Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14)

by Laurence Dahners

  She sat, stewing for several minutes. Worried that her professor was behind the times and that, therefore, what she was learning wasn’t the cutting edge like she’d believed. Then, as if she’d been startled, she abruptly thought, A few minutes ago I was worried that he was a five-year-old who needed babysitting! Now I’m suddenly concerned about his assessment of the equipment in our laboratory?! Get it together Carley! He can’t really know, can he?

  Carley realized that neither of them had said anything for several minutes. When she glanced around at them, they were both staring off into space like zombies. Oh. They have HUDs in their contacts. Carley realized that the mother’s lack of a headband had been what’d struck her as odd about the woman when they’d first arrived. Carley’d first heard about contact HUDs a couple of years ago, but they hadn’t hit the mainstream as fast as she’d hoped. They were still quite expensive and the lenses themselves had to be fitted by an optometrist, then checked every so often. Only extreme early adopters and the wealthy seem to be wearing them so far.

  Of course, if the mother works out at D5R, she probably gets a great deal on them.

  Carley started studying again, but after a moment she decided to look up Zage Kinrais’ name.

  Carley turned around when she heard Dr. Barnes’ voice. Barnes said, “Hello. Oh, hi Raquel. I hadn’t realized that Zage was your son?”

  The mother nodded. Dr. Barnes looked around the lab as if searching for someone, then turned back to Raquel, “Where is he?”

  “Um, right here,” the mother said, putting her hand on the little boy’s shoulder.

  Carley was both amused and a little freaked out by the shocked expression on Dr. Barnes’ face. Barnes said, “But…” The pause went on for an extended period, then Barnes said, “Dr. Donsaii told me that your son was skipping high school and coming to college…” She looked at the boy and tilted her head curiously, “Just how old is he?”

  Carley had the impression that the mother wanted to sigh, though she didn’t. She said slowly, “He’s five. Dr. Donsaii didn’t tell you just how young he was for fear you’d reject him out of hand. I think if you’ll give him a chance, you’ll find he really can do the work.” She glanced at her son, “He loves genetics so he’s highly motivated.”

  Barnes looked askance at the boy, “Motivation can only go so far…”

  “I think you’ll find he’s quite capable as well.”

  Addressing the child, Barnes said, “Have you been attending the Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics classes I suggested?”

  The child merely nodded, a serious look on his face.

  “And do you feel like you’re understanding…” Barnes paused as if she suddenly had the feeling that that “understanding” would be impossible, but then continued, “That you’re following what they’re teaching?”

  The boy nodded again.

  “Can you tell me what the endoplasmic reticulum is?” she asked, obviously wondering whether he’d understood the early basics of cell structure in the cell biology course.

  With a serious expression the child said, “A network of membranous tubules in the cytoplasm of eukaryotic cells which are contiguous with the nuclear membrane. Rough endoplasmic reticulum has ribosomes attached and is integral to protein synthesis. Smooth endoplasmic reticulum lacks ribosomes and is important for lipid synthesis and metabolism. Clinically, abnormalities in the XBP1 gene can lead to heightened endoplasmic reticulum stress response related to syndromes of increased inflammatory responses. Such responses have been confirmed to contribute to Alzheimer’s disease in the brain and Crohn’s disease in the bowel. The unfolded protein response…”

  Barnes snorted and put up a halting hand. “All right, all right, you know what the endoplasmic reticulum is.” She looked at the boy’s mother, “You may be right. He may be capable of the work. I just can’t help worrying that keeping up might be very stressful at a delicate time in his life…”

  Zage said, “If it’s too hard, I’ll let you know. I want to do this because I think it’ll be fun. If it isn’t fun…” he gave them a grin, “I’ll want to do something else.”

  Barnes stared at him for a moment, then broke out a smile of her own. “See that you do. As long as we’re agreed on that, we should be able to find you something to do here in the lab. The first thing I have any of the grad students do is extract DNA from Baker’s yeast, amplify it with PCR, use CRISPR to insert a fluorescence gene and a switching gene, then reinsert their modified DNA back in a yeast cell. I’ve written up a protocol for doing it that the students follow. It’s my belief that running this protocol over and over until you get it right and your yeast glows is an experience that teaches you a lot about how things are done in a genetics lab. Do you feel up to taking that on?”

  The boy nodded again, the serious look back on his face.

  “Carley, could you give him a tour of the lab?”

  “Um,” Carley said, wondering how she could tell Dr. Barnes that the boy’d already toured the lab himself. She was saved when the boy’s mother said brightly, “We’ve already been on a most excellent tour of the lab…” She glanced around, “Unless there’re other rooms besides this one?” When Barnes shook her head, the mother continued, “Is there anything else he should do today?”

  The boy said, “I could get started on that protocol…?”

  Barnes said, “Oh no, let me send you the protocol and you can read over it tonight. Tomorrow you can come in, find your reagents and get started on it. Barnes glanced at Carley, “Carley, when will you, Alice or Rick be around tomorrow so you can answer questions for him?”

  “I’m pretty sure that one of us’ll be here almost all of tomorrow. We each have classes, but not all at the same time.”

