DNA

by Laurence Dahners

  Jamieson’s head whirled again, but he could see no way for Donsaii to be speaking to him. He rubbed his ear, sticking his finger in it to check for hidden earbuds.

  His attorney said, “We could tell who… what?”

  Am I goin’ crazy? Jamieson wondered, but he only said, “Nothin’. We can turn state’s evidence against Wang. I think he works for China.”

  Steve looked at Ell through narrowed eyes. They’d been meeting to talk about the bigger security team when Allan had interrupted to tell Ell what Jamieson was doing. “You’re talking to Jamieson?”

  She nodded.

  “How?”

  Ell explained about the port she’d installed in Jamieson’s skull.

  Steve grimaced, “Installing something in someone’s body without their permission, even if they’re a criminal…” he trailed off with a shake of his head.

  “I know,” Ell said distractedly. “Just one of the many reasons I don’t want anyone else to have some of this technology. Too much temptation to use it for…” she trailed off, but then shrugged and continued, “To use it like I just did.” She sighed, “Lots of times I wish I didn’t know how to do it either.” She shrugged, “Of course, then we wouldn’t be able to reach the stars…”

  Frowning Steve said, “Could you really kill him still?”

  “Sure. Toxin through the port.”

  “Well, no matter how loathsome I find that guy, I’d advise you not to kill him now. ‘Premeditated’ and all that. They probably couldn’t catch you, but if they did…”

  “Yeah, no, I won’t be killing him. I’m just hoping a little threat might keep him from destroying any chance we have of retaining the Kinrais’ anonymity.”

  ***

  Vanessa looked up when the lab door opened. Zage is back! She thought, feeling a little relieved. “Where have you been?! Missing Monday and Tuesday… plus the weekend! That’s not like you.”

  “Sick. I got hurt, but not seriously. I’m okay now,” Zage said quickly, putting his stuff down.

  Vanessa got the impression from the way he’d spit it out that he didn’t really want to talk about it.

  This was confirmed when he continued, “How’d your experiment go?”

  From the way Zage was fidgeting, Vanessa felt pretty sure he wanted to look at his own results rather than hearing about hers, but she briefly updated him on what she’d found with their latest experiment on changes in the gut flora with diet. Knowing he wanted to move on, she asked, “Did you look at what’s been happening with your rats’ weights yet?”

  “Um, yeah. About half of them have lost weight, but, of course, I don’t really know if they’re the ones getting the peptide.”

  Vanessa grinned at him, “What do you think?”

  He gave her a sly grin in return, “Well, since rats usually gain weight unless they’re sick, I think it’s the peptide. But I’d like to go see if they look like they might be sick instead.”

  Vanessa gave him a sly smile, “And are you hoping someone might take you down there?” The animal care people had objected to a child being down in their facilities without supervision, especially since he wasn’t an official University student. Therefore, Zage wasn’t supposed to go down to look at his rats without Vanessa or Dr. Turner to accompany him.

  Zage nodded solemnly, “It’s kind of mean of you to make me beg, you know?”

  She snorted as she got up, “You shouldn’t call people ‘mean’ when you’re asking them for a favor… you know?”

  When they got down to the animal care facility, Zage’s rats all looked healthy. Some of them though… looked sleeker. In fact, though they still looked big, the sleek ones looked more like normal rats than the big fat ones in the adjoining cages. Damn! Vanessa thought, This kid might actually have done it.

  Epilogue

  Carol spoke to her AI, “Connect me to Phil… Phil, have you badgered those people into letting you come back to Mars yet?”

  There was a moment’s pause for Phil to accept the call, then the screen in front of her lit up with his image. He said, “Hey Carol, no such luck yet. You needin’ the thrill… the thrill of Phil?”

  Carol snorted, “You, my man, are gonna be in peril. In peril, of Carol!”

  “Well, your prayers are getting closer to being answered. As near as they can tell from their tests yesterday, I’m no longer any stupider than I was before I went through the port. It might not be too much longer before I convince them that, since I’ve taken all these tests to give them a baseline, that I’m the prime candidate to be sent through the port again, then re-evaluated. Besides,” he grinned, “I’ve convinced them that your emotional well-being requires my presence.”

