Gene Mapper

by Fujii, Taiyo

  Kurokawa furrowed his brows in concern, though I couldn’t see why. We knew the media was going to catch on sooner rather than later. If they found out about the mutation before the investigation had a chance to show results, so much the worse, but we couldn’t hide it forever. Yagodo had discovered the mutation on his own from the TerraVu photos, and the nature addicts at Mother Mekong were photographing and taking instrument readings every day, even if their technique was sloppy. Obviously they would be happy to give their data to the media.

  “Mamoru, you need to see this,” said Yagodo. “It may come as a shock, but before we play it, please understand: I’m on your side. So is Takashi. Ready?”

  “Wait a minute, what the hell—”

  Yagodo pointed to the wall. A video frame appeared with a red, wire-frame globe over a banner reading, “World Reporting: Truth They Don’t Want You to Know.” It was the opening for the same program I’d seen at Café Zucca.

  The banner and globe pulled back into the frame and were replaced by a studio set. Sascha Leifens stood center stage, hands behind her back, blue eyes leveled at the camera. She was illuminated by a spotlight.

  “Sascha Leifens for World Reporting. Tomorrow, we unmask the gross negligence of an agricultural industry completely warped by genetic engineering.” Footage of Barnhard at his distilled crop presentation to the FAO faded in behind her.

  “We know every base pair in this genome. Every trait is under our control. SR01 is just the first drop from the distiller’s pot—”

  “This is Lintz Barnhard, vice president of L&B Corporation, a producer of distilled seedlings. For the past twenty years, this man has been hawking his genetically engineered plants to farmers all over the world. In the process, his company has ravaged the planet with its corporate greed. Look at this.”

  Three-dimensional images of SR06 sites started rising from the floor around Sascha. She strolled between the miniature landscapes and continued her denunciation of distilled crops. She used all the clichés I’d heard a million times, but her words barely penetrated my awareness.

  I couldn’t believe it. I had worked on every one of these sites: Hop Inn Farm in Adelaide, Heaven’s Farm in Borneo, Barmy Plantation in the Gobi Desert … With several thousand SR06 sites around the world, why were they only showing my work?

  Sascha strolled slowly back to center stage. “World Reporting has discovered a site where the L&B logo is disintegrating—proof that SR06 is out of control. We’ve also identified the reckless gene mapper behind this fatal flaw.”

  The floor of the set morphed into a checkerboard pattern. Bone-white stucco walls rose on either side. A cathedral. There was an image of Christ in the alcove behind the altar.

  “This is Saigon Cathedral in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City.”

  Sascha turned and walked deeper into the set, toward a man in one of the pews. He seemed to be staring at his lap.

  “That’s me. How … ?”

  “His name is Mamoru Hayashida. He is a freelance gene mapper working for L&B Corporation. As you can see, he’s praying.”

  She turned to face the camera and pretended to put her hand on my shoulder. Sitting in the pew, I raised my face to the image of Christ, then hung my head again.

  “A deadly mutation is rampaging through the Mother Mekong Project—his project. Did guilt bring him here? Guilt for meddling with life itself? For the damage he’s helping L&B wreak on the environment? Or is it sorrow over what this blunder will do to his comfortable lifestyle?”

  “It was her …” The skinhead in the cathedral. She had turned her cameras on me.

  “After a year of careful investigation, World Reporting will unmask the dark world of genetic engineering and the negligence and arrogance of those responsible for this project.”

  The video clicked off.

  “We didn’t know the target would be you.” Kurokawa frowned. “We assumed it would be Barnhard or Mother Mekong. We were getting ready to rebut whatever they came up with. World Reporting got the drop on us, but we’re going to do everything we can to protect you. I just talked to Barnhard. He’s committed to giving you all the legal support you need.”

  Kurokawa leaned forward to look me square in the face. “Since your name is public knowledge now, the media will do whatever they can to find you. I can ask L&B’s corporate communications department to represent you—”

  “Not a good idea.” Yagodo shook his head. “Running questions through L&B would add fuel to the fire. It would look like Barnhard was trying to muzzle him. All he can do is ask the media to leave his contractors alone.”

