Gene Mapper

  “May I ask you, Mamoru? How far have you gotten with your investigation?”

  “Not far. I heard you went AWOL from L&B. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Enrico’s avatar made his expression hard to read, but he sounded confident and determined.

  “Don’t worry about me. I could not be part of L&B’s response to this problem. Listen, we are going to get pretty tired if we stand here talking. Shall we sit?”

  He turned and walked toward the altar where there were fewer people and sat sideways in one of the pews with his legs stretched out in the aisle. I sat in the pew behind him. The bench was too shallow. My knees almost touched the seat in front of me. The wood was hard under my back and buttocks.

  If you stand for too long in Private Mode, the feedback tends to leave you with an ache in your knees. On the other hand, I had a feeling this bench was going to do me in anyway if we sat here long enough. I had to fidget constantly to keep the blood flowing. Enrico leaned sideways against the back of the pew, his arm stretched out along the top.

  “I left because I have given up on Lintz,” he whispered. “I was the Mother Mekong PM only in name. Lintz gave me hardly any control. This was a project that wanted a firm hand keeping all vendors and subcontractors in line. But when the news from Mother Mekong comes to us, what does he do? He gives everything to Kurokawa, and I am sitting there doing nothing.”

  I wondered whether Enrico had called me just to whine. “I heard L&B’s team has its hands full dealing with customers and the government.”

  His expression seemed to harden for a moment, then a corner of his mouth lifted in a smile.

  “Yes, there is a lot of that, but it is up to Barnhard and the sales guys to handle. They are the ones who wanted to do this. Is it my job to go around apologizing to everybody?”

  I couldn’t figure Enrico out. Was this why he dropped out of sight?

  “Lintz makes everyone busy with silly administrative tasks. And then he gives the investigation—the only thing that matters—to a freelancer! Listen to me, Mamoru. I am sure you are a good specialist. The problem is that Lintz chose Kurokawa.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Indeed, it is. Lintz is completely blind, you see. The real Kurokawa hates genetic engineering.”

  This was a new one on me and not believable at all. I’d worked with Takashi for three years, and his commitment to the job always came across loud and clear. Okay, so Enrico lost out in the corporate game. He would have to blame it on someone.

  “I would not be surprised, even, if Kurokawa is behind this mutation. He had control of all the data and the specifications, everything going to the subcontractors. If he wanted to put in some malware along the way without L&B noticing, it was easy for him to do. Or just mess up the genome itself.”

  “Enrico, you’re out of line. I was the last one to touch that blueprint, and it went directly from me to L&B. You approved it yourself.”

  His face hardened again. Now I knew what it was: an artifact. His avatar was covering his reaction. Maybe an expletive? We’d just met, but I was already starting to dislike him.

  “Yes, that is true. It is a detail, okay? I am talking about Kurokawa. You met him in person. Don’t you think there is something unnatural about his size?” Enrico gripped the back of the bench and brought his face closer. “He is a mutation himself. Distilled crop technology did that. And Lintz was involved.”

  He took a video file from his shirt pocket. “You are a gene mapper. All you can touch is the style sheet, so I am not surprised if you don’t know that fourteen—no, fifteen years ago, L&B’s first distilled rice caused genetic damage in the families of the people who ate it. Kurokawa is one of them. Take a look at this. It is from 2016.”

  He held the file out and pushed the play button with a long forefinger. I peered closer at the screen in the palm of his hand.

  “Give me back my son!” The man in the video was Kurokawa, shouting in the voice I knew so well. Did he have a child?

  He was sitting at a table before a clutch of microphones, glaring at someone out of the frame to his left. It was footage from a Japanese news show. I saw the same thick black-frame glasses, the same hairstyle, the same dark blue suit. But he looked like a mess—hair all over the place, dirty shirt, his suit shiny with wear around the sleeves. It looked like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks. I’d never seen him so agitated.

