by Jeff Carlson
Other U.S. ships lay in front of him.
He identified the Samuel Grant, an Aegis destroyer that should have been on the west side of their battle space. He hadn’t merely lost altitude; he’d leapt forward more than three miles; and he couldn’t explain the jump except to think—
“Break left break left!” Bugle yelled.
From his peripheral vision, Drew saw a flitting black shape above to his right. He threw his plane into a sheer turn. The intruder ripped past. Jet wash slammed into Drew’s aircraft and pulled at his wings. He lost control, his pulse thudding in his head.
That was a Chinese MiG, he thought. We’re under attack.
LOS ANGELES
Sorry I’m late!”
Emily looked up to see Chase slipping through the noisy sandwich shop. At 1:33 p.m., the lunch rush was over, but Sandoval’s was always popular. Emily had fended off two groups who wanted her table, pointing at a second iced tea she’d bought for Chase. She’d also put in his sandwich order. It was the least she could do after he’d delivered a rental car to the Plaza for her, then brought her Altima to the dealer before driving back again in his Lexus.
She set aside the plastic chit #74 she’d been given at the counter and rose to meet her fiancé. Chase was worth the wait. Thick-chested, dark-haired, he carried himself well and wasn’t shy about public displays of affection. Emily met him with a full-body embrace.
Their kiss grew hotter than she’d planned. She was aware of three women laughing at the next table as she nuzzled Chase. Let them look, she thought. She was glad to be young and in love.
At last, she broke it up.
“Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Chase asked, using one of her best movie lines against her.
Emily flushed. She was more pleased that he was playing her game than embarrassed by showing off, but now she felt conscious of the crowd. She sat down after tucking a stray yellow bang behind one ear.
Chase took the chair across from her. “How was your media thing?” he asked.
“Mostly good.”
“Bad?”
“No, it was good,” Emily said before he could start battering at her in his relentless, intelligent way. “I didn’t say anything about a prenatal vaccine.”
Chase looked at her in silence. Was he disappointed?
She was saved by the man at the counter. “Seventy-three and seventy-four!” the man shouted.
“Ham, no cheese or mayo,” Emily said, showing Chase their order number. He was an L.A. boy through and through, barely able to bring himself to eat carbohydrates, although they met here regularly because it was near the hospital.
She wasn’t alone in watching Chase walk to the counter. He turned heads at the next table, too. All three women were well-dressed professionals in their mid-thirties. Emily touched her lipstick to hide a frown.
She’d met Chase at a convention on hereditary diseases where he’d swept her off her feet with a speed that was unlike her. They’d made out on the first date, slept together nine days after that, and almost two years later Emily remained uneasy and excited to be riding this express train.
Chase got too much silly-headed attention from the female staff and patients at work. That was a temptation. Would he give in to it in another five years? He was losing his hair, which had receded at both temples. Emily thought it made him look grown-up, but Chase was insecure about it, always glancing into mirrors to fluff and primp. Would he become more likely to have an affair if the thinning didn’t stop?
I can be everything you want, Emily thought, staring at him as he returned with their tray. “Thank you,” she said, flashing a smile that was as much for the women at the next table as for him.
Chase didn’t miss the byplay. He glanced sideways, then sat down. “So tell me about it,” he said, digging into his sandwich. “Sorry. I’ve got thirty minutes.”
Emily toyed with her food as she told him about her morning and the meetings afterward at DNAllied. “That reporter would have eaten me alive if I told him what I really think,” she said.
“You mean your up-curve?”
“Yes.”
“You made the right call. They had more than enough to take in without you rubbing their noses in it. Besides, why write one paper when you can write two?”
Emily nodded.
“I’m serious,” Chase said. “You need to announce the rest of your data before anyone else starts talking about race-related mutations.”
“Ethnocentric variations,” Emily corrected him. That was her best effort at saying the same thing inoffensively. Race played a major role in individual risk factors. No group was exempt. African-Americans had elevated rates of sickle-cell disease; northern Europeans, cystic fibrosis; and Caucasians of all stripes were more likely to have children diagnosed with ASD than blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or multi-racial parents.
But what if Laura never talks to me again? she thought.
According to her statistical models, an unmistakable dual trend existed in most demographics. Cancer rates were increasing even as cognitive disorders became more common, and the asshole reporter had been fundamentally correct in one thing.
“You have new evidence that reduced apoptosis is a major factor in brain size,” Chase said, prompting her.
“I don’t want to make it political,” Emily said.
“It’s not. It’s science.”
“The implications are too easy to twist around,” she said. “People will make it ugly.”
“Some people,” Chase said.
He was derisive, but Emily felt miserable about her results. She said, “Some of it is ugly, Chase.”
There were scientists, even doctors like Chase, who believed technology kept alive more and more individuals who would have died in other ages, thus weakening the gene pool with traits as slight or as self-destructive as myopia, IBS, diabetes, or schizophrenia.
