by Jeff Carlson
“Yes,” Emily said. “DNAllied believes this information is too valuable to families all over the world to sell or license it.”
“How much will these gene therapies cost?”
“That I don’t know,” Emily said.
The first reporter stood up. “Miz Flint, Miz Flint, this therapy, you’re going to use chimpanzee and Neanderthal DNA in people?”
“I’m not involved in the medical aspects of—”
“Isn’t that what we’re talking about? Splicing animal genes into human beings?”
“Yes,” Emily said as the lights flickered.
Everyone looked up. Several of the camera and sound crews frowned at their equipment. Emily already had a stomach full of butterflies. Now her thoughts turned paranoid.
What’s happening? she thought, and yet she soldiered on.
“Microscopic amounts of clean, tailored genetic material can be used to provide people with healthier lives,” she said. “It’s sterile and painless, like a flu shot. There’s no reason to be afraid. In any case, our gene therapies are somewhere in the future. It might be years. What we’ve accomplished so far is to establish a broad knowledge base of disease-prone and corrective sequences.”
“But your database could be used to screen for those disease-prone sequences right now, couldn’t it?” the reporter asked. “And, uh, selecting children based on how they score?”
Selecting was code for aborting, Emily realized. Numbly, she hoped her dad hadn’t been able to find the right channel in her parents’ house in Santa Barbara. Otherwise her mom had probably fallen out of her chair.
“I’m sorry, who are you with?” she asked. She wanted the reporter to say FOX News or Christian Family Digest, anything to taint his accusations with the mark of the religious right. He ignored her, scribbling in his notebook as the media director signaled Emily and leaned toward the podium.
“Let’s focus on some of the incredible technology Doctor Flint has been using,” the media director said.
Emily stepped back with relief.
“Projects of this scope often begin with Illumina sequencing equipment and Fibonacci structural mass spectrometers,” the media director said. “Our first goal is to…”
Emily barely heard, looking at the back of the room.
Staring at the belligerent reporter, Laura’s spectacular blue eyes were drawn into angry slits. Emily thought she also saw disgust in the face of a female reporter. Did this woman know someone who was sick or handicapped? If she was a science writer, she probably dealt with goons all the time.
It must be aggravating to watch these events taken over by people with repressive agendas, Emily thought.
Her mother was among those who called themselves pro-life. Despite having married Emily’s father, who was less devout, almost indifferent to organized religion, Jana Flint opposed abortion rights and also spoke out against contraception. Maybe her ardency on these topics had been fueled by her shame at falling in love with someone outside the Church.
Emily’s faith was a quieter thing. She didn’t believe what she was doing was wrong or evil. If every speck in the universe was God’s creation, studying His workmanship must be part of the mystery. Free will and intelligence weren’t traps to avoid. They were gifts. And yet…
What if other people used her data in ugly ways?
Finally, the press conference was over. Ray and the media director wanted to compare notes in a private office, but Emily asked for a minute in the kitchenette with her sister.
“You did the right thing, Em. You really did.” Laura hugged both Emily and P.J.
Inside, Emily felt as stiff as the boy. I hope you’re right, she thought, wondering how many women would give birth to autistic children while DNAllied suppressed her vaccine.
Breathing in Laura’s perfume, she remembered the prenatal visits to which she’d accompanied her sister. Neither of them doubted Laura’s baby would be perfect. The worst health concerns in their family were three aunts with high blood pressure. That hadn’t stopped the OB/GYN from encouraging Laura to undergo standard screening for conditions such as Down syndrome or spina bifida. Unprompted, the OB/GYN had also given them the hard sell with a story about her cousin whose son had Down’s.
“He was always happy,” the doctor said, “but even as an adult, he couldn’t tie his own shoes. He needed constant supervision and medical care until he died at thirty-eight.”
