Darwin's Cipher

by M. A. Rothman

  Nate studied the officer, but could detect no guile. Then again, unlike the unrealistic detectives on TV who could always sense whether a person was lying or not, Nate didn’t pretend to be a human lie detector. He was a man of facts, not “gut feel” or intuition. Facts were more reliable.

  “I was actually sent here to investigate a few incidents in the area. I suppose it’s a matter of convenience that they asked me to handle them all.” Nate pointed to a few concrete buildings in the middle of the burnt area. They stood like a gray soot-streaked island in a sea of mottled black. “What are those?”

  The officer followed Nate’s gaze. “Oh, those used to be observation cells, back when this area was used as a bombing range. I don’t think they’ve been used since the sixties, so no real harm done. In fact, they’re probably fine. They were made to keep folks safe from an off-course bomb, so a bit of a fire shouldn’t have done any meaningful damage.”

  Nate hitched his evidence bag over his shoulder and trudged through the burnt field toward the buildings, and the major, after hesitating for a moment, followed. Panning his gaze across the rectangular single-story concrete building, Nate estimated it was approximately fifty feet by twenty. His hiking boots crunched in the burnt debris as he approached.

  He knelt beside the building and detected a scent that brought him back to his days in Fallujah. He raked his fingers through the soil and sniffed his fingertips. He recognized the odor. An accelerant.

  This place was deliberately torched.

  But why?

  As he scraped soil into baggies, he spotted something metallic. Grabbing the tweezers from his kit, he picked it up. It was a glass-coated metal object about twice the size of a grain of rice. A bit of burnt, matted fur was stuck to it.

  “Find something interesting?” the officer asked.

  Nate put the items in another baggie and shook his head. “Just taking samples from different locations. Can we go inside?”

  The officer nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

  The interior of the building consisted of a single central corridor with tiny rooms, almost like jail cells, lining both sides. Scorch marks covered the walls, yet there was no burnt debris. The place had been swept clean.

  “Has anyone been in here since the fire?”

  The major shook his head. “I’m not sure. Like I said, I just got back. But I can’t imagine why anyone would have bothered. This building hasn’t been in use for ages. There wasn’t even furniture in here.”

  Nate kneeled at the entrance to one of the rooms. At the edge of the doorway, just beside the frame, was a bit of ash and dust that hadn’t been swept up. He ran his fingers along the side of the frame, and felt a rough texture where the door hinge would have been.

  Nate glanced at the officer standing near the entrance to the building. “Were there doors here before?”

  The major frowned as he stepped further into the building and scanned the nearest cell. “There sure used to be. Admittedly I’ve been offsite for the last three quarters of a year, and I haven’t so much as looked inside here for a couple years before that, but back then, yeah, these rooms had doors.” He shrugged. “I can check and see if maybe something happened that caused them to be taken off. Is it important?”

  Nate ignored the question. As he ran his fingers along the door frame again, some of what he had taken as a scorch mark fell to the floor. Grabbing his tweezers, he picked up the shriveled remnants of… burnt hair? He dropped it into another evidence baggie.

  He proceeded through the remaining rooms. In some, he found more bits of hair. Mostly dark brown, always short, and all found only on the edge of the doorway. Almost as if wild animals had scraped themselves against the door frames.

  The medical examiner had said the dead Marine had been bitten by a wild animal. Was there any connection?

  Nate turned to the major, who was watching with curiosity but was showing great restraint by not asking questions. “Can I talk to some of the contractors that were here during the fire?”

  The officer shifted uncomfortably. “I’m afraid not. When I heard you were coming and why, I went to talk to them myself. It seems that shortly after the fire, before I arrived, all the contractors assigned here were replaced by the contracting service. I was not given a reason why.”

  Nate stared at the man, not believing his ears. Something was definitely going on here, and by the look on the major’s face, he’d figured that out as well. Or already knew. Was this whole thing some black op that nobody was supposed to know about? Had the Marine stumbled into the middle of it—and perhaps learned too much?

  Nate had the feeling he’d only begun to scratch the surface of the Marine’s death. There was something going on here, and it was way bigger than it first appeared.

  Chapter Four

  Juan’s frustration grew as Steve inched the car along through the pouring rain. They were almost to the airport, but only after being stuck in traffic for nearly an hour.

  Steve tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel as he stared at the traffic ahead of him. “I honestly don’t think they could have picked a more heinous time to have you go to the airport.”

  Juan glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry this took so long. I should have just called a taxi.”

  “Don’t worry about it. At least this time I’ll have a legitimate excuse for being late for dinner. Besides, what else are friends for?” Steve chuckled. “I just can’t figure out why all of a sudden they’re calling you into headquarters. A one-on-one meeting with Winslow either means you’ve done something really bad—in which case I probably don’t want to know who you are anymore—or you’re getting a promotion and we might have to party like back in the old days.”

  Juan snorted. “Don’t plan a party just yet. I think it’s more likely they’re kicking my ass to the curb.”

