Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Would that be good?”

“More water? Probably good for people, right? It wouldn’t be good for arid desert biomes. But maybe people figure we have enough of those already. I mean, desertification is a big problem in some regions. If you were to create some major lakes in the western Sahara, it might slow down the desertification of the Sahel. I think that’s what the ecologists are talking about now anyway. It’s a big topic of conversation among the beakers down here. They’re loving all this stuff. I sometimes think they love it that the world is falling apart. It makes the earth sciences all the rage now. They’re like the atomic physicists were in World War Two.”

“I suppose they are. But on the other hand…”

“Yeah, I know. Better if we didn’t have to do all this stuff. Since we do, though, it’s good we’ve got some options.”

“I hope this doesn’t give people the feeling that we can just silver-bullet all the problems and go on like we were before.”

“No. Well, we can think about crossing that bridge if we get to it in the first place.”

“True.”

“Have to hope the bridge is still there at that point.”

“True.”

“So you’re flying where?”

“I’m on my way around the world.”

“Oh cool. When are you going to meet with Phil about these pumps?”

“Diane will do it.”

“Okay good. Say hi to him, or have her say hi to him. It’s been a lot harder to get him on the phone since he got elected.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I keep telling him to come down here and see for himself, and he always says he will.”

“I’m sure he wants to.”

“Yeah he would love it.”

“So Wade, are you still seeing that woman down there?”

“It’s complicated. Are you still seeing that woman in D.C.?”

“It’s complicated.”

Satellite hiss, as they both were cast into thoughts of their own—then short and unhumorous laughs from both of them, and they signed off.

In San Diego, Frank rented a van and drove up to UCSD, checking in at the department to collect mail and meet with his remaining grad students. From there he walked up North Torrey Pines Road to RRCCES.

The labs were back, fully up and running, crowded, not messy but busy. A functioning lab was a beautiful thing to behold. A bit of a Fabergé egg; fragile, rococo, needing nurturance and protection. A bubble in a waterfall. Science in action. In these, they changed the world.

And now—

Yann came in and they got down to the latest. “You have to go to Russia,” Yann said.

“I am.”

“Oh! Well good. The Siberian forest is amazing. It’s so big that even the Soviets couldn’t cut it all down. We flew from Cheylabinsk to Omsh and it just went on and on and on.”

“And your lichen?”

“It’s way east of where we spread it. The uptake has been just amazing. It’s almost even scary.”

“Almost?”

Yann laughed defensively. “Yeah, well, given the problems I see you guys are having shifting away from carbon, a little carbon drawdown overshoot might not be such a bad thing, right?”

Frank shook his head. “Who knows? It’s a pretty big experiment.”

“Yeah it is. Well, you know, it’ll be like any other experimental series, in that sense. We’ll see what we get from this one and then try another one.”

“The stakes are awfully high.”

“Yeah true. Good planets are hard to find.” Yann shrugged. “But maybe the stakes have always been high, you know? Maybe we just didn’t know it before. Now we know it, and so maybe we’ll, I don’t know. Do them a little more…”

“Carefully? Like by putting in suicide genes or other negative feedback constraints? Or environmental safeguards?”

Yann shrugged, embarrassed. “Yeah sure.”

He changed the subject, with a look heavenward as if to indicate that what the Russians had done was beyond his control. “But look here, I’ve been working on those gene-expression algorithms some more, and I’ve seen a wrinkle in the palindrome calculation. I want you to take a look at it see what you think.”

“Sure,” Frank said.

They went into Yann’s office, a cubicle just like any other office cubicle, except that the window’s view was of the Pacific Ocean from three hundred feet above sea level. Yann clicked his mouse as rapidly as a video game player and brought up pages that worked like transparencies, one colored pattern after another, until it looked like the London tube map replicated a few times around a vertical axis. As he continued to click, this cat’s cradle rotated more on the axis, so that a really good false sense of three dimensions was established. He squished that image into the top of his huge screen and then on the bottom began to write out the equations for the middle steps of his algorithm. It was like working through a cipher set in which the solution to each step cast a wave of probabilities that then had to be explored and in some cases solved before the next step could be formulated; and then again like that, through iterations within sets, and decision-tree choices to determine the steps that properly followed. Algorithms, in short; or in long. They dug in, and Yann talked and drew on a whiteboard and clicked on the mouse, and typed like a madman, speed-talking all the while, free-associating as well as running a quick tutorial for Frank in his latest thinking, Frank squinting, frowning, asking questions, nodding, scribbling himself, asking more questions. Yann was now the leader of the pack, no doubt about it. It was as it would have been watching Richard Feynman chalkboarding quantum chromodynamics for the first time. A new understanding of some aspect of the unfolding of the world in time. Here they were in the heart of science, the basic activity, the mathematics of alchemy, discovered in the equations, matched against reality, and examined for its own internal logic as math.

“I have to pee,” Yann announced midequation, and they broke for the day. Suddenly it was dinnertime.

“That was good,” Frank said. “Jesus, Yann. I mean, do you know what you’re saying here?”

“Well, I think so. But you tell me. I only learn what this stuff might mean when you tell me. You and Leo.”

“Because it depends on what he can do.”

“Right. Although he’s not the insertion guy, as he’s always saying.”

“Which is what we need now.”

“Well, that’s more Marta and Eleanor. They’re doing their thing, and they’re hooked into a whole network of people doing that.”

“So those nanorods are working?” Frank said, looking at one of the shotgun sequencers.

“Yeah. They’ll tell us about it if we go up to the Paradigms for drinks. The gang usually meets there around this time on Fridays.”

“Nice.”

“But first let’s go talk to Leo, and then we can tell him to join us too.”

“Good idea.”

Leo was in his office reading an online paper with lots of tables and false-color photos. “Oh hi guys, hi Frank. Out here again I see.”

“Yes, I’m doing some other stuff too, but I wanted to check in and see how things are coming along.”

“Things are coming along fine.” Leo had the kind of satisfied, paws-dug-in look of a dog with a bone. Still looking at the screen as he spoke with them. “Eleanor and Marta are putting the triple nanorods through all kinds of trials.”

“So it’s nanotechnology at last.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Although I’ve never seen how nanotechnology isn’t just what we used to call chemistry. But anyway here I am using it.”

“So these nanorods are taking your DNA into mice?”

“Yes, the uptake is really good, and the rods don’t do anything but cross over and give up their attached DNA, so they’re looking like very good insertion agents. The best I’ve seen anyway.”