Kim Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

Mathematics continues to develop under the momentum of its own internal logic, seemingly independent of everything else. But several times in the past, purely mathematical developments have later proved to be powerfully descriptive of operations in nature that were either unknown or unexplainable at the time the math was being developed. This is a strange fact, calling into question all that we think we know about the relationship between math and reality, the mind and the cosmos.

Perhaps no explanation of this mysterious adherence of nature to mathematics of great subtlety will ever be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the operations called algorithms become ever more convoluted and interesting to those devising them. Are they making portraits, recipes, magic spells? Does reality use algorithms, do genes use algorithms? The mathematicians can’t say, and many of them don’t seem to care. They like the work, whatever it is.

LEO MULHOUSE kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. In the living room the light was halfway between night and dawn. He went out onto their balcony: screeching gulls, the rumble of the surf against the cliff below. The vast gray plate of the Pacific Ocean.

Leo had married into this spectacular house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its view from the edge of the sea cliff in Leucadia, California, was something Leo loved, but the little grass yard below the second-story porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of air and the gray foaming ocean, eighty feet below. And not that stable a cliff. He wished that the house had been placed a little farther back on its lot.

Back inside, fill his travel coffee cup, down to the car. Down Europa, past the Pannikin, hang a right and head to work.

The Pacific Coast Highway in San Diego County was a beautiful drive at dawn. In any kind of weather it was handsome: in new sun with all the pale blues lifting out of the sea, in scattered cloud when shards and rays of horizontal sunlight broke through, or on rainy or foggy mornings when the narrow but rich palette of grays filled the eye with the subtlest of gradations. The gray dawns were by far the most frequent, as the region’s climate settled into what appeared to be a permanent El Niño—the Hyperniño, as people called it. The whole idea of a Mediterranean climate leaving the world, even in the Mediterranean, people said. Here coastal residents were getting sunlight deficiency disorders, and taking vitamin D and antidepressants to counteract the effects, even though ten miles inland it was a cloudless baking desert all the year round. The June Gloom had come home to roost.

Leo Mulhouse took the coast highway to work every morning. He liked seeing the ocean, and feeling the slight roller-coaster effect of dropping down to cross the lagoons, then motoring back up little rises to Cardiff, Solano Beach, and Del Mar. These towns looked best at this hour, deserted and as if washed for the new day. Hiss of tires on wet road, wet squeak of windshield wipers, distant boom of the waves breaking—it all combined to make a kind of aquatic experience, the drive like surfing, up and down the same bowls every time, riding the perpetual wave of land about to break into the sea.

Up the big hill onto Torrey Pines, past the golf course, quick right into Torrey Pines Generique. Down into its parking garage, descending into the belly of work. Into the biotech beast.

Meaning a complete security exam, just to get in. If they didn’t know what you came in with, they wouldn’t be able to judge what you went out with. So, metal detector, inspection by the bored security team with their huge coffee cups, computer turned on, hardware and software check by experts, sniff-over by Clyde the morning dog, trained to detect signature molecules: all standard in biotech now, after some famous incidents of industrial espionage. The stakes were too high to trust anybody.

Then Leo was inside the compound, walking down long white hallways. He put his coffee on his desk, turned on his desktop computer, went out to check the experiments in progress. The most important current one was reaching an endpoint, and Leo was particularly interested in the results. They had been using high-throughput screening of some of the many thousands of proteins listed in the Protein Data Bank at UCSD, trying to identify some that would activate certain cells in a way that would make these cells express more high-density lipoprotein than they would normally—perhaps ten times as much. Ten times as much HDL, the “good cholesterol,” would be a lifesaver for people suffering from any number of ailments—atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s. Any one of these ailments mitigated (or cured!) would be worth billions; a therapy that helped all of them would be—well. It explained the high-alert security enclosing the compound, that was for sure.

The experiment was proceeding but not yet done, so Leo went back to his office and drank his coffee and read Bioworld Today on-screen. Higher throughput screening robotics, analysis protocols for artificial hormones, proteomic analyses—every article could have described something that was going on at Torrey Pines Generique. The whole industry was looking for ways to improve the hunt for therapeutic proteins, and for ways to get those proteins into living people. Half the day’s articles were devoted to one of these problems or the other, as in any other issue of the newszine. They were the recalcitrant outstanding problems, standing between “biotechnology” as an idea and medicine as it actually existed. If they didn’t solve these problems, the idea and the industry based on it could go the way of nuclear power, and turn into something that somehow did not work out. If they did solve them, then it would turn into something more like the computer industry in terms of financial returns—not to mention the impacts on health of course!

When Leo next checked the lab, two of his assistants, Marta and Brian, were standing at the bench, both wearing lab coats and rubber gloves, working the pipettes on a bank of flasks filling a countertop.

“Good morning guys.”

“Hey Leo.” Marta aimed her pipette like a Power-Point cursor at the small window on a long low refrigerator. “Ready to check it out?”

“Sure am. Can you help?”

“In just a sec.” She moved down the bench.

Brian said, “This better work, because Derek just told the press that it was the most promising self-healing therapy of the decade.”

Leo was startled to hear this. “No. You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Oh not really. Not really.”

“Really.”

“How could he?”

“Press release. Also calls to his favorite reporters, and on his webpage. The chat room is already talking about the ramifications. They’re betting one of the big pharms will buy us within the month.”

“Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.”

“Sorry, but you know Derek.” Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. “It’s all over.”

Leo squinted at a screen. “It wasn’t on Bioworld Today. ”

“It will be tomorrow.”

The company website’s BREAKING NEWS box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep—lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease…

“Oh my God,” Leo muttered as he read. “Oh my God.” His face was flushed. “Why does he do this?”

“He wants it to be true.”

“So what ? We don’t know yet.”

With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.”