Gene Mapper (13 page)

But it wasn’t the scars that stopped me in my tracks. There were three fresh welts over the bar code itself. The raised flesh was spotted with dried blood. He must have tried to rip the bar code off yesterday, after the suit sent him into a tailspin.

The words seemed to echo in my head. Central Research Lab. Plastic surgery to make him look like his father. Biological experiments. A brain that used implants and avatars to control the body …

I replaced the blanket and tucked it around him so only his head was uncovered. His face was utterly peaceful in sleep. I brought the chocolate close to his mouth. He opened it, put out his tongue, and took the candy. The movements of his jaw and tongue were unnaturally smooth, almost mechanical. They were not the movements of a body under direct physical control of a brain.

As I watched him chewing the chocolate, his words were replaced in my mind by Enrico’s, words I had been trying to forget.

“Don’t trust him, okay? He hates genetic engineering.”

The Dong Duong Express pulled into Saigon Station at noon. The area around the taxi stand was clogged with electric bikes. There was a constant beeping of horns, like cicadas chirping. The afternoon traffic jam was in full swing, but I bundled a hesitating Kurokawa into a cab by himself.

“All right then, I’ll wait for you at Yagodo’s office,” he said.

As I watched the cab pull away, I remembered his transformation that morning. Soon after we crossed the border, he had suddenly sat up, said “Excuse me” and changed into his suit. He used gel and a comb to restore his hair to its trademark condition.

I wanted to ask why he was so anxious to beat the TerraVu satellite, but there was no time. I was glued to my workspace, reading the latest from Yagodo. Yesterday’s haul alone was six thousand-some genomes, and he was hurrying to find a match. Most of the salvaged data was for cross-bred cultivars or random mutations. It astonished me that Japan had once been home to so many different rice cultivars. It was unbelievable.

Yagodo wanted to know about the grasshopper. He wasn’t sure whether or not it had anything to do with the mutation, but he wanted to look into it anyway. I sent him footage of the insects munching on SR06 along with a shot of our sample specimen lying motionless in its jar.

I spent the three hours from the border to Ho Chi Minh reviewing Yagodo’s reports and sending him comments and visuals. By the time we reached Saigon Station, it was time for the afternoon traffic jam.

I watched Kurokawa’s taxi disappear into a sea of electric motorbikes before turning away and setting off on foot for Kim’s shop in the Old Market, which was spread out on the west side of the vast shopping area that lay south of the station.

The Old Market was hot, and it smelled. The ground around the food stalls lining the narrow lanes was littered with vegetable scraps, egg shells, and other kinds of raw garbage. The sewage system consisted of open gutters brimming with household waste. Though the area was densely inhabited, judging from the smell, foot traffic was light. As I walked deeper into the maze of streets, the constant honking from the big avenue faded.

What kind of location was this for a bio lab? Just when I was about to decide I was lost, I arrived at my destination. It was a very strange building. No way was anyone going to miss this one.

The structure itself was more or less like the souvenir shops on either side, but with rectangles of four-inch angle iron, painted orange and set in the wall where the window frames used to be. The windows were caulked all around with fresh silicon sealant. The walls and door were plastered with so many biohazard stickers it almost looked like a horror movie set. The average passerby would be certain to give it a wide berth.

Below the black-lettered
kim’s bio solution
sign was a menu of services in spidery script. He offered a full range of DNA profiling and analysis and even leased and sold lab equipment. I assumed that the name meant he was Korean. In these surroundings, which time seemed to have forgotten, his shop looked like it meant business. I pressed the intercom next to the door. A male voice answered.

“Hello? Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes, Mr. Kurokawa reserved. He told me to come here.”

The response came back in fluent Japanese. “Oh, it’s you. Let me open up.”

The rattling of heavy bolts went on for several seconds. Air seemed to be squeezing past the door frame into the interior, making a high-pitched whine. The ventilation fan on the wall started blowing outward, the cool air from inside carrying the smell of ozone. Kim was keeping the inside atmospheric pressure below ambient to keep any microorganisms he was dealing with from escaping. These sorts of arrangements were not easy to make. I decided I could trust his technical chops.

I put my hand on the knob and turned it. When the door opened inward, I was caught off guard and sucked inside so fast that I nearly stumbled.

“Whoa, watch your step!”

A huge man in a white lab coat caught me as I came stumbling into the room. His voice was gruff but cheerful. He steadied me with one hand, put the other on the heavy door, and closed it easily.

