by Jamie Metzl
“Who knows. Some people in the community were looking at that a few years back, but I never heard of anyone confirming anything before I was out. I wouldn’t have known everything anyway.”
“What would be the motivation?” My mind races as I begin to formulate hypotheses.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Gillespie says, “but how does the saying go? Desperate times beget desperate measures.”
“Like using the science developed on the SBN ship for military applications?”
“Could be,” Gillespie says, his tone suggesting he’s not convinced. His cold stare reminds me of the old Gillespie I used to fear.
“Think about it,” he continues, throwing me a bone. “You can’t escape the news from the Middle East even if you try. Most of the Arab countries are just fictional lines on an antiquated map, swept up in the chaos of the great Sunni–Shia war, the roving bands of jihadis and ethnic militias, and the vast swaths of lawlessness. The United Nations protective dome is under threat, the tiny Gulf states are armed to the teeth and sucking in everyone’s money, there’s an open revolt in the United Nations against the deal the US made with the Chinese. Not many countries want the UN to protect Israel, even if doing so was the price America extracted from China for protecting the installations pumping China’s oil. Missiles are getting fired at Israel every day and the UN dome is a big part of ensuring so few of them get through. If you were Israel what would you do?”
I can think of a lot of answers. “I’d probably lobby the countries who want to cut me off.”
“Not sure what world you’ve been living in, but they’ve been trying that for a long time. Americans may feel some kind of moral commitment to Israel, but the rest of the world is simply doing a cost-benefit analysis and seems to have decided the cost of blood and treasure of protecting Israel just isn’t worth it for them. It was probably only American pressure that got them to agree to the dome in the first place. With America’s politics looking chronically unstable, a lot of countries are reconsidering that bet.”
“So, what, SBN is some kind of insurance policy? How would that work?”
“I have no idea. This is all conjecture, informed by a few brief conversations years ago, but I can think of at least two good reasons Israeli intelligence might want to help create something like SBN.”
“Like?”
“Like feeding new, revolutionary technologies to Israeli companies and the Israeli government. With so many of the best and brightest Israelis leaving for safer places, Israel might want to double down on revolutionary research, even research outside the bounds of what the other countries of the world are comfortable with, to obtain a technological edge.”
“So why not just form their own think tank, why go through all the subterfuge of creating SBN and outfitting the ship?”
“You’d have to ask them. But would the most free-thinking scientists from around the world rally to support the Israeli government like they’ve rallied to join SBN? Seems like that would be a pretty good deal for Israel.”
“What’s the second reason?”
“Again, this is just conjecture, but what if they came up with something so revolutionary every person and every country in the world wanted it—something they could control—that could give them a lot of leverage, maybe enough leverage to guarantee the continuation of the protective dome, maybe even guarantee the future security of their country?”
It’s an audacious idea that somehow makes sense. “And Shelton could be a great vehicle for making this happen. The American boy genius could be a perfect cover.”
“Now you’re thinking, Azadian.”
I roll on. “Could that explain the incredible success of IDS? Shelton had an army of Israel’s most gifted programmers behind him and then he vanishes to Cuba just when SBN is being created, escaping the global spotlight and avoiding any probing questions.”
“I’m an intel guy,” Gillespie says, changing tack. “I don’t trust any theory just because it makes sense.”
The jigsaw pieces are flying across my mind. “Heller spent a chunk of his career at the Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem. His wife was Israeli.”
“You told me Heller gave the other half of the encryption key to SBN, correct?”
“Hart and Wolfson and the three other scientists who vanished—all seem to be Jews.”
Gillespie focuses his sharp gaze.
“Would the Israelis want to shut down Heller if they had a connection to him and feared he might expose them in some way?” I ask.
“Why would you think that?”
“Someone got to Heller.”
“Maybe that would be one explanation, but if all this is true, I’d imagine there are a lot of other options,” Gillespie says.
“At least that might explain why Heller was so secretive? If Israeli intelligence is behind SBN, do we assume Heller would have been aware of it?”
“We shouldn’t be assuming more than we have to,” Gillespie says. “Right now, we don’t have answers.”
His use of the plural pronoun somehow comforts me. “Or maybe someone else discovered this connection, some enemy of Israel, an intelligence service, someone who wanted to sabotage the whole thing.”
The feeling rises from my gut. What if this is the work of a hostile intelligence service? If I have to consider all of the options, at least one of them has to be that someone may want something from Toni. And if someone that sophisticated wants Toni, what use are the two “new school” guards from the KCPD at my front and back doors? How much am I doing to protect Toni if the only ones looking into this case are my little group and a few half-assed inspectors from the forty-fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States?
Gillespie has never struck me as intuitive, but somehow he reads my mind. “It’s unbelievable those idiots aren’t doing more to look into this.”
“It’s not unbelievable,” I say, a plan beginning to rapidly gel in my head, “it’s terrifying. Can you help us?”
“I’m retired,” he says cynically before correcting himself. “Forcibly retired.”
Somehow I don’t trust his words. I stare at him without flinching.
“Anderson, we really need you,” Toni interjects.
