Bioterror! (an Ell Donsaii story #14)

by Laurence Dahners

  Mark blinked and tilted his head curiously, “I don’t understand.”

  She shrugged, and pointed at herself, “Board of Directors. There aren’t any minutes for the board meetings since I’d just feel weird documenting my internal conversations. We actually have a lot of investors since most of the employees own little pieces of the company, but at present I own over ninety-five percent of D5R as a whole. For a couple of the subsidiaries, specifically ET Resources and Portal Technology, I only own eighty-six and eighty-two percent, but essentially my vote’s the only one that matters.”

  She waved at herself again, “Black Hole and Capital Reserve…”

  Amundsen interrupted, “Wait a minute! How… How can that be?!”

  She shrugged, “You don’t remember I invented PGR? We talked about it in the Oval Office back when President Teller gave me the Medal of Freedom. That was way back when I was still in the Air Force, but even then it was paying me over $2 billion a year in patent royalties?”

  Amundsen sat blinking in startlement. “I remember being stunned by how much it was paying you…” he said hesitantly, “but, you know how memory can be? I was remembering $2 million a year?”

  Ell slowly shook her head. “It’s one of the things that made me think of you for this job; that you’re supposed to already be aware of all this money.”

  “But… But how can it be so much?!”

  “Even though D5R’s a lot flashier and gets way more attention because the portals do so many really cool things, you have to recognize that PGR chips underpin essentially all the world’s communications by now. The initial royalties were $2.1 billion a year, but they’ve worked their way up to $15 billion plus as of last year. And of course, if you’ve been looking at D5R as a whole and seen its numbers, you know it and its divisions are making some enormous profits of their own, which are almost all flowing directly to…” she waved at herself again.

  Amundsen dropped his forehead onto his palm with a smack, then slowly shook his head, “I should’ve been able to figure this out…”

  Cheerfully, Ell said, “Think of it in a positive light. I am the Board of Directors, so you don’t have to worry about impressing them.” She lifted an eyebrow, “Though, of course, you do need to keep me happy. But, thankfully, I’m not at all impressed with flashy board rooms or big offices. You’re welcome to have one if you want, but if you’re happy with something that’s more functional, it’ll fit better with the culture here. The capital reserves you were concerned about are essentially what I’ve saved up. Since I don’t spend very much, that currently amounts to over $500 billion.” She studied him for a second, “That’s what I’ve saved up, separate from the value of D5R. Counting the subsidiaries, D5R’s a two trillion dollar company. Or it was the last time I tried to figure it out. It’s growing awfully fast.” She tilted her head, “It’s surprisingly easy to make money when you’re selling products everybody wants.”

  As Amundsen sat there flabbergasted, she studied him for another minute, then said, “I was planning on offering you $5 million a year in salary. Bonuses won’t depend on how much profit we make because I think that’s shortsighted. We’re in it for the long haul. Bonuses depend on how happy the stockholders are,” she waved at herself again. “Five million isn’t much for the CEO of the world’s wealthiest corporation. Obviously, we could afford to pay you a lot more, but I don’t want the kind of CEO who wants to brag to everyone about the size of his salary or how big his golden parachute is… or is mostly concerned about getting big bonuses. I’m looking for someone who thinks what we do here’s cool and wants to be a part of it. Someone who wants to make a difference in the world. Someone… who makes my life easier.”

  “I’ll take it!”

  Ell laughed, “You can think about it, talk it over with your wife and so on.”

  Amundsen chuckled, “No, Mary’d love to live here. It’s a lot more money than I ever expected to be paid and a simpler job than I’d feared. I don’t know why I couldn’t figure out on my own how much you must be worth—in fact I’m wondering why you’re offering me the job in view of that glaring lack of insight. But if you’re offering, I want to take you up on it before you figure out just how dumb I must be.”

  When he looked up, Ell had her hand out to shake…

  Chapter Six

  Alice looked up and saw Zage walking into the lab. “Hey Zage, how was your ski trip?”

