by Nicholas Lim
Bryce blinked. Garrett controlled a shiver with her anger. She saw her thought unfolding between them. She began to speak more quickly.
“Now consider a genome. It’s also a document of sorts, made up not of ones and zeros but strings of acids. The twisted strands of DNA are like long sentences written in a chemical language – their natural function is to define protein expression and so forms of life. But if you can write natural language into binary files, why not into this chemical book? All you need is to define translation codes between the genetic letters and a human alphabet.”
Bryce was motionless. Garrett continued, twisting her crystalline idea on its axis, turning it for him to see entire.
“Of course unlike the binary system – where each symbol has only two possible values, one or zero – in this biochemical language each letter can be one of four possible acids, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine: A, C, G and T for short. That means instead of seven binary digits, sequences of just three acids would provide enough patterns to represent all of the twenty-six Roman letters. Let’s say AAA is A, AAG is B, AAT is C. Then the word CAB would be represented by AATAAAAAG. To write the word CAB chemically, you would just have to create this sequence of acids on a strand of the DNA, starting adenine (A), adenine (A), thymine (T), and ending in guanine (G). We already have adequate genetic modification techniques to do this work.”
“Now, think about stringing these triplets together. What do you have? What have you written into the very genome of the creature you have created? Words. Sentences. More: a message.”
Bryce’s eyes were unfocussed. Garrett continued, relentless. His doubt could kill her.
“I am not fantasizing. Last night, I saw a strange group of three-letter words scribbled on the wall of the cell where I was held: CAT, GAG, TAG, ACT. At first I thought they were a parent’s attempt to teach his child simple words.” Garrett shook her head. She studied the muzzle of Bryce’s gun. “It was the use of those letters, A, G, T and C that gave it away. I realised I was looking at parts of a translation table.”
Bryce shook his head.
“But where can such a message be written, is that what you’re thinking? Surely a creature’s DNA cannot be hijacked in such a way without catastrophic functional changes? Well every freshman geneticist knows the curious fact that over ninety percent of any genome is non-functioning: junk DNA, evolution's graveyard.”
Bryce was unreadable. Did he not believe her? She continued to explain.
“What about space? Well, the entire human genome occupies a total of just over three billion DNA base pairs in twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and has a data size of approximately seven hundred and fifty megabytes, which is slightly larger than the capacity of a standard Compact Disc, the rough equivalent of a pickup truck full of books. Admittedly the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is smaller. It has fourteen chromosomes, twenty-three million base pairs of DNA. Around a megabyte of data. But that’s still the equivalent of five hundred pages or a short novel. The junk, ninety percent? That’s four hundred and fifty pages. Plenty of scribble room there.”
“You’re too smart to make the mistake of hoping that such a message will not be discovered, if it is there.” Garrett gestured at the television screen. “This outbreak will trigger massive resources directed at understanding the disease agent. The strain will be sequenced. The sequence will be analysed. If the professor encoded a message, it will be flagged very clearly, very simply. I would guess a long sequence of the same acid at the start of the message would do the trick. Twenty adenine bases all in a row would catch the attention: that would never occur naturally. And the encoding pattern, he will have kept it simple – after all, this message is meant to be read, isn’t it? Yes. If it’s there it will be found.”
Garrett’s blunt words sped through the air between them. Blood stained Bryce’s face. Suddenly his gun looked very small and crude.
“The question is, if there is a message… What did he write?”
“If it’s only precise, adequate instructions to recreate this cure then when other researchers discover the professor's recipe in his message you may still be safe. But there is another possibility.”
***
“What if the professor has told the whole story? Described your organisation. Named it. Identified this place. Do you believe a worldwide manhunt would not trace one of your groups? Interrogate then find all the others? Find this Exodus location? Find Arshu?”
Silence.
“What will they do with him?”
Garrett's question hung in the space between them.
“Of course, there may be no message. You may be safe. And even if there is a message, it may not lead back here. Arshu may be safe.”
Garrett and Bryce stared at each other across the gun. Had she miscalculated? She continued to fire reasoned points, the only bullets she had, straight at Bryce.
“But I think you need to know, don’t you?”
“New labs will already be studying Krissa. But we had a week’s head start. We’ve already sequenced the genome. And we know where the dataset is: sitting on that Analyzer in Porton.”
The gun did not waver in its aim. Garrett did not stop speaking.
“You don’t believe me? Dial in now. Let’s see.”
Bryce stirred, as if from sleep. “We can’t.”
Garrett glanced at the screens. She felt a spike of panic. “Neither of us can afford to waste time. You need to know what that genome is saying. So do I. Every hour, every minute counts!”
Bryce stared at a point in space between them. He spoke slowly, word by word as the thoughts formed. “The Analyzer stores its data on a local drive.”
He gave a slight shake of his head. “And it’s on a Level Four subnet – Porton protocols won’t allow those devices to be accessed remotely.”
