David Dun - The Black Silent

"Uh-huh," she said, oblivious now to everything but what was in front of her. The intense look of concentration heightened his curiosity.

When she was done, she put down the papers and looked up. She took a long look at his disguise-in-progress and gave him a thumbs-up. "Ready to hear about the papers?"

"You bet." Sam continued working while he listened.

"The papers from the whale are in Ben's miserable shorthand, which I can barely read. I think he's making four peptide hormones with different protein expressions, using genetically altered bacteria at least for three of them. But I can't tell more than that.

They're working notes-notes he wouldn't even type up."

After a few minutes she spoke again. "This is pretty interesting."

"What?"

"Ben started with about two hundred eighty genes of the twenty-five thousand or so found in humans and other higher mammals."

"Okay…"

"To get down to six genes or so," Haley said, "is a major step. He clearly was onto something, but I can't see what that something was. Nothing here tells me that he was on the verge of solving the problem of aging."

"Could six genes really solve a problem like aging?" Sam asked. "To get youth retention would be tough, like you said."

"Exactly. Aging is a diffuse process. It's brain, it's body… it's widespread. How are you supposed to fix that with six genes? Add to this that when your body's cells divide to replenish themselves, they have a built-in clock… Well, you read Nature, you know about telomeres. You're stuck with old cells when you get old."

"You still don't believe in this discovery, do you?" Sam asked.

"Do I really believe that Ben has something that will allow people to live decades longer or hundreds of years? I haven't changed my mind. That would be hard to swallow."

Sam had finished with the skin whitener and had gone on to the foundation. "You're a good teacher. Keep going, but hurry." He now applied the foundation makeup in layers of slightly different colors to give the mottled appearance of real skin. Because of time constraints he had opted for only a small bit of prosthetic plastic, so he had to do some contouring with nothing more than heavy makeup.

"Oh, my God," Haley said.

"What?"

"Listen to this." She read aloud:

"Microbial life in the deep seafloor is widespread, to depths of at least eight hundred meters into the bottom sediments. Samples indicate that methanogenesis occurs at the deepest sediment layers where carbon dioxide and hydrogen are converted to methane. The depth limit of anaerobic life in deep-sea sediments is not known. Most striking we have discovered that methane-producing Archaea divide every few thousand years, maybe one hundred thousand years. Their life span, if we could call it that, is unparalleled, indicating a DNA stability unknown in terrestrial life. Notably we have discovered a gene isolate in one species of methanogenic Archaea that differs by twenty-four percent from its nearest relative.

"Then he goes on," and Haley continued to read:

"Popular magazines have picked up on the longevity of Arcs and put it in much more poetic terms describing them as living in time with the slowest rhythms of the earth or as living in

'geologic time’. Interesting that the basic truth is not obscure.

"He actually mentions Discover magazine instead of a science journal. There's a little tongue in cheek there."

Sam was silent a moment. "Archaea, it says?"

"Ben wrote his own comment on the article. 'Archaea are the longest-lived life-forms on the earth. And they are closer to humans, DNA-wise, than are bacteria. The truth is under our nose in popular magazines and in numerous more serious journal articles.

'"They live in geologic time,'" she quoted again. "That would mean these microbes are thousands and thousands of years old. At least. Geologic time implies millions of years old."

Sam could see Haley's mind was spinning. She was determined not to be overly dramatic, but she knew better than anyone that Ben Anderson always chose his words carefully.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

"I think I get the concept of what Ben was doing, if not the details."

"Tell me."

"If a gene releases a protein that, say, translates to a pep-tide hormone that performs a vital function, and we can duplicate the protein or its function in medication, then maybe we affect aging. But how do you use a gene from a deep-sea microbe to help a human being?"

Sam shrugged.

"Here. We need to give you a wig, make you blonde, and put some age on you," Sam said.

Haley was still concentrating on her discovery.

"The answer is you don't use the gene. But Ben seems to be replicating gene functions with organic molecule products. In Ben's case he's allowing bacteria infused with the gene of interest to make the organic molecules that become the medicine. Yet he's still talking about a microbe and you would think its gene would not produce human-compatible proteins."

"So," Sam said, "to know what Ben's doing, we'd have to know something about how certain of the microbe's genes function?"

"To understand it, we would. I suspect what he is doing is letting genes express their products, which would be proteins and then using them as medicine with the caveat that the proteins may ultimately be broken down into pro-hormones, hormones, enzymes, or the like." She explained how that worked.

Then Haley referred back to the notes while Sam splotched her face. "He calls these microbes 'Archaea.' He does have these two hundred eighty other genes he was studying.

So maybe he found homologous genes in microbes, animals, and humans."

Sam nodded. His makeup job looked nearly completed. Hers had a ways to go. "It would be astonishing if we could use ancient microbes to lengthen our life spans." He applied a finishing touch. "People might kill for that."

"I just realized something else that makes sense," Haley said, trying to work on her makeup and talk at the same time. "Archaea microbes live in the bottom of the sea, down where the ocean cleanses itself. How about that?"

They hadn't shot him.

Ben didn't expect that they would until they got their information. They seemed unsure of themselves, which gave him the advantage, since he was completely sure of himself.

No one was going to get a whiff of ARCLES, unless and until proper safeguards for the public were in place.

They could try torture, but he had a glass capsule up beside his molars and it was filled with enough ricin to kill ten people almost instantly, and there was no known antidote.

Game, set, match-or checkmate, if one preferred chess to tennis.

Ben should have been grateful to be tied up in a chair and not tortured for what he knew. Instead, he sat there wondering why they weren't hurting him, or at least shouting questions at him.

There has to be a reason.

They already have the information? Impossible.

The drugs and torture were still to come? Most likely. And soon.

His heart beat faster and he could hear it and didn't like it. He listened for sounds but heard nothing except the faint blare of bluegrass music in the distance. It sounded obscene in the face of his impending doom.

He needed to urinate, and that bothered him as well. It had been many decades since he'd peed his britches and he was probably about due for diapers in another decade or two, but he hadn't been planning on it this weekend. Sons of bitches were being downright uncivilized.

His sole comfort was that old man Sanker would by now be hysterical with frustration.

Unless Sanker himself was behind Ben's current imprisonment. If so, it wouldn't take long to discover that Ben's secrets would not be easily won.

Despite the jocular thought of Sanker, Ben was seriously frightened. If Sanker weren't behind this abduction, then at least two well-resourced parties were after him and ARCLES. At this point he had lost control of his life except to end it, which was not the sort of choice he wanted.