Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14)

by Laurence Dahners

  Zage sighed, “Determination so far. I don’t have as much willpower as I’d like though, so I’m working on finding an easier way."

  "Aren’t we all,” AJ said with a snort. "What’s your strategy going to be?”

  A few minutes later, AJ felt his brain reeling. The kid had just described several hypotheses regarding the obesity epidemic and possible causes for it that he was considering. The kid thought it might actually be a communicable disease and he had several disease agents in mind. He also had various strategies for treating them. To listen to the kid you’d have thought he worked in some kind of laboratory doing sophisticated microbiological and DNA research.

  He glanced over at Morgan and saw that she looked nonplussed as well. Turning back to Zage, he said, “Wow, that’s really interesting. Where’d you learn all that?”

  Suddenly Raquel appeared and plucked Zage out of his seat. “Hey munchkin, you know other people aren’t as interested in obesity as you are. You need to get upstairs and brush your teeth. We need to be ready to say goodbye to everyone here pretty soon.” She set him on his feet and pointed him toward the stairs.

  Zage obediently trotted off toward the stairs, leaving AJ sitting there thinking that he actually did want to know more about what Zage had to say! Everyone else was getting up from the table and clearing away plates though, so he stood as well. Turning to Morgan, he said, “Since we both live in town, we should take the cleanup detail while all these other folks are getting packed up to go.”

  She gave him a smile that seemed both happy and sad as she started stacking plates, “That’s a great idea. You’re a good man Mr. Richards.”

  Morgan and AJ had filled the dishwasher. AJ was manually washing some of the large or delicate items in the sink while Morgan deftly wiped them down and set them on a drying rack. Shan Kinrais put them away and AJ couldn’t help but think that it was pretty weird to have this month’s Nobel Prize winner putting away dishes. Rationally, AJ knew Nobel Prize winners still had to put their pants on one leg at a time; it just seemed like they shouldn’t be doing dishes.

  His heart thumping a little, AJ snuck a couple of fingers into his pocket and back out into the bowl he was washing. He rinsed it under the faucet and handed it to Morgan. Reaching back into the water for the last dish, he watched Morgan out of the corner of his eyes. She’d frozen in place, staring into the bowl. He felt her eyes turned over to look at him. “AJ?”

  “Didn’t I get the ring clean?” he asked.

  “AJ!”

  He turned to her and knelt. “Morgan Kinrais, on this most happy morning, spent with your wonderful family, I’m hoping you’ll consent to joining your family with mine.” He shrugged, “And, maybe… starting our own little family?” She looked shocked. Staring up at her wide eyes, he felt his heart pounding and his body trembling. He’d been feeling a little distance from her; maybe she wouldn’t want to do this? I shouldn’t have asked her… put her on the spot here with her family nearby. It’s going to be so emotional and embarrassing when she says no! How could I have convinced myself it was okay to ask her to marry me just because she’d invited me to breakfast with her family?!

  Morgan reached out and thumped him on the forehead, then took a huge breath. “What in God’s name took you so long?! After all these years I was getting ready to kick you to the curb for a lack of commitment!” She knelt as well to put her arms around him. With a sob she buried her face in the crook of his neck and said, “Of course I’ll marry you… Even if getting a ring soaked in dishwater is about as unromantic as, as… anyone could possibly imagine!”

  AJ pulled back to look into her eyes, “I’m so sorry! I thought it’d be… cute… or something…” He trailed off remorsefully and hopelessly. “I’m just not very good at romantic stuff I guess.”

  “You guess?” Morgan sniffed, “There’s no guessing about that. You suck at it!” She pulled him in for another hug, “But I love you anyway.”

  AJ suddenly realized that Shan was standing there staring at them, a big grin on his face. Looking up at Shan, AJ said, “I proposed.” He brightened, “And she’s saying yes.”

  Shan snorted, “Swept her off her feet, didn’t you Casanova?”

  AJ felt a blush rising up into his cheeks. “I’m not the smoothest…” he mumbled.

