Or believed he knew.
Late that afternoon he spoke to his AI, “See if you can put through a call to Ell Donsaii.” When she answered, he said, “I’m damned if I understand it. You said for me to call you this afternoon when I’d figured it out, but all I have are some half-baked hypotheses.”
“Hit me with ‘em. All my ideas haven’t even gone in the oven.”
“Okay… Number one, you found a world that used to be a crossroads of many different interstellar civilizations. Those civilizations have since collapsed, leaving all these different species on this one world… I know you said you’ve seen no signs of advanced technology, but do orbital surveys show anything that might be the remains of an ancient technological civilization?”
“Other than the hexagonal grids of the ‘cities’ that you’ve looked at, no. At first we thought they represented the overgrown remnants of ancient cities that were hexagonally arranged, but you’ve seen now that they’re actually grown that way out of vegetation. We haven’t even seen any evidence for walls underlying the hexagons.”
“Okay,” Wheat said, sounding very disappointed. “Number two, something in the environment there results in an extremely high mutation rate. The aliens have an extremely high birth rate and are ruthlessly suppressing all the mutations that are counter-beneficial… That would be by far the vast majority of all of their children, by the way.”
Ell didn’t say anything for a moment, then said slowly, “Yeah, we’ve discussed that possibility. It would seem that if they were having to… terminate… way over ninety-nine percent of their pregnancies or newborns, we’d see pregnant Virgies everywhere just so they could keep up. And… wouldn’t there still be a tendency for the more successful body plans to have wiped out the less successful ones?”
“Yeah,” Wheat said, “I don’t like that one either. In fact, every hypothesis I can come up with founders on the question of why the successful Virgies haven’t wiped out the less effective ones.”
***
Vanessa looked back over her shoulder. Instead of the handsome father, a woman with brown hair, presumably Zage’s mother, had dropped him off at the lab today. Vanessa had been feeling guilty about taking money for supervising Zage in the lab when she rarely ever did anything. The kid had figured out how to order all of his reagents and had completely mastered the DNA sequencer. He came in and ran his projects while Vanessa worked on her own experiments. He essentially rarely asked her for anything and really didn’t seem to need her help.
It seemed crazy for her to try to shoo away the golden goose, but she felt like she was ripping them off. When the lady appeared, Vanessa went over and said, “Zage doesn’t really need my help anymore, so I don’t think it’s fair for me to keep taking your money for watching over him.”
The woman looked a little bit surprised, but she simply said, “Please don’t worry about it. We’re happy to pay you as agreed just so you can be available if he does need some help.” She looked down at Zage and winked at him, “And, of course, to make sure he doesn’t do something dangerous by accident. We know he’s surprisingly capable, but that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t overlook some safety procedure or accidentally do something that no one’s taught him could be dangerous.”
Whether it felt unethical or not, Vanessa hadn’t refused to take the money when it was pushed at her that way. The woman hadn’t seemed at all concerned about the expense so it was hard to turn it down. Nonetheless she still felt a little guilty and had continued musing on the situation to herself. Looking up she realized that Zage wasn’t using the sequencer like he had all the other times he’d come to the lab. He was over at the DNA assembly set up. Maybe he does need me if he’s trying something new? She got up and walked over his way. “What’re you doing today?”
Zage looked up at her and she got the feeling he was trying to gauge how she might react to what he was about to say. “I’m going to try to generate a plasmid so I can express a peptide in E. coli.”
It was a simple enough sentence, but it held a lot of complexity. Once again Vanessa found herself flabbergasted to hear something like that coming out of the mouth of a five-year-old. She’d have been surprised enough if it came out of one of the undergraduates. “Um, what peptide?”
The boy chewed his lip for a moment, then he said, “It doesn’t have a name. It’s just a 31 residue peptide that I think will ‘flip’ Trim28 expression.” When Vanessa didn’t say anything, because her mind was trying to catch up with what he’d said, he apparently thought she wanted him to explain, “I was just going to try to get E. coli to make Trim28, but it has 835 amino acids. Then I realized that I actually only wanted to increase its expression.” He shrugged, “I know, a lot of people have already tried unsuccessfully to ‘flip on’ its expression, but I found this obscure paper that made me think a peptide might be designed to do it.” Vanessa was still trying to process what he’d said, but apparently Zage realized just how far out such a proposal was. He said, “I know… it almost certainly won’t work.” He shrugged again, “But I’d still like to try it. It’s a good practice run for me to learn to use the equipment, if nothing else.”
“Um, okay.” Vanessa frowned, “What are you doing now?”
Zage looked at the machine, “I put my sequence into the DNA synthesizer. Hopefully, it’s generating right now. It’d be great if you checked my settings?” He looked up at Vanessa hopefully.
She’d be in the lab late with her own project if she did, but Vanessa thought to herself, I really should earn the money they’re paying me, I guess.
An hour later, Vanessa found her brain reeling once again. She’d gone over the DNA base pairs in his sequence, and found a mistake, she’d thought. It had turned out that she was wrong and Zage was right. She’d gone over how he’d set up the machine and tried to change a setting, but he pulled up the manual and showed her how the way she’d always done it decreased the efficiency of DNA synthesis. He’d even inserted a terminal sequence to use in purification that she’d thought he wouldn’t know about.