  Kurokawa bit his lip. I couldn’t think of a better plan.

  “World Reporting needs a scapegoat,” said Yagodo. “Their reporting is hate speech against distilled crops and genetic engineering. They’ll ignore L&B’s side of the story, and whatever L&B says, they’ll use it against you.”

  “You’re right. We’re not ready to rebut their story. I wonder how they knew Mamoru would be there?” Kurokawa peered at me curiously.

  “… Enrico.”

  “The project manager no one can get ahold of?” Yagodo smiled.

  “He called me. I was in the cathedral. He wanted to meet. I didn’t know it was a setup.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Nguyen. “If I hadn’t asked him to wait for me—”

  Yagodo cut her off. “They were tracking him. They would’ve gotten their footage somehow. It could just as easily have been Takashi.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded at all,” said Kurokawa. “But this body of mine disqualifies me. Using a victim of Super Rice Zero as an example of people who benefit from the distilled crop industry would’ve been slightly bizarre.”

  “In any case,” said Yagodo, “there’s nothing we can do to stop the presses. Getting to the bottom of this mystery is the only way we can fight back.” He spread the SR06 and intruder images—the photos I sent him from the train—across the table. “We’ve got to focus on identifying your intruder.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t get Enrico’s words out of my head. Was Kurokawa pulling the strings in the shadows? And if that was true, why help the media frame me?

  * * *

  The office was filled with the aroma of sweetened coffee. When I came out of my reverie I found Nguyen sitting next to me, stirring sugar into a freshly brewed cup.

  “Just sugar, right?” She poured the coffee over ice and set the glass in front of me. I nodded thanks but didn’t feel like drinking it. Yagodo had our priorities right, but after salvaging nearly ten thousand candidate genomes, we still didn’t have a candidate, much less a confirmed match.

  Yagodo was studying the three-dimensional images of full-grown SR06, searching for something in their physical appearance that could speed up the search. I was skeptical. If it were that easy, we would have found our match already. I didn’t believe a visual inspection would show much of interest.

  “You know, there’s something odd here,” said Yagodo. “The seed heads on both plants are more or less identical. If this was a legacy cultivar with vulnerability to red rust, there ought to be more variation.”

  He zoomed in on the seed heads of each plant, marked the base of the husks and counted on his fingers. “Distilled crops are designed down to the number of seeds on each stalk. It’s amazing. The vascular bundle branching is different from natural grasses, so you designed it as a spiral … Hold it, we might be on to something here.”

  He took a long drink of coffee and condensed milk. “Mamoru, each SR06 stalk is designed to yield a thousand grains, correct?”

  “Under optimal growing conditions. L&B designed the vascular bundle to respond dynamically to the weight of a thousand-grain seed head by boosting the hydraulic pressure. They got a patent for it.”

  “Then we’ve found something interesting. The intruder is supposed to be a legacy plant, but it has roughl
y the same number of grains. The way the grains are setting looks the same too.”

  I took a closer look at the grains Yagodo had marked. They were arranged in more or less the same way.

  “You’re probably too young to have seen an ear of legacy rice. A yield of two hundred grains would be very high for a natural cultivar. But the intruder has more like a thousand grains. It’s as if someone took an SR06 plant and painted it with the old rice color.”

  Yagodo enlarged a grain from the intruder. “Up close, though, the rice is different in certain ways. These intruder grains look slightly withered too.”

  If the intruder and SR06 had the same yield, that was an important discovery, but all it did was deepen the mystery. No legacy cultivar could boast that kind of yield.

  “Mother Mekong’s ground cover doesn’t offer enough nutrients or moisture for most natural plants. I’m not surprised the grains are drying out.” I looked at the tip of the grain Yagodo had enlarged. It was slightly red. “Wait, what’s going on here?” I stood and held the image up to the light.

