by Clara Ward
Sarah took a deep breath of the sock-smelly air. She imagined the grit of chalk on her fingers. She remembered her coach smiling when she was a kid. She remembered crying with joy when the girls she coached won their first meet. She remembered taking them to Canada for their first international competition last month and sitting with them as they fretted over nervous mistakes.
She remembered the day she first saved a teammate from a dangerous landing off the vault. The feeling of greatness and the fear of discovery flooded her again. In this gym she had found a way to use her strange ability. She had never used it to cheat, only to prevent injury. It had bonded her to gymnastics when she wasn’t sure she cared enough to keep training. It had given her a secret and a purpose.
Now Sarah left her bike and shoes just inside the door and strode up to the staff lockers. She ignored her own, for the moment, and reached for one in the upper right corner. It had been empty before she took her girls to the meet in Canada. Then she’d used it to store her overnight bag. In addition to a toothbrush and change of clothes, it held all her travel papers as well as those for girls on the team. She hugged the bag and felt tears come to her eyes as she glanced around the gym. It was time to go, and this was the only home she could say goodbye to.
As Sarah drove south toward LA her eyes drooped. Bot’s dots bumped into her wheel. The thump-thump-thump snapped her back awake. But the adrenaline began to fade in minutes. There was no way she could make it to LA without sleeping. Friday and Saturday she’d worked her night shifts at the group home. Sunday she’d slept three hours and driven Mei Mei to her Aunt’s house. She’d planned to sleep another three hours before meeting Reggie. Right now, her body was set to be asleep.
Instead, she was driving a car with no modern safety warnings down the most boring stretch of freeway in California. I-5 down here was straight and flat, surrounded by cars and cotton she could barely see in the dark. The air was hot and muggy with exhaust. The freeway had just enough cars to form a slalom course for the occasional idiot, but few enough to keep the pace even, the taillights hypnotically soothing.
Sarah pulled into the left lane to pass a line of trucks. Passing the second truck, she saw a police car closing fast behind her. Wakefulness hit so fast, it seemed like she’d never really been awake before. How had they found her? She hadn’t been speeding, not more than a couple miles per hour, and that couldn’t count. Had they already traced the car and notified the CHP to watch for her? There was no GPS. Had she been spotted miles back when she was too dopey to notice?
The police car was right behind her, lights flashing. Presumably there was a siren, but she couldn’t hear it over the truck next to her. She signaled to merge between two trucks. It occurred to her she was not thinking like a teek or like a fugitive. But sabotaging a police car seemed not only wrong but dangerous. It would give them a real excuse to arrest her if she was caught, and out here, where could she hide from the CHP if they called for help? Maybe she’d risk it to cross a border or not get shot, but not here and now.
As she merged into the right lane the police car sped by. They hadn’t been after her, just trying to get past to catch someone else. Terror still pumped in her arms and behind her eyes. What if she had done something to give herself away? What if her paranoia had caused a traffic accident where someone got hurt?
Sarah considered pulling off the freeway to regroup. But she didn’t want to waste her chance to drive now that she was wide-awake. Cautiously, she escaped from between two towering semis and finished passing the truck caravan.
Then her mind was full of Reggie. She could have called Reggie while she was in Sacramento. He might have rushed out to join her in this crazy escape. But what if they were waiting for her to call him? Ashley seemed to think they’d tap phones to find her. And if they’d left town successfully, what could she tell him? Even a free spirit like Reggie couldn’t give up his old life without any explanation. But if she told him and then a telepath heard him thinking about it . . . There was just no sane way she could bring Reggie into this. He was sure to think something terrible about her, and there was no reasonable way to tell him otherwise.
Tears filled her eyes, and Sarah knew she was being stupid. Dwelling on this would do her no good. Still she let her mind paint pictures as tears began to leak down her face. Would someone contact Reggie when she didn’t show up for work? No one at the group home had his number, and calling her phone wouldn’t do them any good. If you crushed a cell phone and threw it into a creek, did callers still get the same stilted “unavailable” message?
What was she going to do with her life anyway? Were there countries she could live in where the US wouldn’t find her? What kind of work could she do? Surely they’d look for her at any job involving gymnastics or anthropology, if they were even looking at all, if such jobs were even a realistic way to support herself.
Maybe she’d be better off dead. So far she’d carefully kept her DNA out of any database she knew of. Maybe the CDC could use hairs found in her car or someplace to study her, but maybe not. If her abilities were really so rare, she’d hate to be the data point that let them genengineer more teeks.
That had always been a problem with Reggie. He wanted kids, no time soon, but he definitely wanted them, and how could she explain her reluctance? Maybe it was just as well she’d been found out and forced to leave. She couldn’t have kept lying to him forever, and she couldn’t change what she was.
Rather than a major soak in self-pity, Sarah tried to make her mind look ahead. She needed to get out of the US and then out of the free-trade sector. If she was still miserable and free in a month, she’d make some rational decision then. Yeah, right.
