Mirikami looked concerned. No one had told him she’d been sick or hurt. “Maggi was in the infirmary?” This was directed at Deanna, who had remained standing nearby. She reddened slightly, but smiled and said nothing.
Dillon noticed that both Noreen and Marlyn shared the same secretive smile as Deanna, with a gleam in their eyes that painful experience had taught him spoke of feminine mischief. “When is she going to show us this new armor? I’ll bet she’s late because she can’t even stand up in the heavy damned thing.” The wise crack was designed to cover his unease. An unease that was generally justified when Maggi was involved. He suddenly leaped two feet in the air and spun around, looking for whoever had just goosed him. Nobody there.
Then Dillon suddenly realized his crotch was getting uncomfortably warm, and he knew where the heat was localized. Standing in front of a roomful of gawking guests, dignitary’s, and two aliens, he pulled a fastener loose on his Smart Suit’s waistband, plunged his right hand down the front of his pants to the “formerly stylish” package bulge of that old suit’s design, and with a hard tug yanked out a metallic athletic cup. The way he promptly dropped the thing, it either bit him, or was hot to the touch.
The sight and sound of the clinking cup bouncing on the deck drew laughter, but Thad had stepped away from Dillon and was looking around intently. Dillon hadn’t jumped out of mere nervousness, although the height of his funny leap might have indicated some of that was present. However, the metal protector had not heated up all on its own.
Thad knew what he was looking for, and spotted it with difficulty. It was a barely detectable visual distortion between him and Dillon. He took two steps forward and appeared to wrap his arms around an empty place in air. Then the empty place in air suddenly broke his grip, lifted him and had him pin wheeling, about six feet above the deck. A handful of Ladies knew what was happening and were laughing hilariously. Of the men in the room, only Rafe laughed with them.
Thad squawked and yelled, “Put me down, damn it!”
A familiar voice, coming from a point just below him said. “You got it, soldier boy.” He dropped to the floor, putting out his hands to catch himself, grateful now for the lower than normal gravity.
Sarge quit enjoying the other two men’s distress, and spoke up before he became the next target. “Maggi, you got ‘em both. You sure have the muscles to do it now.” He nervously backed towards a side table’s edge to keep her from getting behind him.
Longstreet leaned over to Mirikami. “That’s one impressive suit. It works fast in real time, covering at least the visible light range and infrared. I can only detect a faint distortion from time to time. The heating of the metal cup must be some sort of radiant energy, because I saw the front of his pants start to glow in IR when Dillon turned around. I caught a faint shimmer in the air from him to where Thad made the mistake of trying to grab her.”
Joe startled backwards when her voice, just two feet from him, asked, “Who’s the good looking smart guy? And why’s he hanging out with this bunch of puny male losers?”
Mirikami was grinning. He was relieved to know she was well enough to play jokes, and strong enough to rough house. Yet, twelve days was a long time to spend in a med lab for something minor.
She was getting along in years, and despite the fact that modern people stayed active until very late stages of their lives on Hub worlds, Koban had been harder on their bodies than would be the case on any other human world. He’d noted that Maggi had developed gray strands at the temples, and the outdoor, hot summer sun had added creases at the corners of her eyes in the last few years. She was a hundred and eleven he reminded himself. Hell, he was ninety-one himself. The same age Maggi had been when they were captured.
“Maggi, you’ve had your fun. Let’s see this fabulous suit.”
Suddenly, there was a brief shimmer in the center of the room, and a figure barely over five feet tall stood there, in a small smooth textured black and white suit, with an exotic rounded triangular face mask on a relatively small helmet. The helmet’s front had strange multiple glowing blue lights, with something like earphones on the sides of the head.
Those six blue faceplate lights were centrally distributed around where her face would be, but none appeared to be placed exactly where you’d expect her eyes to be. Tet wondered how she could see the outside world.
The entire suit appeared snug and form fitting, even at what were joints on other suits. Here the elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles looked like they flexed as if she were wearing a soft plastic layer only a couple of centimeters thick. The gloved fingers were far more flexible looking and slender than any hard suit gloves any of the men had ever seen.
The shoulders were less blocky than on most suits. However, there it did have small, articulated plates over the same flexible coverings of the other joints. It was an exceedingly compact set of armor, even when you allowed for the fact that it had been made to fit a small, slightly built woman.
The form turned and walked to the podium, passing through the people with a graceful motion that Mirikami recognized as typical of any of the TGs. She definitely had received that particular mod, so she had not needed a powered suit to lift Thad over her head.
With her back to the room, she reached for the helmet sides, which widened at the neck for her to slip over her head as she lifted. When she shook her head, medium length, disheveled blonde hair fell to cover the back of her neck.
For the entire time Mirikami had known the woman, she had sandy hair, always kept in a short, low maintenance style that required little effort. Dillon had known her for ten years before the fateful voyage to Newborn, and he’d never seen her with blonde hair, or grown that long.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked curiously, before she turned around. It appeared that the Ladies had pulled a switch on them, and he heard them snickering even as he asked the question.