“Then there’s only one way to reach that data.” Garrett raised her voice, forced eye contact. “You weren’t trained on that equipment were you? I was. You’re going to need someone who can analyze the sequence for you fast.” Garrett targeted her words at the muzzle of the gun.
“You need me.”
Chapter 42
Four hundred feet below ground Zahra sat alone in the level four Parasitology lab in the midst of a firefly swarm of machine LEDs. She rubbed with the heel of her hand at the small of her back through her safety suit. She was beginning to feel the weight.
Sherlock's discs hummed at her elbow. It had been a long and furious day. There had been briefings all afternoon and evening, endless online conferences and meetings with other labs. Somewhere in the upper offices Skinner was waiting to be interviewed by some official. They were in shock.
It was hard to believe. The government had identified the Brighton malaria strain as a weapon. They said it must have been deliberately released. No-one credible had yet claimed responsibility.
Health trust reports were still coming in from across England – Portsmouth, Salisbury, Exeter – and each new infection centre had provoked fresh anxiety. They had escalated to level four protocols.
Inside the lab, the overhead fluorescent lights had been burning for eighteen hours. Zahra felt a strange sense of inversion. The pathogen was out there. It was meant to be the other way round.
She moved her hand around to her stomach. She had felt another kick that morning. It was such a strange feeling, her baby growing inside her, quickening unseen, part of her yet more than her. When they had discovered the transmission danger, afterwards, it had been a surprise to realise her first thought had been for the baby. The baby! Her baby. Her baby. She repeated the phrase to herself as if to ward off danger. She'd have to start thinking about names! She stroked her stomach. He? – She? – was safer inside.
Rheinnalt had called to say he was on his way in. He had sounded strained. He said Christine might be with him. Sounded like there was something between the two of them. Hard to believe.
The guys on annual leave would arrive over the next few
days – MacLeish tomorrow, back from a family holiday in the Scottish Borders. He’d called from his car.
Zahra glanced at the wall clock. Enough. She logged off. Skinner had ordered her to get at least a couple of hours sleep; there were cots set up upstairs. She stood stiffly. She had to be careful. The baby probably needed her to sleep too. If she could.
At the hatch Zahra glanced back. She rolled her shoulders. It would be good if Christine was in; she’d be a help. She stepped out and spun the door handle.
In the empty lab, one of the overhead ceiling lights flickered. The fluorescent tube ticked away quietly as an element burned down in its partial vacuum. The sound was loud in the empty space, above the purring of air conditioning and spinning hard drives.
After a few minutes the lights went out.
***
Bryce refused to let Garrett search for Jason’s body or check on Cherry. At the top of the path out of the valley Garrett looked back. She could just make out the oval depression of the Eye. She didn’t want to leave him. Words from the St. Matthew’s Passion rose through her. ‘Ich will hier bei dir stehen.’
I would stand here beside thee. But you are gone.
Bryce nudged her in the waist with the gun. “Go!”
Garrett turned away. She stumbled along the track up to the headland.
They took Bryce’s car. He directed her to drive inland, up linked river valleys eastward. On their right the moon swung back and forth like a roving searchlight. To the north the peaks of Snowdonia rose purple against the shaded base of the sky. Bryce turned on the radio.
…particularly affected are towns along the English south coast, including Brighton, Hove and Seaford.
There was a sudden, muffled groan. The sound rose in pitch and grew, becoming something between a scream and a roar, as if the sky were being torn in two from top to bottom. Garrett caught sight of a pointed fleck like a dart sliding with alien speed and straightness down the horizon. Bryce gave no reaction. He sat motionless beside her, the gun held in his lap.
She kept driving, fast, along curving roads, with an empty stomach. Jason’s last dry kiss remained on her forehead. The ache of separation hollowed her. Tears formed and she refused them. She buried the image of the broken body out of reach.
They passed through tall black mining villages with brick sprawls and stone centres and names without vowels. The shapes of the surrounding countryside blurred together in the sweep of headlights, like a picture rubbed out by a child's hand. A trembling at the edge of her vision warned her of exhaustion.
Through the intermittent interference from the hills, a clearer, ministerial voice pierced the static.
“Make no mistake: we are under attack. This artificial disease has been designed to infect and to kill. It’s been released within our borders and has already taken many lives. The safest place is indoors, at home, with your family. Your NHS trusts will give up-to-the-minute bulletins.”
Bryce turned up the volume, as though interested in a match report.
“We may be physically apart but we must be together in spirit, and in our shared determination to survive this terrible attack. We should keep hope. We have the finest public health service in the world. Our scientists are at work. And we are not alone. Others have been attacked – in Indonesia, and maybe America. We have friends across the globe pledging their support and help. Together we will defeat this plague, this cowardly attack. Stay with your families. Remain calm. Be of good faith.”
“They do not understand what they are facing.”