  “I’ll say!” Shan reached out a hand, “Let me help you two love birds to your feet and then let’s go out and tell the rest of the family!”

  By the time they got out into the big room it became evident that word had spread ahead of them. The women gathered to look at Morgan’s ring and the men came over to congratulate AJ. But then AJ found himself facing Morgan’s dad. Mr. Kinrais had a stern look on his face as he said, “You didn’t ask for my permission!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry…” AJ began, but then trailed off as Kinrais laughed.

  “You don’t need my permission, Morgan’s a free woman!” He lowered an eyebrow, “And you’d better not forget it.”

  A whirl of confusion followed as everyone chattered excitedly about the engagement while busily packing up to leave. At some point AJ learned that he was getting married that summer out on D5R’s island, and that he needed to line up three groomsmen. When did Morgan plan all this out? he wondered.

  At one point as AJ stood watching everyone, he found himself next to Raquel. They talked a little about the wedding but when a pause came in their conversation, he asked, “Did you hear what Zage was saying about obesity?”

  She nodded ruefully, “Yeah, not all of it. But I know the gist of what he said because he talks about it all the time. He’s pretty upset about his weight problem.”

  “Did you hear him talking about vectors and transmission; bowel microflora; antigens and targeted vaccination…? I didn’t even understand most of it.”

  Raquel’s expression tightened a little bit and she pressed her lips together, merely nodding in response.

  “He’s only five, right?”

  Raquel nodded.

  AJ glanced over at Zage who was talking to Morgan’s sister Lane. “I hope you’ve got him in some kind of advanced classes. He seems like he’s way ahead of what I’d expect a kindergartner to be.”

  Raquel turned to gaze at her son too, “Yeah we’ve had him in some advanced classes, but those don’t let him socialize with kids his age. We’ve also got him in a regular class part of the day, but he hates it because he thinks it’s a waste of his time.”

  ***

  Miki frowned as she looked at the three skin lesions. As a nurse, Miki was the only medical person on Little Diomede Island, so everyone with anything wrong with them came to see her. Siluk was the tenth person to show up with these odd pustules on their skin. Ten people didn’t sound like a lot, but on an island with only 90-100 people, they represented about ten percent of the population. Probably a lot more people had the lesions if you considered the fact that the islanders didn’t like to seek care and it was the Christmas holidays. Not all the Inuit on the island were Christians, but quite a few were.

  Miki’d spent time searching on the Internet for such lesions without finding anything she could confidently say matched what she was seeing. On the other hand, there were a lot of possibilities. Yesterday, she’d given in and called a dermatologist on the mainland. He’d looked at the lesions over video, but he hadn’t been sure either. He’d suggested that since a lot of people were breaking out with them, it might be some kind of contagious infection spreading through their tiny population. He’d suggested scraping or biopsying some of the lesions and sending samples to the hospital in Anchorage.

  Miki looked up at Siluk, “You’re probably not going to like this, but I need to get a biopsy and send it to the mainland. You’re not the only person with these things and we need to find out for sure what’s causing them.”

  Siluk drew back, a worried look on his face, “Do I have to pay for this biopsy?”

  “No, the health service will pay for it.”

  Siluk relaxed, “Okay
then,” he waved at the splotches. “Do whatever you want.”

  Siluk was tough and let Miki get deep scrapings from all three of his lesions. She put them in the three different types of tubes that the doctor’d recommended. Packaging them up for the next flight to the mainland, she wondered if anything would come from them. Frequently they sent such samples off and the information that came back was pretty useless.

  ***

  It was New Year’s Day, a day Zage’s dad claimed was a national holiday set aside for watching football. Shan did have some of the games playing on the big screen in the house’s main room, but he didn’t really seem to be watching them very intently. Nonetheless, Zage had decided to go sit in the room his parents called the library to get away from the games. He could ignore the video, but the announcers’ steady chatter tended to distract him.

