Tom Hyman (41 page)

Jupiter had a main menu, but all it did was list, in the vaguest language, the program’s primary functions. Within each of these functions there were no help menus at all. Goth—and Guttmann—had designed the program for Goth’s use; so explanations were apparently not considered necessary.

So she just typed “HELP” and punched the Enter key.

The screen abruptly changed. The rows of data were swept away and replaced by a single query:

AREA ?

Anne stared dumbly at the word, not sure what to do next. It had taken her request for help seriously. Why? What had she been doing before she had typed “HELP”?

She remembered that she had been copying data from a genome reference book that listed all the known genes, their functions, and their locations on the chromosomes.

She had decided that instead of plowing through the entire genome, she would concentrate on the genes related to the senses.

This was the area in which Genny was most obviously different.

Anne had started with eyesight. Using the reference book, she had painstakingly typed into Jupiter’s database the tags and locations of all genes known to be associated with eyesight, so that Jupiter could locate them in Genny’s genome and call them up on the screen for her.

She had entered them all, but now she couldn’t remember how many there were supposed to be. The reference book would tell her as soon as she located the right page, but instead she decided to ask Jupiter. She typed out “How many genes?” and hit the Enter key.

Jupiter responded immediately: FOR WHAT FUNCTION?

My God, she thought. She had stumbled upon a whole new interface.

Jupiter was now really talking to her.

“Eyesight,” she typed.

THERE ARE 4 GENES IN THE ALI SIGHT CLUSTER.

ENUMERATE ?

Anne shook her head. That was clearly wrong. She repeated the question and got the same reply. She picked up her reference manual again and found in a glossary that the actual number of genes involved with human eyesight was thirty-six. A difference of six—not very close at all.

She put down the book and stared for a long time at the message on the screen: THERE ARE 4 GENES IN THE ALI SIGHT CLUSTER. ENUMERATE?

Then it occurred to her. She felt that same electric tingling sensation she had felt the day she stumbled onto the code word

“Watson.”

She typed “YES.”

Jupiter immediately threw up on the screen specific chromosome locations for forty-two genes: 13q46, 13q49, 13q56, 13q57, 13q58, 20q34, 20q37, and so on. Anne printed them out and then checked their locations off against the list in the reference manual. When she was finished she was left with the six genes unaccounted for in the reference. They were located at Xql2, Xql4, Xq24, 4q350, 4q370, and 4q371.

Anne tried the same exercise with hearing, taste, touch, and smell. In each area Jupiter offered up a list that exceeded the reference guide’s list by anywhere from six to ten genes.

When she had identified all the sensory genes not accounted for in the reference book, she took a closer look at one of them. She asked Jupiter for a display of Xql2—one of the six unlisted sight genes—located on quadrant 46 of chromosome 13.

Jupiter promptly displayed Xql2. It was twelve kilobases long—a medium-size gene. Its function, according to Jupiter, was to code for the production of a protein that would enhance the light-gathering abilities of the cones of the eyes. Anne printed out the entire sequence of Xql2 and compared it with other genome printouts. What was immediately apparent was that the gene was located in an area where no genes were known to exist. The same was true of the five other extra sight genes. They were all to be found in sections of filler, or

“junk,” DNA—long stretches of nucleotide sequences of unknown purpose.

Goth seemingly had achieved his results not by altering existing genes but by creating new ones.

But how could he have created them? No one, not even a genetics genius like Goth, could have possessed the knowledge required to fashion an entirely new gene, let alone several whole new sets of them. The state of genetic engineering fell far short of such a capability. Only God, or the processes of natural selection, acting over millennia, could accomplish such miracles—and then only by a prolonged process of trial and error involving vast numbers of a species.

But the genes were obviously there.

Anne glanced over at her desk clock. Did it really say two A.M.?

It seemed that she had just seen Genny to bed a few minutes ago.

She had been parked in front of the computer the entire day. Her back ached. Her head was spinning and her eyes burned. And she was famished.