Mirikami made the same assumption, and wondered why this seemed such a funny joke to them. It was mildly amusing, but not a laugh riot. Then she turned to answer Dillon.
Maggi’s voice asked, “Who do you think, stud boy?” The question came from an attractive young woman’s mouth, one wearing a touch of makeup and eye shadow that Maggi had never been seen to wear.
Dillon answered, “I don’t know, that’s why I asked, Tinker Bell.” He glanced to his left to see that Tet was standing with the first slack-jawed expression he’d ever seen on the normally unflappable man. Mirikami recognized the voice, attitude, and resemblance.
“Tet, you look like you know who she is.”
She answered for him. “Of course he does, you twit. I told him once that I had mentored a moron when I chose you. What a waste of my advancing years to train a scientist that can’t see obvious evidence unless it hits him in his package.” She started forward to demonstrate said action when Mirikami touched her arm and stopped her. He used his already open mouth to ask her a question.
“How the hell did you do this, Maggi? You look fabulous!”
“Why, thank you for noticing, dear.” She said this with a bright cheery smile and a fake fluttering of her long eyelashes as, without looking at Dillon, she extended her left hand and casually flicked a center finger off the tip of her thumb, to feel it smack sharply on the previously announced target.
Dillon yelled and bent over as a laughing Noreen stepped close to tell him she still loved him, despite his inability to recognize his oldest friend.
Sarge and Thad started talking over one another. Sarge, the loudest, won.
“Holy crap, Maggi, you look decades younger.”
Thad asked, “Are you a natural blonde?” Only to have his wife kick him lightly in his shin.
“What kind of question is that, you lunk head? Her hair got darker as she got older. It changed back. Mine used to be red before it lightened in the sun here. Shades change.” She was strawberry blonde now.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Tet reminded Maggi. “This obviously isn’t a
face lift and makeover. Coldar said you have been in what must have been a med lab, based on his description. What happened?”
“The Prada happened.” She answered, and then explained.
“We used a number of genes from Koban life, but we certainly aren’t limited to that source. Wister is over a thousand of our years old, but this isn’t a natural condition. They don’t age after reaching maturity, and they reach that age in just under twenty orbits of this world. They still die from accidents, predator attacks, Krall wars, and diseases, but not from old age. Wister explained that due to his race’s reverence for elders, that at some point in their distant past, they discovered how to modify their genes, adding some that they designed to prevent ageing, to produce the elder and wiser leaders they wanted to follow.”
Dillon, coming closer to listen asked, “They solved the problem of preventing loss of telomere ends during cell division?”
“Not exactly,” she said. She made an effort to explain to the others, “Telomere regions on our DNA deter the degradation of active genes near the ends of chromosomes, when cells repeatedly divide without creating a perfect DNA copy. As telomeres shorten, functional genes are lost over repeated cell divisions, so we start to lose genes we need to maintain our bodies, and we age in a variety of ways. About four hundred years ago, our own early geneticists found ways to slow the loss of telomeres, and thus delay the onset of age related gene damage. It keeps us younger longer, but eventually, after a hundred twenty or thirty years, the damage incurred by cell division progresses and accelerates to a point where the loss of genetic material is too fast, and we deteriorate rapidly in just a few years. What we colloquially refer to as RELP. Rapid End Life Process.”
“What did the Prada do that’s different?’ Thad queried, certain he wasn’t going to understand the answer.
“Their DNA was modified to create a permanent template of the original young telomere regions at conception, and stick it in the center of a section of evolutionarily unused, so-called-junk-DNA. These are areas found in most genomes, which at one time in the far distant history of life would have made proteins no longer used by the evolving organism. Proteins not needed in our case because we are not the primitive fish-coming-out-of-water creatures we once were.
“Much of the junk DNA doesn’t do anything, it is excess evolutionary baggage. The Prada modifications make copies of their birth telomeres, and place the templates in this unused DNA. Then, in another active gene section, nearer the “safe” central regions of their DNA strands, they put an intelligently designed and functional gene complex that has the job of copying from that saved template, fixing any loss to the ends of the telomeres when there is cell division. That designed gene complex can copy the protected template from its own cell or from other cells, so there are zillions of copies of what the healthy end pieces of your original chromosomes should look like.”
“Well, I was sure I wouldn’t understand and I don’t,” said Thad. “That sounds like adding those Prada genes would end your aging by saving the telomeres you have now. Except that if you did that this month, you were already over a hundred and ten years old, with that many years of degradation. Isn’t that how old you’d stay, using your old telomeres? You look a lot younger.”
With her TG muscles, Maggi slapped Thad playfully and painfully on the shoulder. “People don’t smoke anymore or grow tobacco, but give that man a cigar.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Never mind, old reference. I only meant you asked the right question and deserved a reward. We now have nanites that we can program to scavenge for specific DNA segments. They were the answer for us old farts, and our age-damaged telomeres. I’ll let Rafe describe it, since he’s the brains that solved that problem.”