  Carol frowned, ignoring his statement about her well-being. “So, have they decided that it really did affect your intelligence, at least for a while?”

  Phil sighed, “Yeah, they really can’t tell how my mental function compares to what it was before I went through the port because they just didn’t have good enough data from before the transfer. However, I do test a little bit smarter now than right after I was ported. They think that means that my smarts were knocked down for a while.” He winked, “I’m trying to convince them that going through the port actually boosted my intelligence, it just took a while.” He shrugged, “Not that they seem to be buying it.”

  Uncertainly, Carol said, “Maybe we shouldn’t push it then.”

  “Not you too?!”

  Carol gave him a mischievous look, “It’s not like you had any brain cells to spare, you know?”

  Phil put his hand on his chest and gave her his most wounded look, “E tu brute!” he said, pronouncing it “brute” like a savage, rather than “Brute” like Caesar’s friend. After a moment’s pause, he said seriously, “I want to get back out to Mars, so if they’ll let me, I’m going to be back out there to rub your back again.” He shrugged unhappily, “However, if they won’t let me, there won’t be a whole lot you or I can do about it.”

  Still looking very thoughtful, Carol said, “I guess…” Then she brightened, “Hey, we’ve got the latest results from the dome. The cyanobacteria are really cranking out the oxygen now. Lindy thinks they’ve mutated to generate a strain that tolerates the really high CO2 better than the original ones the dome was populated with. It’s starting to look really promising.”

  Phil said, “I’ve been doing some calculations. Rather than trying to create an atmosphere for the entire planet, I’m thinking we should start by just doming over the Valles Marineris.”

  Carol tilted her head curiously, “What?”

  “I’m picturing that we cover that huge valley with a graphene sheet that holds the new atmosphere inside of it instead of letting the air escape to the rest of the planet. The Valles has an area of about a quarter of a million square miles, close to the size of Texas. That’s huge, but it’s still only about an eighth of a percent of the size of all of Mars.” At Carol’s stunned look, he said, “I know… The dome’s going to leak, but the leaks will just be a start on the terraforming of the rest of Mars. Meanwhile, we can make sure things are actually going to work on that little piece of Mars.” He shrugged, “Kind of like a bigger version of Lindy’s current test dome.”

  Carol said, “And we’d have a place where we could live now, while we’re waiting for the rest of Mars to have an atmosphere.”

  Phil lifted an eyebrow, “Yeah, and we’d want the graphene cover over the Valles to have several layers as insurance against punctures. Once we had some air pressure underneath it, we could start filling the space between the layers with some water. The air pressure would hold it up, even against the weight of the water. And the water would protect us from radiation. Even a meter of water would result in a huge reduction in solar particles.”

  “Oh! Phil, I think going through a port must have increased your IQ, just like you were saying…”

  ***

  Zage stood with his dad and Amy in the big reception area full of men in tuxedos an
d women in exotic gowns. Even the circulating wait-staff were dressed in formal clothing. Dr. Pace and his pretty wife Viveka from Allosci were talking quietly to Zage’s dad. Zage was listening to their conversation with one ear.

  Though he hadn’t seen her, Zage’s mom was supposed to be coming as Ell Donsaii which seemed so weird to him. Since that night that he’d learned who his mother really was, he hadn’t seen her as Ell Donsaii again. And, in public, like here at the Nobel Prize reception, he was supposed to pretend that he didn’t actually know her, which was… so bizarre. He understood why, but it still felt unreal.

  Zage could feel people’s eyes on him. His dad had had to be fairly forceful when requesting permission for Zage to attend. Most Nobel Prize recipients were old enough that they didn’t have children Zage’s age. The people in charge of the function were not happy about having a five year old child at their elegant event. Despite Zage’s tuxedo and calm behavior, the guests eyed him uncomfortably as if they expected him to burst into a tantrum at any moment.