  He paused as if giving the question serious consideration. “It was pretty thought-provoking. I found it really interesting how much harder it is to breathe up at higher altitudes. Have you ever been skiing?”

  Trust the kid to think that the most remarkable thing about skiing’s how you get short of breath, Alice thought. She said, “I’ve been skiing, but only twice. We just went to Snowshoe West Virginia.” She gave him a wry wink, “Cheaper than flying out to Colorado, you know?”

  He nodded, “My granddad really loves skiing in Colorado, so he pays for the whole family to go out there once a year. He thinks it’s a nice way to get the family together for a little reunion.”

  Alice lifted an eyebrow, “Well, he must be rich.”

  “He had a business making household products. When ports first came out he got hooked up with an early license from Portal Technology and ET Resources to make portable heaters, coolers, camping toilets—all that kind of stuff.”

  “Oh! Smart move!”

  Zage nodded, “I think he’s done pretty well.”

  “Is he paying your tuition here at Duke?”

  Zage shrugged, “Maybe? If he is my parents haven’t told me about it.” He looked around, “Is Dr. Barnes here today?”

  “Yeah. She’d like to talk to you and me together if that’s okay. She has a project she’d like us to work on as a team.”

  “Oh, okay, that’d be a good way for me to get started.”

  They were in her office and Reggie’d finished describing a number of the diseases which were attributed to misfolding of important proteins. Then she’d explained the issues with understanding protein folding. She’d already described in broad strokes her idea that they could predict folding of entire protein chains by developing rules based on the ways that relatively short, four-amino acid, tetrapeptides folded. Now she said, “Alice, can you tell Zage about some of the problems you’ve been having with the project so far?”

  Alice took over and described how the relatively short peptides they’d been synthesizing so far didn’t necessarily fold in the same manner that those particular amino acid sequences were known to fold within full-length proteins.

  At this point, Reggie interjected, “I’m afraid that the peptide sequence near the folding point of interest is influenced by the amino acids that’re nearby on the chain. The only solution I’ve been able to come up with so far is to work with longer peptides than we’d planned for. Maybe octapeptides…?”

  Alice said, “Unfortunately, that makes the problem much more complex. If the folding at a site’s influenced by amino acid sequences that’re even a relatively short distance away, the number of factors influencing folding must go up a lot!” Getting a grumbly tone in her voice, she said, “Probably why it’s an unsolved problem so far.”

  “I still think we’ve got to give it a shot…” Reggie said, trailing off thoughtfully.

  There was a brief pause as Alice and Reggie marshaled their thoughts. Zage said, “There’re twenty amino acids, so the number of possible sequences in a peptide are twenty to the power of the length of the peptide sequence. Twenty to the fourth power means that there’re 160,000 possible sequences for your tetrapeptides. Even that isn’t really doable, but if you start making octapeptides, twenty to the eighth power’s over 25 billion possible peptides you’d have to synthesize before you could determine the folding of each sequence a single time.”

  Stunned, Reggie stared at him for a moment, wondering why she hadn’t heard him query his AI for those answers. “Math’s never been my strong suit,” she said slo
wly. “I knew it’d be a lot of peptides, but I guess I should’ve asked my AI to do the math for me instead of just trusting to my instincts on this one.” She snorted and looked at Alice, “Seems like someone who does what I do for a living should have a feel for this, but it turns out I didn’t have any instinct at all for this one.”

  Alice said, “Geez, I thought it’d be a big number, but I was thinking thousands, not billions! I should’ve done the math too.” She paused for a second, then turned back to Reggie, “I’m not coming up with any great ideas for how we might solve this problem. Do you have any suggestions Dr. Barnes?”

  Disheartened, she shook her head. “I’m going to have to give it a lot of thought, see if I can come up with any other ideas.” She took a deep breath, then said, “That still leaves us needing a project for Zage.” She turned to Alice, “Could you use some help on your sequence sifting project?”

  Alice smiled at Zage, “Sure. I’ll ask Rick and Carley if they could use a hand with any of their projects too.”