Chapter 6
March 31, 2025 – Bangkok, Thailand
This time, he had it. James rechecked his gene chips. Three of his new paranoid schizophrenic samples seemed to have the markers associated with the telepathy phenotype. They were homozygous for markers 8N31F856 and 8N31F857. Those markers were only three thousand bases apart, and the critical 2346 bases for telepathy lay between them.
For the thousandth time James wished he could put the telepathy sequence on his own custom chip. He could, of course, make spotted arrays in secret, but what good was it to build a biotech empire if he couldn’t use it all at will? Alak said it was a security risk. He didn’t say exactly which government peon felt qualified to weigh their risk against his science. There were problems with being the only real geneticist in Thailand cleared to study telepathy.
James took his three samples and began sequencing the section between the two markers. It was tedious work. Each sample took several minutes to process.
He’d only once before found a telepath in a psychiatric sample. It had been one of the multiple personality cases in a local hospital. The finding was interesting, but not statistically significant. This new finding was extremely significant. Three telepaths out of sixty-four subjects! It was a British sample, too, not many people of recent Chinese descent there.
While the first sample was sequencing he glanced at the other results for his sixty-four schizophrenics. Fifteen had another sequence in common that only matched 8% of the general population. That could be meaningful. Paranoid schizophrenia might well include several genetic subtypes. He’d personally found three completely separate sequences that correlated with mood disorders, and they only explained half of that population.
Better yet, twenty percent of this sample had the bipolar correlate he’d refused to sell to Minerva, including all three of the possible telepaths. Was he about to solve that conundrum?
There was a knock on the lab door.
“Yes?”
A tech popped her head in, “Lunch, James. Want anything?”
“No.”
“How ‘bout a tuna sandwich?”
“No. I’m busy.”
“As usual. Suit yourself.”
She left. The first of the three samples was finished processing. James went to his computer. He f
umbled the keys as he called up data. Not a perfect match, but almost. The new sample was missing a small section of the telepathy sequence. James brought up the relevant segment. The telepathy sequence included a ninety base section repeated three times, the new sample had those ninety bases just once. That was the only difference. It could be a deletion, but more likely, this new sequence was older, a predecessor.
Until now, it had seemed that telepathy appeared only two or three hundred years ago, probably in China, but with carriers moving almost immediately to the U.S. The lack of genetic drift supported that time frame. But something so complex shouldn’t just pop into existence fully formed.
Now James had found a simpler genetic form. What if modern telepathy had appeared when a group of ninety bases accidentally copied three times? He pulled up the calendar on his pilot and added a dot in today’s square.
On his main computer, he pulled up data for the second sample, which had just finished sequencing. It contained the same shorter variant. The third did too.
So the genetic precursor to telepathy, possibly in combination with the other new sequence or his old bipolar sequence, seemed to correlate with paranoid schizophrenia. Were these people telepathic? Did they really hear voices in their heads? Were the voices weaker or intermittent because their sequence had only one copy of those ninety bases?
What did those ninety bases do? James had studied the telepathy sequence for eighteen years. He’d artificially produced its protein, variants, and antibodies. He’d screened these against a panel of all known cell types, grown up from stem cells. He knew the structure of the protein and what many of its sub-units could do when active with other proteins.
But he still didn’t know how telepathy worked. The ninety bases that repeated three times were one of the most ambiguous sections. A close analog in other parts of the genome served a timing function. Perhaps a repetition could affect the rate at which this protein did whatever it was supposed to do. But so far, it remained inactive with samples of all cell types, and any timing activity was only hypothetical.
Did the Chinese know? The U.S.? James wished for a free exchange of ideas, even as he braided his mind through his latest discovery. If his samples from telepaths hadn’t turned up this older variant, then it probably wasn’t coding for telepathy as he knew it. What did it do? Did it work together with his bipolar sequence? He’d checked his genetic database of telepaths for the bipolar sequence, and they were no more likely to have it than the general population.
James walked three steps across the room, turned and started back. It would be nice if he could study the three patients with the other telepathy variant. Three steps, turn. But he’d been lucky to receive the samples at all, and there was no way he could go to Britain. Three steps, turn. The Brits may not have their own program, but they were in tight with the Americans. Three steps, stop at the computer. If he pursued anything about those samples, someone might guess what he was looking for. He needed samples he could follow up on.
He wondered if he could replicate his findings among European paranoid schizophrenics. At the next Swiss conference he could try to make arrangements.
Another knock sounded at the door. What was this, a teaching lab?
“Come in.”
Alak stepped sideways through the door, holding his bulky briefcase shoulder bag out of the way. He lowered his head slightly and said, “I hope I am not interrupting.”
James didn’t answer. Of course Alak was interrupting. How could intruding on the lab not be an interruption?
“Chinda said it was a good time.”
James crossed his arms, holding himself still as he tried to place the name.
“She told me to make sure you ate something. A good woman to have around.”