  The caption along the bottom read: ARE YOU AT RISK? SUPER RICE ZERO CAUSES GENE MUTATION!

  A woman wearing a gray suit sat next to Kurokawa, gazing at him with concern. She looked like she might be his lawyer. But what was Kurokawa doing on a news program fifteen years ago?

  “How dare you call it Super Rice? Why did you make something like that? Bring back Takashi! Give me back my son!”

  Kurokawa looked like he was going to leap over the table. The woman gently restrained him. Enrico’s finger overlapped the screen and touched the pause button.

  “That is Kurokawa’s father. It is strange, isn’t it? How much they look alike. The video is genuine. It is from L&B’s own archives. I will give you a bookmark. You can verify the date for yourself.”

  When I looked up, Enrico was standing between the pews, holding out a widget shaped like a bookmark.

  “Okay, Enrico. I get that Takashi looks just like his father. What I don’t get is, why are you showing me this?” I snatched the bookmark away and shoved it in my pocket irritably. Yagodo could confirm whether it was fake or not. I assumed that not all of it was, but Enrico had a prime motivation to enhance it since his job had been taken away.

  “Watch the continuation and you will understand. Shall we?” He held up a forefinger and slowly lowered it to the file. I couldn’t take my eyes off the tip of his finger as it moved in an arc to the playback button.

  The video played. The camera pulled back and panned to the table facing Kurokawa. The image went out of focus and sharpened again. Barnhard. He was sitting there, far too large for his chair, looking suitably uncomfortable. He opened his mouth slowly before he spoke.

  “Our product, Super Rice Zero, is specially formulated for brewing sake. It has not been certified safe for direct human consumption. Words cannot express my regret that Takashi Kurokawa and twenty-six other people were harmed by it.” The Japanese interpreter’s voice overlapped Barnhard’s, the way they used to do it before machine translation.

  “I won’t even try to minimize what happened with fancy words. Our product put your son and twenty-six others in a coma. All those affected, as well as their families, will receive generous compensation from L&B. If you wish, we will see directly to the victims’ care until a means of treatment is found.”

  Enrico tapped pause again.

  “This goes on for a long time, but I think you get the point. Takashi Kurokawa eats Barnhard’s Super Rice Zero and it puts him into a coma.”

  I shook my head. “Wait a minute. Barnhard’s distilled rice, was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The first distilled generation was SR01.”

  There was another facial artifact, then he shrugged his shoulders. “You should know.”

  Didn’t this guy even know the terminology? I was glad they hadn’t given him the investigation.

  “Anyway, now you have seen it. Kurokawa’s father feeds him L&B rice, Takashi falls into his coma. After he comes out, he goes to do freelance work for L&B. Doesn’t that strike you as a little bizarre? Kissing everybody’s ass in his Japanese English. But you never know what he’s thinking, do you?”

  Enrico rested his hands on the back of the bench and leaned toward me.

  “Anyway, why would Lintz give him anything to do in the first place? It makes no sense. Would you give work to someone after robbing him of some of his life? I think Kurokawa knows something about Lintz, something Lintz is desperate to hide. I wan
t to know what it is.”

  I glanced sharply at Enrico. There would be plenty of time to consider his warning about Kurokawa, but I could already see he was not a man to be trusted. I had lowered my Behavior Correction settings before I left Tokyo, and my distaste for him was probably easy to see.

  And that was just fine.

  “Come, you don’t need to look at me that way. Just don’t trust Kurokawa, okay? Take the investigation away from his hands, for your sake. Understand? You have been warned.”

  He logged off.

  I shoved the pew backward to get some leg room. Sure enough, my butt was totally numb from sitting on the hard narrow bench. My joints kept popping as I stretched and tried to loosen up my neck.

  I looked toward the entrance. Ms. Skinhead and her camera crew were gone too.

