by Joshua Klein
Without hesitating the fish swam to the penny and grabbed it, wedging it into its mouth before swimming over to one film canister and then the other. The goldfish nudged the canister upright and deposited the penny inside.
Then the fish swam over to the side of the tank and looked out at him.
"Put in a rock" whispered Tonx, clearly enjoying himself. Fede did. The fish caught the rock before it hit the bottom and put it in the other canister, then returned to watching them from inside the glass. Tonx keyed in a sequence on the canister next to the tank and a thin slick of grayish fluid seeped out of one of the spines. Inside the tank the fish began to bob up against the surface of the water, sucking at the slick.
"What the fuck was that?" whispered Fed. Tonx just laughed and turned off the light over the tank.
"That, my little man" he said, "is a mutagenetically altered goldfish. Your brother here found a way to conjoin endomorphic neurological tissue with shocked brain tissue using genetically modified carcinogens." He smiled proudly.
Fede slowly raised his eyebrows. Tonx rolled his eyes and sighed. He was clearly enjoying himself.
"I cut and pasted some brains, and used a GM cancer to make it stick" he explained.
Fede let his eyebrows stay raised, waited for the long explanation that was sure to follow. Tonx strolled over to the futon and fell back on its rumpled sheets.
"The coursework I worked on at MIT focused on mutagenics. The big breakthrough I came into there was the use of endomorphic tissues - you remember that?"
"Yeah" said Fed, squinting as he remembered the hazy past, back when Tonx had been clean-cut, carefully clad, ready for his break into the corporate graduate schools. Ready to make it, big time. "Yeah, endomorphic tissue is from squids and stuff, yeah?"
"And a lot of other critters, yes. It's tissue that can readily change. Stuff like color, shape, firmness… that kind of stuff. Turns out that endomorphic tissue readily accepts mutagenesis."
"That is… " asked Fed.
"Meaning it's easy to hack its genetic code. Endomorphic tissue readily accepts changes to its base DNA sequences. It led to a bunch of patents Johnson & Johnson licensed off MIT for those T-cell multiplier Band-Aids. The ones they recalled because they gave a bunch of people a nasty rash?"
Fede remembered. "Yeah. Funny shit. Why was that?"
"Not everyone's body gets rid of mutagenic cells the same way - a lot of folks' skin freaked out and tried to isolate the cells thinking it was foreign tissue. Made lots of little bitty scars under the skin. Anyway, J&J got bit because they didn't test it well enough. They only used refugees from Serbia as a test base. They happened to have readily mutagenic-prone cell bases."
"So they didn't get the rash?"
"Exactly. But J&J imported the stuff here and slapped it on a bunch of people and all of a sudden the entire population of Irish Americans in New York started getting nasty zits. Biogenetics are like that, man. Got to take into account the entire variance of the human genome, you know?"
"So what about the goldfish?"
"Right. Lots of people had discovered that using endomorphic tissue as a base provided you with a ready chunk of material you could mutagenetically alter directly. But as a conversion vector it's got a lot of problems - mainly, the body thinks it's a virus.
"Just about the time I bailed from school some of my peers figured out that they could use cancer cells to create recombinants - cells that combine DNA sequences. The ability to hack cancer cells has been around a long time; you just set it up to create the cells of your choice and off you go. But the body readily identifies those cells as foreign, typically, and kills them. Cancer in the wild propagates because it finds a variety that's particularly virulent - whatever you end up mixing together at home is pretty easily taken care of by the immune system. So what we figured out was a marriage of the two - a genetically unstable cancer that sought endomorphic cells and was vulnerable to conjoining."
Tonx looked proudly up at Fed, his hands laced behind his head. Fede folded his arms.
"What the hell does that mean?" he asked.
Tonx smiled. "It means the cancer cells bust open the endomorphic cells and ingest part of their DNA. Makes a new cell, a combination of them both."
