The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  She was not yet fifteen. It was still possible, then, to be adopted out of country. Covertly, she set about it. Caitlin Tyrone was the person who helped her from afar.

  They’d met online, in a science chatroom. Ireland needed scientists. She didn’t know or care where that was; she’d have gone to Hell. It took almost a year to arrange it, the adoption. It took all Fang’s diligence, all her cunning, all her need, all her cold hate, to keep it from her uncle, to acquire the paperwork, to forge his signature, to sequester money, and finally on the last morning to sneak out of the apartment before dawn.

  She flew from Guangzhou to Beijing to Frankfurt to Dublin, too nervous to sleep. Each time she had to stop in an airport and wait for the next flight, sometimes for hours, she feared arrest. In her sleepless imagination, the waiting lounges turned into detention centers. Then she was on the last flight. The stars faded and the sun rose over the Atlantic, and there was Ireland. O! the green of it. And her new mother Caitlin was there to greet her, grab her, look into her eyes. Goodbye forever to the wounded past.

  She had a scholarship at Trinity College, in biochemistry. She already knew English, but during her first year she studied phonology and orthography and grammar, to try to map, linguistically, how far she’d traveled. It wasn’t so far. The human vocal apparatus is everywhere the same. So is the brain, constructing the grammar that drives the voice box. Most of her native phonemes had Irish or English equivalents, near enough. But the sounds she made of hers were not quite correct, so she worked daily to refine them.

  O is where she often came to rest. The exclamative particle, the sound of that moment when the senses surprise the body, same in Ireland as in China—same body, same senses, same sound. Yet a human universe of shadings. The English O was one thing; Mandarin didn’t quite have it; Cantonese was closer; but everywhere the sound slid around depending on locality, on country, even on county: monophthong to diphthong, the tongue wandering in the mouth, seeking to settle. When she felt lost in the night, which was often, she sought for that O, round and solid and vast and various and homey as the planet beneath her, holding her with its gravity. Moving her tongue in her mouth as she lay in bed waiting for sleep.

  Biochemistry wasn’t so distant, in her mind, from language. She saw it all as signaling. DNA wasn’t “information,” data held statically in helices, it was activity, transaction.

  She insisted on her new hybrid name, the whole long Gaelic mess of it—it was Caitlin’s surname—as a reminder of the contigency of belonging, of culture and language, of identity itself. Her solid legs had landed on solid ground, or solid enough to support her.

  Carefully, arduously, one connector at a time, she unplugged herself from the bodysuit, then sat up on the slab. Too quickly. She dizzied and pitched forward.

  Get up, you cow. The da again. Dream trash. As if she couldn’t. She’d show him. She gave all her muscles a great heave.

  And woke shivering on the carbon deckplates. Held weakly down by the thin false gravity. It was no embracing O, just a trickle of mockery. You have to do this, she told her will.

  She could small acetone on her breath. Glycogen used up, body starts to burn fat, produces ketones. Ketoacidosis. She should check ketone levels in the others.

  Roger came into Fang’s life by way of Caitlin. Years before, Caitlin had studied physics at Trinity. Roger had read her papers. They were brilliant. He’d come to teach a seminar, and he had the idea of recruiting her to the Lab. But science is bound at the hip to its application, and turbulence occurs at that interface where theory meets practice, knowledge meets performance. Where the beauty of the means goes to die in the instrumentality of the ends.

  Roger found to his dismay that Caitlin couldn’t manage even the sandbox politics of grad school. She’d been aced out of the best advisors and was unable to see that her science career was already in a death spiral. She’d never make it on her own at the Lab, or in a corp. He could intervene to some degree, but he was reluctant; he saw a better way.

  Already Caitlin was on U, a Merck pharmaceutical widely prescribed for a new category in DSM-6: “social interoperability disorder.” U for eudaimonia-zine. Roger had tried it briefly himself. In his opinion, half the planet fit the diagnostic criteria, which was excellent business for Merck but said more about planetary social conditions than about the individuals who suffered under them.