He glares through the screen but then his eyes soften slightly. “I’m cut off these days. My old partners can get into big trouble for even speaking with me.”
I feel no choice but to throw down the trump card. “You know better than anyone what the stakes are here.”
Toni kicks me surreptitiously. Referencing how the US government’s secret plan to seed the American population with genetically enhanced children ended up getting nine pregnant women killed and causing a national crisis may be my way of pressuring Gillespie to cooperate, but Toni’s style, as usual, is different.
“It’s not about that, Anderson,” she says softly. “This is about the future, about protecting people. We know you’re no longer in the government, but we’d be so incredibly grateful if you could please—”
“I can’t promise anything,” Gillespie fires, then breathes in deeply.
I pounce on the opportunity with as much gentleness my impatient mind can muster. “Gillespie, I need one thing from you. I know you understand how big of a deal this all is, how many people might be in danger. I need your help.”
His body stiffens. His eyes narrow. Annoyance blankets his face. But I still sense Gillespie affords Toni and me grudging respect from our Genesis Code experience and recognizes he owes us one. “I’m listening.”
“I need you to tell me where I can find the Scientists Beyond Nations ship.”
41
I splash my driver’s license from my u.D to the guard’s screen before marching into Franklin Chou’s lab feeling like I’m racing against a clock I can’t even see.
The lab is once again a hive of activity with laser-focused students manning their battle stations in front of the massive wall screens. Large glass cabinets filled with agar plates are
assembled in the middle of the room.
“If this is real, it’s one of the greatest discoveries of all time,” Chou states meditatively as I approach.
“What do you mean ‘if this is real’? I thought Hart and Wolfson proved it.”
“Much of what we’re doing hinges on the science being verifiable. Those records prove only what someone wrote down, not what’s confirmed to be true. They almost gave the Nobel Prize to Hwang Woo Suk in Korea before people figured out he was making up his genetic research. They reported you could live forever if you consumed enough resveratrol and red wine until someone tried it and only wound up drunk. I’m a scientist. For me it’s only true if it’s replicable, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
“How big of a job is it?” I ask.
“Huge, but ours is a lot easier than Heller’s was. He had to make everything up from scratch. All we have to do is follow his blueprint, at least what we have of it.”
I move toward the cabinet of agar plates. “Roundworms?”
“That’s where he started and that’s where we have to. I had this rush shipment delivered earlier today. We’re trying to speed things up by keeping the incubators at twenty-five degrees Celsius and also using the digital simulation of the C. elegans from the OpenWorm network. I’ve got four hundred transgenic mice coming tomorrow from Jackson Laboratory.”
I’m not sure I’m fully following Chou so I cut to the chase. “How long will it all take?”
“I really have no idea. We have some of the pieces but we’re missing the capstone. Heller’s formula called for integrating genetic material from an earlier phase of the organism’s life, a few short sequences from the Turritopsis nutricula melanaster jellyfish DNA, and the specific factors for the chemical compounds and molecules. The lifespan of the roundworms is so short and their reproductive cycles so quick, it’s easy to get the first, and the protein sequences for the jellyfish DNA are in Heller’s lab notes, but we don’t have any of Heller’s catalytic compound and don’t have the formula to make our own. There could literally be millions of options.”
Chou’s words depress me. I hadn’t fully realized the odds were so bleak. “Millions?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve got a lot of graduate students, an unlimited supply of roundworms, and a good amount of computing power, but to say that we’re looking for a needle in a haystack would be a vast understatement.”
“You’ll keep trying?”
Chou ignores my question. It’s midnight and the lab is still buzzing. His face is lined, his bowtie crooked, and he’s wearing the same shirt I’ve seen him in for two days.
“Rich,” he says with a flicker in his eye, “if you can get me a vial of Heller’s catalytic compound or the formula for how to produce more of it, it might speed up our process considerably.”
“I can try,” I say, fighting dejection. The first of the two vials was either destroyed with Heller’s lab or gone before it blew up. My chances of tracking down the second may be entirely in Gillespie’s shaky hands. And even if I can somehow find the vials, I still have no idea where to find the actual formula for the catalytic compound, without which the secret for replicating the reversion process once the vials are used or gone will be lost forever.
I stumble out of Chou’s lab feeling the exhaustion catching up with me. Fueled by a toxic mix of adrenaline and caffeine, the days seem to blur into each other. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was at dinner with Shelton in his mansion. Now that world feels like a scene from another life.
The newsroom is mostly dark when I arrive, but I find a glow coming from our conference room where Joseph and Sierra quietly plug away. The four digital walls are filled to the brim with recently color-coded files, but the data still doesn’t tell us the full story. I brief them on my conversations with Gillespie and Chou. Another data hub, for the Israeli Scientific Service, gets thrown up on the wall.
Joseph and Sierra look like they’re about to drop. I tell them to go home so I can spend some quiet time in the conference room.
“Remind me again who you are to tell me to go home?” Sierra asks.
Joseph looks at her admiringly then turns toward me. “Not going home, boss.”
I look at Sierra, then Joseph, and shake my head slightly. “All right then,” I say, “let’s go through this again.”