Tonx watched Fede for a moment, traced the slow steady vector of his thinking and pre-empted him. "The benefit of that is twofold. One, you don't have to try to introduce an entire DNA sequence into the cancer cell before you launch it. That shit's hard, and you usually get something too unstable to last long enough to get it into a new system. Two, the body starts out thinking it's trying to kill two things, and then suddenly those two things are gone and you have a third thing instead. Takes a little while for the body to adapt.
"The reason folks are so shit-hot to make this stuff work is for healing or replacing limbs or other tissue. If you could just stick a chunk of endomorphic base tissue onto the bloody stump of somebody's arm and have it grow back you'd have yourself some pretty powerful economic leverage.
"The way they've done it so far is by having the cancer cells look for two types of cells: stem cells, and endomorphic cells. Stem cells are endomorphic, so it's not as hard as it sounds."
Tonx paused, looked at Fede from the corner of one eye. "Stem cells are the ones that turn into whatever other kind of cells is needed."
"That's the stuff the breeders are used for, right? They get them out of embryos?" asked Fed.
"Yeah, but I'm not talking about that. Every body makes its own stem cells, it's part of the normal healing process."
"Okay" said Fed. "I got it." He was starting to enjoy himself now, the back-and-forth of his brother's stream of thought and his questions. Like old times. He found himself relaxing into learning, looking for holes in the logic, questioning his own knowledge and marking out things for later exploration.
"Good" said Tonx. "So you set up the cancer cells to ingest the transformative DNA sequence carried by the stem cell. That's the "message" the stem cell has about what it's supposed to turn into when it gets to the damaged part of the body. The cancer cell eats that, combines with the endomorphic tissue, and uses the message sequence from the stem cell to inform the final mutation. The result - if you're lucky - is a cell that's accepted into the body as a replacement for the damaged cell."
"So does the body accept it as native?" shot back Fed, seizing on a loose thread from earlier in the conversation. "You said that one of the benefits to the process was that the body starts out looking for two types of tissue, and then discovers a third."
Tonx nodded. "Bingo. The big problem is that no matter what you set up the mutagenic cells - that's the result of all this rigmarole - whatever you set up the mutagenic cells to be you end up with something that the host body thinks stinks. The delay you get by making it three-phase gives you time for the tissue to integrate, but eventually the body realizes it's permeated with shit, and attacks it. Right now my goldfish only last about two weeks. By the end of the first week they're pretty damn smart, but eventually I always end up with retarded goldfish. They're fucking Algernons. Most die - I damage their brains to prompt the production of stem cells, and because the mutagenic cells replace the stem cells that were sent to heal the brain it ends up scarred. The fish's body thinks its got a malignant growth and eats any local connected brain tissue. Its immune system eats its own brain."
Tonx sighed, sat up and rummaged around under the edge of the bed. "The other problem is that you can only really make one kind of cell. If somebody gets their finger cut off the stem cells think they're supposed to produce a scab, and all the mutagenic cells absorb that message and you get a scab the size of the host medium - the endomorphic tissue - that you stapled on there. There's no way to make the mutagenic cells responsive to the variance of the host body's repair response." He pulled out a little golden jar and unscrewed it. The smell of strawberries swam through the room.
"That's the hurdle everyone's stuck on right now, except me - they keep ending up w
ith one kind of cell, which is useless to them."
He began rubbing the contents of the jar into his lips with his thumb.
"Doesn't the goldfish have the same problem?" asked Fed.
"Nope. That's my brilliant discovery: brain tissue. Brain tissue is inherently mutagenic - it changes in response to use over time, like muscle, except electrolytic. So you can produce a shitload of the same type of tissue and integrate it into the brain, and the brain just thinks it's got new virgin brain to work with. It accepts it immediately and starts firing synapses like crazy to formulate usable neuropathways. You go from a genetic matrix to a neurochemical one - and the DNA base suddenly becomes moot. You sidestep the entire problem of DNA sequence variance, and just build a bigger brain. It populates itself."
Fede stared at his brother. "Let me get this straight. You smack the goldfish's brain to damage it, rub on some endomorphic tissue, shoot it up with your GM cancer, and the endomorphic tissue all turns to brain tissue?"
