by Neil Clarke
“I had First Officer Qin Wei examine the cultivation cabin monitoring system,” the captain said, her gaze growing more intent. “It appears to have been modified with a ‘green screen’-like technology. Police droids entering and leaving the cultivation cabins would show up on the monitors as normal, but they’d always appear against a background showing the interior of the Adam chambers functioning normally.”
“You’re saying that the recording was selectively tampered with? The images of the Adam cabins on the monitors never changed?”
“No, not ‘never changed;’ they showed as ‘functioning normally.’ On the monitors, you could see the organs growing as expected, and when orders were supposed to be fulfilled, they were ‘harvested normally.’” The captain shook her head. “This method of tampering with the system is highly sophisticated.”
The captain’s news deepened Luo Ming’s puzzlement. “But this is what I can’t figure out. If the entire incident was a premeditated crime, then the criminal already accomplished the most difficult step—taking over Adam’s high-security monitoring system. Yet they forgot to cover their tracks in the far more basic hospital systems.”
“There’s a simple explanation for that: the criminal couldn’t conjure the patients’ requested organs out of thin air. They had no choice but to leave the orders alone and hope that patients would not exercise their right to examine the cultivation cabins.”
Luo Ming shook his head. “But they could have played any number of other tricks that would have worked better. For instance, they could have systematically delayed the order fulfillment dates for all the affected organs to prevent anyone from knowing what had happened. However, based on my review of the hospital’s records, the doctors and patients only found out at the last minute that their orders had been delayed or canceled. The notices came through the hospital’s regular organ reception channels, not Adam.”
“I’m now thoroughly confused.” The captain furrowed her brow. “What are you trying to say?”
“For someone who came up with such a complicated scheme—going so far as to use a green screen to tamper with the monitoring records—forgetting about the hospital’s basic database is a very strange oversight. They clearly have the capability to break into the hospital’s systems, but they didn’t—why not? One possibility is that they actually wanted to draw attention to what they did, but another possibility is that they didn’t even know that the hospital’s information platform existed.”
“That’s impossible,” the captain said. “Every person aboard Eden knows about the hospital’s organ replacement database.”
“Of course, that’s how it should be,” Luo Ming said. “But there are always bound to be some people who don’t know.”
“I’m not interested in a vague hunch. If you have a definite suspicion, say so.”
“On this ship, who wouldn’t know about the existence of the hospital’s organ replacement database? Or rather, who’s never ordered an organ?” Luo Ming looked at the captain. “I hope you can help me gather a list of names. They’re the primary suspects.”
The captain tapped the armrest with a wrinkled finger and chuckled coldly. “That’s quite an accusation.” She met Luo Ming’s gaze. “I’ve never replaced an organ.”
4. Orthrus
Men say that Typhaon (Typhon) the terrible, outrageous and lawless, was joined in love to her, the maid with glancing eyes. So she conceived and brought forth fierce offspring; first she bore Orthus the hound of Geryones . . . but Echidna was subject in love to Orthus and brought forth the deadly Sphinx which destroyed the Cadmeans.
—Hesiod, Theogony, 304-335 (as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)
Some legends say that it was actually Orthrus, and not Typhon, with whom Echidna conceived of those other monstrosities: Chimera and Sphinx.
—Anonymous
The first time I see her is at my father’s funeral.
Although at least half of that crowd of tens of thousands have come to see her, I’m the only one who picks her out. She’s wearing a black silk dress, a diamond ring dangling from a string around her neck. Her face looks even younger than mine. I don’t know if it’s my practice at identifying faces or a natural instinct that makes me recognize her as my mother. Then, she sees me too.
Five seconds later, I receive a direct message: “I’d like to chat after the funeral.”
I remember my father’s last words to me as he lay dying: “She’s your mother, and she gave you the gift of life twice—be grateful.”
Once the crowd dissipates, I duck into her car. She enters Oslo Airport, Gardermoen as the destination and turns her seat around to face me.
“Hello, Tony.”
I haven’t been called that in years. After my parents created the Tony Lee Charitable Foundation, I had to change my name to protect my privacy and live a normal life.
“Mom?” It turns out to be easier to say than I thought. “You look so young.”
“Yes, it’s me.” She laughs, then winks, as though we share a secret. “I’m conducting a new experiment to restore my cells to a more youthful state. It’s a dangerous experiment, and we don’t know all the side effects—it’s such a shame that I don’t have another son to be the guinea pig this time.”
“Um—” I have no idea what to say in response.
“Oh, darling, I’m just joking!” She spreads her hands disarmingly. “Now, tell me about your life. I hear that you’re a police officer?”
“It’s just a job.”
Her grin widens. “You’ve done well. I noticed that you’re dealing with AI crimes. Amazing.”
“The world changes so quickly. Scientists can’t control everything they invent.” I resent her tone: she’s speaking as though she’s always been a part of my life, exercising a mother’s care.
“That’s true.” She nods vigorously. “Sometimes we don’t understand our creations as much as we’d like people to think.”