  U was supposed to increase compassion for others, to make other people seem more real. But Caitlin was already too empathic for her own good, too ready to yield her place to others, and the U merely blissed her out, put her in a zone of self-abnegation. Perhaps that’s why it was a popular street drug; when some governments tried to ban it, Merck sued them under global trade agreements, for loss of expected future profits.

  Caitlin ended up sidelined in the Trinity library, where she met and married James, an older charming sociopath with terrific interoperability. Meanwhile, Roger kept tabs on her from afar. He hacked James’s medical records and was noted that James was infertile.

  It took Fang several hours to come to herself. She tried not to worry, this was to be expected. Her body had gone through a serious near-death trauma. She felt weak, nauseous, and her head throbbed, but she was alive. That she was sitting here sipping warm tea was a triumph, for her body and for her science. She still felt a little stunned, a little distant from that success. So many things could have gone wrong: hibernation was only the half of it; like every other problem they’d faced, it came with its own set of ancillaries. On which she’d worked.

  In addition to her highly classified DARPA work on hibernation, Fang had published these papers in the Journal of Gravitational Physiology: serum leptin level is a regulator of bone mass (2033); inhibition of osteopenia by low magnitude, high frequency mechanical stimuli (2035); the transcription factor NF-kappaB is a key intracellular signal transducer in disuse atrophy (2036); IGF-I stimulates muscle growth by suppressing protein breakdown and expression of atrophy-related ubiquitin ligases, atrogin-1 and MuRF1 (2037); and PGC-lalpha protects skeletal muscle from atrophy by suppressing FoxO3 action and atrophy-specific gene transcription (2039).

  When she felt able, she checked on the others. Each sleeper bore implanted and dermal sensors—for core and skin temperature, EKG, EEG, pulse, blood pressure and flow, plasma ions, plasma metabolites, clotting function, respiratory rate and depth, gas analysis and flow, urine production, EMG, tremor, body composition. Near-infrared spectrometry measured haematocrit, blood glucose, tissue O2 and pH. Muscles were stimulated electrically and mechanically to counteract atrophy. The slabs tipped thirty degrees up or down and rotated the body from supine to prone in order to provide mechanical loading from hypogravity in all directions. Exoskeletal waldos at the joints, and the soles and fingers, provided periodic range-of-motion stimulus. A range of pharmacological and genetic interventions further regulated bone and muscle regeneration.

  Also, twitching was important. If you didn’t twitch you wouldn’t wake. It was a kind of mooring to the present.

  Did they dream? EEGs showed periodic variation but were so unlike normal EEGs that it was hard to say. You couldn’t very well wake someone to ask, as the first sleep researchers had done.

  All looked well on the monitor, except for number fourteen. Reza. Blood pressure almost nonexistent. She got to her feet and walked down the row of slabs to have a look at Reza.

  A pursed grayish face sagging on its skull. Maybe a touch of life was visible, some purple in the gray, blood still coursing. Or maybe not.

  Speckling the gray skin was a web of small white dots, each the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. They were circular but not perfectly so, margins blurred. Looked like a fungus.

  She went back and touched the screen for records. This steward was long overdue for rousing. The machine had started the warming cycle three times. Each time he hadn’t come out of torpor, so the machine had shut down the cycle, stablized him, and tried again. After three failures, it had moved down t
he list to the next steward. Her.

  She touched a few levels deeper. Not enough fat on this guy. Raising the temperature without rousing would simply bring on ischemia and perfusion. That’s why the machine gave up. It was a delicate balance, to keep the metabolism burning fat instead of carbohydrates, without burning too much of the body’s stores. Humans couldn’t bulk up on fat in advance the way natural hibernators could. But she thought she’d solved that with the nutrient derms.

  It was the fortieth year of the voyage. They were two light-years from home. Not quite halfway. If hibernation was failing now, they had a serious problem.

  Was the fungus a result or a cause? Was it a fungus? She wanted to open the bodysuit and run tests, but any contagion had to be contained.