Emily wasn’t so certain. Evolution had never been an organized, step-by-step process like those goofy charts of a fish who became a reptile who became a monkey who became a man. Life was loaded with dead ends and miracles. Natural selection took generations to produce new characteristics that might be lost in recessive genes, then reappear centuries later. The deterioration of humankind was one explanation for the rise in children who were cancer-prone, depressive, or autistic, but Emily wanted no part of reinforcing this theory, because the most glaring solution was straight out of Nazi Germany. Eugenic programs. Genocide. It was unthinkable.
Some people would refuse her cures. Many families championed their sons and daughters with ASD. They said autists were different, not inferior. The more militant groups claimed the condition represented higher evolution because of the savant skills a tiny percentage displayed in mathematics, musical ability, or other talents.
Emily knew her media release would bring a lot of heat. Even before today, she’d received hate mail on her company email. Some people reviled her merely for writing on the subjects of autism and biotech.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “My data suggests ASD is a throwback to prehistoric modes of consciousness. Whether that’s better or worse isn’t a value judgment I’m prepared to make.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do. If I publish something that says the genetic markers for autism are homologous to specific sequences in Neanderthal DNA, it’s like playing catch with a gun. Somebody will get hurt.”
“Are you talking about your mom?”
“I—” Emily shook her head.
He’s always surprising me, she thought. Was he encouraging her to defy her mother? Chase had charmed her parents by attending Christmas services and Easter Vigil with her mother and talking football with her dad. Emily was pleased to think he’d choose her over them. He could be such a politician himself, wooing both sides.
And yet… her success would be his own. Chase might gain even more traction at the hospital if his wife was a Nobel contender.
Do you really love m
e for me? How much of it is because of my job?
“Sometimes I wish I’d never gotten into this business,” she said.
“What are you talking about? I’m proud of you,” Chase said. “You made the right choice today. Rocking the boat would be stupid. The vaccine can wait. Maybe it takes longer than you want, but either way, you win. This isn’t about right or wrong, babe. It’s right and right.”
Emily smiled. “So you don’t care if…”
“Better health means better lives for everyone,” Chase said. “I see it daily, people spending all their money and time just to stop hurting. You’re going to change the world.”
“I know.” Her smile faded.
“Your gene therapies are just the beginning.”
“We have to be very, very careful how we talk about intelligence,” she warned him. “Everyone assumes you personally support any theory you advance.”
And it gets worse, she thought.
Long ago, offspring with greater reasoning had become more likely to thrive. They’d passed their intelligence on to their children—but at a steep cost. The gap in cancer rates between chimpanzees and Homo sapiens appeared to be due to how each species’ cells self-destructed, a biological process known as programmed cell death or apoptosis.
Cancer and cognitive dysfunction represented a bizarre seesaw. Homo sapiens produced neurons at a much higher rate than chimps. The flip side of the coin was that human beings also failed to destroy cells as quickly.
In the end, men had conquered the planet. A higher cancer risk was never an evolutionary pitfall since most cancers didn’t manifest until after people reached reproductive age. From a standpoint of sheer efficiency and species propagation, it was an excellent trade-off.
“I wouldn’t know where to start with a new paper,” Emily said. “There are so many variables.”
“Name one.”
“I’ll give you three,” she said. “Dietary, lifestyle, and environmental factors are all at play in comparing chimps’ cancer rates to ours. For one thing, high caloric diets are a massive trigger, especially diets rich in sugar. We’d need to separate out how much of the incidence of cancer is predicated on obesity.”
“So you don’t expect funding from Burger King,” Chase said. “So what?”
We’re so different, Emily thought with an appreciative smile. She valued his support, but thrashing out her plans with him could be exhausting.
Chase didn’t understand how badly her trends were muddled. Nor was cancer a single disease. People tended to group more than two hundred unique pathologies under the term cancer and yet the fascinating truth was humankind appeared to be regaining the cancer resistance of their cousins in unconscious, involuntary ways.
One benefit of Down syndrome was tumor-suppressing genes on chromosome 21. People with Down’s had a wildly reduced incidence of most malignancies, as did those with many other cognitive diseases—but not autists.
ASD seemed to have no correlation with low cancer rates, yet overall the data was bewitchingly suggestive. Was the rise in mental disorders the first step in evolving into a more cancer-resistant human? Why would that happen? Could it be in response to the pollutants they’d dumped into their environment?
“My little worrier,” Chase said, reaching out to stroke her forearm. “Just do your work. Some people are always going to get their panties in a bunch.”
“You sound like Laura.”
“Yep.” Chase knew Laura was in his corner, and he knew Emily had a high regard for her sister’s opinion.
Does he know I’ve been having doubts about us?
“Thank you,” Emily said. “I mean it. You’re really working all night?”
“’Fraid so.”
“I love you,” she said, feeling inordinately fond of her arrogant, educated husband-to-be. They made a good team. “We should elope right now,” she said. As she spoke, she realized she wasn’t entirely kidding.
Chase saluted her with his glass of iced tea. “Your mom would kill us.”
“I don’t want to wait. We… We could start our honeymoon tomorrow. Tonight.” Emily laid her hand on his thigh under the table.
Chase stared at her. “You’re not serious,” he said.
“Aren’t I?”