Of course, James should have remembered the tech’s name was Chinda. He’d been told that several times. He crossed to his desk to jot it down before he forgot. On the way he waved Alak to a swivel chair he saved for visitors. At his own stable, wooden seat he scribbled “Chinda” on a post-it, set down the pen, picked it up again, added “tech – lunch orders,” and slid the note into the center drawer of his desk. Alak waited, politely not watching what he wrote.
James brought his focus back to Alak. “You didn’t come to see if I was malnourished.”
“No, though if Chinda asked me to lunch . . .” Alak smiled and raised his oily eyebrows.
James smiled back weakly and waited for Alak to state his business. He had no desire to swap innuendo with Alak, even if the tech was rather attractive now that he thought about it.
“You don’t happen to have understood any more about the Minerva offer?” Alak asked.
“Maybe. Have you?”
“What?”
Alak sat up straight now, as if he hadn’t expected James to offer anything. James didn’t really want to explain yet, his partial discovery was still too tentative. But if Alak wasn’t expecting anything, then why had he come?
“I found a correlation, in a small sample. It might not be anything, but why did you come?”
“A correlation with what?”
“Between the sequence they want and a variant on the telepathy sequence.” James replied telepathically. “Do you know if they’ve found a variant? Is that why you came?”
“A variant? What do you mean?”
James steepled his fingers and they began to tap rapidly. Alak didn’t know anything and wasn’t giving any information. “It may be nothing, a sequence I found in three foreign subjects. You’d probably learn more spying on the Americans, unless you can get me more samples. Now what did you come for?”
“Please, explain what you’ve found.”
“There’s nothing to explain yet. Now what else.”
“I heard you declined the offer from Minerva.”
“Yes.”
“We’re trying to share information with you on this. We need to keep channels open.”
How stupid. James would have told them his plans if he’d thought of it, but he wouldn’t have them telling him what to do. That was the point of his arrangement with Thailand.
“When they make a new offer, I’ll let you suggest replies.”
“Assuming they try again.”
James shrugged. He almost hoped they wouldn’t. Alak was reminding him of the American recruiters during his student days and his father before that. His arrangement in Thailand was supposed to be different. He’d built their biotech industry on the strength of his patents and research. They’d facilitated genetic sampling from their significant teep community and promised him scientific freedom and support. He’d hoped other researchers would follow him to Thailand, but that hadn’t come to pass. There was local talent, good minds in genetics and manufacturing. He hadn’t built biotech into Thailand’s fourth largest industry alone. But no other teeps, refugees or semi-native, had joined in his genetic research, and that work had been mostly stagnant, until today.
“Alak, I may have a lead here, but I can’t follow it without more subjects or more information.”
Alak sat back quietly, without his usual nod or other acknowledgement. He was quiet for a full minute, then pushed his chair back and stood. James followed him as he headed toward the door.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Alak said, reaching for the handle. Then with the briefest of nods, he was gone.
James stood uncertainly in his own lab. He walked back to the computer where he’d discovered the attenuated telepathy sequence. He stared at the results, but his earlier triumph felt hollow. He pushed his palms hard against the edge of the counter and tried to focus his thoughts on the meaning of ninety bases.
Chapter 7
April 2 – 8, 2025 – Sacramento, USA
Reggie opened his refrigerator and glared at the leftovers sitting from Sunday night. He’d made cannelloni for Sarah, because she liked it and Sunday was the one night he had plenty of time to cook for her. She worked Friday and Saturday nights, then slept the weekend days at the ho
use she was inheriting. Sunday night each week she returned to Reggie’s, completely phase shifted but ready for whatever Reggie had prepared. The rest of the week she lived with him, but Sunday was sort of like a date.
Except last Sunday Sarah didn’t show up.
Reggie had waited until the candles burned low wondering which of Sarah’s peculiar acquaintances might have arrived on her doorstep needing help or which of her mother’s old friends might have called needing comfort. With Sarah, bizarre problems seemed to crash and recede like waves on the shore. She collected needy people as if they were stray kittens. But she usually managed not to let them take advantage; she passed through their troubles unscathed. And until now, she always arrived where she was supposed to be, eventually.
At nine on Sunday Reggie called her cell phone. He couldn’t get through and didn’t leave a message. He put away the cannelloni, blew out the candles, and ate salad and bread in the moonlight. He thought about calling the police or activating a scatter mob search party, but it was too soon and Reggie refused to panic. He listened to Ekova, creators of the inventive language remix movement, until he’d played every hCD they’d ever made.
Now it was Wednesday morning. The cannelloni still sat in the fridge. Bright sunlight burst through the window that covered one huge wall of the loft. Reggie pulled toast and coffee from his preprogrammed appliances. It was good organic, fair-wage coffee from Chile, but he hardly tasted it. Instead, he drifted through the loft, touching each piece of fabric Sarah had brought back from India. Pinks, blues, yellows, and oranges, all bright and intricate, all with patterns to touch as well as to see. Sarah’s cloth covered the sofa, the table, the top of the bookshelf. She’d made some into a bedspread and pillow covers. All the beauty Sarah seemed to overlook, the colors and subtlety that she’d never wear, were in the fabric she’d found and brought back from their time in India.