  They’d discussed possible failure modes. Gene activity in bacteria increased in low gravity; they evolved more rapidly. In the presence of a host they became more virulent. Radiation caused mutations. But ultraviolet light scoured the suits every day and should have killed bacteria and fungus alike. Logs showed that the UV was functioning. It wasn’t enough.

  James—the da, as he insisted Fang call him—had black hair and blue eyes that twinkled like ice when he smiled. At first he was mere background to her; he’d stumble in late from the pub to find Caitlin and Fang talking. Ah, the Addams sisters, he’d say, nodding sagely. Fang never understood what he meant by it. For all his geniality, he kept her at a distance, treated her like a houseguest.

  Caitlin was more like an older sister than a mother; she was only twelve years older. It was fun to talk science with her, and it was helpful. She was quick to understand the details of Fang’s field, and this dexterity spurred Fang in her own understanding and confidence.

  After a couple of years, James grew more sullen, resentful, almost abusive. He dropped the suave act. He found fault with Fang’s appearance, her habits, her character. The guest had overstayed her welcome. He was jealous.

  She couldn’t figure out why a woman as good and as smart as Caitlin stayed on with him. Maybe something damaged in Caitlin was called by a like damage in James. Caitlin had lost her father while a girl, as had Fang. When Fang looked at James through Caitlin’s eyes, she could see in him the ruins of something strong and attractive and paternal. But that thing was no longer alive. Only Caitlin’s need for it lived, and that need became a reproach to James, who had lost the ability to meet it, and who fled from it.

  The further James fled into drink, the more Caitlin retreated into her U, into a quiescence where things could feel whole. All the while, James felt Fang’s eyes on him, evaluating him, seeing him as he was. He saw she wasn’t buying him. Nothing disturbed him more than having his act fail. And he saw that Caitlin was alive and present only with Fang. They clung to one another, and were moving away from him.

  James was truly good to me, before you knew him.

  On U, everyone seems good to you.

  No, long before that. When I failed my orals he was a great support.

  You were vulnerable. He fed on your need.

  You don’t know, Fang. I was lost. He helped me, he held on to me when I needed it. Then I had you.

  She thought not. She thought James had learned to enjoy preying on the vulnerable. And Caitlin was too willing to ignore this, to go along with it. As Fang finished her years at Trinity, she agonized over how she must deal with this trouble. It was then that an offer arrived from Roger’s lab.

  Come with me to America.

  Oh, Fang. I can’t. What about James? What would he do there?

  It was James’s pretense that he was still whole and competent and functional, when in fact his days were marked out by the habits of rising late, avoiding work in the library, and leaving early for the pub. Any move or change would expose the pretense.

  Just you and me. Just for a year.

  I can’t.

  Fang heard alarms. If she stayed and tried to protect Caitlin, her presence might drive James to some extreme. Or Fang might be drawn more deeply into their dysfunction. She didn’t know if she could survive that. The thing Fang was best at was saving herself. So she went to America alone.

  There was a second body covered with fungus. Number fifteen. Loren.

  Either the fungus was contained, restricted to these two, or more likely it had already spread. But how? The bodysuits showed no faults, no breaches. They were isolated from each other, with no pathways for infection. The only possible connection would be through the air supply, and the scrubbers should remove any pathogens, certainly anything as large as a fungus.

  In any case, it was bad. She could try rousing another steward manually. But to what purpose? Only she had the expertise to deal with this.

  She realized she thought of it because she was desperately lonely. She wanted company with this problem. She wasn’t going to get any.

  Not enough fat to rouse. Increase glycogen uptake? Maybe, but carbohydrate fasting was a key part of the process.

  They had this advantage over natural hibernators: they didn’t need to get all their energy from stored body fat. Lipids were dripped in dermally to provide ATP. But body fat was getting metabolized anyway.

  Signaling. Perhaps the antisenescents were signaling the fungus not to die. Slowing not its growth but its morbidity. If it were a fungus. Sure it was, it had to be. But confirm it.

  After she came to the Lab, Fang learned that her adoption was not so much a matter of her initiative, or of Caitlin’s, or of good fortune. Roger had pulled strings every step of the way—strings Fang had no idea existed.