She was a bit stung by the alarm in his eyes. Chase had always been bolder and more spontaneous, which were traits she admired. Either he had his own doubts about their marriage or he feared crossing her straightlaced mother.
Did she enjoy upsetting her mom? No. Her career choice was not a second child’s act of rebellion, trying to get her parents’ attention. Her mom should have been proud of her even if the Church frowned upon reproductive sciences including biology and genetics.
She gave Chase an impish grin, teasing him, testing him. “I want to do it. Road trip. Vegas. We’ll save at least five grand.”
“Emily, let’s wait.”
“You’re just mad you didn’t think of it first,” she said. Letting him off the hook, she laughed out loud.
“Besides, you need time to get your next paper together,” Chase said.
Maybe he was right. In many ways, her trend analysis was even more intriguing than her work developing gene therapies. Her data definitely needed more scrutiny. The nature of humankind was changing.
But what are we becoming? Emily wondered. And why?
She was halfway home when she left the 110 on the first off-ramp she saw, drove under the freeway, and took an on-ramp heading back in the direction she’d come.
Speeding south toward DNAllied, she was frustrated by the traffic. At 3:32, the 110 had clogged with the afternoon commute. At least her rental car, a Nissan hybrid, was even nicer than her Altima.
She didn’t want to lose her job, but she couldn’t ignore her belief that DNAllied would bury her data for a prenatal vaccine. I can’t be that selfish, she thought. I have to do it. I’ll pirate my own data for the guys at the University of Texas.
“Arrg, I’m a pirate,” she said, trying to keep up her courage.
What if Ray was still at work?
The DNAllied building was on South Union Drive in a light industrial neighborhood between downtown L.A. and West Hollywood. Emily slowed as she reached her off-ramp and merged into the city. The radio was playing an awesome Taylor Swift song. That felt like a good omen, but as she sat at a traffic light, her windshield glowed with bands of purple and red.
What in the world? she thought, leaning over her steering wheel.
The radio was suddenly reduced to static. The clear sky erupted with color. Then her vision exploded with blinding white shapes and ghosts.
The next thing Emily knew, she was staggering through her own small hell, moving on foot on the black asphalt of a street. Her cheek felt bruised. Her sleeve was torn. Other people walked around her, many of them crying or yelling. Somewhere a dog barked. At first, the people’s voices were confused. Then the yelling grew louder.
Where am I? she thought.
Office buildings, a Sizzler restaurant, and storefronts lined the block. Motionless cars surrounded her. Emily recognized the street as West 6th. She was two hundred yards from the freeway. She saw her rental car down the block.
Most of the abandoned vehicles were in clumps, joined by fender benders and bang-ups. A blue sedan had gone through the glass front of a convenience store. No one appeared to be driving, although she heard a few engines running.
As she watched, an old Buick nudged past a smaller car and rolled several feet before crunching into the side of an SUV. No one sat behind the wheel. The Buick must have been left in drive. But not everyone had left their vehicles. Some people, disoriented, seemed to be trapped or unable to open their doors.
The mayhem reminded Emily of her crash that morning.
It’s happening again, she thought, sorting through her broken memory. But what’s happening!?
SOUTH CHINA SEA
Drew hauled his jet up into the sunrise, twisting his head from side to si
de. The Samuel Grant lay below. A second Aegis destroyer was also in sight. His gaze left the ocean for the sky. What if more enemy fighters were inbound?
The Chinese MiG had just swept overhead, passing Drew at a downward angle as he climbed to 3000 feet.
We’re too low, he thought.
To the west, the dark landmass of Vietnam had brightened in the sunrise, its coastline emerging from shadows to brown and green. Yellow light glistened on the always-changing surface of the ocean. Then the MiG slammed into the water.
“Shit,” Drew said. He’d had nothing to do with the other pilot’s death, but the sight filled him with dread. He thumbed his radio. “Six Oh Two, this is—”
“Missiles four o’clock high inbound!” Bugle yelled.
Drew forgot everything else. He dove for the ocean again as Bugle relayed their position and status on their control frequency, yammering through as much data as possible in case they were hit.
“This is Five Oh Four we’re under fire from bandits inside our screen I think in sector ten we’re fielding an EMP attack repeat a major EMP attack!” Bugle yelled as Drew accelerated into a steep turn to his right, firing chaff and flares from his aircraft’s belly. With luck, the air-to-air missiles behind him would retarget the incandescent chaff.
“No good! Still tracking!” Bugle screamed.
Drew punched more chaff and flares, executing a thirty degree cut left.
“Now they’re at seven o’clock!”
Drew reached 1100 mph as the missiles closed in. The G forces were a smothering weight. It crushed Drew against his seat. Fortunately he was layered in gear, each component blending man to machine. The Nomex sheath of his G suit was packed with air bladders that expanded under acceleration, pushing the blood up from his legs and abdomen into his chest and head, where he needed it, while the form-fitting straps of his torso harness secured him to the KOCH fittings on his seat.
The pressure felt like being squeezed under the heel of a giant boot, but Drew was familiar with this pain. He was more stunned by the gleam of purple and blue reflecting in vast pools across the ocean.