The OB/GYN’s opinion was firm. Nonviable children should be aborted. The screens weren’t able to test for ASD, however—not yet—much less determine which children might be high-functioning versus those who would be low. If those predictions became reliable, where did anyone draw the line?
I can’t imagine our lives without P.J., Emily thought, and yet Laura and Greg were better off than most parents. They lived in West Hollywood, a golf course community where they owned a house with a yard, unlike the cramped apartment complex where Emily lived with Chase in Pasadena. Although they easily covered their expenses for physical therapy and special ed, the stress of having an autistic son had added to the fine wrinkles and dark, permanent smudges of exhaustion around Laura’s eyes. Too many families didn’t have the money for special assistance.
Maybe I really should steal my data for the guys at the University of Texas, she thought. They can say they developed those results on their own. Simultaneous discovery. It happens all the time. DNAllied won’t be able to track it back to me.
With a prenatal vaccine, no one would suffer—not the children, not the parents—but Emily didn’t want anyone else to refine her work.
Her possessiveness wasn’t a matter of her ego or her guilt.
She wanted to keep a secret.
Her statistical models held the prospect of something more controversial than any vaccine. In comparing the protein expression patterns of Homo sapiens to those of Neanderthals and chimpanzees, Emily had uncovered a disconcerting trend she hadn’t shared with anyone at DNAllied, much less Ray or the board.
What would her sister think?
Emily had found a genetic time bomb buried deep within modern man. The fuse was burning. And she wasn’t sure if making it public would do more harm than good.
Letting go of P.J., Laura smiled at her son. Then she paused. She hugged Emily again and kissed her cheek, misinterpreting the worry on Emily’s face. “Don’t be upset about that reporter,” Laura said.
Emily ducked her eyes. “I won’t.”
“Some people are always going to be upset,” Laura said. “That’s their problem, not yours. You’re helping children. Never forget it.”
“Thank you,” Emily said. But her heart was unhappy.
I still haven’t told you the whole truth, she thought.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
The noon sun glared through the windows as Marcus walked from the control room into the lounge. Roell and Agent Drayer followed him. Marcus turned on her, hoping to push her farther from their computers with his voice.
“This is illegal and stupid,” he said. “Our lawyers will file an injunction.”
He’d hardly slept since driving to the array three days ago. His nerves were tight, and his blood felt like dirty water. Given the choice, he would have concealed his frustration from Roell, but he refused to let his son out of his sight with armed men posted in the control room and the parking lot.
He’d learned Agent Drayer was a desk jockey like himself. Her specialty was signal analysis, which was why the National Security Agency had sent her to the array. They expected Drayer to verify Marcus’s readings and to ascertain whether or not he was faking his data. Her fellow agents were also analysts and techs. The two Army soldiers had been sent to quash any inkling of causing trouble.
“We can fight you in court,” Marcus said.
“Mr. Wolsinger,” Drayer replied, always Mr. Wolsinger. She was formal and dry. “Unless you have something new to—”
“Our lawyers have contacted the media. Thousands of our suppo
rters worldwide are posting about your takeover on the net.”
“I understand.”
Between the two of them, Marcus and Roell outweighed Drayer by three hundred pounds, but she wore her authority like it was sewn into her dark suit. She reminded him of Janet. Drayer was white, in her late thirties, tall and thin, but Janet’s composure had always been his favorite thing about her even when she used it against him.
Wrestling with his anger, Marcus took a step toward Drayer. He would protect the array with force if he was able. She must have seen the impulse in how his posture changed. Her eyes widened. So did Roell’s.
Marcus treasured the excitement in Roell’s expression. The boy was impressed with his father, so Marcus was louder than necessary for Roell’s benefit.
“The work we’re doing now is pivotal,” he said. “By shutting us down—”
“You’re in operation.”
“If we can’t share our data with other observatories, it’s inefficient and—”
“Mr. Wolsinger. You have your phone lines, and your assistant seems to be coordinating fine with other installations.”
“She’s wasting time she could direct elsewhere.”
