Hybrids np-3

by Robert J. Sawyer

  A moment later a different female voice came on. “We’re five minutes away,” she said. “Can you describe the patient’s condition?”

  “No,” said Mary, “but I’ll put his Companion on.” She picked up the desk set and carried it across the room, setting it down near Lonwis. She then spoke to Lonwis’s implant: “Switch to English, and answer all the questions you hear. Help is on its way…”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “And yet, some of us will stay permanently on Mars. Now, in the pages of science and science fiction there have long been notions of terraforming Mars—making it more Earth-like, by enhancing its atmosphere and liberating its frozen water, thus creating a world better suited for human habitation…”

  Jock, Ponter, and Adikor had rushed off to Strong Memorial Hospital, along with the still-unconscious Lonwis Trob. There was nothing Mary could do to help, and, at Jock’s urging, she had stayed back at the Synergy Group.

  It took Mary a good hour to calm down enough to get back to her work, but finally she did so…only to have it blow up in her face.

  One of Mary’s friends back at York had been a Linux evangelist, trying to convince everyone in the genetics department that they should abandon Windows and switch instead to the open-source operating system. Mary tended to stay out of computer wars—she’d remained neutral years before in the Mac-versus-PC skirmishes—but every time her Windows-based PC displayed that blue screen of death, she felt like throwing her support in with the Linux crowd.

  And now it had happened again, for the second time today. Mary did the three-fingered salute, but after sitting through the interminable wait for the system to reboot, she found that it stubbornly refused to reacquire its network connection.

  Mary sighed. It was 7:00P.M. , but she could hardly call it a day; Ponter and Adikor would need her to give them a lift back to Bristol Harbour Village whenever they returned from the hospital.

  Of course, there were lots of other computers here in the old mansion that housed the Synergy Group, but, well…

  Jock had one of those nifty Aeron chairs Mary had read about in the Sharper Image catalog. It was supposed to be super-comfortable, an ergonomic heaven. Granted, he had probably adjusted all its heights and tilts for his rangy body, but, still, she could get a feel for it if she worked in his office.

  Mary got up, and headed down the staircase, which was carpeted in a wine red. Jock’s office door was wide open, and Mary walked in. Jock had a big bay window, looking south over the marina. Mary shivered at the view, despite it still being warm inside.

  She walked over to Jock’s super-chair, all black metal and plastic, with a fine-meshed black back that was supposed to allow one’s skin to breathe while seated. Feeling like a mischievous kid, she lowered herself into the chair and leaned back.

  My God, she thought. A product for which the hype was actually true! It was wonderfully comfortable. She used her feet to rotate the chair left and right. Mary knew Aerons cost an arm and a leg, but she had to get herself one of these…

  After relaxing in the chair for a few more moments, she settled back to work. Jock, who had left this room in a hurry when Lonwis Trob had his heart attack, was still logged onto the network. Mary suspected her own password would work from here, but wasn’t positive, and so she decided to leave well enough alone, and continued working as if she were Jock. She opened up the “Neanderthal genetics” folder on the server, and—

  Mary’s eyebrows shot up. She spent most of her time in this folder, but there were two icons displayed that she’d never seen before. She felt nervous: although Mary was pretty good at backing up, she was afraid the crash she’d had upstairs had corrupted the directory tree.

  She decided to check by double-clicking on one of the icons she didn’t recognize—it showed a red-and-black double helix. Mary knew most of the genetics apps on the market, and their accompanying document icons, but this one was unfamiliar.

  After a moment a window opened. It said “USAMRIID Geneplex—Surfaris” in the title bar, and a screenful of text and formulas appeared below it. USAMRIID was an acronym that appeared often enough in the genetics literature: United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. And Geneplex was obviously the program’s name. But “Surfaris” didn’t mean a thing to Mary.