  I turned back to the altar. My eyes were drawn to the image of the crucified Christ. The afternoon light pouring through the stained glass of the rosette windows on both ends of the transept threw multicolored patterns on the floor and ceiling. As I gazed at Christ bathed in the shifting colors, Enrico’s words started circling in my brain like vultures. Don’t trust Kurokawa … Could he be right? Since this trip began, I had found myself liking him more and more. His refusal to let his size defeat him, his relentlessly cheerful and sincere approach to everything—was it all a deception?

  “Takashi …”

  I was letting my suspicions get the better of me when I caught sight of a white ao dai hurrying toward me like a small whirlwind.

  “Mamoru! Sorry to keep you waiting. Oh, are you all right? Your face …”

  “I’m fine, it’s nothing. I felt a little unwell for a minute there.”

  “Well, I hope you feel better now. Oh, right, Isamu says he’s not going back to the office today. You can take the rest of the day off. Would you like to have dinner with me?”

  “I’m sorry, there’s something I need to check at the office. Maybe next time.”

  * * *

  I touched the brass door handle and let myself in. Two blinks to activate the augmented reality stage.

  “Anyone here?”

  The table was piled high with dirty Frisbees and tennis balls. John and Paul had been hard at work since I left.

  I reached down to retrieve a ball from the floor. It changed into a folder before I touched it. The label read FAN FAN FARM: NIIGATA PREFECTURE, 2014.

  What a mountain of work. I had a huge amount of matching to do, but at least I was looking at the beginnings of real progress. For the first time I felt like things were moving ahead.

  “Maybe I can ask Isamu to match these while I’m gone …” Talking to myself again.

  Something moved near the entrance. I turned and saw a golden retriever with a red bandanna peeking at me around the edge of the door.

  “Hey, don’t scare me, okay?”

  John trotted over to the table, nails clicking on the floor, and deposited another tennis ball on the table. I put my hand out to pat his head. The feedback chip gave me a sensation of hand movement, and I could see the dog’s fur move, but there was no sensation of touch. He was indistinguishable from a real dog, but the lack of sensation reminded me I was in augmented reality.

  I patted him a bit more before he trotted reluctantly to the door, looking back at me a few times. He touched his nose to the handle and let himself out.

  I sat down on the sofa. I thought I’d better take another look at Enrico’s video after all. Not that I was eager to see it again, but I wanted to try his bookmark when he wasn’t around. The image file that the bookmark pointed to played flawlessly. I watched to the end, but all I saw was more of the same: Takashi Kurokawa had gone into a coma after eating Super Rice Zero. The way Barnhard apologized made it sound like the coma was irreversible. How did Kurokawa finally recover, I wondered.

  Something else bothered me. Kurokawa and his father looked far too much alike for father and son. The glasses, the hair, everything except the size was identical, so identical that it made the video look fake. I thought of having Yagodo do a forensic check, but then again, was this something I should even show him?

  I looked closer at the video, thinking maybe I could figure it out myself, when a voice spoke from behind.

  “So, you’ve seen it.”

  It was Yagodo. He was sitting at his desk in a cream-colored shirt. He hadn’t been there when I walked in. He must have logged on from somewhere. He came over and sat on the couch.

  “Isamu, do you know about this?”

  “Yes. I did a background check on Takashi and there it was. It’s an awful story. I found a few other articles that confirm it. Takashi is one of the Super Rice Zero victims. A lot of people in the industry still remember it, even this many years later. Hey, what’s the matter? Is there something on your mind?”

  What sort of expression did I have? Should I tell Isamu how I got this video?

  “I know it’s a shock, but why don’t we wait and let Takashi tell us in his own time?” said Yagodo. “Right now we’ve got an intruder to identify.”

  He put his hands on his knees and stood up. “You’ll be in Cambodia overnight. Don’t worry. While you’re gone I’ll keep salvaging candidates off the Web. Today alone, John and Paul have already brought me about two thousand possibles. I’ll take care of the matching work too.”

  “Hey, that’s good of you, Isamu.”

  He logged off.