  Amy had stopped a pretty blonde woman carrying a tray of appetizers and asked her to bend down and show them to Zage. The woman was explaining the different treats on her tray to Zage and he was trying to dredge up the willpower to avoid taking one.

  He realized that a silence had fallen over the room.

  Zage looked around, thinking that perhaps the king of Sweden had arrived at the reception. All eyes in the room had turned in one direction, so it was easy for him to determine that they were focused on the entrance. In the opening, Zage saw a breathtakingly-beautiful, slender, strawberry-blond woman in a long-sleeved, simple black gown with scarlet edging at the neck, cuffs, and hem. A narrow scarlet belt and a simple necklace with a brilliant ruby pendant were her only adornments.

  Yet all the other guests looked tawdry by comparison.

  Stunned by his own mother’s beauty, Zage looked up to see if his father had noticed his mother entering the room. Shan was staring with the rest and his throat worked a little. His father’s hand slipped on to Zage’s shoulder. To Zage’s surprise, he saw that Viveka, and Dr. Pace’s eyes both trembled with unshed tears.

  Somewhere in the room, someone began to clap.

  Moments later, the room was filled with thunderous applause, not just for the first person to hold four Nobel Prizes, but also for the person who’d saved their world and themselves.

  ***

  Reggie Barnes walked into D5R and the receptionist waved her on toward the huge room where a lot of the physics research was done. As she headed down toward the left end of the large space, she saw Ell Donsaii coming toward her accompanied by a tall man with unruly hair.

  Once Donsaii had given her an enthusiastic greeting and introduced her to Roger Emmerit, they made their way again to one of the small conference rooms. As soon as they stepped inside Donsaii asked, “You’ve inserted that DNA sequence in some cells?” Reggie nodded, “Yes, though markedly different, that sequence had some similarities to some of the error correction proteins in Earth species. It only coded for a single protein so it seemed unlikely that it carried any great risks, still we synthesized and inserted it in the Level 4 lab as you requested.”

  “What kind of cells?” Emmerit asked.

  “Yeast, they’re eukaryotic like our cells but divide rapidly so radiation induced mutations become evident pretty quickly.”

  “Have you been able to evaluate mutation rates yet?” Donsaii asked eagerly.

  Reggie gave another nod, wondering if they had any idea just how much time she’d been investing in this project. “It’s freaking amazing… I think, though I certainly can’t be sure at this point, that it’s able to repair even double-strand breaks almost perfectly every time. With current Earth species, single strand breaks are readily repaired by copying the intact strand back onto the broken strand. But in Earth organisms double-strand breaks are usually repaired by just patching the two ends back together, often with missing nucleotides which results in mutation of the gene that stretch of DNA coded. What I suspect the Virgies’ protein is doing is somehow finding some of the RNA generated from that segment of damaged DNA and using the RNA as a template for repair.” She shook her head, “If you’d asked me a month ago, I would have said that wasn’t possible!”

  “So,” Roger asked, “would this protein enable repair of the kinds of radiation damage we’d expect to encounter on Mars?”

  “No doubt. Radiation levels there are about 50 times what they are here, but the Virgies’ DNA repair system might be as much as 100 times better than ours.”

  Ell and Roger gave each other a high five, “That’s awesome, we’re going to Mars!”

  “Mars would be cool,” Reggie said, “but I think a lot bigger deal than radiation protection is the fact that this would keep people from getting cancer. A lot of cancers are due to transcription errors.” Reggie shrugged, “However it’s a little early to get too excited about it. We’d have to get the DNA for this protein into every cell in your body before it could protect them all from radiation. We don’t know how to do that.”

  Ell raised an eyebrow, “But the Virgies do…”

  ***

  A few days after Christmas, Zage went up to his room and wiped the top of the vial with alcohol. He punctured its rubber stopper with the tiny needle on the insulin syringe and drew up a tenth of a milliliter of his peptide solution.

  He used the alcohol swab to wipe a small spot on his stomach, then picked up the syringe with a sigh. For a moment he wondered if he could actually do it, then he reminded himself just how badly he hated being overweight. Calling to mind the sleek, slender rats in his treatment group, Zage gritted his teeth, stuck the tiny needle into his skin and depressed the plunger.