  “This isn’t dying. It’s naturally red. The color has gradations from red to purple.” I swept a finger from the tip of the grain to the base. Held against the light, it was clear that the color was transparent toward the middle. Grains on a dying plant would have been opaque.

  Yagodo looked at me with open-mouthed surprise. “You found it! Why didn’t we notice?” He gave me a playful shove. “This is a heritage rice. It’s close to wild rice. Heritage grains are the color you see there. What gives it that color? Like with eggplants. One of the anthocyanins … Right, cyanidin.”

  Yagodo suddenly had a soiled rag in his hand. “John! Paul! You’ve got work to do!” The door opened, and the two golden retrievers came running in.

  “Fetch me the genome for black rice! The ones with lots of C15H11O6+ cyanidin.” He held the rag out for them to sniff. “It’s urgent!” The dogs gave a short, excited bark and ran out the door.

  “What’s that rag?” I asked.

  “The search query. It’s a matter of time now. There aren’t that many varieties of heirloom rice. I think we’ll have your intruder identified by the end of the day.”

  Yagodo reached for his iced coffee, but Nguyen was already picking the glass up off the table. She took mine too, though I’d only had a sip or two.

  “You can’t let the ice melt. It’s made from raw tap water.”

  Kurokawa was about to take a drink of coffee but handed his glass to Nguyen.

  “This is perfect,” he said to Yagodo. “By the end of today! It won’t give us enough ammunition to shut down World Reporting, but at least we’ll have something—sorry, someone’s calling me. Hello?”

  He stood up and took the call on a “receiver” formed from his extended thumb and little finger, like something out of an old movie. He took the “receiver” from his ear and put his other hand over his little finger.

  “It’s Thep. I’d like to invite her here. I think you should all hear this.”

  “Fine with me,” said Yagodo. “Mamoru?”

  “Why not? Tell her yes.”

  Kurokawa made the gesture of invitation and pointed to the sofa. Thep’s avatar popped in, sitting next to me. She was wearing cargo pants and a windbreaker with the Mother Mekong logo emblazoned on the back. This must be her work avatar.

  “It’s the grasshoppers.”

  “What happened?”

  She just shook her head. Her avatar was pink-cheeked and healthy looking, but her voice trembled.

  “I don’t know where to start. Everything is so strange, so confusing …” She balled her fists on her knees and stared at her lap.

  As we waited for her to say something, the door opened noiselessly and John came trotting in with a tennis ball. He noticed Thep immediately and kept his eyes on her as he approached the table. He dropped the ball and rubbed his muzzle on her knee. The muzzle of a real dog would have passed right through her, but one avatar can interact physically with another.

  Thep gasped and looked up. Yagodo grinned and touched the ball, changing it to a folder. He held it up to Thep.

  “Nice to finally meet you, Ms. Thep. My name is Isamu Yagodo. The dog is John. He’s brought us a file salvaged from the Internet—a candidate genome for the intruder at Mother Mekong.”

  John continued rubbing his head affectionately against Thep’s knee. “Do you like dogs?” asked Yagodo.

  “Of course.” She stroked John’s head and looked over my shoulder toward the door. “Wait—how many do you have?”

  The door was standing open. Paul ran in, a red bandanna around his neck, followed by another John. Each dog left a file on the table and scampered out again, but before they reached the door more Johns and Pauls came trotting in with more balls and Frisbees. The table was quickly piled high with their booty.

  “Sixteen all together. I’ll be at my desk searching for matches. Please continue.”

  “Your dogs made me feel better,” said Thep. “I have two things to report. First, look at this video from the camera array. We captured the moment of mutation.”

  Thep put a video file on the table. The thumbnail showed a group of grasshoppers clinging to an SR06 plant. I recognized the hills in the background.

  “I’m going to play this. Pay attention to the spot where their legs touch the leaf.”