  The boy said, “I don’t want to bug them, I’m sure they all have their own things to do.”

  “Nonsense,” Barnes said. “Each of them followed this protocol when they started in the lab and they all needed help from someone more senior to them. It’s a long-standing tradition for seniors to help juniors. Besides,” she glanced at Carley, “you never learn something quite as well as when you have to teach it to someone else.”

  After the boy and his mother made their goodbyes and left, Barnes turned to Carley and exhaled a long breath, “Holy crap! A five-year-old.” She got a distant look in her eyes, “I’m not sure I know how to process this.” She paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, then turned back to Carley shaking her head, “What do you think? Don’t pull any punches. If I have to tell them he can’t work here, I’ll just have to gird my loins and do it.”

  Carley blinked a couple of times, then said, “After they first showed up, I did a search for his name—which is uncommon.” At Barnes nod, she continued, “He’s already listed as co-author on a publication about using ports to analyze gut microbiota by Turner and Jenkins at UNC.”

  Barnes got a pinched look, “Dilution of authorship’s getting to be a real problem…”

  Carley shook her head and interrupted, “I… I think he probably made significant contributions.” She flushed a little bit, “The tour of the lab they took?”

  Barnes nodded, “Thanks for that,”

  Carley shook her head again, “I didn’t take them around. Ms. Kinrais asked if they could look around, and I said, ‘Sure, as long as you don’t touch anything.’ They walked through the lab and, I swear, they looked at every single instrument we have in here.”

  Barnes shrugged, “That’s fine. If he’s going to work here, he’s going to see that stuff anyway…”

  Carley interrupted again, “You don’t understand. They were talking quietly, but I’ve got… really good hearing. They didn’t just look at the equipment, that little boy told his mother what each thing was, what it could do, and how we use it to do the kind of things you do working with DNA.” Barnes gave her an astonished look, but Carley lowered her voice as if telling an embarrassing secret and continued, “He also had opinions about almost every one of our instrume
nts. Some were state-of-the-art, some were perfectly adequate; for some he thought we should’ve gotten a competitor’s product, and some he felt were poor quality or out of date and really should be replaced!” She looked up into Dr. Barnes eyes, “I don’t really know where you’d even get information comparing our instruments to whatever else’s on the market! Does someone publish reviews?”

  Barnes swallowed, then said, “Maybe someone does do reviews, but I haven’t seen them.” She glanced away, speaking quietly, “Sometimes you have to use what you’ve got because your grants won’t buy all the newest toys…” She shook herself and turned back to Carley, giving her a weak grin, “Maybe he won’t be a drain on our time and resources after all, huh?”

  On their way home, Zage said, “I still don’t think you needed to go with me.”

  His mom shrugged, “I know you want to do this college thing on your own. But they were freaked enough by your age that I think they might’ve sent you packing if I hadn’t been there.”

  Zage folded his arms over his chest, “I think I could’ve dealt with it by myself.”

  Ell snorted softly, “Well, just think of it as humoring your worrywart of a mother then…”

  Chapter Four

  Mark Amundsen looked around the big research room at D5R. The room was filled with small clusters of bright-looking people animatedly working on obscure projects. They seemed to be using a lot of exotic looking equipment and he had the feeling that great things might be getting accomplished. It didn’t, however, look very polished. It looked more industrial or something.

  It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as he’d expected. Ell had taken Amundsen and his wife out to a nice dinner the evening before at which they hadn’t talked any business. She told him that she wanted him to get a tour this morning without her so he’d feel free to talk to D5R’s people and look at whatever he wanted.

  A nice young lady named Bridget Spaulding was taking him around. She said, “Is there something in particular that you’d like to see?”

  “Cutting edge research?”

  Bridget shrugged, “This building’s pretty much where they do all the research on new stuff. Manufacturing, port warehousing and control, allotrope synthesis, space energy and asteroid mining all happen at other facilities. Down there to the left’s Quantum Biomed where they work out how to do biological interface stuff, like artificial arms, eyes, hearts, kidneys, lungs and pancreata.”

  “Pancreata?”

  “Plural of pancreas.”

  “Oh… I understand how the artificial pancreas monitors blood sugar and administers insulin to control it, that’s not so different from the external pumps people’ve been wearing for some time, it’s just that it’s done through implanted ports. I also have a vague idea how the arms and eyes work through their neural interfaces and that the artificial kidneys simply imitate dialysis without the person having to be hooked up to a big machine… And I’m pretty sure that the heart device just helps squeeze your own heart, right?”

  Bridget nodded.

  “But I don’t understand how the artificial lung works. Is it something like the heart-lung machines they use in surgery?”

  “Yeah, and that’s the problem they’re having as I understand it. They have to use blood thinners to keep the blood from clotting as it passes through the membranes to get oxygenated. Blood thinners are really dangerous, having a high mortality from bleeding into the brain and similar problems. Roger’s working with some membrane chemists to come up with a membrane that’ll exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide but won’t stimulate clotting in the hopes it can be used without thinners. I don’t know how it’s going, but let me take you down where you can ask him yourself.”

