by L. L. Fine
GENOSIMULATION
Liron Fine
Copyright © 2001 by Liron Fine
All rights reserved
ISBN: 1492714410
ISBN-13: 9781492714415
TO DADDY,
Wish you were here
Table of contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
03/22/01 MSN CHAT
03/23/01 PEE-MAIL
03/23/01 EMAIL
03/23/01 EMAIL
03/25/01 EMAIL
03/27/01 PEE-MAIL
03/27/01 NANA CHAT
03/27/01 EMAIL
04/1/01 MSN CHAT
04/3/01 EMAIL
04/10/01 EMAIL
04/20/01 EMAIL
05/2/01 IRC
05/13/01 EMAIL
05/13/01 EMAIL 2
05/22/01 EMAIL
05/24/01 MSN CHAT
05/29/01 EMAIL
06/05/01 NANA CHAT
06/10/01 PEE - MAIL
06/20/01 EMAIL
06/22/01 EMAIL
06/28/01 EMAIL
07/06/01 MSN CHAT
SOMETIME IN JULY 2001
07/24/01 EMAIL
08/01/01 MSN CHAT
08/05/01 NANA CHAT
08/05/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
08/06/01 EMAIL
08/10/01 EMAIL
08/11/01 MSN CHAT
08/12/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
08/13/01 EMAIL
08/13/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
08/14/01 EMAIL
08/16/01 WALLA CHAT
08/22/01 EMAIL
08/22/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
08/23/01 EMAIL
08/24/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
08/24/01 EMAIL
08/25/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
08/28/01 EMAIL
09/03/01 EMAIL
09/03/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
09/04/01 EMAIL TO ZOMY
09/10/01 EMAIL
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Prof. Zvi Livneh of the Weizman Institute of Science, for inspiration and guidance on the subject of DNA and cancer. I would also like to thank Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, winner of the A.M. Turing Award, for shedding new light on cryptography and computational complexity. Furthermore, I simply must thank the late Rabbi Philip Berg, who made Kabbalah open to so many. And most of all, I would like to thank Major Y, of unit 8200 in the IDF. Special thanks to Idan Holstein for translating this book, and to Julie Phelps for brilliant editing
The events described herein are completely fictitious. There is no confidential biological lab near Rehovot. There is no secret super computer acting as a global Trojan Horse. All the names and the dates are a figment of my imagination. All, but one.
As a token of my appreciation, here is a preview of the first five chapters of my second book published on Amazon, “At God’s Mercy”. Please click here to download it.
Click here see it on Amazon
03/22/01 MSN Chat
Chromosome: I need your help.
Me: Excuse me?
Chromosome: I need your help. What's not clear?
Me: You are not clear. You are also rude. What do you want?
Chromosome: I need you to trust me.
Me: ???
Me: Who are you?
Chromosome: The question is not who I am, but if you can help me.
Me: Are you sure you have the right person?
Chromosome: Sure.
Me: OK.
(3 minute pause)
Chromosome: Hello, are you there?
Me: What do you wannnnnnttttt?
Chromosome: Help! What’s not clear?
ME: OK. How can I help you?
Chromosome: Oh! Now you're talking. I need you to write some things on my behalf.
ME: ???
Chromosome: To write a book about me.
ME: How do you know I write books?
Chromosome: I'll email you in a moment.
At this point he went offline. I didn’t give it a second thought. And why should I? He obviously didn't have my email, and it was an anonymous chat - no email addresses were used in it.
I spend a lot of time online. I chat a lot. I know that strange conversations are the bread and butter of the Net. So, nothing unusual actually happened here.
Anyway, if you go into that, when men approach me, it's usually for sexual reasons: they are gay, and hope that I like men. Well, although I'm gay-friendly, I am not gay. Sorry, Mr. Chromosome. Look elsewhere.
And yet it seemed to me that he knew me – not a simple knowledge, either. Real knowledge. Yeah, well, that's not a big thing either. Probably somebody I met on the Net. I meet hundreds. No exaggeration.
No more than five minutes passed - and I actually got an email.
More than one.
It started with a precise description of all the online information about me. Every mail account I use (there are several), all my favorite sites, and all the forums that I participate in (including the sexual and the most embarrassing, which I use under fake aliases, may my wife forgive me).
This annoyed me.
The next step started to worry me.
He sent me my bank account details. Updated to the second. Including all investments and securities. My driver's license. National security. Tax depositions, salary notes, everything.
This man knew too much, Goddammit.
The emails kept flowing. Traffic tickets. Legal suits (two cases). Medical history – even things I forgot ages ago. Military reports. Psychological evaluations. School grades. More psychological evaluations. Final exams scores, including those disgraceful math tests I'd rather forget. My personal secret file, one that I never knew existed.