Dammit!
So once again, she was wondering why she was supervising him, rather than vice versa. She tried not to sound irritated, “Well, as near as I can tell, you’ve really got this part down. Maybe I’ll be able to help you get the plasmid into the E. coli strain, or purify your peptide or something like that.”
“That’d be great! I really appreciate your help.”
It would be great, if I’d actually ever helped you! She wondered if he was just humoring her.
She reminded herself that she was actually very smart. It was just in comparison…
***
Jamieson lay on the bed in the crappy little hotel room he was staying in this week, staring at the ceiling and considering possible plans.
The simplest would be to just go break into the Kinrais house in the middle of the night. Find Donsaii and Kinrais, Taser, trank, and bind them up. Find the kid, hold him down and trank him. Once they were all bound and torpid, he could carry mother and child out to the car and head for a safe house. Darkness would provide a huge advantage because Jamieson could wear night vision goggles. Also, Donsaii wouldn’t be wearing her AI in bed so she wouldn’t be able to get the word out.
Not knowing the terrain inside the home would be a major disadvantage. Tripping over toys, stepping on squeaking boards, setting off alarms—those all represented nightmares that could require an abort. An aborted mission would result in a much higher security level at Donsaii’s house during any further attempts. Jamieson might not respect Donsaii’s security team, but even they would make things much more difficult if Jamieson had to try again. Much as he’d like to work at night, he really didn’t like that plan.
The other possibility was to take them, either coming or going from the school. This would take a bigger team. He’d need someone to run the car off the road, and more vehicles to block it front and back. There was a stretch of country road between the home and the school where t
here weren’t any houses or other observers. If they did it there and one of Jamieson’s vehicles had flashing lights so that passing cars would think the police were already on the scene, he probably wouldn’t have to deal with any strangers. The isolated stretch was pretty far away from Donsaii’s farm and the security team headquartered there. Jamieson would have to Taser and trank Donsaii and her kid almost immediately, then start transporting her somewhere else in a nondescript vehicle. He didn’t mind spending some cash for help, so an advantage would be that he’d have quite a few team members there to help him carry out the snatch. There were multiple roads on which he could egress the area. Disadvantages were numerous. It’d be daylight so she’d see it coming. She’d have her AI on so she’d contact her team or the police before he could stop her. He’d have to get her AI off, put her in a vehicle, and get her and the kid the hell out of Dodge before anyone could arrive in response to her message. Also, he could find a couple of reliable people to help, but some of the people you could get for this kind of job were likely to be idiots. He’d have to hide his identity from them because they’d almost certainly get caught.
He sighed. He felt almost certain that he was going to have to go with the daylight mission just so he could carry it out at a distance from her security team. Oh well, I’ve got to find a place to hide them away before I do anything anyway. I can keep thinking about the actual mission in the meantime.
***
During dinner Shan winced when Ell asked Zage how school had been. She’d asked him such questions in the past and he had calmly explained just how horribly boring it was to sit in that classroom. The topic was agonizing because Shan and Ell had no way to determine whether having their son spend time at a school he hated was worthwhile. He certainly wasn’t learning anything there except, possibly, how to get along with other kids. They both worried that he was going to find it difficult to get along with people, but didn’t really know how to help him learn those skills. Shan himself flip-flopped frequently from thinking he should go to the school to feeling like it was a useless waste of Zage’s time. Unfortunately, neither he nor Ell could think of a better way for Zage to learn age appropriate people skills.
Apparently, Zage had decided to stop torturing them with descriptions of his day, because he answered in a fashion more typical for a surly teenager, “Fine.”
Shan didn’t know whether to be unhappy about the short dismissive answer, or glad not to have to hear about how bad kindergarten was. Evidently, Ell wasn’t sure what to do with the answer either. She finished chewing and swallowed, then asked, “What did you do in the lab this afternoon?”
Zage visibly brightened at this question, “I purified my peptide.”
Shan wasn’t sure what a peptide was, and evidently Ell wasn’t completely sure either, because she asked, “A peptide is… like a small protein, right?”
Zage nodded, “Yeah, the same thing, except for the size. Usually fewer than 40 amino acids is called a peptide because when you get longer than that the chain tends to fold up.”
Ell tilted her head questioningly, “I thought you were sequencing your DNA. When did you start making a peptide?”
Zage explained that he thought he’d had an adenoviral infection that’d inserted some DNA into the genome of at least some of his cells. “I think the inserted genes have ‘flipped the switch’ on my expression of Trim28…” He looked at his parents curiously as if wondering whether they were comprehending him. “Trim28’s a protein that regulates several other genes. When there isn’t very much of it, both rats and people tend to get obese.”
“What’s this have to do with you making a peptide?”
“I think this peptide will upregulate Trim28… um, that means turn the cells on to make more Trim28.”
Irritated to have his five-year-old son explaining things to him as if he were the child, Shan wanted to snap that he knew what “upregulate” meant. He bit his tongue however, realizing that he really did need explanations of most of the things Zage was saying.
