“Doctor?”
“Yes. It’s all right. Thank you,” Susan said.
Jennifer glanced up at the refrigerator. There was no Coke machine on the immediate site. The men and women had to keep the stock up. But there were machines and a restaurant back at what everyone called the hotel, the old resort. Did all the service personnel have top clearance? What about the company men and women who had to refill the machines? Was that a weak area, a possible security breach? She was amazed. She had been around military people for a short time and already she was beginning to think like them. She decided to open her can, to drink the murky clear refreshing elixir. Still, she could not help examining the design further.
Susan drew a line in green, giving it an arrow point. The arrow pointed to the side of the board at which she had begun. She capped the pen. Another satisfying snap. Somewhere below the compressor whirred online. She continued her lecture, projecting a bit more.
“Let us return to science as we know it. To continue with viruses: They are our predators. We have taken dominion, or so we like to think, over practically every place on earth. Yet the smallest of creatures, invisible to our eyes, visible only with the strongest of instruments of our own design and invention, thwarts us, stalks us, intends us (or, in true science, by random or chaotic acts) inflicts upon us great and irrevocable harm. Most of them we survive, but only because they “allow” it (you perceive how difficult it is to discuss these beings in purely scientific manner). They are the ultimate genomic engineers, reducing our puny attempts at recombinant reconfiguration as pathetic. For every action we take, they counter with three or four, and are always, or nearly always, well ahead of us and prepared for anything we might do. Against them we must be ever vigilant.
Like a yin and a yang, plants and animal species need each other to survive. The basis of life is carbon; the fundamental need for animal life is oxygen. Animals are living beings which ingest oxygen, expel carbon dioxide, locomote, reproduce. From bacteria to ape along the scale of evolution. We knew this defined animal life. We knew what defined plant life.”
“Until now!”
People in the group shifted positions again. They’d been sitting awhile. Jennifer stood up to stretch. Two of the others did as well. Hodges, who had been standing since he served the beverages, found an old secretary’s chair behind the kitchenette corner. He wheeled it over. It had a crack in its green plastic cover. He found some duct tape. He stretched out the tape. He tore the strip. He taped over the crack. He replaced the tape in the supply cabinet by the refrigerator. He sat down. The chair creaked. It expelled air from its cushion. Wells stood up. In his lanky stride he went over and stood by the stairwell. Susan continued.
“These vent creatures do not take in oxygen. They do not consume food from without their bodies.”
An undercurrent of murmur passed among a few of the men. They looked at Delores. She said something to Magruder. She looked out at Jennifer. Jennifer looked away. She returned her gaze to Susan. The others took up her lead.
“Your question obviously is how do they survive? Everything has to take in energy-converting substances. Well, as far as we can determine, they don’t survive for very long, and they are born or generated very quickly. In between, we now have some knowledge.”
“Look at your pictures. Witness their tubule bodies. These—just a moment, let me come around and point them out. Here. No, here, right within them, and then down here on the floor.”
Susan meandered about the room, pointing out certain images in the photographs. She had a silver-plated pen that telescoped into an elongated pointer. Often, at the lectern, she drew it out for dramatic effect, then pointed at her visual aid.
So she did now, leaning over her participants. Jennifer noted she leaned quite close to Hodges, seeming to ensure her breasts fairly brushed against his shoulder. He looked up at her, close enough, it appeared to her, that he might be breathing on his instructor’s neck. He had been looking at her, after all. Could he, she …
At first the images were difficult to see by the untrained eye. Most of the troop caught it soon enough. Susan went around again to the rest, explaining with the patience of an excellent teacher.
“These are scores, hosts of scores of colonies of bacteria, so astonishingly numerous the full colony can be seen with the naked eye, as snowflakes gather into a snowfall. Through some symbiotic process as yet little understood, there is an exchange between the bacteria colonies and the tubule creatures. Look closely; the bacteria colony can still be perceived even within the confines of the opaque membrane walls of the tubule creatures. Remember this is not oxygen and carbon dioxide metabolism. In fact, it turns out the chemical basis for these beings is mostly sulfur and its compounds, such as sulfuric acid and methane as I discussed earlier. There is some silicon and manganese influence as well.”