Rafe went to the podium and harrumphed twice to clear his throat, and then gave what he’d call a concise description. “None of us older people have completely original telomere copies, but the damage happens at different rates in various tissues, and there isn’t the same identical loss of telomere segments in each type of tissue. I sent programed nanites into Maggi’s body gathering telomere copies from multiple tissue types, and then used other nanites, and a standard gene-sequencing program, to assemble what her original undamaged telomeres most likely looked like when she reached maturity, at about age twenty-five. We used that process to create her personal template for use by the Prada repair genes. I made one for myself, and one for Aldry, and all three are different in each individual, unique for our bodies.”
Dillon’s face lit up in comprehension. “The Prada genes stop the aging process, but you used nanites to perform reconstructive DNA surgery on Maggi for the past week, restoring her telomeres and lost genes. The accumulated age damage.”
“Well…, twelve days, not seven.” Rafe corrected. “It could go a few days longer and lower her apparent chronological age by another five years, I believe. I think she may be at about where she was at age thirty. The transformation isn’t fully complete because not all of the cells were repaired, or damaged ones out of her tissues yet. The process can always be repeated, by the way if, there is age slippage.”
Sarge looked at the spec ops troops, grinning like a fool. “Ain’t cha glad you came now? We can make you young again.”
Sergeant Jenkins looked at him funny, and then chuckled. “You decrepit old geezer, I’m only twenty-five right now.”
There was a great deal of laughing and enthusiasm in the room, as people contemplated reversing their current ages. This was as momentous to many of them as the Koban genes had been. Mirikami saw that with Maggi’s appearance as a spur, even the recalcitrant Hub City clone gene recipients were now thinking of accepting a new gene mod, one originating in an alien species they had just met today.
Coldar, unaffected by the human’s enthusiasm, asked a pointed question. “Have you considered the implications for your species of indefinitely extending your lives this way, and of the reproductive issues and population pressures this will produce?”
Maggi had removed the remainder of the suit, which opened for removal much the way the helmet had. She was in a small jumpsuit that she had worn under the armor. It clearly revealed she had a fuller, if still slender figure. “Yes. Aldry, Rafe, and I have considered the possible long-term consequences for humanity, Coldar, yet we don't have an answer for your question.
“I was personally finished with reproduction, because I had delivered three children in my life, and desired no more. I recognize that I might change that position now. There are mothers in our society that produced five or six children, or even more, for the replacement of population after our brush with near extinction. Others did so for population expansion on our more sparsely inhabited colony worlds. We reproduce much more slowly than the Krall, but more of our children survive to adulthood, I think. At least they did before the Krall began killing so many.”
Coldar added an observation. “Your species expansion into space was a very short time ago by the standards of every intelligent species we have encountered or learned about. In less than half the length of Wister’s own life, you humans first left your home world. You then discovered and settled on over seven hundred planets.
“Consider that the Prada took nearly seventy thousand orbits to colonize a tenth of that in a volume of stars where light could travel for three-thousand orbits of this world, from one side of their space to the other. They had a very slow moving expansion.
“My own species, even with help from the Olt’kitapi, traveled in the stars for eleven thousand years, and lived on many fewer worlds in a volume less than your mind pictures tell me your species control now.
“I do not know how long the Olt’kitapi was in space before the Prada. The Prada say they also do not know, but are certain they were exploring much earlier than they were. Yet the former settled worlds of the Olt’kitapi, taken by the Krall, were not as many as your people use now, even if their volume of explored stars is far greater. You humans live anywhere. E
ven the Krall avoid the most common type of habitable worlds, those with modest gravity less than Haven’s, or that are too cold or too wet. Humans use those worlds.
“You are the most adaptable species I know of, and you occupy a range of worlds that other species would consider unsuitable. You use planets around a wider number of star types, with higher surface gravities, greater temperature ranges, and modify the existing life you find there, or modify your own plants and animals, to make them livable.
“I ask you this. If you survive the Krall war, how long before your species would become an eternal life plague, and swarm over all of the habitable worlds of the galaxy? Will you become more dangerous than the Krall? Are the Torki wise to help you defeat one evil, only to see it replaced by another potentially greater and swifter spreading threat?”
Mirikami gave the best answer he had. “Coldar, and you too Wister, I can’t predict where my species will be in twenty or fifty thousand years, or if we will still exist. Whatever harm we may cause in our expansion to fill the many worlds we find acceptable, we will not wantonly destroy all those people we find ahead of us. We have hoped to meet other species. We met two initially antagonistic species on Koban, which thought of us as prey and tried to eat us. We made them friends and partners. We would make peace with the Krall if that were possible. We want to do that with the Torki and the Prada.
“I believe those of us living on Koban are representative of our entire species, because we came from many of our different worlds. Most of us are united in the belief that Haven, right next door to us, is where we want to place the survivors of the alien species the Krall have conquered. Some of our people want to live there, sharing that world with you. I believe that our unforced actions are a good example of our intentions, an answer to your speculations about what the pressure of our expansions in the far future will mean for the rest of the galaxy.
Koban: Rise of the Kobani Page 57