“It will have to do. Our country is nearly at war.”
Drayer had a habit of lifting her chin when she spoke. The gesture was superior and irritating, and Marcus gritted his teeth.
“There are tactical advantages in hoarding our intelligence,” Drayer said. “The more data we gather about what’s happening, the better we can deal with it, and it would be irresponsible to share our information in ways that can be intercepted by the enemy.”
“You can’t hide the sun!”
“China doesn’t have the facilities we do.”
Marcus’s defeat was another feeling that reminded him of Janet. It was linked with every humiliation and loss from their divorce. “Are we prisoners here?” he asked.
“No. If your staff wants to leave—”
“We’re staying. We built this place,” he said, letting Drayer see his possessiveness. Then he said, “My son should go home.”
“What?” Roell said, “Dad, I don’t—”
“You’re going.”
“I can help! You said I could help.”
Now he wants to stay, Marcus thought. The arrival of real-life government agents must have been the greatest thing that ever happened to Roell, but he didn’t want Roell mixed up in legal issues. He was acutely aware of Drayer’s gaze moving back and forth between them, analyzing Marcus’s failures and Roell’s disobedience.
“You’re going,” Marcus said.
“Shit.” Roell stamped out of the lounge, banging down the hallway.
Marcus glanced at Drayer. She nodded slightly, either confirming her permission for Roell to leave or acknowledging Marcus’s quandary. Did she have children? She wore a wedding band, although it was smooth platinum and lacked a diamond, not even a chip, being utterly functional like everything about her. Even if Drayer was a mom, she couldn’t guess what she’d done to him.
Marcus had won this fight, protecting his son, but he wasn’t sure at what cost to their relationship.
Roell wasted no time throwing his stuff into two duffel bags. Marcus reached to take one, but Roell grabbed everything and stalked back into the hall. Marcus followed.
Outside, Roell paused. An Army corporal stood on the ramp for handicapped access. Sunlight gleamed from the endless dishes of the array, and, much closer, from the cars lined against the station.
“Call me when you’re at your mom’s,” Marcus said.
Roell walked to a green Toyota Prius, dumped in his bags, and climbed into the passenger seat. Marcus knew it was wrong to call Janet after their son was en route, depriving her of the chance to protest. What if she had plans for drinks or dinner with her boyfriend?
The main thing was Roell’s well-being.
“Hurry back,” Marcus said to the driver. The Prius belonged to one of their postdocs, a white kid named Chuck. Chuck wanted to stay, too, but Marcus had said he’d consider it a personal favor, and Janet’s home in Palo Alto was barely four hours away.
“See you tonight,” Chuck said.
Marcus waved, although Roell wasn’t looking. His gut hurt from sleep deprivation and coffee. He needed food, but he didn’t know when he would ever sleep.
He returned to the office where Roell had bunked. No one else should get stuck with cleaning, although he realized tidying up was also a way to say goodbye.
Behind him, Agent Drayer knocked on the open door.
“Mr. Wolsinger,” she said. “We have a call from back East.”
Why had she come instead of one of his assistants? Was she was trying to be courteous? They would be working alongside each other for the foreseeable future, so Marcus supposed he should accept her olive branch. “Let’s go,” he said, brushing past.
They walked down the hall together, uncomfortable and silent.
Marcus had spent years feeling bitter after his divorce, but, for once, there was no solace in delving into his work. When he reached the control room, he found Steve, Kym, and one of Drayer’s men. Her other agents were in the adjacent room with the servers. They’d started to install network monitoring software that Kym muttered was a jack, as in hijack. Soon the NSA would be a permanent presence, limiting their outside contacts and recording every move.
Nevertheless, Steve was bursting at the seams. “Marcus!” he said. “You need to see this.”
Across the room, Marcus caught a glance from Kym. Drayer went straight to Steve, making certain she didn’t miss anything, while Marcus pretended to yawn and let Drayer pass.