“You’re suggesting these are sulfur, methane, silicon creatures.” It was the first time Jennifer heard Magruder ask a question. She knew it was his without looking. She had not yet become accustomed to being surprised his voice was high pitched, like a woman’s. Even so, she had that funny feeling at the nape of her neck. He seemed to know more, have some insight. Or was it just that strange high voice from a man well-manufactured in muscles?
“Yes,” Susan said.
“It sounds like a Star Trek or—” Jennifer had known that Hodges was smarter than he looked and tracked the lecture with comprehension.
“Yes. In a way it does.” Susan said.
“But this is here. On earth.”
“Precisely. And it is not at all fiction. It is proven zoological fact. We are now questioning the fundamental principle of the definition of life itself. At least the survivability of life. If life species as we know them can exist at elevations beyond conventionally thought life support, and at depths few other forms can fathom, if you will (again Susan giggled, covering her mouth with her pointer and hands at her pun and soon enough she continued), and if life as we don’t know it, or, rather, don’t as yet understand it, can exist at places above 100° centigrade, then who knows what exists anywhere on any planet or moon in the universe?”
The compressor turned off-line. The command center cast into silence. Jennifer swigged her Coke, killing the can. She could hear the liquid compound with precious water necessary for life gurgle down her throat, felt the coolness in her esophagus, drip into her stomach, where it would began its metabolic passage to give bathing catalytic life to her cells.
“We believe, that somewhere, inside these vents, may lie the answer to the mystery of life itself. That life may have begun not by carbon combinations, but by sulfur, or methane or something else, deep in the interior of the planet. Perhaps this may happen anywhere in the universe. On our planet, sometime in the distant past this life exploded through steam released vents. As the organisms floated, bubbled, twirled up to the surface, there were occasional mutations; remember what I said about viruses, mutations, antibodies, immunities. They found they could survive in the sea and ultimately above it, on an alien environment to them, land. This is our supposition. This is, in whole or in part, what we hope to discover over there, or, rather, under there.”
Delores stood up. She had it, Jennifer saw. She had been listening intently and now she had the whole thing.
“We’re going to be looking for the birthplace of life itself.”
Susan paused. She smiled, a slight, knowing Cheshire grin. She often did this for effect, before answering a question, the pause, the wily smile. Then she spoke only one word.
“Yes.”
The commander sat down. The compressor revved. It seemed louder this time. Jennifer wondered if she was always the only one who heard it hum up to specs, or felt the silence when the thermostat opened it went offline.
Susan confirmed Delores’s conclusion.
“Do you understand the implications? Life forms, life on e
arth before it mutated and evolved. DNA as it was originally designed, without error, without the misspellings and corruptions of the code that have come down through uncountable generations and genetic challenge.”
She was an experienced classroom lecturer. Now, for the first time, she observed some eyes start to spin. They were getting away from her. She had to simplify. She needed an analogy to bring them back.
“All right. Let’s go at it this way. We have no more than 20, maybe 25 times the number of genes than does E. coli. And we already know there is a vast amount of homology, of metabolic commonality, even between E. coli and us. For that matter, let us examine Drosophila, the simple fruit fly. It has about 10 to the 8th base pairs in its DNA. We have only a little over 10 to the 9th. Consider it: Only one dimensional number away, meeting then a similarity, a vast, huge similarity between us, a higher life form, and them, a supposedly lower life form completely similar in metabolic pathways, in genetic function, in enzyme control, in homeostatic and other physiological maintenance.”
Her next preliminary phrase would be the clue, she knew, where students registered for credit would scurry to scratch in their notebooks, if any still did, or on their iPad or other sophisticated devices, knowing the material would be featured on the exam.