  Still, she looked at the window’s contents, and was absolutely astonished. Some of her own earlier work here at Synergy had involved trying to use the quorum-counting facility of bacteria to determine an actual tally of how many chromosome pairs were present—twenty-three or twenty-four. But that hadn’t worked. First, the quorum mechanism seemed to lack the ability to distinguish quantities that precisely. And, second, chromosomes only resolved themselves out of the chromatin during mitosis, which, of course, was hardly the usual state of affairs within a cell.

  But Jock had apparently had someone else also working on this problem, and that geneticist had come up with a much simpler technique. In a Gliksin, what had been ancestral chromosomes two and three had fused, producing a much longer chromosome. The genes that had been at the end of chromosome two now abutted the genes at the beginning of chromosome three, somewhere in the middle of the new, combined chromosome.

  The same genes existed in a Neanderthal, but they did not abut. Rather, the last gene on chromosome two was followed by a telomere—the junk-DNA cap that did nothing but protect the tip of the chromosome, like the little plastic-wrapped bit at the end of a shoelace. Likewise, the first gene in chromosome three was preceded by another telomere, the end cap on the leading edge of that chromosome. So, in a Neanderthal, you’d find these sequences:

  At the end of chromosome 2:

  …[other genes][gene ALPHA][telomere]

  At the beginning of chromosome 3:

  [telomere][gene BETA][other genes]…

  Those sequences wouldn’t exist anywhere in Gliksin DNA. Conversely, in Gliksin DNA, millions of base pairs away from any telomere, you’d find this sequence, a combination completely absent from Neanderthal DNA:

  …[other genes][gene ALPHA][gene BETA][other genes]…

  A logical extension of Mary’s original work—and a perfect, infallible way of distinguishing between the two kinds of humans, even when a cell wasn’t undergoing mitosis. It was precisely what Jock said he’d wanted: a simple, reliable method to distinguish a Gliksin from a Barast.

  Mary was pleased to see that all the tests were invoked. In theory, one could test for only one of the three conditions. Finding either of the first two sequences—either gene ALPHA or gene BETA next to a telomere—clearly denoted Homo neanderthalensis. And finding the third sequence—genes ALPHA and BETA adjacent to each other—denoted Homo sapiens. But things could always go wrong, and so the test to identify a Neanderthal used a little logic tree, explained, presumably for Jock’s benefit, in plain English:

  Step 1: Are Genes ALPHA and BETA found side by side?

  If yes, abort (this isn’t a Neanderthal)

  If no, this is probably a Neanderthal: go to Step 2

  Step 2: Is Gene ALPHA found next to a telomere?

  If yes, this is still likely a Neanderthal: go to Step 3

  If no, abort (this should never happen in a Neanderthal)

  Step 3: Is Gene BETA found next to a telomere?

  If yes, this is definitely a Neanderthal: go to Step 4

  If no, abort (this should never happen in a Neanderthal)

  The abort conditions in steps two and three were fail-safes. They occurred if the genes ALPHA and BETA were not side by side (as determined in step one) and neither ALPHA nor BETA were next to a telomere—combinations that should never be found in either kind of hominid DNA.

  It was a pig-simple program for a computer to execute, but it was a bit more complex to code into a cascade of biochemical reactions, although apparently that was what Jock’s geneticist had done. Mary had no trouble following the formulas for enzymes produced at each stage of the reaction, and could see that the results would inde
ed follow the intended logic. At the end of it all, she expected to just see an enzyme or other marker produced whose presence could be easily tested for: an unambiguous flag saying, yup, this is a Neanderthal, or nope, it’s not.

  But she wasn’t anywhere near the end of the process, as she saw when she scrolled down to the next screen full of formulas and text. Mary’s jaw dropped as she continued to read, discovering what step 4 was. Jock and many members of his team had come from RAND; Mary had gotten used to them speaking in cold-war clichés, but the next term stopped her heart for a second: “Payload delivery.”

