Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14)

by Laurence Dahners

  “Really?!” Kelso said, sounding shocked.

  “Yes ma’am, I don’t have the capability of testing it so I’m hoping you’ll fund some testing in animals and hopefully someday in people. I…” after a brief stumble, Zage continued, “I really think it’s about time we did something about the obesity epidemic.”

  “You think vaccination will work for obesity?”

  “Yes ma’am, I do. Obesity’s spreading far too much like a communicable disease to be simple slothfulness.”

  “NIH usually funds those kinds of studies,” she said slowly, “not CDC.”

  “Oh… could you suggest it to NIH?”

  “Let me talk to my bosses. Maybe CDC’d actually like to do the study itself. It is, after all, a national health crisis.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Um, would you be interested in a job here at CDC?”

  “Oh! No. But I’d be happy to help with any other problems like this one.”

  Kelso snorted, “Okay, but I seriously hope we don’t have any more problems like this.”

  ***

  Phil’s awakening was a slow and cloudy process. Suddenly, he recognized Carol’s face hanging over him.

  He felt light.

  I’m on Mars again! he thought. “Hi Carol!” he said, his voice sounding unsteady even to him.

  “Hi yourself, you big lunk!” she said, her lips trembling up into a smile while a tear ran down her cheek. “It’s good to have you back out here.” She tilted her head curiously, “You do know where you are, don’t you?”

  “Sure, this’s the moon, right?”

  Carol grabbed his nipple and started to twist, “No!” Phil yelped, “Mars! Mars, sorry!”

  “That’s better,” Carol said. “I could’ve predicted that, even in the midst of the scariest event of our lives, you’d be jackin’ around like some kind of idiot.”

  “Yeah,” he gave her a weak smile, “but I’m your idiot, right?”

  “I do seem to be stuck with you.”

  “Can I get up?”

  Carol glanced to one side. Mark Wilson, the doctor on their Mars team stepped into view. “No reason we shouldn’t give it a try, I guess. You’ll probably be dizzy, so we should start by just having you sit up.”

  ***

  Reggie looked up at a diffident knock on her door. Zage stood there. “Dr. Barnes?” he said uncertainly.

  “Hey Zage,” she said, turning her chair toward him and motioning him in. “How’re things going?” She wondered if he was about to tell her his Cell and Molecular Biology courses were too much for him, or that he’d decided he really didn’t want to do research after all. Having a five-year-old taking those kinds of courses and working in her lab still seemed entirely too bizarre for Reggie to believe. She hoped he wasn’t giving up though, he was fun to have around and certainly had odd and perceptive insights into scientific questions. She paused this thought process and chided herself—the kid was really pretty astonishing. I shouldn’t be thinking he might be about to quit, I should be wondering what cool new thing he might’ve figured out.

  “Pretty well, I think,” Zage said. “I’ve been working on Alzheimer protein misfolding. It does look like a couple of the known Alzheimer’s associated genes do code for versions of proteins that have a significant likelihood of folding more than one way.”

  “And you’ve determined this how?”

  “Well, I selected Alzheimer associated genes that code for proteins and… And I sent them to Gordito with a query about how they’d fold. Gordito said folding at some locations was indeterminate.”

  “Indeterminate?”

  “Yes ma’am. Instead of having a high likelihood of folding one particular way or another, those proteins have a site where the likelihood is, not 50-50, but maybe twenty percent, or even thirty that they’ll fold into a nonfunctional state.”

  “Ah, and for some of them, once one protein misfolds, there might be a crystallization event where neighboring proteins fold the same way and then form clumps?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Okay, how’re we going to test that hypothesis?”

  “I was thinking that we could use the new system from the Virgies to insert a corrected gene?”

  Reggie narrowed her eyes, “And how do you know about that?”

  Zage looked startled and didn’t say anything for a second, then he said, “My mom said something about it. She might’ve heard about it from Ell Donsaii. They work together, you know?”

  Reggie snorted, “Donsaii’s had me sign all kinds of secrecy agreements about this, but she’s telling her assistant who’s spreading the word to her kid?!”

  Zage shrugged, “Sorry.”