Tonx nodded.
"But how does that new tissue fit in its head? And how does the fish think with it?" he asked.
"One, you scrape out some of the bone. The brain is just lumped in a sack inside the skull, so once you have more room the endomorphic tissue swells to fit. Two, I don't know, but it seems to do okay. I think they see better, and they certainly learn better. Obviously size isn't everything - elephants aren't smarter than people - but the extra mass does seem to be used quickly as ancillary memory. In one case it grew out the visual cortex and the damn fish fit all the rocks in the bottom of the cage into a solid plate, just by sizing them. It doesn't much matter to me how it works, at least not yet. What matters is that you can make something smarter. If I could get this stuff to work on something bigger than a goldfish it wouldn't take much to test where and how to apply it for maximum results."
Tonx slowly leaned forward, his eyes glittering. "Can you imagine it?" he whispered. His brother's grin split wide across his face. It was the ultimate upgrade; it was the truest hack Fede had ever heard of.
"The big companies would never think of it" Fed said.
"Truer words were never spoken. They want marketability; they weren't able to make the leap. That's the advantage the undergrounds have got, Fed. We think outside the box because we ARE outside the box. Who would think of adding mass to your brain?"
Tonx's smile slowly faded. "The problem is that the changes never stick; it's just as vulnerable to immune system rejection as any other mutagenic recombinant. The worst part is that it's become a data-crunching problem. In a fish lumping on another gob of brain tissue isn't so big a deal. The genome's been mapped a bazillion times over, so finding combinations that are within a working range isn't so impossible. But even there it's taken forever to find something that will last two weeks. It's much harder to find something that'll pass as native to the goldfish's immune system - although I believe it's possible."
"Does that mean I can't become a genius here?" asked Fed.
"That's exactly what it means" said Tonx. "Trying to discover a working recombinant for three-way DNA mutagenesis in a more complex creature is orders of magnitude more complicated. It's just impossible."
Tonx leaned back on his elbows. "Each conjoined state needs to account for the entire genome's sequencing before and after that state's conversion, and the end recombinant needs to stay stable as usable tissue. The goldfish is about as dead simple as it gets - and it took me two years of processor time on every machine I could beg, borrow, or steal access to just to get this far."
"But isn't it just a matter of combination matching?" asked Fed. He realized his hands were shaking. It sounded impossible - but it wasn't. It was just very, very hard.
"Sure it's just a matter of combination matching" shouted Tonx. "But the combinations range in the millions of billions - and they all have to be cross-compatible. And any satisfactory result set needs to be cross-checked across the entire data set."
He screwed the lid roughly onto the jar and tossed it under the bed. "I wrote a short compiler to process the data I've got so far, but I don't have enough processing power. Nobody does. I know my code is crap but it just doesn't matter at this scale. To prove my work, to make it worthwhile, I need to figure out how to keep the cells from eating themselves, locate a reasonably intelligent endomorphic creature that has had its DNA fully mapped, and then co-opt all the computing power in China to run the comparisons." He rubbed his hands over his eyes.
A faint thumping noise began, Fed's leg jumping nervously against the bottom rung of the stool.
"Okay." said Fed, quietly. His voice trembled slightly. He stared wide-eyed into space, his hands fastened tightly to his knees, fingers rubbing the junction where his sockets turned to flesh.
"Okay" he said again, louder. He looked at Tonx, a smile playing across his face. "You find me a data set for a real smart endomorph and I'll get you the computational power to design a match."
Tonx opened his mouth, closed it again. He frowned, and opened his mouth again.
"From all the computers in China." Fede said, and pulled out his chording keyboard.
Chapter 7
Poulpe tapped all ten fingers roughly onto the desk and pulled off the headset. The lights in the room slowly brightened as the panel set into the desk dimmed, an aesthetic touch by the Japanese designers who had implemented the system. As the room brightened Poulpe's log notes slowly faded from view on the walls around him, cast by projectors hidden in the molding. He watched as three charts he kept placed near the doorframe slowly disappeared. They showed a steady upward march of tic marks, and were listed against a timeline of three years.