  Steve shook his head. “Nah, Winslow wouldn’t have his admin book you a flight just so they can fire you. They could do that over the phone. I’ve heard more layoffs are on the way, though. Rumor mill, of course, so take that with a grain of salt. Though they did cancel my open position, so I know they’re still pinching pennies.”

  Juan said nothing. Despite his friend’s assurances, he couldn’t stop the nagging worry that he was about to lose his job.

  Steve pulled the car into the American Airlines check-in area. “Well, we made it.”

  “Thanks, Steve. And don’t worry, if I get a promotion I’ll try not to let it get to my head.” Juan reached into the backseat and grabbed his duffel bag. “Just save your guest room for me. I might need a place to bunk if they toss me out on my ass and I can’t afford my apartment.”

  Steve laughed. “Hey man, keep a positive attitude, and don’t let them see you sweat!”

  ###

  Dr. Harry Winslow was the sixty-something-year-old Director of Research at AgriMed Global. As the head of the company’s R&D division, he had nearly five hundred people either directly or indirectly reporting to him across five different continents. Juan hadn’t seen him more than once or twice since the day the director had welcomed him to the company on his first day at work. That had been three years ago.

  Now Winslow tossed Juan a smile and motioned to a pair of brown straight-backed chairs in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Juan. Make yourself comfortable.”

  His tone was friendly, but Juan couldn’t help but notice that the director’s dark-brown eyes stared shrewdly at him and his jaw muscles bulged slightly, as though he were gritting his teeth.

  He also looked not at all like the lab-coat-wearing genetic researcher Juan had met on his first day. He had become very much the corporate executive, complete with black pinstriped suit, not a strand of his salt-and-pepper hair out of place.

  With Juan’s thoughts focused on the uncertainties of his research and the rumors of more layoffs at the company, he’d barely gotten any sleep. Over the years, he’d shared his progress with his manager, b
ut he had no idea if any of that had filtered up to Winslow.

  Juan sat down, took a deep breath, and returned the director’s smile. “Thank you, sir. I’m glad that I’m getting a chance to talk with you. I’ve made some headway on my research that I think you might be interested in.”

  Winslow leaned forward, elbows on desk, and steepled his fingers. “Juan, soon after I approved your being hired, I accompanied you on that trip to the Siberian dig site. The one with the preserved mammoth. You remember that?”

  Blinking with surprise at the unexpected question, Juan said, “Yes, of course.”

  “You’d also just written a paper. What was its title again?”

  “I think it was something along the order of ‘Natural selection as a guide to directed evolution.’ It was a study of Darwinian principles for moving research beyond the twenty-first century.”

  He remembered the trip, and the paper. What Juan couldn’t figure out was why Winslow was bringing this up now. Or was this just small talk before he got canned?

  Winslow’s face took on a somber expression. “You don’t know this, but I had a lot of hope about the direction of your thesis—and in fact, I’ve been watching your work for quite a while. That’s why I’ve personally greenlighted your research over the years.”

  Juan sensed a “but” coming, and his anxiety intensified. He’d spent three years of his life searching for something nobody thought he’d find. He’d traveled the world collecting DNA samples from extinct species to further his research. And he knew he was on the precipice of something great. Yet it all could crumble into nothing, right here, right now. All those thousands of hours spent refining his mutation algorithm…

  “Juan, we both knew it was a long shot. You’ve put over three years of work into this, and it was a worthwhile effort. I’m glad you pursued it. But three years, and you have nothing to show for it—”

  “No! I’ve got results.” Juan leapt from his chair, his heart threatening to pound out of his chest. If he was going to get laid off, it wouldn’t be because Winslow didn’t understand the significance of what he’d uncovered.

  With Winslow staring wide-eyed at him, Juan pulled a three-ring binder from his bag, set it on the man’s desk, and flipped through his research. When he found the DNA sequencing graphs, he turned them for the director to see.

  “I found a pattern! And it’s not just a fluke. I’ve confirmed it’s not a statistical anomaly.”

  Winslow looked at Juan and frowned. Only after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence did he look down at the binder and pull it closer to him. “A pattern, you say?”

  Juan’s body was tingling with nervous energy. He focused on slowing his breathing. He had to make his case. It was now or never.

  “Sir, as you know, I’ve been sequencing and analyzing the DNA from extinct species for years. These graphs show the results of my comparative analysis between the samples of intact DNA I extracted from the various extinct specimens. It took two full years for the computers and I to analyze the sequencing data and I’ve spent the last six months—”

  “How much data are we talking about?” Winslow glanced up as Juan flipped to another graph.

  “Well, for example, the woolly mammoth.” Juan flipped a page and tapped his finger on a graph. “Its diploid genome has approximately 9.4 billion base pairs—that’s almost fifty percent more genetic material than humans, which the computer encoded into the equivalent of about 2.3 gigabytes of data. I did comparative analyses, normalizing the source to the same general vicinity in Siberia, and using various samples from different points in time along their evolutionary history. My oldest sample is nearly one hundred thousand years old, and I also have samples from seventy-five thousand years ago, forty thousand years, and fourteen thousand years. I mapped those changes against the local environmental conditions from where the samples were found.”

