by Jeff Carlson
Somehow her new files had been corrupted. DNAllied’s laptops were loaded with firewalls and crypto. The university’s supercloud was equally secure. A virus was unlikely. What did that leave? Either she’d experienced data transmission errors or someone in the company had sabotaged her results.
My God, Emily thought. What else could go wrong today?
LOS ANGELES
In the kitchenette tucked behind the conference room, Emily stood by the sink with her older sister Laura. Laura’s eight-year-old son, P.J., sat in the corner with a Nintendo 3DS game. Both women held handfuls of note cards.
The power flickered, and Emily glanced at the lights as the microwave beeped, automatically resetting its digital display. “Is that bad luck?” she asked. “I’m having bad luck today.”
Laura smiled. “You can’t get out of this, Em.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re stalling.”
An hour and a half had passed since Emily’s fight with Ray. The media event started in ten minutes. Through the wall, Emily heard a hubbub of voices. She paced nervously while Laura leafed through several cards prepared in Emily’s handwriting.
Laura was gorgeous. Her dark blond hair was more honey-hued than Emily’s straw-colored ponytail. The diamond stud earrings and smoky eyes didn’t hurt, either. Laura exuded a casual, unflinching maturity Emily tried to emulate. Since they’d been kids, she’d wanted to emulate nearly everything about Laura.
Will you be proud of me? she thought.
Detached from the women, P.J.’s silence made an odd counterpoint to Emily’s restlessness. Laura rarely allowed him to play his 3DS because it could be an ordeal to separate him from the game. P.J. resisted to the point of shrieking.
Now the thin-limbed boy set his 3DS in his lap, ignoring the rousing sound track of LEGO Indiana Jones. Was he staring at the wallpaper?
“Let’s practice one more time,” Laura said.
Emily gestured at him. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. He’s fine, Auntie Em.”
The nickname rankled and pleased Emily. She wasn’t a wrinkled old lady like Dorothy’s aunt in The Wizard of Oz, but the movie had always been one of their favorites.
The good news was she’d recovered her statistical models from UCLA. A few minutes ago, the IT guys at DNAllied had texted Ray and Emily to explain what they thought had happened. The ECC circuitry in DNAllied’s server—error control and correction—appeared to have been fooled by corrupted line transmissions that met the circuitry’s parity tests. For several seconds, Emily’s data packets had been dropping bits in between UCLA and the Plaza. Then the problem stopped, although Laura said she’d read some nutty stuff on her iPhone this morning.
The net overflowed with stories of hackers and worms. Credit cards had been declined everywhere on the West Coast for twenty minutes. Emily wasn’t sure what to think. First her car, then her computers. If she gave in to Ray’s demands and made no mention of a prenatal vaccine, today would be a complete disaster.
“I need to ask you something,” she said.
Laura shook her head and raised the note cards like an axe. “Straighten up. You’re slouching.”
“Sir, yes, sir, sir,” Emily joked. But she did as she was told and lifted her shoulders. “Thank you for coming in this morning,” she said, smiling at an imaginary crowd. “Your press kits contain links to hi-def presentations. I’d like to touch on several highlights, then field any questions you may have.”
“Slower,” Laura said.
“My colleagues and I have finished a comprehensive study in functional genomics, reaching into mankind’s distant past in order to study who we are today. More specifically, we focused on the causes of one of society’s most tragic epidemics.”
Settling into her speech, Emily stole another glance at P.J. while Laura’s gaze was on the note cards.
Her nephew was autistic. Auntie Em believed she could save him. She’d gone into biology for other reasons, but P.J. had become a large part of what motivated her.
“Hold on,” she said, stepping toward him.
“You cheater,” Laura said.
P.J. didn’t turn as Emily approached, taking the game from his lap before it fell to the floor. “Here you go,” she said.
Did his gaze dart toward her face? Maybe. She did not receive the smile she’d hoped for. Interacting with P.J. could be like talking to someone through a fog bank. There were glimpses, which made their relationship all the more poignant. P.J. was someone she’d lost too many times. From one day to the next they would be apart, together, then apart again.
Emily wanted to ruffle his hair, yet stopped herself, putting his feelings before her own. Most of the time, P.J. didn’t like physical contact—but he’d detected something in how she’d paused.
“Four thousand seventy-four,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Four thousand seventy-four,” he said.
Autistic children had trouble reading expressions and body language. They responded to different cues. Emily wondered what he’d meant until she realized, That’s how many dots there are on the wallpaper.
His talent for math ran in the family. She shared the same knack. On good days, he was capable of solving multiplication tables that would stump a high school senior.
“P.J., you’re so awesome,” she said.
He had been seventeen months old when he faded. Until then he’d been an active little bug, grasping and walking and beginning to make silly noises like words. Then his gaze turned inward. He stopped talking. The change was a horrific trauma for everyone in the family, especially Laura’s husband, Greg, who eventually—right or wrong—put the blame on himself.
In developed nations like the U.S. and Europe, autism rates had skyrocketed, increasing 700 percent since 1996. More than 1 percent of children were being diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders.
