give our baby to your mom to take care of?”

  She shouted the words in disbelief and he saw her muscles tighten and he braced again certain she was going to try to push him over but she did not. He was confused by her reaction. He thought it was a safe answer because that is what Andrea does.

  “Wait a minute. What am I saying?” she said. There was a comical look of bewilderment on her face but he missed it. “How did this get so freaking twisted?” she said. She laughed at her own crazy reaction to letting his mom take care of the baby she did not have. This whole thing is insane she thought as she looked at him. She turned to him and lifted his chin and studied his open innocent features and his intense grey eyes.

  They were cast downward she knew because he found it hard to meet her gaze and then she realized he had absolutely no clue what she was talking about. Of course it was natural he would expect Andrea to take care of their baby. In his experience she is the mother unit and that’s what she does. She continued to look at him and lifted his chin higher so he would have to look at her face. “Tyler do you love me?” she said. Her voice was low and questioning but also conveyed a tone of challenge.

  “Yes,” he said. He spoke without hesitation and although she had asked the question she was not prepared for the impact his direct simple response had on her. It brought fresh tears to her eyes and now it was her turn to look away.

  He shifted uncomfortably on the bed because tears meant he said the wrong answer and he tried to think of a different word to say.

  “Do you know what it means?” she said.

  She spoke the words softly the question directed more at herself than to him. Did he know what it meant?

  “Yes,” he said but this time he did not risk saying more words. Instead he took her hand and held it on his lap and opened her fingers one by one to show her the bottle cap she held in her palm. Then he looked into her eyes and held them for a long moment, “Yes,” he said.

  He turned his eyes away from hers but not before she saw something in them which caused her to shiver. Her rational mind knew he did not understand what love means to a girl, to him it was the same word you said to your grandma, but her heart at least hoped it meant something more.

  She was exhausted and emotionally drained. She squeezed his hand and said “You can watch TV now if you want I’m going to get ready for bed.” He did not reach for the remote and when she started to get up he did not let go of her hand. He gently pulled her back down beside him.

  “Are you mad?” he said.

  “Yes, but I’ll get over it,” she said and smiled.

  “Me too,” he said.

  She laughed and he laughed because she laughed and it made her feel a bit giddy.

  “Sorry about the baby,” he said.

  “It’s okay Ty,” she said.

  “Gene,” he said.

  “Gene?” she asked.

  “The baby,” he said.

  “You already have a name for our baby?” she said. She was amazed at how detailed his thinking was and she laughed.

  “The baby is Gene,” he said.

  “Don’t I get to pick the name?” she said playing along with him to see where he went with this.

  “No,” he said.

  “That’s not fair,” she said.

  “You can pick the next one,” he said.

  “Next what?” she said confused trying to follow this weird conversation.

  “Baby,” he said.

  “You think there’s going to be two babies?” she said and poked him in the ribs trying to tickle him but he did not flinch. She gave up and started to rise from the bed to get changed.

  “Brenda,” he said.

  She laughed. The whole thing was crazy.

  “You said I could name the next one,” she said.

  “You waited too long,” he said and laughed.

  She laughed and grabbed him and tried to put him in a headlock and they struggled a bit and then for some reason this time he let her.

  Chapter 15

  Bad News

  Mann held her as she sobbed he could feel the intense raw emotion radiating from her. After a while her tears subsided and he heard her say, “The Sergeant’s suit is shredded I had to cut it to get it off.” />
  The words she spoke were muffled as she whispered into his shoulder. He knew she was in shock from all that had happened but he was relieved to hear her say those words it meant she’d come to terms with the situation and made a decision.

  “I think I can patch it,” she said.

  “Hunter’s suit is small, not quite the right size for Tyler but it is undamaged,” he said, “it will be tight but I’m sure he can squeeze into it.”

  He spoke softly into her hair and knew again what he knew the moment he saw her in Ralph’s. He loved her deeply, hopelessly, and always had.

  “Promise me you will keep him safe, both of you safe,” she said.

  He nodded his head and tried to let go of her but she would not release him. She held him fiercely to delay if only for a few seconds the storm she knew was coming.

  “I know this all seems wrong to you but it is the only way to deal with this mess. I don’t think Western knows about the anthrax but as soon as things quiet down he will send another team into the old factory and it will be game over for us. For all our sakes we have to beat him and the police to it,” he said.

  “Why? What’s in it for him?” she said.

  “Something Hunter told me makes me think he wants the virus for himself. He seems to be working way beyond his authority. He doesn’t yet know how POrna works but he knows it does, he’s seen the results. He knows if he controls the virus he could conceivably make hundreds of millions of dollars.

  The country that ends up controlling POrna virus would immediately create an anti-virus to inoculate their own soldiers against its effects. That country could then destroy the armies of any and all nations opposing them. Western would become obscenely wealthy by selling POrna to the highest bidder. I know Hunter will eventually tell Western what she heard in the motel room, if she hasn’t already, and her story will convince him even more to try and get it,” he said.

  “If you manage to destroy the evidence in the lab that will take care of the anthrax problem but what makes you think it will stop Western?” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking about this. The way I see it once the physical evidence is gone no one can legally tie anything to Tyler. It might not stop the authorities from trying but it is tough to prove anything in court without physical evidence. As for Western he can’t implicate Ty in the death of the street person because he would need to explain why the Canadian Military knew about the body and did not report it and why one of his vehicles exploded outside the crime scene and his people ran away.

  Without physical evidence nobody will believe a sixteen-year-old kid failing grade eight could do any of this. I wouldn’t believe it if I had not talked with Tyler and seen the results of POrna myself. I’m hoping Ty is right about the virus being self-limiting and it will not continue to infect soldiers. If it’s true the virus will eventually die out and take the problem of its existence with it,” he said.