  The so-called library actually only had a few old print books. But it had plenty of screens to pull up information from the net. Zage’s AI, Osprey, was getting better and better at making the HUD (Heads Up Display) in his contact look like it was displaying multiple screens, even though all it was really doing was building a virtual image of the screens. In whatever direction Zage was looking, the screens were shown in high resolution and lo-res placeholder screens showed in the area outside the center of his field of view. Zage suspected that at the rate Osprey was improving he wouldn’t be using physical screens much longer, but for now he still liked having a bunch of screens where he could put up different kinds of information at the same time.

  His mother came in and sat down beside him on one of the big overstuffed chairs. She was done up as Raquel. Zage still found it hard to believe that his mother and Ell Donsaii were one and the same person, especially the way she managed to change her accent, appearance, and even the way she walked between her two identities. Even the color of her eyes had recently changed slowly so that they were different between the two identities. More brown for Raquel and a brilliant green for Ell. He’d asked her about it and she said that it was pretty easy because the new AI contacts also let light out of the eye. So she could just alter the color of the image of her iris in the processing unit before it exited. She said, “What’re you working on?”

  “I’m trying to learn more about antigens.”

  She looked curiously up at his screens, “What’re antigens?”

  Zage was still coming to grips with the fact that his heroine Ell Donsaii didn’t actually know everything. He doubted he’d ever be able to stump her on physics, but there seemed to be a lot she didn’t know about biology. “Um, an antigen’s a location on a germ, or cancer cell, or even on an allergen. It’s a site that antibodies can attach themselves to. Usually it’s a peptide, which is a small protein; or a polysaccharide, which is a chain of sugar molecules. Sometimes it’s a lipid.”

  His mother blinked, “Oh, and what’re you trying to learn about them?”

  “Well…” he said slowly, thinking about how to explain, “I’m hoping that Osprey and I can search the genome of a virus and predict what its antigens’ll be.”

  Ell looked unseeingly off into the distance for a moment, then said, “So… you find the virus’s genetic coding for peptides, polysaccharides and lipids, then compare those to human genetic coding. Wherever the codes are different you could assume that part of the virus could act as an antigen that the human immune system could attack?”

  “Well yeah, but it isn’t really that simple. If, say a peptide’s different in the virus or isn’t present in humans, then it could be an antigen that antibodies would attack. But, if that peptide’s in the center of the virus, antibodies’d only be able to find and attack it if the virus was already dead and broken apart. So we’re trying to find sites that could be antigens and that should be on the exterior of the virus,” Zage said, tilting his head curiously as he wondered whether his mother would understand.

  Ell gave him an intent look, “And if you were able to identify such an antigen, then what?”

  Ell’s narrowed eyes gave Zage pause. He wondered whether there was some reason she might object to his plans. Tentatively, he said, “Um, you could vaccinate people or animals with that antigen and produce immunity to the virus…”

  “Are you thinking about vaccinating yourself to human adenovirus 36?” she asked slowly.

  Zage slowly shook his head, “No, I’m pretty sure I’m not infected with the adenovirus anymore. My immune system’s already gotten rid of it. I just have some of its DNA inserted into some of my own cells. That DNA may be causing trouble, but it wouldn’t help to vaccinate myself against some DNA.”

  “Why not?”

  “That DNA’s inside my cells where my immune system can’t attack it.”

  Ell’s eyes turned back up to the screens. After a moment, she said, “So, how’re you going to recognize possible antigens from a study of a viral genome?”

  “Osprey and I’ve been working on a program that figures out how proteins will fold when they’re formed. If we can tell how they fold, we’ll know which parts of the molecule are on the surface and exposed to the immune system. Also, we’re working on being able to determine which parts of which proteins and polysaccharides are likely to be located on the exterior of a virus. There were some programs out there that tried to do these things but they weren’t very accurate. I’ve been able to make some suggestions and Osprey…” Zage paused and looked up at his mother. “Osprey is… pretty astonishing you know? I know you said he’s supposed to be pretty high end, but, from what I can tell, AIs aren’t supposed to be able to do a lot of the things that he can?”