We move the data around but something essential is still missing, the armature connecting the disparate pieces. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. Nothing comes.
Then the feeling of warm drool on my hands wakes me. I lift my head with a jerk. Joseph is running on fumes as he waves his hands to move files back and forth across the wall. Sierra has somehow maintained a dose of her perkiness, but the limits of human physical capacity seem to be weighing on even her.
“Look who’s awake.” Sierra grins.
I look at my u.D and feel a twinge of shame. It’s 3:22 a.m., and I’ve been asleep for over an hour.
“Why don’t you go home so I can spend some quiet time in the conference room?” Sierra says dryly, taking a slug of coffee.
Touché.
“I need to go check on Toni,” I say awkwardly. “Let’s all get a few hours of sleep. There may be some kind of magic formula out there, but we sure as hell don’t have it now and we’ll all kill ourselves if we keep going like this.”
Joseph looks at Sierra as she weighs my words.
“Let’s meet here tomorrow morning at 8 a.m.,” I say.
Only Haruki is awake to greet me enthusiastically as I enter my kitchen through the garage. He bows deeply. “Welcome home, Dikran-san—”
“Not now, Haruki,” I exclaim, feeling little energy to interact with anyone or anything, including the ever-perky robot.
“Yes, Dikran-san,” he says, his eyes dropping as he turns to follow my march past him on my way up the stairs.
“Please just go to the next room and power down,” I say, not looking back.
“Yes, Dikran-san,” he says.
Is it just my state of mind, or do I perceive sadness in his voice? I hear the wheels rolling against the tile floor as I walk up the stairs. Then I stop. “Haruki,” I say quietly, turning.
Haruki is facing me at the bottom of the stairs. He tilts his head slightly and leans forward, waiting for me to speak. His eyes are bright and alert.
I freeze a moment, unsure if Haruki, in spite of all his advanced hardware and software, is more like a toaster, a dog, or a person.
Haruki lifts his head then tilts it forward again, beckoning me to speak.
More than a toaster, less than a person. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Yes, Dikran-san,” he says eagerly. “Please explain.”
“I want you to keep an eye on Toni. Do you understand?”
“I believe you are asking me to surveil Ms. Antonia Hewitt, am I correct?”
“Something like that, yes, Haruki.”
“I will do my very best, Dikran-san.”
Looking into Haruki’s wide, dilating eyes, I almost see cognition and wonder for a moment what our species’ future is going to look like. But then old-fashioned human exhaustion catches up to me. I turn, walk up the stairs, gently open the bedroom door, climb into bed, and slide toward Toni. She pulls me into her accrued warmth, and I sink into her embrace for the fraction of a second before unconsciousness overtakes me.
It feels like the night hasn’t happened at all when my u.D vibrates me awake at seven-fifteen.
“Baby,” I say, whispering gently into her ear, “I’ve got to go. I’ll be back later.” I again feel guilty for leaving her when she’s lost so much.
My words rouse her from her sleep. She sits up quickly, puts a hand on each of my shoulders, and looks me in the eye. “Wait a moment,” she says softly. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m good,” I say, feeling the urge to get back to the Star conference room.
“Good?” Her eyes focus sharply on mine.
There are a lot of th
ings I want to say—that I’m afraid, that the world we’ve known is feeling shaky, that I need to protect her but don’t even know what we may be up against—but most of those urges direct me back to the conference room. The others I suppress.
“Any more dreams?”
“No. I’m sorry,” she says. “How important is it?”
“I don’t know,” I say quietly. “There may be no link at all, but if Heller’s hypnotized you in some way and you’re having dreams with the colors of floating jellyfish, maybe there’s something in your subconscious trying to get through.”
“Want to have a look?” she says with a smile, opening her mouth.
I place my palm on her forehead. “Don’t I wish.”
Toni rolls her eyes. “I’d probably be afraid to learn all that’s going on in that overactive head of yours.”
My distracted smile betrays my scattered thoughts.
“But if you think there could be something important lodged somewhere in my brain,” she continues, “I’ll continue looking.”
She’s only half mocking me, but somehow the strategy makes strange sense.
42
Joseph Abraham lied.
I step groggily into the conference room at 8 a.m. and find him in the same clothes with the same look of exhausted determination on his face as last night. An empty mug with three used tea bags stuck to its side rests on the table beside two empty SaladBar wrappers. I fight the urge to tell him he needs sleep.
“I haven’t found much of anything,” he says when he sees me walk in.
The rest of the wall is filled with stacked digital files. The area around the hub for the Israeli Scientific Service remains almost as unpopulated as it did last night.
“There are a lot of minor references,” Joseph continues, “a lot of people raising questions in online forums, but almost no real information. It’s kind of incredible.”
“Incredible there’s so little information? Or because it’s so well hidden?”
“Probably both. All I can find is the most basic information and even that is contradictory. One site says ISS was created in 2008, another in 2017. I found one reference saying it was the brainchild of former Israeli president Shimon Peres after his ninetieth birthday but another claiming it was started by Israeli venture capitalists coming back from the failed Lebanon invasion in 2006. There’s nothing definitive, certainly nothing at all put out by the Israelis.”