That’s unexpected. “Really?”
She doesn’t answer, asking a question instead. “Will you come to our press event? We’re going to announce some important news.”
I’ve heard about her research group’s press event, scheduled for next month. After seven years of silence, everyone’s dying to find out what she’s going to say.
“This could change the course of humanity.” The car slows down. She glances out the window, then looks back at me. “You’ll be there, of course.”
Her confidence irritates me. I am not my father, who was always so entranced by her. “Sorry, I’m not interested in it.”
“Believe me, darling, you will be interested.” The car stops. She taps twice on her watch, and I receive an invitation as well as a packet of documents. “The thirteenth of next month. Be there.”
She holds my hand for a moment, then leaves for the airport. The midnight sun throws her black dress into sharp relief.
Three hours and forty minutes later, the Airbus A400 she’s on plunges into the sea.
I end my vacation early to join the search and rescue effort, but the Baltic Sea has swallowed any trace of her. In the depths of the turbid waves, I see the wreckage of the plane.
They say that there lies entombed humanity’s wildest dream.
The day the rescue efforts end, I receive another invitation to the press event.
I’ve run out of excuses. Heeding the call of fate, I set forth on a journey of more than ten thousand kilometers. On the plane, I look through the documents she gave me.
There are pictures of a pig from when it was a piglet to when it was fully grown—undoubtedly my savior. I transfer planes at Amsterdam and New York before arriving at a small town in the middle of the desert. My father once told me about this town: it’s the birthplace of my kidneys.
“Tony Lee,” I say to the person who’s here to meet me. The name is written on my invitation.
Her mouth hangs open with exaggerated surprise. She lowers her gaze. “I’m Chen Ying. My condolences.”
“Thank you.”
I enter the auditorium to a hero’s welcome. Everyone seems to recognize me: they surround me, chattering about my mother and my kidneys, but neither of these two topics feel real to me. Thankfully, the press event starts up soon after. The chattering ends as the lights dim, and everyone turns to look at the illuminated stage.
“We will change the world once again.” The middle-aged man on stage opens the ceremony with these words.
The applause is enthusiastic. “Alright, Edmund!”
Edmund is the chief scientist of my mother’s medical research group—he and my mother once won a Nobel together. After the applause dies down, he speaks again.
“In the past thirty years, we’ve accomplished the unimaginable. From chimera experiments to the first successful human organ cultivation, as well as the spread of regenerative medicine thereafter, we’ve saved many people’s lives—but we’ve also faced much opposition. The main objection has been: should we use humans as research subjects?”
Edmund picks me out of the crowd. “We’re honored to have Mr. Tony Lee among us today. The fact that he’s healthy and alive is our answer.”
Thunderous applause and a blinding spotlight fall upon me together. The world goes white for a moment, and I can’t see a thing.
“Our lab has never backed off from the effort to make our case to the public, but we’ve always lacked a decisive argument for the moral rightness of allowing human experimentation.”
The spotlight eases away from me as Edmund continues, “But our latest discovery should finally settle this decades-long ethical dispute. First, let me introduce the youngest and most powerful member of our team: Mr. Sphinx, an avatar personifying our quantum computer.”
Rays of light gather at his fingertips and then scatter to form a human shape—a powerful demonstration of the latest hologram technology. But given my profession, what draws my attention is the word “avatar.” After handling hundreds of AI-related crimes, I’m leery of them, especially one taking advantage of quantum computing.
Sphinx renders as a golden-skinned teen. Once the rays of light have condensed, I almost can’t tell that he’s a hologram. A shy smile appears on his face, perfectly calibrated to give the impression of innocence.
“Good evening, everyone. I have a riddle—”
Laughing, Edmund interrupts him. “Let me guess: ‘What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?’ Sphinx, everyone knows the answer: humanity.”
“Humanity, yes. That riddle compares a lifetime to a day,” Sphinx says. “But I have a different riddle for you.”
“Go ahead. The best minds of the world are gathered here today.”
“Where did humanity come from? Before ‘morning,’ what happened in the darkness before dawn?”
“Evolution, Sphinx. I taught you this,” Edmund says, sighing.
“But you must have proof,” Sphinx says.
“We have many fossils of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.” Edmund pauses. “But—”
Sphinx takes over. “But, there is a gap in the fossil record. Until now, we have no direct evidence that modern humans, or Homo sapiens sapiens, evolved from the archaic Homo sapiens.”
“But you have no evidence to disprove that modern humans evolved from Homo sapiens, either,” Edmund counters.
“No, I do have proof. I know that humanity’s ancestor is a chimera.”
For about ten seconds, Edmund is silent. Murmurs rise in the meeting hall.
“A chimera?” Edmund says finally. “What kind of joke is this?”