  If, and only if, the test subject was found to be a Neanderthal, a new cascade sequence was invoked that ultimately resulted in…

  Mary could hardly believe her eyes. Her specialty was ancient DNA—that’s what had gotten her involved in all this to begin with, after all—but that didn’t mean she was ignorant of more recently identified sequences, especially those that had made front-page news around the world.

  If the specimen was a Neanderthal, a payload was indeed delivered: a payload based on a filovirus that would result very rapidly in the development of a hemorrhagic fever.

  A fatal hemorrhagic fever…

  Mary leaned back in Jock’s chair. She could taste bile climbing her throat.

  Why on Earth would someone want to wipe out the Neanderthals?

  But, of course, the question really should be, Why, with two Earths, would someone want to wipe out the Neanderthals?

  Hemorrhagic fevers were contagious. Gliksins couldn’t cure them, and she very much doubted Barasts could, either, for two reasons. First, by virtue of never having developed agriculture and animal husbandry, the Neanderthals had also never had to develop techniques for dealing with plagues. And, second, all known hemorrhagic fevers were tropical diseases—something the northern-living Neanderthals would have had very little experience with.

  Mary swallowed hard, trying to force down the biting, sour taste.

  But why? Why would someone want to kill the Neanderthals? It didn’t make…

  Suddenly Mary remembered her little exchange with Jock back at the Debral nickel mine:

  “It’s astonishing,” Jock had said. “I knew in an intellectual sort of way that we’d screwed up our environment, but until I saw all this… ” He’d indicated the pristine countryside. “It’s like finding Eden. ”

  And Mary had laughed. “Isn’t it, though? ” she’d said. “Too bad it’s already occupied, eh? ”

  A little joke—that’s all it was. But Jock hadn’t laughed. All you had to do was get rid of those pesky Neanderthals, and an Eden awaited…

  It was horrific—but Jock had spent his life dealing with scenarios of mass destruction. What was horrific to Mary was just another day at the office for him.

  Mary’s first thought was to erase the computer files—but, of course, that would accomplish nothing. There would doubtless be backups.

  Her second thought was to pick up the phone and call—well, as a good Canadian, she naturally thought of the CBC, which could then spread the news to the four corners of this world. There was no way people would stand for this sort of genocide.

  But she didn’t know how far along Jock was. If he was ready to go, Mary certainly didn’t want him to feel cornered, since he might release his disease vector as soon as he heard that the public had gotten wind of his plan.

  Mary needed help, ideas, support—not just from Ponter or Adikor, but from another Gliksin, someone who understood how this world worked.

  There were people she trusted back in Toronto, but was there anyone she could rely on here in the United States? Her sister Christine—the real Christine—of course, but she was in Sacramento, clear across the continent, thousands of—of miles —away.

  And then it hit her.

  The obvious answer, as much as her youth and beauty rankled Mary.

  The woman who had saved Ponter Boddit’s life when he’d first arrived in this reality.

  The quantum-physics postdoc that Jock had scooped up to try to replicate the Neanderthal computing technology.

  Louise Benoît.

  Not that Louise would be much help in medical matters, but—

  But her boyfriend! Granted, Reuben Montego was no specialist, but he’d be a lot more help dealing with a disease vector than would a physicist.

  Mary knew that she might never again get access to these computer files. She looked around Jock’s office and found a spindle of blank CDs (Kodak brand, of course, this being Rochester). She took one, put it in the computer’s CD drive, and clicked on the CD-burning application. Just to be on the safe side, she selected all the files in the folder. The whole thing topped out at 610 meg—small enough to fit on a single CD. She clicked the “copy files” button, and leaned back in the Aeron chair—which, just now, didn’t seem comfortable at all—wishing she knew some way to calm her racing heart.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “But there have been objections to terraforming Mars from those who feel that, even if it has no indigenous life, we should leave its stark natural beauty pristine and unspoiled—that if we visit it, we should treat it as we do our Earthly parks, taking nothing but memories and leaving behind nothing but footprints…”

  Ponter and Adikor had ended up spending the whole night at the hospital with Lonwis and Jock. Mary had eventually gone home alone to Bristol Harbour Village, without having had a chance to tell Ponter what she’d discovered.