Was there an environmental factor, a sudden genetic drift, or both? The first might cause the other. The world’s drinking water was laced with new chemical compounds and trace metals. Pharmaceutical agents, pesticides, flame retardants, and dioxin were all measurable in the biosphere, some of it transient, most of it everlasting.
Originally, Laura had seized any number of explanations for P.J.’s condition. Several advocate groups had filed lawsuits, insisting vaccines such as MMR caused autism. After dozens of studies, solid evidence said vaccinations weren’t at fault—but it was an emotional issue, because if there wasn’t an outside source, the cause must be something in the parents themselves. Research showed a powerful genetic basis for ASD, a term used to encompass autism, Asperger syndrome, Rett syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.
Even with Emily’s data, several steps remained before anyone could determine if ASD was caused by rare mutations or by multi-gene interactions of common variants. One thing she knew for sure. Ninety percent of the risk of ASD was inherited.
One factor was older moms and dads. The father’s sperm were less active, the mother’s eggs had aged. Laura was eleven years Emily’s senior because Emily had been a late surprise for their parents. Greg was six years older than Laura. In the modern age, people delayed parenthood to pursue their careers or simply to avoid the responsibility.
Emily’s personal fear was mixed with defiance and shame. She wanted kids. Chase said he did, too, but neither of them wanted to rush into diapers and a minivan. And if they waited a few more years… Her family genes were suspect.
Walking back to Laura felt like walking a tightrope. Emily didn’t want her sister’s life, which was something she could never admit.
She blurted other words instead. “I need to know what to do,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Laura asked.
“I have two speeches. Those notes you’re holding are the company version. But there’s another one.” Emily grabbed her handbag. She opened it and showed Laura a second
set of note cards. “They only want me to say part of what I should say. I didn’t tell you because, uh, I’ve been working on more than gene therapies for babies and kids.”
Laura stared at her. “Are you in trouble?”
“Yes. It’s a prenatal vaccine. It would stop anyone from ever being born with ASD.”
“What about people like P.J.?”
“We’ve talked about this before,” Emily said quietly. “There will be complications with juvenile therapies. By their second year, kids are establishing their permanent neurological makeup even if some pathways are underperforming or missing altogether. The therapies… They’ll change him, Laura. He’ll become a totally different person.”
“Isn’t that what we want?”
At least right now you two can get through the day, Emily thought. P.J. would have to relearn everything, maybe even how to walk or use the toilet.
But you’ll be angry if I say so.
She understood Laura’s hope. Sometimes P.J.’s pixie face lit up. On his best days, Laura was able to coax him into sharing what he saw inside his head, stammering through discussions of his favorite toys and snacks. And if he lost his talent for math, Laura would gratefully trade that ability if P.J. gained new social skills and normal awareness.
“We’ll help him, too,” Emily said. “That’s what my boss wants me to focus on. But our company will make plenty of money if we tell people we’re also refining our data for a vaccine. Selling out to Enring Corp. shouldn’t be the main point of the media release.”
“Maybe your boss knows what he’s talking about.”
Emily was shocked. “What?”
“It sounds to me like you’re doing good things either way,” Laura said. “You don’t have any patience, Em. You never did. Why can’t you finish the gene therapies first?” Her smile was gentle, even pitying. “You know I’m right.”
“I guess,” Emily said. You’re wrong, she thought. If I don’t make my data public, they might bury the vaccine for years.
But if she used the media conference to say what she wanted, she would lose her job. They’d probably hit her with a lawsuit. Even if she walked away free, even if another company hired her, DNAllied owned her statistical models. She would be forced to start from scratch if she could re-create her data at all, and once again the prenatal vaccine would be delayed or lost.
Her idealism had a price. She’d made her deal with the devil. Now she was locked in.
Worse, she’d shared her apprehension with Laura. She felt disloyal for not making P.J. her first priority.
Laura turned away from her. She used P.J. as an excuse to rebuff Emily, walking across the room to her son, but she couldn’t have hurt Emily more if she’d slapped her.
“P.J.?” Laura said. “Sweetheart? Let’s go to the bathroom before Auntie Em is ready for her talk.”
He didn’t answer. Emily couldn’t speak, either, her insides whirling as Laura glanced back at her. For a long moment, the two women studied each other in silence.
“What are you going to do?” Laura asked.
Emily nodded, trying to reassure her sister. She wanted to say, I’ll do it your way. Instead, she thought, We’ll see.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
We may be in trouble,” Marcus Wolsinger said as he shut the door to the control room. Dust and flies were anathema to their electronics, but Marcus closed the door harder than necessary in frustration.
Most of his staff had yet to return to their desks. They’d been up for thirty-six hours straight before last night. Marcus was exhausted, too. Nevertheless, he’d woken early to call the East Coast and Colorado. His mind hadn’t allowed him to rest. He wanted to get back to work. He needed his staff.
Steve Church was the only person in the shoebox-shaped room, a small, prefabricated structure. The walls were aluminum and glass. The furniture consisted of six cheap desks and eight good chairs, although each desk held its own computer and expensive flat-screen displays.