  He blinked, it hadn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d expected.

  Well, it was a tiny dose. Perhaps when he had to inject more—assuming that this tiny dose didn’t cause a problem—it might hurt more.

  But, mostly he’d been worried about the needle puncturing his skin, and he’d hardly felt that.

  Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as he’d feared.

  As long as his mother didn’t find out what he was doing…

  The End

  Hope you liked the book!

  If so, please give it a positive review on Amazon.

  To find other books by the author try Laury.Dahners.com.

  Author’s Afterword

  This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I’ve always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world? Each of the stories tries to ask such questions.

  “DNA” asks about some of the things that may come to pass as we learn to control our own DNA. Though many have great fear of what may happen when humans begin to manipulate their own DNA, feeling that it is unethical to do so, they ignore the fact that DNA has been modified by evolution since the dawn of life here on earth. In historical times, purposeful animal breeding by humans has been modifying DNA as well. I believe that intelligently guided evolution is going to happen. The first genetic edits will be to cure horrific genetic diseases. Conditions which are so ghastly that—once we are able to modify the patient’s genome for a cure—almost everyone will agree that correcting the victim’s DNA is the ethical thing to do. Then we will start down the slippery slope of correcting our children’s “not so great” genes, then selecting “super” genes for our children because we feel they won’t be able to compete if we don’t. Once we find ways to modify genes in adults as well as embryos, each of us will face our personal decision about whether to modify our own genes to reduce our risk of cancer, then to improve our endurance/strength/intelligence/lifespan, then our beauty—each decision perhaps a little less ethical
. As we make these decisions some will be horrified that others are doing it, calling them unethical, yet eventually seduced to do it themselves by the siren song of the improvements they want for their lives and the lives of their children.

  DNA also asks, “What if” non-technological aliens have evolved means for correcting, adjusting, and improving their own DNA? Like dogs, whose olfactory systems are so much better than our own that they can sense and recognize just a few molecules per million. What if these aliens could sense the sequence of DNA molecules and further had an organ that allowed them to generate modifications of those molecules? What if they evolved on a planet with high background radiation like Mars, requiring that they evolve and perhaps self-generate their own means for correcting DNA damage in order to live in that high radiation environment? Since large numbers of the cancers that afflict the human race are due to DNA errors from radiation and other mutagens, learning how to more accurately repair DNA damage from such aliens would reduce our risk of cancer. What if we were able to trade with such aliens, not “things,” but knowledge?”

  It again asks, “What if obesity really is a communicable disease ‘epidemic’?” What if the mechanism for that epidemic has to do with Trim28, a gene known to result in obesity when its activity is reduced? Perhaps a virus or a change in the bacteria inhabiting your intestines switches Trim28 off? There are, after all, known to be viruses and changes in the intestinal microbiota which influence obesity.

  This story continues to explore the (to me) fascinating possibility that other life bearing worlds may have enormously different atmospheric pressures than Earth. In most science fiction, other living worlds are colder, or hotter, or heavier, or lighter, or have a (to us) unbreathable atmosphere due to a lack of oxygen or the presence of toxic gases. But, even if we had a breathable mix and a reasonable temperature, if the pressure was markedly different it could make it impossible for us to live on those worlds. If we just look at the range of atmospheric pressures on the second, third and fourth planets of our own solar system we can see a huge range of variability (Mars = 0.6% of earth’s pressure; Venus = 90X earth’s pressure – neither pressure is even close to livable for humans or other earth animals even if they did have the right mix of gases). But animals can evolve to live at high pressures; witness the depths of our own oceans. So aliens might have evolved to thrive at high pressures. Personally, I believe that tides in our atmosphere induced by the close proximity of a large gravitational body (our moon) have been resulting in the loss of atmosphere over millions of years and that the subsequent thinning of our atmosphere at least partly explains why flying and land animals are so much smaller than they were in the past (a dense atmosphere would have provided such large animals support).