  Exhausted, she didn’t get in to Seabreeze until 11:00A.M. , but Ponter, Adikor, and Jock still hadn’t come in yet. After getting an update from Mrs. Wallace on Lonwis’s condition—stable—she climbed the stairs to Louise Benoît’s lab. “How about some lunch?” Mary asked.

  Louise looked pleasantly surprised. “Sure,” she said. “When?”

  “How about right now?” said Mary.

  Louise looked at her watch and was clearly surprised by how early it was. But something in Mary’s voice had obviously got her attention. “Bon, ” she said.

  “Great,” said Mary. Their coats were on a rack by the mansion’s front door. They put them on and headed outside, into the crisp November day, a few snowflakes blowing around.

  There were several restaurants on either side of Culver Road. Many were seasonal—Seabreeze was a summer resort, after all—but some were open year-round. Mary started walking purposefully to the west, and Louise fell in beside her.

  “So,” said Louise, “what do you feel like?”

  “I was in Jock’s office last night,” said Mary, without preamble, “while he was off at the hospital with Lonwis. He’s had a virus designed to kill Neanderthals.”

  Louise’s accented voice was filled with disbelief. “What?”

  “I think he’s going to wipe them out—all of them.”

  “Why?”

  Mary looked over her shoulder, just to be sure they weren’t being followed. “Because the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Because he wants to claim their version of Earth for our kind of humans.” She kicked some litter out of her way. “Maybe so we can start over without all this.”

  Up ahead, on the left side of the road, an amusement park was visible, closed for the winter, its roller coaster a lump of rusty intestines. “What—what should we do?” said Louise. “How do we stop him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mary. “I only stumbled onto the virus design by accident. My network connection went down, and so I went to his office to use his workstation, since he was gone for the day. But he’d left in such a hurry when Lonwis had his heart attack that he hadn’t logged off his account. I copied the virus designs onto a CD, but I think what I’d really like to do is get back into his account again, and modify the master file so that it won’t produce anything deadly. I presume he’s planning to feed those instructions into the codon writer, and then release the virus into the Neanderthal world.”

  “What if he’s already made the actual virus?” said Louise.

  “I don�
�t know. If he has, we may be sunk.”

  They were walking along a narrow sidewalk. A car drove by them.

  “Have you thought about just going to the media with the CD—you know, blowing the whistle?”

  Mary nodded. “But I want to…to defuse his virus before I do that. And I’ll need help finding a way back into Jock’s computer.”

  “The Synergy Group network uses RSA encryption,” said Louise.

  “Is there any way to crack that?”

  Louise smiled. “Before we met our Neanderthal friends I would have said no, there was no practical way. After all, most encryption systems, including RSA, are based on keys that are the products of two large prime numbers. You have to be able to figure out the prime factors of the key number to crack the code, and with 512-bit encryption, like our system here uses, it would take conventional computers millennia to try all the possible factors. But quantum computers—”

  Mary got it in a flash. “Quantum computers try all possible factors simultaneously.” But then she frowned. “So, what are you proposing? That we have the portal shut down so that Ponter’s quantum computer can crack Jock’s encryption for us?”

  Louise shook her head. “Setting aside the fact that Ponter’s is hardly the only quantum computer that exists in the Neanderthal world—it’s just the biggest one, that’s all—we don’t need to go there to get this problem solved.” She smiled. “You may have spent the last couple of months gallivanting over two universes, but I’ve been hard at work right here, and my job was to build our own quantum computer, based on what I’d learned from Ponter during our quarantine. We’ve got a perfectly fine little quantum computer in my lab here at Synergy. It’s got nowhere near enough registers to do what Ponter’s big unit did—open a stable portal to another universe—but it certainly can crack 512-bit encryption codes.”