She turned off the computer, got up, stretched, and went into the kitchen. The insides of the refrigerator looked like an alien landscape. Almost everything in it had been put there by either Mrs.

Callahan or Lexy.

She found a slice of quiche and a nearly empty bottle of seltzer water near the back of the top shelf. She heated the quiche in the microwave and ate it while standing over the sink. The seltzer was completely flat, but she gulped it down.

In bed, she couldn’t sleep. She dozed off briefly at around threethirty and had a dream in which she met Dr. Goth in a laboratory somewhere. He appeared as a well-decayed corpse, able to move and talk. She wanted to ask him questions about the Jupiter program, but he just grinned at her. His bare skull was visible through the rotting flesh of his face. His eyes seemed to float in sockets of bone, and there were no lips or gums around his teeth.

He was wearing what looked like an animal skin around his bony frame.

In one hand he brandished a large bone. He looked like a relic from the Stone Age. He lunged at her suddenly, swinging the bone at her head.

Anne sat up, trembling. She pressed her face into her hands and rocked gently back and forth, waiting for the remnants of the nightmare to evaporate. After a few minutes she slipped out from under the covers and went over to check on Genny. The child had kicked her blanket off and was lying sideways across her bed. Anne straightened her out and covered her again.

She sat on her bed, fully awake now.

Jupiter would give her no peace. She went back to the study and turned the computer back on.

As soon as the program booted up, Anne asked it to call up one of those extra sight genes—the one located at Xql2. Next she directed Jupiter to highlight the sequences that began and ended the gene. Jupiter obliged. Anne studied the sequences, then checked them against several reference sources. They were precisely what they should be—promoter sequences that carried the coded instructions necessary to turn a gene on and off.

Anne printed out the entire sequence of the gene and then asked Jupiter to call up her own genome and tell her how many sight genes it contained. Jupiter answered thirty-six. She repeated the process with Dalton’s genome and several others she had at hand.

In all of them Jupiter found only thirty-six sight genes.

Anne then printed out the area of her own chromosome 13 that corresponded to the location of the sight gene at Xql2 on Genny’s genome. She did the same with Dalton’s chromosome 13. She aligned the three printouts on her desk and studied them. She expected to find the whole twelve-kilobase-long sequence that formed Genny’s extra gene entirely missing from the other two printouts. But that’s not what she discovered at all. To her astonishment, all three of the printouts showed identical sequencing, with one small but crucial difference: the stretches of twelve kilobases on her genome and Dalton’s genome were not bracketed by promoter sequences. Their genomes contained the same gene as Genny’s, but theirs were inactive. Turned off. Shut down, like engines whose ignition systems had been removed.

The gene at Xql2 in Genny’s genome was therefore not a new gene at all.

It was an old gene—one that had been abandoned, probably tens of thousand of years ago. It was a vestige from mankind’s prehistoric past. The human genome had long been assumed to carry chunks of its heredity in the long stretches of inactive DNA, but no one had yet made a thorough study of it.

Science had had its hands full the last two decades just trying to determine the functions of the genome’s active genes.

Anne repeated the same exercise with the other five extra sight genes in Genny’s genome and got the same results.

So Goth’s great secret was not that he had invented anything new but that he had discovered something lost. He had salvaged old genes from mankind’s past—genes that evolution, for one reason or another, had seen fit to abandon—and switched them back on again, using standard, well-understood DNA control sequences. And by so doing, he had created Genevieve Stewart, a new human with extraordinary capabilities.

Anne recalled the bone Goth had wielded in her dream. He had collected prehistoric fossil remains—had left boxes of them behind at his old laboratory in Coronado. He must have extracted DNA fragments from them. That was probably where he had discovered these genes.

So Genny was not a new kind of human so much as she was a return to a kind of human who must have existed a long time ago. She was a kind of throwback—yet a throwback markedly superior to the present model.

During mankind’s evolution the genes responsible for these superior abilities had been shut down. Why? Had their survival value been lost?