Kym took him aside with a whisper. “Why are you reading about ice caps and lava beds?” she asked.
Marcus’s heart leapt. “I’m not,” he said.
“Uh.” Kym’s dark gaze didn’t move to Drayer, and Marcus liked her for being so perceptive. She said, “We just got twenty-six file attachments from NOAA.”
“Delete them for me.”
“Even if I did, everything stays on the servers, where these guys’ll find ’em as soon as they check your traffic. Sorry. But I saved the files to a thumb drive.”
“Good enough. I’ll tell you about it later,” Marcus said, offering Kym his full confidence.
She smiled before he hurried across the room. Maybe she’d bought him some time. Possibly he could bargain with it. He needed to regain control.
Joining Steve and Drayer, Marcus said, “What’ve we got?”
Steve didn’t let their tension affect his enthusiasm. “Goddard’s reporting similar microflares from half a dozen F-and G-stars, and they’re barely a quarter of the way through their logs,” Steve said. “We’re sure to see more.”
“What does that mean?” Drayer asked as Marcus said, “What’s the longest span?”
“Eight years,” Steve said.
“One of you needs to explain what that means,” Drayer said.
“I’d like to make several calls,” Marcus told her.
“First you talk to me.” Drayer answered too quickly—she didn’t mean it—but he would try to hold her to their bargain when he wanted to contact Australia and Japan.
“Show her,” he said urgently.
Steve tapped at his keyboard. The smattering of instant messaging windows on his screen were blotted out by eleven hi-res images, each of which began to jerk through its own slide show. Most of the images looked like speckled blobs of white Jell-O set against backgrounds as black as obsidian, although a few were distorted like jellyfish or windswept ghosts. No matter their shape, every image expanded or fell inward during the short, repeating video loops.
The sight caused an unpleasant, forlorn emotion in Marcus. He felt as appalled as when the doctors explained his mother was sick.
He found his voice. “We have a friend at Goddard, the Goddard Space Flight Center near Baltimore,” he said. “That’s one of the places where they perform ground control for the Hubble Tel
escope.”
Drayer pointed at the screen. “Those are stars,” she said.
“Correct. Goddard’s been crunching data on thousands of main sequence G-class stars like our own.”
“Why do they look like bubbles?”
“Those are heliospheres. There’s one around our sun, too.” Marcus cupped his hands as if holding Roell’s basketball. “The solar wind creates a sphere of gas that pushes out past Pluto into deep space. We know a lot more about it since NASA put up the Interstellar Boundary Explorer. They’ve been mapping the termination shock, where it stops.”
“Okay,” Drayer said. “So what?”
“It’s collapsing.”
Once activated in high Earth orbit in 2008, IBEX had required a mere six months to map the heliosphere, which stretched twenty billion miles across. IBEX completed its initial run so swiftly because the storms within the termination shock produced energetic neutral atoms, many of which sped back to the sun.
The IBEX team had expected to see variations in the particle flux. The heliosphere was no more a creaseless ball than was the sun itself, but they’d predicted these variations would be minor. Instead, they’d discovered an enormous rift where the heliosphere was buckling under interstellar pressures.
In 2008, this dent had been 50 percent deeper than anyone could explain. Years later, it had continued to sink inward as soft spots appeared in other places.
Some of the collapse could be attributed to the long solar minimum. With any decrease in the solar wind, the heliosphere would weaken—but after closely analyzing the rift’s rate of decay, IBEX was able to put a rough date on its origin.
The heliosphere had been shrinking for thirty thousand years.
“Look at the candidates they sent us,” Marcus said. “The heliospheres of these stars are rapidly bleeding away or expanding. There’s an undeniable pattern.”
“Why hasn’t anyone seen it before?” Drayer said.
“They have. We didn’t think it applied to us.”
“Aren’t those stars identical to the sun?”
“More or less. But thousands of others aren’t exhibiting microflares.”