  Alice started to get up, so Zage did too, but he said, “Have you tried putting your sequences up on the Gordito website?”

  The two women turned to look at him, then at one another in puzzlement. Alice said, “Nooo, I haven’t heard of it.” She glanced again at Dr. Barnes, but Reggie shook her head.

  Zage said, “It’s a pretty new website. You feed it the DNA sequence from a virus and, it recognizes the protein sequences in the code. It determines how the protein sequences fold and forms a 3-D model that lets it recognize the protein’s likely function. If the protein’s going to be located on the exterior of the virus, it tells you which amino acid sequences are on the most accessible surfaces of the protein.” He shrugged, “The website was set up to help investigators recognize likely externally located peptide sequences that could serve as antigenic targets for immune responses, but it has to work out the folding to do that. Presumably it could answer folding questions for you if you needed them…” he kind of ran down, then rushed to finish, “even if you don’t need to know about any antigenic sites.”

  Reggie found herself staring. A glance showed her that Alice was confounded as well. “That’s… that’s astonishing. If this website can do that, the people who’ve set it up have solved a protein folding problem that’s been driving people crazy since the nineteen sixties! Why haven’t we heard about it?!”

  “Um, it’s really new. I don’t think it’s seeing much traffic yet. I… I just got lucky… um, finding it.” Reggie had the distinct impression that Zage was actually embarrassed about finding the website, though she couldn’t imagine why he’d be nervous to admit that he’d found a site on the web that claimed to be able to do something most people thought was impossible. That wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Zage continued, “I just thought it might be worth a try.”

  “Do you know who set it up? Has anyone checked it to see whether the information it generates is any good? If it can do what you say, then my protein folding grant’s essentially pointless and I should probably return the money to the NIH.” She shook her head, “But whoever figured it out needs to tell the rest of the world how to do it. Science is supposed to be open.”

  “It seems to be an… anonymous site. Maybe it won’t work for anything except recognizing viral protein antigens.” He shrugged, “Maybe it doesn’t even work for that, but even if it does, maybe it won’t correctly predict the folding of other proteins. Do you want me,” he hesitated, “or Alice and me to try to check it out?”

  Reggie said, “First see if someone else’s already validated it. If you can’t find evidence that it’s been confirmed to work and to be accurate, then we could talk about some methods we could use to try to validate it ourselves. That might be a good project for you. It’s always important that anyone’s scientific methods get checked out by others to confirm they work.” She shook her head, “Really the first thing you should do’s find the people that set up this website. They shouldn’t be working in isolation. Think about it, even if their website works perfectly and is a boon to mankind, if the people that built it were to die and nobody knew where their server was to maintain it, the world could lose that resource. They need to be open about whatever it is they’re doing.”

  “Oh,” Zage said softly, looking as if he’d just been chastised for doing something wrong himself, “okay.”

  Reggie gave kind of a dismissive wave and said, “Alice, why don’t you and Zage have a look at this website. See if you can find the authors or at least someone who’s checked it for accuracy. If not, run a few known sequences through it to see if it gets them right. If it isn’t obviously bogus, let me know and I’ll give it a quick once over myself.”

  Back in the lab Alice turned to Zage and said, “You want to try to track down whoever set up or is funding the Gordito website while I pick out a few sequences where we know the 3-D structure of the protein for us to send Gordito a test?”

  Zage shook his head, “I’ve already spent quite a bit of time unsuccessfully trying to figure out who Gordito is. Why don’t you give that a shot and I’ll pick out some sequences?”

  With an indifferent shrug, Alice said, “Okay,” and they split up to separate screens in the lab and started looking.

  About twenty minutes later, Alice came back over and said, “You’re right. I can’t find anything about whoever created that website. However, I did find a review of it on a site that reviews scientific web engines, you know sites that compute or find science information for you? They said it correctly worked out known antigens for three different viruses.”

  “Oh, I didn’t find that review when I did my search,” Zage said. He felt kind of good even though he now realized that at least three of the viral genomes he’d worked through so far on Gordito had just been tests.