It was no doubt true that senses as keen as Genny’s were hardly necessary in today’s world. They were perhaps even a handicap, overloading the mind with more information than it could usefully process. But superior strength? Health? Intelligence? They had enormous survival value. Why had they declined? Was mankind somehow gradually weakening its own gene pool?

And what other vestigial genes might Goth have reactivated?

Anne asked Jupiter for a total gene count of Genny’s genome.

Jupiter gave the number as 150,826. She called for the totals in her genome and Dalton’s. The numbers came back the same for both: 150,022.

That meant Genny was carrying 804 extra active genes. Her additional sensory genes totaled only 54. That left 750 unaccounted for. How many of those could be devoted to enhancing intelligence, health, and strength? Certainly not all.

Anne thought about Genny’s remarkable healing ability. And her seeing auras. They no doubt accounted for some of the extra genes as well.

But could they account for so many?

What else was there hidden in Genny that hadn’t yet surfaced?

It frightened her to contemplate the possibilities.

Anne yawned so hard her jawbone cracked. She felt a profound fatigue.

The implications of her discovery would take months to sort out and digest. Meanwhile, she wanted to sleep for a week.

The telephone rang. She looked at the little clock by the computer.

Just six A-M- She fumbled for the receiver. She felt so weak, so crushed by the weight of her fatigue, it was all she could do to bring the receiver to her ear.

“H’lo.”

“It’s Hank Ajemian, Anne. Sorry to call so early.”

“S’okay.” No point in telling him she hadn’t really been to bed yet.

“How are you?”

“I thought I’d better call you.”

“Something wrong?”

“Everything’s wrong. The baroness is taking over. She’s got control of Jupiter. In another month or so she’ll probably have control of Biotech as well.”

“It doesn’t really upset me very much, Hank.”

Anne could hear a snuffle at the other end of the phone.

“They’re accusing me of stealing a copy of Jupiter.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Remember I told you we keep a copy of Goth’s program in Dalton’s office safe? The baroness demanded it be sent to Munich ; to be copy-protected. She was just angling to get control of all the copies.

I sent it, but before I let it go, I made another copy, just to protect Dalton.”

Anne felt suddenly short of breath.

“When they got their copy, they found it was blank. Empty.

Nothing on it. I couldn’t believe it. I thought they were lying.

Then I got out the copy I had made from it and put it in the computer.

It was blank too. The only possible explanation was that someone had stolen the real copy from the safe and substituted a blank. But Dalton and I are the only ones with access to the safe. Dalton had no reason to take it, so naturally the baroness is convinced it was me. But it wasn’t. I don’t know what the hell to do. I think somehow she’s framed me, but I can’t figure out how. Nobody could get into that safe. Even if they knew its location and the right combination, they’d still trip a burglar alarm.

Nothing had been touched. I think that somehow the blank must have been switched for the real one before we even put it in the safe the first time. But how the hell can I prove it?”

Anne struggled with her conscience. She was too sleepy to think straight. But she knew she couldn’t let him take the blame for something she had done. “I took the copy, Hank.”

There was a prolonged silence at the other end of the line.

When Ajemian finally answered, he sounded more hurt than alarmed.

“Christ, Anne. I wish you’d’ve told me. How did it happen?”

Anne sighed. Poor Ajemian. Caught in the middle. She had great affection for him, but he still worked for Dalton, still looked out for Dalton’s interests. She couldn’t be completely open with him.

Reluctantly, she described how she and Lexy had broken into Dalton’s office and replaced the Jupiter RCD with a blank one.

Hank’s gravelly voice became louder, sharper. “Anne. Listen.

Just let me come over and make a copy. You can keep the one you have.

I won’t tell him you took it. Just let me copy it. I’ll make two copies—send one to Munich, put the other away for Dalton. I’ll tell him there was a mixup. It’ll get me off the hook.”

Anne smiled. “Okay, Hank.”

“Thank God…. Anne, you’re an angel. I’m so sorry you got mixed up in this.”