“I never joke,” Sphinx says. “Before the birth of quantum computers, calculating the product of two large prime numbers was very easy for classical computers, but figuring out the prime factors of a semiprime number, a natural number which is the product of two prime numbers, was practically impossible, making them useful for cryptography. After the creation of quantum computers, these early encryption technologies are no longer of use, as we can easily decrypt those methods using quantum algorithms. After adding me to the lab’s research team, Edmund had a new idea—he wanted me to factor humanity’s DNA.”
“In other words, I wanted Sphinx to take one person’s genome and separate it into their parents’ genomes. It’s a biologist’s extension of quantum decryption.” Edmund shrugs. “What I didn’t expect was that Sphinx would actually be able to do it.”
Sphinx nods. “Yes, after continuous algorithmic improvements and experimental confirmation, I can ensure a very high degree of recoverability. That is, if I have the complete genome sequence for any one of you, I can figure out the genome sequences of all your ancestors. I can recover their skin color, blood type, hair and eye color—give me enough time, and I can even recreate an ancestral human. With the support of medical databases from around the world, I quickly created a database of the genomes of humanity’s ancestors.”
“As we factored human genomes,” Edmund added, “we also attempted to factor the genomes of as many other species as possible, including mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, mollusks, and even plants—a total of 115,000 species for which we now have an ancestral genomic database. In the end, we made an astounding discovery.”
The whole meeting hall is silent, enraptured.
“In every species other than humans, there is a similar trajectory for the number of ancestors that contributed to the species’ genome.” Rays of light once again gather in Edmund’s hand. “Observe this graph—the x-axis is the number of genetic specimens per time period, and the y-axis is time. As we go further up, we go further back in time.
“Let’s start with puffins. As we go up in the time scale, we discover that, regardless of how long the population has remained stable, there is always a period where the population rapidly declines—a ‘bottleneck zone.’”
The graph slowly rises in pace with Edmund’s gesture and stops at the midway point to show an hourglass shape. “What does this mean? At some point, for whatever reason, puffins died off in great numbers. The puffins we see now are descended from the few survivors of the bottleneck zone.
“If we continue tracing back the population count of the puffins’ ancestors, we discover a fascinating phenomenon: history repeats itself. Above the bottleneck zone is an expansion period, and above that, another bottleneck—this goes on. We’ve calculated the trajectories for 115,000 species over the past 500,000 years, and they are all the same.
“Now, let’s take a look at the human population.”
Edmund waves his hand to the side. The human population graph rises up a bit, then quickly narrows to an almost invisible dot.
“A rather terrifying bottleneck, is it not?” Edmund says. “But, when we go back from here—”
He lifts his hand, but the graph doesn’t rise with him. It stops there, towering, like the minaret of a mosque.
“What does this graph of humanity tell us? It tells us that, approximately 180,000 years ago, our common ancestor ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ gave birth to her children, and those children gave birth to more children, until human civilization dominated the globe.” Edmund slows his speech. “But please take note: this graph also tells us that humanity can trace back to only one common ancestor.”
Sphinx breaks in, “Let me remind you, one individual cannot proliferate the species.”
“Of course, ‘one’ is neither accurate nor possible. We know now that, other than this woman, our common ancestors include four men as well. But regardless of how many people survived that bottleneck, how could something like this have happened? Sphinx’s genome factoring analysis tells me that, before these ancestors, there were no ancestors.”
“It’s true,” Sphinx says.
“Was there a mistake in our calculations?” Edmund says, “But we tested our calculations on fast-reproducing bacteria and generations of laboratory mice with detailed genetic records, and our algorithms were confirmed to be correct! Sphinx did not make any errors. Why, esteemed guests,
why is it that we can trace the unbroken trajectories of 115,000 other species, but we can’t do the same for humans? Before humanity’s morning, what happened during the predawn darkness?”
Dead silence.
Everyone looks up at the inconceivable graph. Judging by the introductions given to me earlier, this room is filled with the world’s top scientists and doctors, a few politicians and business tycoons, as well as representatives from a number of influential media outlets. Everyone is trying to find a flaw in the graph, but no one speaks. “Chimera,” the word that Sphinx said at the beginning of the presentation, floats like a ghost over our heads.
“When I, too, was at a loss like everyone here today, I called my mentor. After she listened to my description, she asked me only one question: ‘Edmund, do you still remember that pig?’”
Edmund looks at me. “Tony, do you still remember the pig that saved your life?”
Faint murmurs fill the hall.
Edmund shakes his head. “Maybe you don’t; but I do. I always thought that that pig was the first chimera with human cells. But I was wrong.
“I had Sphinx trace back a few other populations, those of the chimeras we’ve been cultivating these past few decades. Although there aren’t many chimera species, some rat-mouse chimeras have already reproduced over a hundred generations. What happens when we calculate the genomes of their ancestors?”
All of the graphs except for the human population graph disappear, replaced by the graphs of a few dozen chimera species. Like demons, the graphs climb upward, all terminating in a single point, some higher, some lower.
“They are the same as humans—these chimeras are the same as humans.” Edmund pauses, then raises his voice. “But can we conclude from this that humans descended from a chimera? Of course not!