  Reggie shook her head, “You’re starting at the hoped for end result, treatment of the disease. I’ve got to point out that no one’s going to approve human testing just because you have a theory it’ll work. Therefore, the first thing for us to do is to synthesize some of the proteins you’re talking about and see if they actually do misfold sometimes. And if they misfold, do they then crystallize neighboring proteins into clumps?”

  “Oh,” Zage said, looking disappointed.

  “Welcome to science kid. It’s a world where you’ve got to do a lot of dull, rigorous testing before you get to make your moonshot and claim the grand prize.”

  “Okay,” the kid said in a disheartened tone, “I guess I’ll get started on synthesizing some of those proteins tomorrow?”

  “There you go.” As Zage turned and left her office, Reggie looked after him, thinking about how she’d recently learned that most childhood prodigies play instruments or do math astonishingly well as kids, but then don’t actually contribute much that’s original after they grow up. But I’ll bet that kid does something that makes a difference in the world someday. Maybe not something that saves lives or makes the news, but something that’s somewhat important, at least in its own way…

  ***

  Carol gave the command through her AI and the third balloon of the triple airlock into the dome deflated. As the atmosphere of the dome rushed into the lock, Phil felt his suit collapsing around him. Stepping forward, he looked out into the dome with awe. A kilometer in diameter really is huge, he thought, staring out across what, after living in the tunnels, felt like a vast distance.

  Turning around, he saw Carol had her Mars-suit most of the way off so he started removing his own. He glanced up at the roof of the dome. Mars didn’t get a huge amount of sunlight to begin with, and with only about fifty percent of that available light making its way through the graphene layers and a meter of water, it’d have been pretty dim, but brilliant light from a near-solar parabolic mirror was flooding through a port running on a rail up high against the dome. He understood that if you were standing at a certain spot in the center of the dome, the lighting port would track across the dome right in front of the sun. Of course, in most locations in the dome it wouldn’t hide the sun, but at least it moved across the “sky” like a sun should.

  Once he had his Mars suit off, the first thing Phil noticed was that the temperature was pleasant. Even though, cognitively, he knew the dome had been set up for months with a meter of water providing insulation and the solar parabolic mirror not only providing light, but significant heat as well, he’d subliminally still expected it to be cold. Mars, after all, was really cold on the surface, and even though he was in the dome, it was so big that it felt like he was outside. Carol took his hand, “Feel like a stroll, big boy?”

  “Sure.”

  She walked him out to show him the “ponds.” They’d purposefully set up this second dome on an area of the terrain where there were several depressions. The water they ported in from the oceans of Europa pressed the graphene bottom layer of the dome down into the depressions to make the little lakes where the cyanobacteria did the initial conversion of carbon dioxide ported in from Venus into oxygen and biomass. Once some of the water had been used up, they brought in machinery to shovel Martia
n dirt through ports onto the floor of the dome. They mixed organic material from earth into the Martian dirt according to a recipe that the agricultural scientists recommended. Some early plantings were already starting to grow.

  Phil looked out over all of it, overcome by a great feeling of pastoral satisfaction. Turning to Carol, he said, “This could be our home!”

  She smacked him on the shoulder. “It could not! First of all, you’ll be bored here after a day or so. Farmers are the kind of people who’ll enjoy living here, not jumped up wrestlers who think they’re astronaut adventurers! Besides, inheriting your genes, my kids are going to have one strike against them from the get-go. Lord only knows,” she leaped high into the air, then landed softly in the low gravity, “how they’d turn out if they were raised in a low gravity environment too!”

  ***

  White House, Washington DC—Today President Stockton announced victory in the battle against modified smallpox, a disease which medical experts are now telling us could have killed as many as 5-6 billion people worldwide if not for a rapid reaction from Homeland Security and CDC. Not all of the virus created in Dallas has been accounted for, but at this point the vast majority of Americans have been vaccinated and vaccinations are proceeding apace in the rest of the world. Stocks of the Gordito antibody have been built up enough that CDC believes they could use them to treat even a significant outbreak of clinically evident disease. The President praised a number of people who were important in preventing this from becoming a disaster. These included Miki Denuit, Mary Aston and Dr. Nancy Tigner; who first recognized the vaccination virus on Little Diomede island. Dr. LaQua Kelso at CDC was credited with her rapid recognition of the seriousness of the situation and for excellent management of the medical response. D5R got credit for shutting down Islam Akbar’s planned method of distribution. And, of course, almost everyone now recognizes the incredible contributions made by the anonymous “Gordito.” Stockton begged Gordito to come forward and be recognized. A number of other organizations are offering jobs, lucrative consultation positions and outright prizes as well, but so far the three persons who have claimed to be Gordito have all proven to be impostors.

