Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

Martial continued: “We’re funded by the votes of politicians, who are funded by the churches, who have a vested interest in the status quo. Knowledge is power, after all. We’re the funnel here. We release too much information, or the wrong kind of information, and the politicians suddenly have a lot to answer for. They have screaming donors. Midnight phone calls.”

“I still don’t understand.”

They pushed through another set of doors and took a flight of stairs down to a lower level. Here there were no windows. They entered another room—this one bristling with activity. For a moment, Gavin’s mind couldn’t take it all in. Lab-coated techs moved through the room like bees in a busy meadow. Some carried clipboards. Others pushed carts. Gavin saw one who held a baby bottle. She was pretty and serious, but his eye snagged on the bottle, so incongruous in the setting. He watched as this technician crossed the room to where an incubator sat near a wall beneath a halo of light, surrounded by beeping machines and digital readouts. Within the incubator, he saw a shape. A small bundle.

The tech moved against the incubator, sliding the bottle and her arm through a small aperture in the side. Inside the glass enclosure of the incubator, a tiny hand reached up to hold the bottle.

“Not everything is meant for prying eyes.”

Gavin stared at the little hand curled around the bottle. He moved no closer. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“We never lie, here,” the old man said. “We just control the truth.”

When Gavin found his voice, he asked, “And get what in exchange?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

The old man gestured toward the incubator.

“We get freedom.”

“Freedom to do what?”

“To play God.”

Paul followed Janus down the hall, arms full of sample tray, being careful not to spill the gel.

It was Paul’s sixth week of training, and he’d finally been assigned to a project. “The Endangered Species Project” Janus had called it, saying the words slowly so that Paul would understand the gravity of the task. For some kinds of scientists, conservation was ideology. Save an animal, and it was like saving the world, one unit at a time. Paul envied men who felt this way. It had been a long time since he’d believed the world could be saved as easily as that.

Paul watched Janus run the samples. They were working with bald eagle DNA, testing the degree of heterozygosity of an inbred population in Colorado. They loaded the assays into the machine and hit the button.

“Pay attention to this,” Janus said. “This is the thing you watch for.”

Janus was tall. Almost as tall as Paul, so they were looking nearly eye to eye as they stood there in front of the machine. Janus seemed to have gotten used to the eye patch now, that earlier flash of pity now replaced by a nearly constant look of irritation.

“You put in a sample, and the machine spits out data. Then you plug the data into a program. The rule of thumb is, heterozygosity good, homozygosity bad.”

“Got it,” Paul said. As if he’d needed to be told.

“Too much homozygosity leads to a paucity of immunity haplotypes. Like cheetahs. All practically twins, a bottleneck within a bottleneck. These eagles might not be much better.”

Paul nodded. Despite appearances, the genes of men, he knew, like the genes of eagles, were less diverse than most species. A function of our creation, some said. Man, after all, had been made on the last day. Made in His perfect image.

Paul put the samples of eagle DNA in the tray and hit the button.

“I’m going to lunch,” Janus said.

“Go ahead,” Paul said, without looking up from his work. “I’ll finish up this batch.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’d rather get it done.”

“Okay.” Janus left.

When Janus was out the door, Paul continued to work. He waited two minutes, counting to one hundred and twenty in his head. After a hundred and twenty seconds, he figured that Janus had made it to the elevator. If he’d gotten that far, there was a good chance that he wouldn’t turn around and pop back into the lab for some reason. Paul put down his samples and rushed across the room to the forgotten drawer. He pulled out the old Tylenol bottle at the back.

He dumped the lozenge into his hand.

For a moment, his breath caught in his chest.

It had been a long time since he’d looked at the sample. For the last several weeks, he’d almost been able to pretend that none of it was happening, if he wanted to. But now, here it was.

Green and smooth to the touch. The lozenge was made of a special protein membrane, vacuum-sealed with a pocket in the middle. It was still hermetically sealed. Still protecting its secrets.

He inserted the applicator tip into the lozenge like a hypodermic needle and drew out a tiny sample of fluid.

The rest he knew by heart. Mass-production analysis, in two-million-letter sequences. But the key, he understood, wasn’t in the sequences; it lay in finding the places where the sequences were different. That’s where the software came in. He injected the sample into the agarose, adjusted the settings. He hit the button. The machine whirred to life.

From a genetic standpoint, most life on earth was quite similar. It was all just variation on a theme: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, repeated in a pattern and packaged in chromosomes. Even the sequences themselves didn’t differ a whole lot between species. Humans and chimps were identical across the vast majority of their sequences. But tiny differences could result in big changes in the organism. The entire human genome was more than three billion letters.

He went to the keyboard and typed the restriction codes.

The prompt flashed on the screen: Sample Type?

Paul typed five letters: Human. He wondered if it was true.

“Now we find out,” he whispered. Then he hit Enter.

Paul looked at the clock.

The read would take about fifteen minutes. Janus usually spent around twenty eating his lunch. It would be close.

Paul sat on his stool and waited to be found out or not.

Time dragged.

The machine hummed.

Paul stared at the machine as if watching it could hurry it.

Finally, an interminable time later, it beeped.

Paul checked his watch. Janus would be back any minute. He hit Print. He walked across the hall to retrieve the printout from the laser printer.

Gly – lle – Yal – Glu – Gln – Ala – Cys – Ser – Leu – Asp – Arg – Cys – Pro – Yal – Lys – Phe – Tyr – Thr – Leu – His – Lys – Asn – Gly – Met – Pro – Phe – Tyr – Ser – Cys – Yal – Leu – Glu – Yal – Asp – Gln –

Page after page of it, building into a thick stack. And this was only a small, representative sample—a compilation of hypervariant loci compressed into an amino acid chain. Hot spots, not the genome entire.

It might as well have been Morse code. Paul shoved the hard copy into his backpack and put the lozenge back into the Tylenol bottle. The lozenge contained enough sample for another analysis, if needed. He shoved the Tylenol bottle into his front pants pocket. Then he plugged his jump drive into the computer and saved the files to it. After that, he hit Delete. And it was like it had never happened.

Except for the jump drive.

Except for the printout.

Five minutes later, Janus returned. He came through the door and walked across to the lab bench.

He looked down over Paul’s shoulder.

“You didn’t get much done while I was gone,” Janus said.

“It’s slow work.”

That night, Paul sat in the darkness of his apartment, reading the code. He read it for hours, tracing the letters with his mind.