“I emphasize this: Extraordinarily similar; fully overlapping.”
They were coming back. Soon, she knew, for she had the entire methodology mapped out, as if she had spent weeks in preparation for this moment; in a real sense, she had spent years; soon they would be in her palms, and, as any competent lecturer knows, the old high feeling of wrapping her fingers about them. What a glorious thing to be a teacher, when all flowed so well.
Susan Arthknott warmed to her material. Her excitement grew, a felt pulse of energy about the room. All felt it. She pushed her glasses up once nearly every sentence as she grew clearly agitated. All faces were on her. Jennifer could see a transformation in her that was rare, a passion that rose up, like bubbles bursting upon the surface of green-blue deep water, something she had never seen in her friend before.
Suddenly a red flush painted her flesh, near her ears; it reminded Jennifer the blush she had witnessed upon her lovers as she teased them to submission, and spread in streaks upon her own skin, she knew, since she could often feel the same heat generated from deep within her body, welling up to her skin, like life from below edging to the surface.
She wondered if she were exhibiting the same ruddy hue now, any change in coloring that would give her away to the group. But like the others, she could not take her eyes off Susan. It seemed like Susan’s voice, like that of an opera diva capable of eight high C’s a night, emerged not from her oral cavity, but from a vortex area defined within her forehead.
“Now imagine, just imagine a creature a little more complex than the fruit fly, probably at least 90% a direct homologue to our DNA. Or what would have been our DNA if we had not been challenged by viruses, bacteria, evolutionary insult, and more.”
“Our DNA is like a computer operating system that has been corrupted and patched and patched and fixed for millennia! Now we could obtain the master configuration. The cellular level control, the singular presentation of intra-cell transport, the primeval metabolic pathways and precisely what depended upon what! Here we would have the original design, the original message as God or chance had first intended. Compared against the current form, every error, every mishap could be literally calculated, every mystery of life’s and disease’s code: Uncovered! Revealed! At last, known, all known! All mystery of life known!”
Susan breathed heavily, rapidly now. Her nostrils flared. Curiously, she stopped pushing her glasses up. They hung precariously low on her nose, and there they stayed. It was obvious at least to Jennifer that Susan wasn’t looking at the group any more. Indeed, she might have suddenly not been aware of their presence. She spoke to some other entity. She reached deeply in to some pure part of her mind that raced ahead, dashed to a finish line climax that would be as explosive as any Jennifer thought she could remember.
“Every gene in that creature, governing every pathway would be pure and primitive. Deleting that gene would tell us precisely what process went awry. Each gene would be the target for some drug as a remedy. Where we now have predominantly several dozen classes of fundamentally different kinds of drugs, we could imagine developing several thousand! We could map the DNA variations that characterized the “cause” of virtually all the disease of aging: Cancer! Heart Disease! Arthritis! Osteoporosis! Diabetes! Myasthenic Syndromes! Wrinkles!”
Susan was in control. Nonetheless, this last choice drew more laughter than she expected. But it had the effect of starting to return her to the level of the group. She let the pause continue, for effect, as she had before. She worked the crowd now, and she knew it. At last she pushed her glasses back, to focus her mind, to glance over the rims in her intimidating fashion upon the faces that did not leave hers. They were riveted. She was riveting.
“All curses of ills and ailments could be genetically determined. Once determined, the efforts of medical research could be surgically focused on a cure, on a repair, no longer wasted on why or how.
And the reverse would be equally true. This, I make a presumption, is what your superiors may want; this is what I most fear; this is why science should remain in charge, for the good and not for the evil in our souls.”