Garrett did not reply. They had stopped at a set of lights in a railhead town of fifteen thousand souls. The place was still ending its bank holiday. Two young women in matching pink skirts stumbled down the pavement arm in arm, smoking and laughing. They ran a few yards. One of them held a can of lager at arm's length. She toasted something invisible, fell, and was hauled up by her friend. Behind them, a red neon sign in a lace-curtained window advertised “A sage”. The two girls studied the occupants of the car at the lights.
Garrett drove on. The same thoughts kept recurring. How fast was the outbreak spreading? Had it reached here?
She steadied herself, reaching down beneath the surging fear, the bone tiredness, the pain in her left arm, to the cold clear currents of her old confidence; a confidence founded on understanding.
“What happened after you lost your parents? When you left the forest?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Don’t you want to tell me?”
Garrett slowed through a tight corner and accelerated out. The car’s automatic gearbox changed up with a sliding jerk of momentum. When she glanced back at Bryce, he was staring down the approaching straight.
“Arshu came back to the valley with me – to my old family home – and we founded Asari together. He encouraged me to continue my studies and then to take a research position. Arshu has always been fascinated by the potential of science. The Asari greenhouse and seed bank, and the lab – he understood and supported our wishes before we had them.” Bryce waved a hand in front of him. “It is hard to explain unless you have experienced it. When you share a vision, you think with one mind, act with one body. With Arshu, he knows our thoughts.”
“You really believe that?”
Bryce looked sideways at Garrett. “You told me you brought your son up a Catholic. You must once have believed in a man who was all love? You knelt to him; you ate his body and drank his blood. That vision is clouded, unequal to our times. But the great Christian innovation, the finding and promotion of the perfect man over all, has not been lost. I’ve found it alive, made flesh in front of my eyes, Christ once again. I hear and see him.”
“If he is a man, he is a primate, a mammal.”
Bryce shook his head. “What happened? How did you lose your faith so completely?”
The road twisted in the headlights, fifty feet above a snaking river course. Garrett thought of Jason, then of Cherry’s adamant smile.
“I grew up.” Her voice was bitter.
“I think you blame your faith for what has happened to you. You are angry–”
There was a rumble as the car tyres clipped a line of cat’s eyes. Garrett corrected position.
“Yes I’m angry. And yes, I blame the ‘faithful’ for harming, for taking from me, those I love.”
“Faith is a hard gift–”
“Faith is childish. And deep down you know it.”
A blind corner approached too fast. When she stabbed at the brakes the back wheels began to skid. Bryce put out a hand and held the dashboard.
“You condemn what gave birth to your own science.”
Garrett steered into the turn, threshold braking until the tyres gripped. She accelerated hard out of the corner into the straight. The morning star was visible overhead, a sharp silver point nailed into grey.
Did he really want an argument? Now? After what had happened? She let the anger dry on her cheeks. At least it stopped her thinking about what she had buried. She continued to drive fast above the winding river, steering into the turns.
“Religion gave us our first chemistry, our first psychology, our first medicine. But in this century its claims are usually wrong–” as she drove through the sharp bends, Bryce’s head began to jerk back and forth as though punched by an invisible fist, “–often immoral and always man-made. And those who hold to superstitions simply for comfort or by convention give cover to terrible misunderstandings; they prepare the ground out of which can grow truly pathological thinking.”
“You mean us.”
“Yes.”
“You detest me for my faith.”
“No I don't. I judge and hate what you do because of it.”
“Did you not follow my thought experiment? Isn’t it reasonable?”
“It is inhuman.”
“Perhaps – compared to current human behaviour, which is psychotic. But it is right to take the necessary steps to avoid disaster. We are engaged in a hol
y war.”
“Holy?” Garrett couldn’t keep the contempt out of her voice.
“A war against the unbelief of planetary suicide.”
“Salvation through mass murder?”
“A war fought with a new vision, combining the Eastern and Western Enlightenments. What we do is both spiritual and scientific.”
“You’re not a scientist. You are a lab assistant. You provided Professor Richardson with facilities and resources to manufacture your cure and pathogen, but you didn’t create them. You use wind power but you couldn’t invent the technology. You have a climate-controlled greenhouse – I doubt you built the components yourself. You’ve only enough knowledge to exploit and misuse. That is all.”
“Not true.”
“You need me to decode a genome for you.”
Leaving the city Garrett drove north as she was told along unlit country roads. She understood Bryce’s caution. East of Cardiff the barrier of the Severn River forms the English-Welsh border and the two motorway bridges are monitored with cameras. Darkened villages swept past as road signs: Tideham, Stroat, Lydney. Bryce gave directions at each junction.
There are different silences between two people, between the dull, the embarrassed, the married or old friends. And there is the preoccupied silence of the dressing room before fights and matches with no waste of words or pretence of society.
The River Severn rejoined them for the run into Gloucester. They used the small road bridges on the outskirts of the city and turned to push south through the sleeping Cotswolds, through a road maze bordered by neat high hedges and haunted by religious memorials at every fork and crossroad.