  Juan took a deep breath. “I didn’t catch the significance of the changes until I saw the genetic evolution across the entire group. I ran all of the data through the computers—it took months given the volume of data—but eventually, a pattern emerged. And what I’ve found is… the mutations were not random.”

  The room suddenly seemed warmer. The aroma of the lemon-scented wood polish coming off of Winslow’s desk left Juan feeling nauseated. Despite the trickle of the cool breeze coming from one of the air conditioning vents in the ceiling, he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead before continuing.

  “I derived an algorithm to replay the mutation patterns, and then applied it to other species I hadn’t yet finished sequencing. I found the same pattern of changes when I finally began decoding the DNA samples from a cave lion, and then again in the Eurasian auroch. Once I made a few adjustments for the estimated length of each of the species’ generations, I managed to get a nearly perfect match between what I was decoding and what my predictive mutation algorithm said I should find. With what I have now, I’m able to predict within .001% the evolutionary patterns across thousands of generations.”

  Winslow leaned back and drummed the fingers of his right hand on the desk. “I don’t understand. So you sequenced some DNA and retroactively predicted evolutionary patterns that we can already measure anyway. Why should we care? Where are you going with this? And more to the point: How can AgriMed use this to further our drug research? How can this be monetized? I supported this research in the hope that you would find a genetic root for cancer. Or better yet, a genetic root for fighting cancer.”

  A tingle raced up Juan’s spine as he nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Exactly. I did. That’s why I started with the mammoth. As you probably know, modern elephants are highly resistant to tumors. They have many extra copies of TP53, a known tumor-suppressor gene. So I wanted to see how that evolved. Then I stumbled onto the pattern I told you about, and it suddenly dawned on me that if I could predictably follow the pattern of all of these different extinct animals and study how various parts of their genetic code evolved, couldn’t I, using the same algorithm, simulate how our genes will evolve in the future?

  “Imagine it. What will our genetics look like in a thousand generations? Ten thousand generations? What will we be able to discover? We’ve mapped our genes, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of truly understanding them. We hunt and peck like blind chickens searching for a kernel of corn, just hoping that the genetic modifications we experiment with do something useful. But with this predictive algorithm, we could model in months what nature would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to do.”

  Juan leaned over and flipped to the summary page of his most recent simulation. “In that simulation run, I applied my algorithm against the genome for the common laboratory rat. I simulated the evolution of the rat’s DNA across the next two hundred thousand generations. That’s about four to five thousand years of future evolution.”

  Winslow leaned closer to the printout on his desk, his finger tracing across the page. Was that a flicker of interest? Juan waited uneasily, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  Suddenly, Winslow looked up. “If I’m reading this right, you believe that, given a few thousand years of evolution, the common rat will begin to show multiple copies of the TP53 tumor-suppressing gene.”

  Juan nodded. “That’s what the simulations are showing. It’s much more complicated than that—the entire genome has all sorts of changes that need to be studied—but it was easy for me to pick up that anomaly since it was something the computers were already flagging. And if I can continue my work, see what triggered that change, and better yet, actually see this in a live specimen…”

  Dr. Winslow leaned back in his chair, nodding thoughtfully. “You’re suggesting that if we understand the triggering mechanism… perhaps the same trick could be pulled with our own genome.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Juan said. “But we won’t know unless we continue my research. Ideally, I’d like to move on to some laboratory trials. I need to test som
e of these sequences to understand what they do.”

  The director chuckled. “Well, this… this changes things. Juan, I like the direction you’re going with this. We’ll arrange for those trials. Make sure you document on the server all that you’ve done, especially that algorithm you talked about, and I’ll talk to the other research leads and see if we can get you some more help on this.”

  Juan felt as if a load had been taken off his shoulders. “Sir, I’ll get right on it. I’ll submit my plans to the Ethics Compliance Review Board—”

  Winslow help up a hand and smiled warmly. “No need for the ECRB. Send your plan directly to me. I’ll look it over and fast-track it through the hoops for you. I have a good feeling about this, Juan. A very good feeling.”

  He stood, walked to the door, and opened it. Then in a lowered voice he said, “But Juan—please keep everything to yourself for now. Don’t share the details of any of your work with anyone. You have a real opportunity for advancement here at AgriMed. More than that, you have an opportunity for true greatness in our field. We can’t let talk of this type of thing leak out before we’re ready, you understand?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  They stepped out of the office, and Winslow addressed his admin. “Sheila, can you call Jenkins, Ratheblume, and Marty Cohen and get them over here? I need a face-to-face with all three, ASAP.” Turning to Juan, Winslow shook his hand and asked, “You’re all set with transportation to the airport and such?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s all taken care of. Regarding the genetic—”

  “Uh, uh, uh.” Winslow tutted at Juan and shook his head. “Let’s not talk about that anymore for now. You get me the details we talked about, especially your algorithm and any other related research notes on what you’ve learned, and I’ll take care of the rest. You’ll hear from me tomorrow.”