The black plastic housing on the top of the tank next to him hummed gently, filtering the blood and loose bits of skin and muscle out of the water. He squinted at the display he'd stuck neatly to the outside of the tank, watched the pixels flash and dance there. Reaching out a finger he traced the fat grey cable running out of the display and into the water, connecting neatly to the beige plastic lid of the baby-food jar just under the surface next to the glass. He paused a moment, watching the red and yellow LEDs softly blinking on the top of the jar. A pair of glass pipettes had been pushed through the lid next to the cable, antibacterial medical tubing leading from them to the machinery in the tank top. Poulpe tapped gently on the glass, looking at the tiny gray mass perched on the brown stump of growth medium in the jar. He lightly jiggled the cable, watched the jar's contents slowly rotate until two small orbs swam into view. Poulpe examined the squid's eyes, willing them to life.
"Wakey-wakey" he said softly.
Poulpe stepped back, admiring the view it afforded of himself. He liked how he looked in the LCD screen, liked the way the squid brain perceived him. As always he wondered at the tracers and blurs of color that followed his motions. He'd observed that the overall picture took on richer, redder tones when the tissue was in pain, and cooler colors when fed or when feeding was likely to occur, but that wasn't really his business. In any case it certainly wasn't validated by any scientific analysis, and as such Poulpe refused to pay it any heed.
He stood up and carefully removed his paper-thin sanitary tyvec suit. He folded it with practiced ease, pressing the creases flat with familiar fingers before stacking it in the disposal. His hands adjusted his tie as he left the study, humming tunelessly to himself. Once in the kitchen he took down a covered bowl of soup and half a baguette, remnants from lunch. As the soup heated he grated fresh Parmesan over slices of tomato on the bread and put them in the oven to heat. The soup chimed just as he finished. Taking a white towel from its hook next to the microwave door he carefully placed the bowl in front of the window and slid the adjustment open just enough to allow a breeze. He slipped on his shoes and coat and stepped outside for a smoke, confident that the oven would cut the heat in time to prevent the cheese on the bread from burning.
It was early evening, a lull spot in the circadian rhythms of tourists and locals alike. Now was a shift-changi
ng time, when cleaning crews came and went, sure not to disturb residents as they went out for early dinners or late lunches, or slept the dead, ignorant sleep of tourists, bodies discovering themselves under new skies. Poulpe slipped out of his building and onto the stoop, nodding at a Polish couple that was huddled under the doorway's overhang. A late October rain was threatening, fat sullen drops probing at windows and the hoods of cars. He lit his cigarette with a match from a matchbox that fit nicely in his coat. He had a case of them in the apartment; he'd first bought them from the cafe where he'd found them, after he'd discovered how well they fit in his jacket pocket. Now he ordered them from the manufacturer every six months. The Polish couple relaxed at the smell of his Portuguese cigarettes, lifting their own butts with stained fingers. Poulpe recognized the bluing around their cuticles as an indicator of neurological damage from the house cleaning supplies they were using. He didn't ask about it.
His comm vibrated against his hipbone. He had several optional units that he could wear about his person, but he was from an era where the first early comms had been pagers - simple alphanumeric devices - and he'd never gotten out of the habit of wearing a belt-mounted unit.
Poulpe nodded politely at the Polish couple and shuffled around towards the opposite side of the doorway, eyes squinted against the smoke that drifted into his eyes. "Yes?" he asked, lifting the comm to his ear.
"Oh" he said. "One moment please."
Poulpe switched the phone to his other hand, wedged it between his shoulder and his head as he took the cigarette out of his mouth. He went to drop it, reconsidered, and offered it to the Polish man. The man, an old, graying lump of a person, took the cigarette gingerly. The woman smiled at Poulpe, yellowed teeth jagged in her bloodied gums.
He turned his back on the couple. His free hand tapped out a silent staccato against the doorframe, his fingers a blur hidden by the fold of his coat. The comm chimed lightly, a secure connection established between himself and the voice on the other end of the line, and his hand stilled.