  Soon Amundsen found himself talking to Roger Emmerit, an intense young man with an unruly shock of hair. They hadn’t solved the clotting problem, but he was excited about several new possibilities they were getting ready to test. Then Bridget took him down to talk to some people who were in the very early stages of working out a system of traffic tunnels that they hoped to put under large cities with the same type of melting tunnelers that were being used on Mars. They also expected that going under bodies of water would be much cheaper than building bridges over them.

  Amundsen felt like his head was spinning after just these two discussions and Bridget was talking about several other projects he could look at, but then she stopped and said, “Or we could go talk to Ell. She said to bring you by any time you felt like you were ready to talk to her.”

  “People here just call her Ell?” Amundsen said, feeling a little surprised that his tour guide was on a first name basis with the CEO.

  Bridget shrugged and leaned closer as if speaking confidentially, “She’s my roommate. If I had to call her Dr. Donsaii all the time it’d be kind of clumsy. I do it around outsiders, but she said you might be joining our team?”

  Amundsen’s eyes had widened, but he adjusted. Roommate?! he thought. Don’t they pay Donsaii enough for her to live by herself? “I guess I am ready to talk to her, do you want to check with her to see if now’s a good time?”

  “No, it’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  Amundsen followed her, expecting to go to a corner office with a great view of the verdant landscape outside. Instead, Bridget led him down an ordinary hallway to one of a row of offices that didn’t even have a window. Inside, Ell was mounted on what Amundsen recognized as a waldo controller. When Bridget said, “Ell, Mr. Amundsen’s here,” she immediately told her AI to shut it down, pulled off her 3-D goggles and dismounted with a big smile on her face.

  Looking genuinely happy to see him again, she put out her hand for a shake. “What’d you think? Would you be interested in trying to herd this particular bunch of cats?”

  He said, “I think so, yes. But there’s still so much I don’t know…” he trailed off hesitantly.

  “Well, if you’re at all interested we should get you around to see our other facilities. You’ve got to visit Portal Technology where the ports are manufactured and check out the huge port controller warehouses where we support the ports.” She glanced at him, “Even though we call them warehouses, almost all of them are actually underground now to keep them safer from people with ill intent. That’s especially true now that we can simply melt more tunneled space for them any time we need it.” She glanced at a wall screen, then back at Amundsen, “Also, you should take a tour of ET Resources where they manage the asteroid mining, radioactives disposal, the solar parabolic mirrors, and the deep space cooling resources.” She pointed up at the ceiling, “Since there’s really no rush for you to make a decision, I think you should also take a ride up to the space habitats and look in on where Allotrope Science is manufacturing a lot of our carbon-based products.”

  “Um, I thought those were all separate companies, licensees of D5R’s patents. Are you telling me they’re all subsidiaries of D5R?”

  She tilted her head, “Well, it’s complicated, but, essentially the answer’s yes.”

  “And none of them are listed on the stock exchange so… I’m assuming that everything’s privately held?”

  She nodded, “Everything’s held by private investors, yes. We have a board and they vote their shares on important decisions, though they leave most of the day to day decisions to me.”

  “And if I were to decide to come on as CEO, they’d make the final decision and I’d answer to them?”

  “Yep,” Ell said cheerfully and winked. “They’ll like you, I promise.” She tilted her head again, this time looking curious. “You look like you have some concerns?”

  Amundsen shrugged and spoke slowly, “Well, so far I’ve only looked around the research facility. Admittedly, I thought I was looking at the biggest part of the company. Ms. Spaulding mentioned other facilities, but I mistakenly thought they were small outlying buildings where some space mining, allotrope synthesis and port manufacturing research was being done, rather than understanding that she was referring to entire companies that I s
imply didn’t realize were subsidiaries.” He shook himself a little bit as if settling that knowledge into place, “In any case, I was little bit concerned about the lack of polish, or glitz or whatever you want to call it., You know, those shiny places companies show their investors to make them feel like they’re investing in something substantial and cutting edge.”

  Ell just grinned, “Don’t worry too much about that. Our investors are much more interested in results than sparkly bangles.”

  “I assume I’ll be able to look at the financials?”

  Ell nodded.

  “And meet some of the major investors?”

  “Sure. If you decide you want the job, we’ll have a meet and greet.”

  ***

  Having checked with the house AI to make sure Ryan wasn’t there, Ell bounded up the basement stairs into the house she shared with Bridget. As she made her way through the main room toward the front door, Mary from the security detail stood up out of one of the chairs. Realizing that Mary’d been waiting to talk to her, she stopped and said, “What’s up?” She smiled, even though having one of her security team stop her for a chat was rarely good news.

  Mary said, “You might be aware that I’m taking a self-defense course at Zage’s dojo because it falls at the same time as his class?”

  Ell winced, “Yeah, I know the class you’re in isn’t very advanced and so it’s probably pretty boring, huh?”

  With a shrug, Mary said, “That’s no big deal. It keeps me in shape and lets me watch over the munchkin without it seeming weird…” She paused, as if uncomfortable, but then forged ahead, “It’s the watching him that we need to talk about.”