“The damn door opens the wrong way. Should’ve used a decent contractor.”

He let me go and took a step back. My eyes were at the level of his throat. His bulging chest muscles strained at the fabric of his silk shirt.

“I am Kaneda.” He extended a hand that was twice as beefy as mine. Its deeply tanned skin was crisscrossed with white scars. The ball of muscle at the base of his thumb looked like stone.

“Mamoru Hayashida.”

“Sit. Yagodo told me a little about your project.” He gestured to a white plastic table and some chairs of the same cheap material, the type the food stands used. The table was surrounded by strange equipment of all kinds and sizes, stacked nearly to the ceiling.

“Thanks. So you’re Japanese.”

“Oh? Did you think I was Korean? Good, that’s the whole point. But as you see, I’m Japanese.”

I wondered if I was supposed to laugh. He didn’t look Japanese at all. He was as tall as Barnhard and must have been twice my weight. His loose-fitting lab coat could not hide the thick musculature of his torso. His face was sunburned and deeply lined, and his white hair was cropped short. He looked more like a soldier than a biochemist.

But it was the eyes that made his ethnicity iffy. The strange color was not a trick of the light. His right eye was light brown, like Yagodo’s, but the left, the lid of which was crossed by a deep scar, was inky black.

“Yagodo told me you needed DNA profiles for two plants and one insect. Do I have that right? I’d like to do a separate contract for this, not an attachment to the one I did with Yagodo for the helicopter and the suits.”

“Sure, that’s what I was planning. L&B will be subcontracting you directly. There’ll be some confidentiality clauses.”

“In AR, right? We can do that now. Gotta warn you, my stage is pretty basic.” He put an index finger to the temple of an imaginary pair of glasses in the invitation gesture. I blinked twice to activate. He opened his left hand, put his thumb and little finger to his temples and whispered “Activate,” the same protocol as the biochem suits.

The stage was generic. Nothing was altered or enhanced. The table was the same. Kaneda had put all of his computing power into his avatar; it was only just recognizable as one.

“Well, this is fine,” I said. “I’d like to keep the whole agreement confidential, if you don’t mind.” I zipped my index finger across my lips in the NDA gesture. Kaneda nodded and I unlocked my NDA filter. Avatars are useful for transactions like this.

“The work is for one sample of SR06, one sample of an unknown rice plant, and one insect specimen, all from Mother Mekong. You will extract the genome to a gXML file.”

“The insect is from Mother Mekong?”

“Yes, a grasshopper. The site is crawling with them.”

“But SR06 is supposed to be
the
sustainable crop. No insects, no pesticides. What are grasshoppers doing out there?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we need an ID first.”

“Do you have a photo?”

I handed him an image of a grasshopper chewing on an SR06 leaf, taken with the suit camera.

Kaneda studied the photo. “This looks like a locust.” A subtitle appeared in the air in front of him.

LOCUST: SWARMING PHASE OF CERTAIN SPECIES OF SHORT-HORNED GRASSHOPPERS

“Maybe a desert locust. It’s just like something I saw in Somalia years ago. I can’t say for certain until I have the genome, but this is no Asian pest. This sick green color is the distilled plants, right? Wait a minute, this could …” He stroked his chin and raised an eyebrow. “This could be worth a fortune.”

“Say what?”

“Can I have commercial rights to my findings? L&B and other distilled engineers would love to get their hands on the genome of an insect species that actually feeds on distilled crop plants. We could split it fifty-fifty—”

“You’re not serious, are you?”

“No? Too bad. Okay, how about a thousand US to do the work and keep my mouth shut?” He held up a finger and winked. His eyes were smiling. A thousand dollars was not much at all. That stuff about selling the genome and hush money had been a joke.

“The price is right, but I need it now.” I was too anxious about getting the work done to laugh at the jest.

“I’ll be running these through the serial sequencer. I assume that’s okay. Is tonight soon enough?”

“That would be great. Let’s do that agreement—” I reached for the template.

“This is great. You’re just like your pal.”

“Who? You mean Kurokawa?”

“Yeah. Your way of doing business is the same. That’s what Yagodo told me. ‘Two good guys brought us an interesting job.’ ”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. “Well, thanks for that,” I said finally.

Kaneda guessed right. My contract template was cribbed from something I got from Kurokawa. His jobs were not always interesting, but the arrangements were always fair and speedy.

“How about a cup of tea while you get that ready? You need a break from the heat.”