She needed not to glance at Delores. The military officer knew to whom that last sentence was directed. There was one flaw in Doctor Arthknott’s reasoning that Delores and all good military commanders knew, know. It was a distinct false assumption to believe that wondrous scientific discoveries and technologic inventions would be used only for beneficence; their use eventually would be bent toward some weapon of horrific destruction as well. This had become the hallmark of American military strategy in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor: To divine the technique first, to be prepared to counter, to be prepared. Therefore, as Susan continued, Delores had already intuited most of what was coming in the lecturer’s denouement.
“By knowing exactly what our most basic cellular processes were strictly dependent upon, we could devise chemicals which in effect could be deadly disruptive with no longer a concern that the organism had evolved a defense. Even HIV: we know patients, or, rather, subjects, with HIV who can not progress to AIDS because of a “genetic mutation.” Our DNA mutates and maneuvers like a virus, adapting, building in redundancy, alternatives, defenses to challenges. Some persons evolved defenses against smallpox, a disease once so virulent it wiped out towns and villages. But with an understanding of the pure and fundamental processes the target creature or creatures could provide us, we could disrupt homo sapiens’ metabolic processes with synthetically constructed chemicals for which only the chemist creating the agent would have the antidote. A Satanic Arm of the Agents of Death: Angels of Death, with no recourse.”
Susan’s tone had shifted gradually over the few moments when she offered the cornucopia of a disease-free world to one with perhaps tens of thousands of molecular poisons for which cure would be impossible, perhaps immediately lethal, except to the agent creating the DNA plague whose arm she imagined outstretched just as she stood with her own arms stretched out. She dropped one slowly, not so much for the impression it made but for the fact that it was simply too hard for her to hold it up any longer. She dropped her other arm, again, slowly, feeling the ether, flowing this way and that, almost as if it appeared a billowing jellyfish in the order of the deep sea.
Susan was only half-through. “Then there is the dark side. Very dark side. We are like Szilard, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Einstein and the others working on the Manhattan project to realize the release of energy contained in matter by Einstein’s famous equation – with the promise of nuclear energy – and the outcome of nuclear weapons. You see, these bacteria, tweaked a bit with CRISPR, a DNA-editing tool, can be converted to capture sulphur and water and con
vert it to some slime. Fine. Now we can recall that sulfur is the third most abundant mineral in the human body, about half concentrated in your muscles, skin, and bones. It makes up vital amino acids used to create proteins, hormones, enzymes, and such. The body is also about seventy percent water. Dropping these bacteria as a biological weapon on humans would literally suck then dry. They would look like an avocado left outside in the July summer for two weeks. Comparatively they would make Wade Wilson in the movie Deadpool look good – but he was also immortal; you would be dead.”
Jennifer was stunned by Susan’s astute reference to a popular movie. She couldn’t be more proud of her friend. She saw Susan push her glasses up again. And again. She knew she wasn’t through yet!
“Now I know the old military saw that the biological weapon when launched will come back to bite the perpetrator in the ass. In World War I, the mustard gas launched by the Germans sometimes blew back into their own trenches. Now we know these bacteria like other life forms have telomeres, tips on their DNA, which are reduced with each cell’s division. They are like a biological clock. Once the reductions hit a critical level, there’s apoptosis – the cell dies. Jennifer could use CRISPR to tweak into the DNA an exponential decrease in telomere length after each division so that there would be a time clock. After a short period, the bacteria die off leaving only its human devastation. There’s no blow-back”
All eyes turned to Jennifer, and she reacted as usual. She wrapped her arms around her torso as casually as she could. Speaking as professorial as her mentor, she added, “Just as the Manhattan Project warriors, we’ll be obtaining both a boon for mankind but a potentially deadly weapon. There is no such thing, we may say, as a free lunch.” They turned back to look at Susan.
She pushed her glasses up again, for now she stared at the commander. Everyone could feel her look heavy upon her. The commander did not flinch. She was tougher than that. She stared down any challenger if it meant going to her grave with both eyes open, unblinking. Susan’s intimidating gaze then toured the room.
Deeptide Vents . . . of Fire Page 8