  Thep set playback at 3,000x and touched PLAY. The sun shot into the sky, peaked, and dropped behind the hills. The fields in the background started glowing faintly blue. The grasshoppers moved slowly and jerkily across the surface of the leaf. It looked like their legs were leaving a stain on its surface.

  “See how the color changes? Look again, closer this time.”

  She zoomed in on a single grasshopper and set playback at 100x. “Look at the mandibles. It’s not eating the leaves.”

  I almost doubted my eyes. Wherever the grasshopper bit the leaf, it turned a dull green. The color change spread out as if a drop of ink had fallen on the leaf and was wicking along its veins.

  “I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Thep, “but the grasshoppers are changing the color of the living plants. Wherever they bite, the leaves start mutating.”

  Now I knew why the grains in SR06 and the intruder were setting in the same pattern. SR06 was mutating directly into the intruder. But could a living plant mutate into another living plant?

  Thep put two new photos on the table side by side. “These are microscope studies of SR06 cells before and after mutation. Can you tell which is which?”

  The photos showed cells in cross-section, surrounded by thin membranes. Tiny fluorescent-green granules surrounded the nuclei of the cells in both images, but the cell on the left had objects like small, black strands scattered among the green granules. The strands were roughly the same size as the nucleus.

  “The image on the right shows normal SR06 cells. The cells on the left have something new. They look like organelles, but no organelle is large enough to see at this magnification without staining.”

  “What are they?”

  “Don’t know, and I don’t have the gear to investigate further. I never thought I’d be doing detailed cell studies out at the site.”

  “Ms. Thep, could you send samples of the intruder cells to the Central Research Lab?” said Kurokawa.

  “It’s taken care of. They’ll arrive the day after tomorrow.” She pulled out another folder. “The cell studies were one thing. Now for the main problem.”

  Yagodo looked up from his search for matches. “Shall I guess? The grasshoppers aren’t only going after SR06. They’re attacking plant species all around the site. Am I right?”

  Thep’s expression hardened, then changed slowly to a smile. Her avatar’s Behavior Correction was searching for a straightforward way to reproduce her expression. A smile is the system default for anything too
subtle—or inappropriate—to reproduce.

  “I wish I could say you’re wrong.”

  Yagodo shook his head and sighed. Kurokawa leaned forward, body tensed. “Ms. Thep, are you telling us that the vegetation beyond the perimeter is also mutating?”

  She nodded, took several more images from the folder and laid them on the table. The photos showed a strange change coming over the vegetation.

  The rice plants and the forest beyond the perimeter were a monotone green. Neither the deep green of mature foliage nor the yellowish hue of newer leaves was visible. Everything was the same dull green as the intruder. Even the red bark of the gum trees was dyed a dull green. It looked like an image processing error.

  A closeup of the mutated foliage showed an even more ominous development. The plants were sprouting rice stalks with tendrils—genetic chimeras.

  “The smaller the genetic distance between rice and the affected plant, the faster the mutation,” said Thep. “The angiosperms are changing too, though not as fast. Ferns and lichens are unaffected. As to the effect on non-plant life, we can only pray …” Her expression defaulted to a smile again as her voice faltered.

  “You’ve got a biohazard.”

  At Yagodo’s words, everyone froze. Kurokawa’s eyes widened with fear. His jaw trembled. Nguyen swallowed hard and stared at Yagodo.

  “Who do you contact about biohazards, the World Health Organization?” I wondered out loud. “Takashi?”

  “Can’t we … eradicate the grasshoppers? If we send a sample … to the research lab …”

  He hadn’t even heard me.

  “We’ve got to notify the WHO!” I heard myself shouting. If we were dealing with a biohazard, it wasn’t just a problem for L&B and Mother Mekong. We had to alert the Cambodian government and the international community.

  “I just notified L&B and Mother Mekong headquarters,” said Kurokawa. “We’ll let them handle the notifications. I want to get a clear handle on the situation and find a way to keep this from spreading further.”

  “Shouldn’t we alert the WHO directly?”