He knew everything about me. And I began to sweat.
When I tried to write him a reply, I received a message saying his address didn’t exist.
Poof.
03/23/01 Pee-mail
Are you familiar with these websites that allow you to send your friends a funny special greeting card? One of the more pleasurable ones is called Pee-mail. It lets you pee your message in the snow. You should try it. Anyway, I use it often enough, and here’s one - this time somebody used it to send me a message.
I clicked the attached link, and a small illustrated child jumped in front of my eyes, his muzzle elegantly drawn, and a cheerful yellow liquid stream drew the following handwritten words on the screen:
I need your help
I took a moment to think. Obviously, this guy knew too much about me, and didn’t bother to hide it. On the contrary, he was waving this fact in front of my eyes in a threatening way: I know who you are, I know where you live, and I can hurt you. Really bad.
I did not like it, and I even considered turning to the police. But, I didn’t.
For many reasons. Firstly, involving the police is such a complicated thing - a real headache - that this so called threat didn’t yet justify it.
Beyond that, the police wouldn’t really know how to treat it. Dealing with the Internet, as we all know, it is quite above the IQ threshold of the police. Sure, some policemen know something about it - but the police themselves? Nah, they are still trying to find the button that turns the PC on.
But the real reason for me to hold my horses was him, himself. His style. And the fact that he made a point of asking for help.
"I need your help" - these words spoke to me, I must admit. An individual seeking help is a person who needs help. If he threatens while doing it, it mean
s he need a very big help.
So I waited. Not too long.
03/23/01 Email
Tapuz chat. Now.
*
In those days, Tapuz was one of the leading chat platforms on the Israeli web. I was in the middle of doing something else, but I responded anyway. I entered it and looked for him.
Again, his email address was fake. ‘Nobody’ didn’t want me to know who he was. Yet.
This time I used a completely different name, I wanted to spy on him a little.
Yeah, right.
*
Chromosome: Oh, you changed your name!
Mentally crushed: Yes.
Chromosome: Why?
Mentally crushed: No reason.
Chromosome: I have no problem identifying you.
Mentally crushed: I understand that. I turned to the police.
Chromosome: What? Why?
Mentally crushed: You ask why??? You showed me some scary stuff! What’s this all about? Who are you?
Chromosome: Sorry… I didn’t want to scare you.
Mentally crushed: So what do you want?
Chromosome: I can't tell you yet. I need your help in the publication of several things.
Mentally crushed: What exactly?
Chromosome: You can call it government secrets...
Mentally crushed: I'm listening.
Chromosome: …but no one must know they are government secrets.
Mentally crushed: I'm starting to not understand.
Chromosome: A moment…
Here I waited more than ten minutes. I noticed Chromosome was still in the chat, and spent some time explaining why I was so mentally crushed to some worried women.
Chromosome: I'm back.
Mentally crushed: Welcome back.
Chromosome: Where were we?
Mentally crushed: "…no one must know, it’s a secret…"
Chromosome: Oh yeah. It should be written in the form of a fiction book. So it wouldn’t be completely clear whether what it says is true or not.
Mentally crushed: Why, what's the big deal??? What would happen if they knew?
Chromosome: The Mossad? They would kill me and kill you.
Mentally crushed: What do you say?
Chromosome: Sorry. It's the truth.
Mentally crushed: And if it was written like a fiction book?
Chromosome: This way, there is doubt. They can let us go.
Mentally crushed: Then they won't kill me?
Chromosome: That's right. It will be to get publicity, and you can always claim you made up everything. Like your previous books. They were not very realistic either.
Mentally crushed: What do you know about my books?
Chromosome: One published, and two drafts you have on your hard drive.
Mentally crushed: Son of a bitch! You know everything about me?
Chromosome: Pretty much…
Mentally crushed: And what about you? Won't they kill you too?
Chromosome: It doesn't matter. I'll be dead within a few months anyway.
Mentally crushed: ???
Chromosome: Maybe a little more. I should be developing cancer in a few months, but I might skip it. We'll see.
Mentally crushed: What nonsense… stop the bullshit, will you?
Chromosome: I assure you, it's not nonsense. Everything is real.
Mentally crushed: Yeah, right.
Chromosome: Here it begins.
Mentally crushed: What begins? Your cancer?
Chromosome: My story.
Mentally crushed: OK, I'm listening.
Chromosome: Gotta go! Bye.
*
As I recall, at this point it was clear that it wasn’t going to be a short story. Mr. Chromosome (by the way, his alias is, perhaps, the only detail that is not made-up in this book. He kept using this alias ‘Chromosome’ most of the time. Everything else - names and dates - are completely made up. Mostly.) sounded like a serious person, at least in his intentions to share something interesting with me.