  Alice said, “Yeah, but it made me realize an issue. What if this’s no more than a search engine for viral antigens and perhaps for protein structures? This Gordito website hasn’t accomplished anything that we haven’t also done just by searching through databases. We have no idea whether Gordito actually calculates a structure or just reads the information out of somebody’s paper.”

  Zage chewed his lip. “You’re right. The only thing I can think to do is ask Dr. Barnes if she’s got access to the three-dimensional structure of any proteins that haven’t ever been published. Or, maybe she has an in with someone here on campus who can determine the 3-D structure of a couple proteins that no one’s ever studied?”

  “That’d be a big favor to ask someone,” Alice said. “Hopefully she’s got unpublished structural data on a few proteins just laying around.” She glanced up at the time, “I know you’ve got to go, so I’ll go ask her.”

  Zage was almost home when he got a message from Alice. “Dr. Barnes did have 3-D data on some proteins that’ve never been published. I’m putting the sequences for three of them up on the Gordito site. We’ll know if the site’s any good in the next few hours.”

  Zage realized from the tone of Alice’s message that she thought the Gordito site must be running a computer program that worked out the protein folding. He wondered if he should immediately try to start working on whatever sequences she submitted in the hopes he could turn them around quickly enough that she wouldn’t be disappointed. After thinking about it for a little while, he decided he shouldn’t establish the expectation that sequences might be turned around in a matter of minutes. That certainly wouldn’t happen when he was asleep and he felt sure there’d be plenty of times when he was too busy to get to them right away.

  Nonetheless, he felt very curious about what she’d submitted and whether he and Osprey could work out protein folding on non-viral proteins. He decided he’d work on it after he’d spent some time with his dog Tanner. However, even if he got it done quickly, he’d schedule the results to be put up sometime during the middle of the day tomorrow. That’d both set expectations that this could take a while, and imply that he had nothing to do with it if they came ou
t while he was at school.

  ***

  Ell was in her waldo controller running Virgwald. At present, Virgwald was talking to Striper, the older appearing Virgie with the black stripes who seem to fill the role of respected scientific adviser for the Virgies’ leader. Her AI Allan was translating for her as she tried to get Striper to explain how the Virgies disseminated DNA to every cell in their body. It apparently wasn’t a very important problem for them, since they usually manipulated DNA in small parts of their body rather than throughout every cell.

  However, Ell wanted to know how she could insert the DNA for the Virgies’ radiation resistance mechanisms that enabled them to do well in their high radiation environment. Striper conveyed the idea that such a radiation resistance mechanism should be inserted in the first cell of an organism when it was being formed. That way, when that initial cell proliferated to form an entire organism, the mechanism would already be present in every cell in the body.

  It’d been difficult, but Ell had managed to convey the idea that she, as Virgwald, hadn’t had the radiation resistance mechanism inserted by her progenitor and would really like to have it done now.

  Striper had seemed somewhat grumpy, complaining that modifying most of the cells in a certain region of the body was much easier than trying to modify all of the cells throughout the body. Ell’d managed to obliquely refer to the diagrams of the DNA molecule Virgwald had provided and the diagrams of the compound microscope-eye that Striper was growing in herself. Although Striper’s microscope-eye was still developing, it was apparently already producing images that Striper found very exciting and several of her colleagues were starting to grow their own compound lens eyes. Ell thought one of them was trying to follow the diagram for a telescope.

  Ell’s strategy of mentioning Virgwald’s gifts had apparently succeeded in making Striper feel guilty about her refusal to help with DNA dissemination. Striper had proceeded to draw a set of diagrams that appeared to show something that Ell thought looked like a virus being inserted into a cell. Apparently that cell would make thousands of copies of the virus releasing them through the cell membrane a few at a time. Those viral particles would then go out and infect more cells in a geometric process that appeared to Ell to be pretty much the same way she understood that viral diseases worked here on earth. When she tried to ask Striper why such a virus wouldn’t kill the host, Striper looked appalled, but Ell couldn’t seem to understand Striper’s explanation of why that wouldn’t happen.