  “Lee, I don’t understand how any of this could happen. He has been with me his whole life, I knew he was interested in science and experiments, you only have to look at his bedroom to know that, but how does a kid go from playing around with science to creating POrna?” she said.

  He sighed and kissed the top of her head; it felt so normal and right to be holding her again.

  “Well, like I said before, you can forget your worries that Ty might be mentally challenged, clearly he is not. In some respects the focus of his thinking is narrow but in a fundamental way I believe his intelligence redefines the definition of genius.

  He is not aware of any of this and if he was I don’t think it would interest him. I believe, though he’s had no formal training, he represents a type of natural scientist,” he said.

  “I don’t understand. Can someone who is a disaster at school be a scientific genius?” she said.

  “What I am going to say may sound simplistic because, frankly, it is. His intelligence manifests in ways which make him appear to be intellectually challenged. Most people operate within well-defined social structures from which they evaluate others by observing their behaviours . Ty doesn’t recognize the accepted social conventions. I’m not sure if he is like someone with autism who can’t detect social cues or if he is so advanced social cues are detectable but meaningless to him. Either way I am counting on society’s continuing ignorance of him; ultimately that is what will save him from prison.

  There are maybe a dozen Ph.D. geneticists on this planet who could perhaps start to comprehend what he has achieved and I know for an absolute certainty, knowing what I do about POrna, that I could not convince a single one of them it exists and that is what I am counting on to get him out of this mess. Have you ever heard the term ‘savant’?” he said.

  Andi nodded her head. Most people have heard of those rare disabled people with a single incredible but often useless ability.

  “I think Ty is a kind of savant but without the associated disability. It is true he has few social skills but there are thousands of engineers and scientists exactly like him except his deficits and talents are more extreme. From observing him I believe his mind naturally operates on multiple discreet levels; one level has an intuitive ability to identify connections between unconnected things but at an extreme level of connectedness. Another level has a ravenous appetite for raw scientific data and a computer-like ability to retrieve and make sense of it.

  While I was talking to him in his room he was reading new research on glial cells on his computer while at the same time watching The Simpsons on part of the monitor with the sound off and using ear buds to listen to some God awful music. I questioned him about glial cells and I found he had a post doc level of understanding of the material.

  When I asked him he clearly knew what The Simpsons episode was about though I suppose he might have seen it before.

  My point is he is ingesting and learning vast amounts of information all the time. I do not believe much, if any, of this learning is conscious on his part. I don’t think he is saying to himself, ‘today I will learn bio-synthesis.’ It is more like the way a baby acquires language. He is not actively trying to learn anything he is simply absorbing information from exposure to it.

  These discreet brain functions along with his ability to focus on several things at once are, individually, extraordinary traits but to possess all of them is unprecedented.

  He is able to combine these talents and make the kind of connections and intuitive leaps needed to come up with something like POrna. I know he is developmentally and emotionally immature; he obviously lags behind his peers socially but I believe he will eventually overcome this. Imagine him as an adult with his gifted agile mind and a mature intellect.

  Given access to the right resources think of what he might achieve. He could potentially eradicate disease as we know it or reform the human genome so we live for hundreds of years. There is no limit to what his brilliant mind could come up with,” he said.

  She was listening in silence her feelings ranging from fear to pride to hope and all the while holding on tight to him.

  “Another piece of this puzzle is what spurred him to create POrna in the first place. As unlikely as this might sound it was something Zen said to him.”

  “What on earth did she say?” she asked.

  The look of surprise on her face made it clear she didn’t think anything Zen would say could be that important.

  “She told Tyler her father died in a war,” he said.

  Andi’s brow wrinkled with confusion. “What? That’s not right. Her father, if you can call him that, was a drug addict. He died living on the street in East Vancouver. Ellie told me all about him.” She leaned back and looked at him and asked, “Why would she lie to him about that?”

  He leaned back from her and looked at her with a raised eyebrow and an indulgent half smile.

  “Her dad was a drug addict who died on the street. Why do you think she lied?” he said.

  “Oh,”

  “Anyway the truth doesn’t matt
er. He picked up on the emotion or the pain she felt when she said it and it had an impact on him. At the age of ten, because of his strong connection to Zen, he decided to fix the main problem with the human race. It is ironic he developed POrna because of a lie she told but that does not make it any less amazing,” he said.

  He put down his beer and took her hand while he was talking and he was holding it tightly with both of his when she looked him in the eyes and said, “I have some iron-on patches that should seal up the suit.”

  She got up from the couch. He watched her turn to go to get the patches but stopped when she saw something move past the window. She turned back to him with a quizzical expression on her face. She was about to ask him if he saw it when there was a deafening bang and the front door disintegrated.

  Chapter 16

  Cutting Orders

  September

  7:00 AM

  Patricia Hunter paced stiffly around inside Western’s office. She was agitated, she did not want to sit, the skin under the tape wrapped around her ribs itched like hell and she wanted to get the hell going. Her next assignment was in Paris she would be happy to get out of Victoria. Things went very wrong at the old factory and she was worried a disproportionate amount of the blame would stick to her if she hung around.

  Sergeant Nichol was in a stage three coma and not likely to survive. The blast cost her twenty-five percent of her hearing in her left ear and ten percent in her right. She did not mention that to Major Webb at the Canadian NATO Mission in Paris when he requested her services.

  “What did they say?” she asked when he hung up the phone.

  “He is non-responsive; they are still buying the motorcycle story at least for now. That was good thinking on your part. I hope they never go looking for…what was the name you gave them?” he said.