  He’d known of Fang because all student work—every paper, test, email, click, eyeblink, keystroke—was stored and tracked and mined. Her permanent record. Corps and labs had algorithms conducting eternal worldwide surveillance for, among so many other things,promising scientists. Roger had his own algorithms: his stock-market eye for early bloomers, good draft choices. He’d purchased Fang’s freedom from some Chinese consortium and linked her to Caitlin.

  Roger, Fang came to realize, had seen in Caitlin’s needs and infirmities a way to help three people: Caitlin, who needed someone to nurture and give herself to, so as not to immolate herself; Fang, who needed that nurturing; and himself, who needed Fang’s talent. In other words: Roger judged that Caitlin would do best as the mother of a scientist.

  He wasn’t wrong. Caitlin’s nurture was going to waste on James, who simply sucked it in and gave nothing back. And Fang needed a brilliant, loving, female example to give her confidence in her own brilliance, and learn the toughness she’d need to accomplish her work. That’s what Caitlin herself had lacked.

  If Fang had known all this, she’d have taken the terms; she’d have done anything to get out of China. But she hadn’t known; she hadn’t been consulted. So when she found out, she was furious. For Caitlin, for herself. As she saw it, Roger couldn’t have the mother, so he took the daughter. He used their love and mutual need to get what he wanted, and then he broke them apart. It was cold and calculating and utterly selfish of Roger; of the three of them, only he wasn’t damaged by it. She’d almost quit Gypsy in her fury.

  She did quit the Lab. She went into product development at Glaxo, under contract to DARPA. That was the start of her hibernation work. It was for battlefield use, as a way to keep injured soldiers alive during transport. When she reflected on this move, she wasn’t so sure that Roger hadn’t pulled more strings. In any case, the work was essential to Gypsy.

  Roger had fury of his own, to spare. Fang knew all about the calm front. Roger reeked of it. He’d learned that he had the talent and the position to do great harm; the orbiting bombs were proof of that. His anger and disappointment had raised in him the urge to do more harm. At the Lab he was surrounded by the means and the opportunity. So he’d gathered all his ingenuity and his rage against humanity and sequestered it in a project large enough and complex enough to occupy it fully, so that it could not further harm him or the world: Gypsy. He would do a thing that had never been done befo
re; and he would take away half the bombs he’d enabled in the doing of it; and the thing would not be shared with humanity. She imagined he saw it as a victimless revenge.

  Well, here were the victims.

  A day later, Pseudogymnoascus destructans was her best guess. Or some mutation of it. It had killed most of the bats on Earth. It grew only in low temperatures, in the 4 to 15° Celsius range. The ship was normally held at 4° Celsius.

  She could synthesize an antifungal agent with the gene printer, but what about interactions? Polyenes would bind with a fungus’s ergosterols but could have severe and lethal side effects.

  She thought about the cocktail. How she might tweak it. Sirtuins. Fibroplast growth factor 21. Hibernation induction trigger. [D-Ala2, D-Leu5]-Enkephalin. Pancreatic triacylglycerol lipase. 5’-adenosine monophosphate. Ghrelin. 3-iodothyronamine. Alpha2-macroglobulin. Carnosine, other antisenescents, antioxidants.

  Some components acted only at the start of the process. They triggered a cascade of enzymes in key pathways to bring on torpor. Some continued to drip in, to reinforce gene expression, to suppress circadian rhythms, and so on.

  It was all designed to interact with nonhuman mammalian genes she’d spliced in. Including parts of the bat immune system—Myotis lucifugus— parts relevant to hibernation, to respond to the appropriate mRNA signals. But were they also vulnerable to this fungus? O God, did I do this? Did I open up this vulnerability?

  She gave her presentation, in the open, to DARPA. It was amazing; she was speaking in code to the few Gypsies in the audience, including Roger, telling them in effect how they’d survive the long trip to Alpha, yet her plaintext words were telling DARPA about battlefield applications: suspending wounded soldiers, possibly in space, possibly for long periods, 3D-printing organs, crisping stem cells, and so on.