I looked up from the contract and saw an artifact I’d never seen before. A clear liquid was pouring from a point in midair into a glass with ice at my elbow. At first I thought it was an AR widget, but I could feel a few drops of liquid splash onto my arm. The cup and the tea, at least, were real.

“Don’t be startled. It’s just iced tea.”

“But it was coming out of nowhere …” I pointed to a point above the glass.

“Out of this, you mean.” A bottle appeared suddenly on the table next to the glass. “Like it? This is Physical Mixed Activity. PMA. It’s a method for doing things with your avatar while you do something else with your body. With practice, you could even strangle someone in Private Mode.”

Kaneda showed me how he could sit with arms folded and move the bottle on the table. “This is the simplest kind of PMA. You fold your avatar’s arms and then slowly unfold your own arms. You have to ignore what the feedback chip is telling you. Your avatar is programmed to show natural movement only, so if you unfold your arms from a slightly unnatural angle, the chip can’t read what you’re doing.”

“I get the basic principle. But you were pouring tea into a glass. How could you see the real cup in AR?”

“Didn’t you notice my eyes? I can use augmented and nonaugmented vision simultaneously. I have one corneal implant. Simple, no? That’s all you need to do all kinds of things.” He grinned. “If you want to learn, you have a good teacher.”

“Kurokawa, you mean?”

“Yeah. He’s the only person I know who can use PMA to make himself look taller. I can only do PMA with simple movements and my dominant hand, but I bet he can use it to control his expression.”

Kaneda’s avatar sat with arms folded while the bottle levitated again and poured tea into his glass.

“Anyway, let’s do that contract. Not ready? You do it like Kurokawa, but you sure are slower. His contracts are finished as soon as he pulls them out.”

I wasn’t sure I could compete with a man who had two avatars.

After tea, I followed Kaneda into his lab. The intensity of the lighting made me blink. Every inch of the room was bathed in light. A bewildering array of cutting-edge and vintage equipment was neatly arranged. The room was small, but everything looked organized and efficient.

A cell-processing workstation with a manipulator stood in the center of the space, along with a blacklight-illuminated work table.

“Mamoru, can I ask you to put the insect in the chamber yourself?” Kaneda opened the hatch and inserted the serial DNA sequencer read head.

“Sure, but why?”

“I don’t need the headache. Sometimes I get idiots in here with containers that aren’t properly sealed.”

“All right, no problem.” I pulled the sample jar with the grasshopper out of my shoulder bag.

The jar was empty.

“What the fuck?” I was so shocked, I started twisting the lid.

“What are you doing? Don’t open it!” Kaneda put a huge hand over mine.

The jar contained a small, dry clod of dirt, and that was all. I turned it upside down and peered at the inside of the lid. The dirt made a tinkling sound. The lid was empty.

I knew I had placed a grasshopper in the jar yesterday. The sensation came through the suit’s AR, but I could still feel the dry carapace of the insect with my fingertips as I interrupted its single-minded munching and plucked it off the leaf. I even felt a slight letdown when the bug made no move to escape.

The lettering on the label was my own. Kaneda took a closer look at the jar and snatched it away from me.

“Give it here. We’re in business.” He tossed the jar into the chamber.

“What are you doing?” I was dumbfounded.

“I saw some grasshopper parts in there. It looked like the dirt was eating them—they’re disappearing right now. Get back to the office. I’ve got to grab some viable cells before they disappear.”

Kaneda hunched over the manipulator and went to work.

*   *   *

I sat at the plastic table with my head in my hands. The other two sample jars were in front of me.

I had returned from Mother Mekong with three sample jars—one grasshopper, one SR06, and one intruder sample. Kaneda had the jar with the grasshopper. The problem was the two jars in front of me. Both contained the intruder. There was no mistaking that dull green hue and the red-tinged grain head. I thought I was losing my mind.

“Well, Mamoru, we lucked out.” The vinyl curtain parted and Kaneda came through. “I managed to isolate muscle and intestinal cells. The sequencer is reading the DNA. It’s working very slowly for some reason, but we’re home free. We’ll ID that bug—hey, what’s the problem?”

I handed him the sample jars and explained what had happened.

“I don’t get it. Well, we’ll read both of them. We can get to the bottom of this later. Maybe your SR06 and the intruder are the same plant.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Everything I had seen at Mother Mekong was mediated by the suit’s AR stage. How and why it presented things to me the way it did was something I wasn’t in a position to know.