Especially, when Zage went on, “The purification process is kind of cool.”
Shan said, “How do you purify it?”
Zage’s eyes gleamed, “Well, when I programmed the peptide’s sequence into the DNA synthesizer, I added a ‘tag’ to the end of it. The tag binds to a granular resin you pour into a pipe. So you pulverize the E. coli, filter all the cellular junk out, and run everything else through this resin filled pipe. All the rest of the proteins and other stuff that came out of the E. coli go on through the pipe, but my peptide gets stuck to the resin inside because it’s still attached to the sticky tag. Then, this is the cool part, you run some more fluid through the pipe that has a different pH and the tag breaks right off of the peptide. So when that fluid comes out the bottom of the pipe, it’s got pretty much pure peptide in it! Pretty cool, huh?”
Shan nodded, but Ell’s eyes had narrowed. She said, “And what are you going to do with this peptide?”
“Um, well, that would be the hardest part. You can’t swallow peptides, they get digested. That’s why insulin has to be injected…” He looked up at his parents to make sure they understood what he was saying. Apparently deciding that they didn’t look confused, he continued, “So, I’d have to inject it.” He shrugged, “And you know how I hate needles.”
Ell looked horrified, “You think you’re going to inject this peptide into yourself?!”
“Um, I haven’t been able to think of any other way to get it inside where it can have an effect.”
Wide-eyed, Ell said, “You can’t do an experiment like that on yourself!”
“Why not? If it doesn’t work, I won’t have lost anything. I’ll still be fat, that’s all.”
“What if it turns out, for some reason you haven’t considered, that this peptide has some other effect? A toxic effect!” Ell glanced wide eyed at Shan, then back at Zage, “Aren’t some venoms peptides?”
Zage looked uncomfortable, “They are, but they’re nothing like this one.”
“Still,” Ell said seriously, “what if it was some other kind of poison? Or a carcinogen? Or similar enough to insulin that it dropped your blood sugar… a big dose of insulin can kill you, you know?”
Zage stared at her for a moment, then shook his head, “The random ordering of 31 amino acids? That’s 31 shriek! That’s a huge number!” He turned to his dad the mathematician, “How big is it, dad?”
“31 shriek is eight to the 33rd power,” his mother said grimly, “which is an enormous number, but the number of permutations of your peptide wouldn’t really be that big, ‘cause there’re only 20 amino acids, not 31.”
Zage’s eyes flashed to his mother, “How did you know that?!” he asked suspiciously. Apparently he’d believed his dad might estimate the size of 31 shriek in his head since he was a mathematician, but obviously he hadn’t thought that his mother would have any idea.
“My AI told me,” Ell said dryly.
Zage looked a little startled, apparently thinking that he should have realized she might get the answer from her AI rather than concluding that she’d done it in her head even if the answer had come very quickly. He shrugged, “So, the chances of me randomly generating something toxic is infinitesimal. Even 20 shriek is huge.”
Ell shook her head, “You didn’t generate anything randomly though, did you? You specifically designed a peptide that you think is going to do something. If you were to take a deck of cards and lay them out in an order that was pleasing to you, the chances that I might lay them out in the same order is a lot less than 52 shriek.”
Zage got a distant look, then he shrugged, apparently accepting his mother’s thesis. “I guess.” He got a mulish look on his face, “I still don’t think it would be dangerous though.”
“You think it’s going to do something powerful, i.e. make you lose weight. You just can’t assume that it will be able to do that without thinking that there’s a chance that it might generate some other, possibly dangerous, sid
e effects!” She shook her head, “There aren’t any other medications that don’t have side effects.”
Zage looked chastened for a moment, but then he said, “But I really think this will work! How else am I going to test it?!”
Ell looked at him fondly for a moment, “I’m really not an expert at this, so you probably should ask Dr. Turner or Vanessa. I think the way it’s usually done is that first you test it on some cells in tissue culture. You can’t see if the cells lose weight, obviously, but,” she lifted an eyebrow, “you could see if they die. And,” she shrugged, “maybe there’s some way to measure whether they make more Trim28?”
“Oh…” Zage said, looking like a light had just come on.
“Then, if that seems to be okay,” Ell continued, “maybe you could try it in some of those obese rats you were talking about?”
Zage sat for a minute, staring at nothing, evidently thinking, then said, “I’ll talk to Vanessa about it. If we’re going to test it in rats, though, I’ll have to ask her to apply for an animal protocol approval. I’m almost sure the university won’t let me apply for it myself.” His eyes shifted back and forth from his mother to his father, “Or do the injections… Uh, I’ve already spent most of the money you put in Dr. Turner’s lab account. This will cost quite a bit more…”
Shan and Ell looked at one another, “We’ll need to…”
Zage interrupted, “You could take me out of that expensive kindergarten and save some money that way,” he said hopefully.
Ell laughed merrily, “You’re not getting out of kindergarten that easily. I’m pretty sure we can come up with the money for you to keep doing your research. We think the time you spend in the lab’s really important for you.”
The smile that spread over Zage’s face warmed Shan’s heart. Then the kid narrowed his eyes and turned to his mother, “How come you even know about factorial numbers?”
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