  Ell studied her son for a few seconds, then ventured, “Your dad’s a pretty good programmer, you know?”

  Zage gave her a disbelieving look, “I’m not talking about programming! I’m talking about raw computing power. I’ve looked at Osprey’s hardware and it’s really good, but it’s not even the best available.”

  Ell snorted, “Okay, you’ve got me. Osprey’s CPU’s actually much better than its label would suggest, but he’s got some hidden PGR chips that link his CPUs to CPUs located elsewhere. We constantly upgrade that hidden bank of CPUs with the latest hardware. Essentially, even though Osprey himself isn’t the very latest generation supercomputer, he’s PGR linked up to a very large stack of the very best, along with linkages to huge amounts of additional memory and high-speed data storage. He’s even hooked up to some QPUs that can handle some of the problems they’re really good at.”

  “QPUs?”

  “Quantum processors. They can solve some staggeringly difficult computations. Someday they may do all computing, but for right now they’re kind of a specialty chip.”

  “So, you’re saying that the part of Osprey I can see is only part of a widely distributed supercomputer?”

  Ell nodded, seeming a little surprised by his quick understanding. “Yeah, it’d be kind of crazy for you and I and your dad to each have our own distributed supercomputer, since we wouldn’t keep them busy. Essentially when any of us asks a really big question, that person’s AI gets access to as many of the computing resources as they need.”

  Zage tilted his head, “So you mean that if I’d asked a really complex question that required an enormous amount of computational power, it might reduce your access?”

  His mother laughed and ruffled his hair, “No, I have to admit that my requests would take priority over yours. Your dad’s too.” She got a serious look again, “I’d like to talk to you about some safety issues.”

  “You mean you’re going to take me on tours of more tunnels, or something?”

  “Um, no. Let’s start by talking about your request to go to college instead of kindergarten.”

  “Oh, great!” Zage said sitting up and suddenly looking much more enthusiastic. “Can I start this spring semester?”

  Ell rolled her eyes. “Yes,” she said resignedly, though he didn’t think she was really all that upset. “You did… you did astonishingly well on that SAT you took back in
December.”

  Trying not to look smug, Zage said, “I thought I knew a lot of the answers.”

  “Still, I’m not sure how you’d fit into a regular college curriculum. You already know a lot of the stuff they teach in standard classes.”

  Zage nodded, “I’ve looked over the classes for a lot of the undergraduate degrees. I think I know what they teach in a lot of them and I don’t really need to know what they teach in most of the others.”

  Ell shook her head and sighed, giving Zage the impression she didn’t really know what to do with him. “It’d probably be good for you to get a broad education in some things other than what you’re interested in, but I’m not going to push that right now. So, here’s what I’ve been working on. I’ve gotten to know a Dr. Barnes over at Duke University. She’s a DNA researcher who’s working with D5R. I know her pretty well as Ell and I’ve told her that one of my friends, Raquel Kinrais, has a really smart kid who’s skipping high school and going directly to college, mostly at the graduate level.”

  “You didn’t tell her I’m skipping elementary school too?”

  Ell shook her head as if she felt a little bit exasperated by the whole thing. “I thought that’d be a little much for her to take at first. I suspect she’s going to be a little freaked out when you show up and she realizes just how young you are, but by then it’ll be a done deal.”

  Zage widened his eyes in mock horror, “So you want me to do the dirty work of telling her myself?”

  Ell grinned, “I did all the dirty work of setting this up for you, the least you can do is be the one who has to tell her how old you actually are!” Ell paused for a moment, but when Zage didn’t say anything in response, she continued, “Dr. Barnes suggested one senior level class and one graduate level class for you to take. I’ve enrolled you in those. The rest of your time’ll be in her lab doing research. I’d suggest you start looking at the readings for the courses so you can try to catch up with things the instructors will expect you to already know if you’re taking them.”