“I told everyone to be here,” Marcus said.
Steve looked up from his Mac. Even with the AC cranked to a frosty sixty-eight degrees, Steve was bleary-eyed, and Marcus wondered if his friend had slept.
“I just got off the phone with SWPC,” Marcus said. “They think I’m crazy.”
“They’re right,” Steve said.
“Nothing’s wrong with our software.”
“There must be.”
Marcus shook his head uneasily. “Two observatories confirmed our data. It’s the satellites that can’t hear it. And if we move past the idea that we’re getting false reads, we may be in trouble.”
Marcus and Steve were senior astronomers with the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field, a radio telescope array in the mountains north of San Francisco. Marcus was black. Steve was white. Otherwise, Marcus felt like they might have been brothers. Both of them were in their mid-forties, although they dressed like kids in T-shirts and jeans. Steve had a crop of beard stubble he’d let go for two days. Marcus wore a BEAM ME UP pin given to him by Steve’s wife, harking back to a time when they’d been as fresh as the crew of Star Trek. Now both men had potbellies (Marcus more so than Steve) and receding hairlines (Steve more so than Marcus), and yet their relaxed appearance could not mask the intensity he felt.
Marcus took the computer beside Steve. He began to type, then, half-consciously, he paused to survey the desktop.
Marcus had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was notorious for rearranging the junk on any desk into neat geometries—keyboard, mouse pad, sticky notes, pens. He shaved when Steve did not. He changed his socks when Steve did not. His ex ridiculed him for being an anal robot, but that he’d brought order to her life was precisely why Janet had been attracted to him in the beginning.
He aligned three pens and a binder with a cold, stale cup of coffee. Then he rattled on his keyboard, opening the files he’d developed since sunrise.
Outside the control room’s broad windows, the brown California hills were a stovetop warming in the sun. None of the worn, dirty peaks of the Coast Range lifted higher than five thousand feet, and the landscape consisted of weeds, brush, and scattered oak and pine trees. Their array was more commanding. The terrain was dotted with thousands of white six-meter dishes identical to those used for commercial television. The Hoffman Square Kilometer Field and another like it in Australia were the cutting edge in radio astronomy, with more channels and capabilities than anything else on the planet.
Marcus pointed at his files. “The signal creep is subtle, but it’s there,” he said. “I think the sun is experiencing a rise in microflares.”
Steve answered with tired irritation. “We anticipated a lot of background chatter when we built the array. What if the software is creating patterns that don’t exist?”
“Our system’s one hundred percent. The programmers and I ran a dozen integration checks.”
“It would be better if those guys were here.”
Marcus shrugged. Their lead programmers lived in Silicon Valley. They’d consulted with him online despite his connection failing twice. The net had been spotty all morning. Marcus had asked them to drive to the array but was met with excuses. No one wanted to stay in the mountains. Their programs often ran for weeks, so the site staff were a few postdoctoral kids in their twenties. Marcus and Steve had only made the trip up from the San Francisco Bay Area because they’d discovered more junk noise than usual in their data during the past week.
The noise was escalating.
Marcus found that disturbing.
“Look.” He opened a series of waterfall plots on his computer. Each plot—a square graph—was a cascade of color-coded lines, a snapshot image of the broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation analyzed by the array. “There’s an irregular but upward trend,” he said. “The electrostatic bursts in Earth’s magnetic field have hit one plateau after another.”
“Why isn’t SWPC forecasting a solar storm?” Steve asked.
“They’re sti
ll gathering reports from the satellites.”
“The sats would record the flares.”
“No.” Marcus shook his head. The Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, was where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitored solar activity, but Marcus had grown accustomed to the role of the devil’s advocate. He could be ruthless about proving his ideas. “These are microflares,” he said. “The satellites have inferior hardware, software, and data storage.”
“I’m not convinced.”
“We’re seeing something new. Something deeper than surface activity.”
Most of Marcus’s self-respect stemmed from his career, which had begun with the SETI Project before he was asked to join ES2, an innovative new venture to explore the reaches of space. Unfortunately, a lot of people belittled the Extra-Solar Earth Search Program and everything associated with it. Science fiction had made sure of that. The public thought aliens were a joke. They expected bloodthirsty monsters. Steve’s caution was understandable. He wanted to make sure they didn’t embarrass ES2, whereas Marcus was more willing to trust his intuition.
“If we could go further back, the trend would be obvious,” Marcus said. “It’s easy to extrapolate our readings.”
“So everything you’ve said is just a hunch?”
“No.”
One of the challenges in radio astronomy was the sheer volume of incoming noise. The universe was unimaginably vast, although Marcus sometimes felt as if he could grasp a complete model of its ancient, busy clockwork in his head.
Every day, tracking one hundred million frequencies in a tiny portion of the sky, the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field listened to 800,000,000,000,000 bits of data. Their computers discarded 99.999 percent. They didn’t have the capacity to retain so much information, much less analyze it. No one did. For the time being, the engineers who’d designed the array had leapt far ahead of the processing power of any computer. It was like asking a blind old man to sort through the voices in a jam-packed football stadium.