And I'm, of course, a big fan of interesting stuff, even if it’s not real, as I will constantly remind you throughout this book. This, by the way, will be the way it's done: I'll tell you a worrying story that might be true, but you will read it as if it is a true work of fiction. This way, everyone will win. You will hear a fascinating story that should keep you awake at nights. Chromosome (or Zomy, for short) will have the publicity he desires. And maybe, just maybe, you'll think it's not just a made-up imaginary paranoid tale.
Which of course it is.
*
And what will become of it?
I don't know. If enough people think a story is true, then it becomes so. This is how things are. Ideas turn into reality. Just like Communism, just like religion. Someone said something, someone else listened, and that's how it caught on.
This is what Chromosome wanted, and I hope this is what he wants still.
And it started with a new email I received from an entirely new fictitious address.
03/23/01 Email
This is how it will be done: I'll send you all that has happened to me the last two years, and you promise to publish it as a book. OK?
But it must be a novel, an investigative journalism piece, or something like that. When they begin to examine the facts, they MUST discover that everything is complete fiction or something like it.
If they find that there is something real here, and start to check it out, then we’re both screwed – you more than me, because I'm dead anyway. As for you, some people you know will start to die… and who knows how it will end.
I can swear on my father's grave that what I write here is the absolute truth, but your readers must understand that it is an entirely imaginary book. If you want out, say so now, and I'll find someone else to help me.
I'll give you some time to think about it. If your decision is to go through with it, post a message on the BDSM forum on the Hyde Park site. Say you are looking for a female wrestler or something.
*
Well, what choice did I have?
I went on and I posted the short message he told me to. I wasn't surprised to find out that the message was deleted after day - the man knew how to wipe out any trace, obviously. After two days I received an email from him.
03/25/01 Email
Thank you for taking this job. I'm sure you'll enjoy it because I know you're quite a voyeur. Now, I have a little problem. I don't know where to start. So I think I’ll start by telling you some details about who I am and what I do, and hope you won’t be able to figure out actual true stuff from my details. : )
OK.
It doesn't matter what my name is. What DOES matter is that I work for a non-existent government institute, dealing with decoding the human genome.
Now this is not what you might think from what you saw on the news. Everything they sell you about Dolly the sheep and scientific breakthroughs is actually old news.
We cloned a cow in the early nineties, and I know the Americans did it too, so did the French and the Russians. It's not that complicated.
The real trick here is:
1. Deciphering all the genetic code
2. Understanding what is written there
They tell you we’re not there yet – but it's all one big lie. There’s a company called Celera which supposedly did a great part of the work already. Moreover, the global genome project is working towards it too. Yet it's all bullshit.
What Celera is doing now, we did 5 years ago. So either we're so clever and advanced – or Celera is a fictitious project of the Americans.
To cut a long story short - the genome has already been decoded, and if you'll pay me a visit at the lab (it’s not possible of course) you can see our genome-based computer.
Yet I'm working on something else completely.
Must finish now – talk to you soon.
*
I was VERY interested by then, but I was still skeptical. Who wouldn’t be?
> Yet it certainly looked like the beginning of a book. Still, I had to remind myself, this man had access to all my past and present data, from kindergarten to my last visit to the supermarket. I’d hoped this was not a joke, but at the same time I hoped that it was - some not-funny practical joke by one of my friends, who accidentally came upon me in a confidential database and wanted to tease me a little.
And maybe it really was a bored office worker with access to databases? A small time "analyzer"? Or a 14-year-old computer geek who wanted to be cruel to me?
Those things were known to happen.
Either way, I haven’t heard from him in two days.
03/27/01 Pee-mail
Again the little boy peeing on my screen! I laughed quite a bit.
"Sorry... boss disturbed me……."
*
Or was it your teacher? Or your mother?
Anyway, I waited patiently. And I got my reward the same day.
I read that email carefully. Twice, thrice, ten times over.
It absolutely shocked me. Made me think a lot. Had things gone the other way, I might as well share it with you, but as things turned out, I cannot share it.
Not THAT email.
As a matter of fact, I can't share most of the messages I had received from Mr. Chromosome. Why, do you ask?
There is more than one reason. Firstly, the correspondence reveals too much personal information - such details that will make it easy to track him down, to confirm (or disprove) what will be written here below. I could try to rewrite it – I actually did try, but it turned out I'm not that good a writer. It had to be done some other way.
The other reason is more to the point: those emails and chat messages are mostly BORING. I can't make a book out of them. And this is what you’re here for, isn’t it? To read a good book.
It's also what he asked me to do: to write everything in the book. A novel.
So, in order to protect him and to entertain you, large parts of this book will be written as a book.
I will start with the content of that email.