  ***

  Zage felt a little torn. Carley, Alice, and Rick had invited him to go out for lunch with them. It felt good that they were taking him along on something kind of social instead of just talking to him in the lab. On the other hand, out here in public, he knew most people just assumed that one of them had brought their kid with them. The fact that his legs were short enough that he almost had to trot to keep up with them made it worse.

  He also worried that they’d assume they needed to pay for his lunch. That’d be embarrassing so he’d told Osprey to download the bill and pay his part of it while they ate.

  He’d managed to tell Osprey where they were going shortly before they left. When they entered the restaurant, he saw Randy and Linda from the security team sitting at a table near the middle already. He’d hoped they’d be able to do that instead of following him to the restaurant from the lab.

  After they sat down, the waitress brought three adult menus and a child’s menu. He blushed a little but Carley obviously recognized his discomfort because she asked the waitress to get him an adult menu also. Even worse, then he found he wanted to order off the child’s menu because he was worried that some of the adult choices would be too spicy for him. Eventually he settled on a plain hamburger and French fries, then relaxed back to listen to the three grad students talk.

  The conversation ranged widely, touching on the basketball team’s prospects, whether or not Donsaii’d let them get in on the Virgies’ system for altering genes in every cell of the body, Rick’s new girlfriend, and how the world had gotten off easy with the smallpox thing.

  Zage had managed to take a seat with his back to the wall so he could watch the door like he’d been taught, so he noticed when the guy came in the door. He looked vaguely familiar but didn’t seem to be sure he was in the right place. Zage thought the young man was perhaps undergraduate age, which was a little unusual in this little restaurant that seemed to cater more to grads. He didn’t really look like a student though.

  “What do you think Zage?” Alice asked.

  Zage hadn’t been paying close attention to the smallpox conversation, but had been following enough to know they’d been talking about who Gordito might be. “I favor the ‘weird computer guy sitting in his mother’s basement’ theory,” Zage said.

  “Oh come on,” Rick said, “that kind of guy wouldn’t know enough about protein structure to be able to design an algorithm that predicts folding!”

  Zage didn’t respond because the young guy who’d come in had focused on their table and started their way. His three friends looked at Zage when he didn’t respond, then turned to see what he was looking at.

  The young man said, “Carley?”

  “Eli!” Carley screamed, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms around her long lost brother.

  The End

  Hope you liked the book!

  To find other books by the author try Laury.Dahners.com.

  Author’s Afterword

  This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I’ve always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the stories tries to ask such questions.

  “Bioterror!” asks what kinds of terrible things a terrorist with some of the new technical skills in gene manipulation might be able to do. Personally I find it difficult to believe that someone with the genius to understand the technology and actually modify a genome would also be evil enough to use that rare ability to harm other human beings, but certainly history is replete with stories of evil genius doing just that. The frightening thing is that such a constructed disease could be built to resist treatments and be even more virulent than the disease, smallpox in this case, it’s based on.

  “Technology is a two-edged sword” many would say, referring to the fact that, while it can do much good, it can also do terrible things, sometimes even as an unintended consequence. I prefer to think of how technology might solve even the problems that it itself creates.

  That if one evil genius fabricates a disease, another benign genius might fabricate the means by which we contain it.

  What if that benign genius was a child prodigy? Not a prodigy who plays piano or does math, but one with a math-like skill for analyzing genes and proteins?

  For those of you interested, there is evidence that smallpox vaccination did protect recipients somewhat against other diseases—HIV, asthma, and others—for reasons that aren’t well understood.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Mike Alsobrook, Allen Dietz, Hamilton Elliott, Jack Hudler, and Stephen Wiley, each of whom significantly improved this story.