  Tomorrow we were leaving for Cambodia. Yagodo was right. There would be time to consider Enrico’s warning later. It was time to get back to work.

  8 Farm Manager

  I was down to my boxers. I had my hands on them, ready to take them off, but I couldn’t summon the nerve. The cold from the linoleum crept through the soles of my feet and up my legs. Shue Thep was putting us through Mother Mekong’s standard security check.

  “Shue, don’t you have any guys who could cover this?” My hands were still frozen.

  “We’re short on people. Short on time too. Would you just get those off?”

  Thep brushed a long strand of black hair from her face and leaned tiredly against the door. There were faint circles under her almond eyes. She was only a bit taller than Kurokawa, but with the top half of her too-large jumpsuit wrapped around her waist, she almost looked smaller. Her purple sports bra and tight-fitting T-shirt looked freshly laundered, but the jumpsuit and work boots were flecked with mud.

  “It’s just a formality. As soon as I see you’re not hiding anything, I’ll turn my back. Now get a move on.” Her voice was as tired as she looked. Maybe her English was politer than it was coming across in Japanese, but Yagodo’s translation engine favored mood over meaning. She certainly sounded more than a bit pissed off. I wished I knew how to change the engine’s Mood Sensitivity setting.

  Kurokawa stood with his back to Thep. He was out of his clothes and as close to the locker as possible, reading the warnings on a bottle of green gel.

  Kurokawa and I had hardly spoken after I joined him in the lobby that morning at six. We’d pushed the cart piled high with Kim’s gear to the edge of the river near the hotel and loaded everything onto a waiting helicopter. Almost as soon as we buckled up, we were airborne and hard at work. Kurokawa conferenced with L&B over the noise of the rotors while I paged through the genomes that had started to come in from Yagodo. He had already salvaged over three thousand candidates, but he was coming up dry on matches.

  The only words we exchanged during the flight came after Kurokawa unwrapped his fourth chocolate bar.

  “You sure have a thing for chocolate.”

  “Yes. It’s the calories.”

  * * *

  “We’re supposed to apply this to our genitals too. Very thorough.”

  The US Ground Forces biochemical warfare suits Yagodo had ordered for us were nothing like the “field gear” I had been picturing. The su
its were assemblies of black carbon-fiber plates that encased the body in a suit of armor. The plates were joined with carbon-fiber ribbons that automatically adjusted for length, letting the user move freely.

  When we opened the shipping container, a tutorial video started automatically on a monitor inside the lid. The suits came with mil-spec AR feedback. The green gel held millions of nanomachines that passed through the skin to stimulate the nervous system directly.

  I’d never seen a tutorial like this, but I had to admire the care that went into it. The explanation of the suiting-up process, user features, and emergency escape procedure in case of injury were easy to understand the first time through. I was impressed by the narrator’s guarantee of comfort in any environment, even in a sewer with one hundred percent humidity. The suit also protected the user from unpleasant sensory experiences, like the stench of rotting corpses on a battlefield.

  Kurokawa started spreading on the goop. Thep took a long, thoughtful look at him.

  “You’re an SR Zero victim, aren’t you? When did you come out of your coma?”

  “Listen, Shue—”

  She turned toward me, but her eyes were focused at a point in midair.

  “Seven years ago,” said Kurokawa matter-of-factly. “As you see, my growth stopped completely.” His voice seemed to snap Thep back to reality. She blinked, shook her head, and straightened up.

  “I’m sorry, Kurokawa-san. Maybe that was a little too personal.”

  “Don’t give it a second thought. You look like you need some rest.”

  “Rest. Yes, rest would be nice. I’ve hardly slept since the mutation started. That was five days ago. I keep sending information to L&B, but they never get back to me. Instead I get two requests for samples from you, and you’re not even L&B. Then I get a personal message from Barnhard telling me to let you tramp around collecting samples yourself. Isn’t Enrico still the PM? What’s going on with L&B anyway?”