Frank Schatzing - The Swarm

'Not long. We're on the verge of a breakthrough.'

'How long is not long?'

'Rubin says that if all goes to plan, he can be ready in a day or two. We got lucky in the lab. The yrr are using a pheromone to communicate. We already know how to synthesise it and we-'

'Skip the details. So, Rubin says he can handle it?'

'He's certain of it, sir,' said Li. 'And so am I.'

The President pursed his lips. 'I'm relying on you, Jude. Any problems with your scientists?'

'No,' she lied. 'Things couldn't be better.'

Why all the questions? Had Vanderbilt…

Get a grip, she told herself! He was only enquiring. It wasn't in Vanderbilt's interest to tell tales. The fat bastard had a malicious tongue, but he'd never say anything to make himself look bad. 'I can assure you, sir,' she said, 'that we're making good progress. I gave you my word that I'd settle this problem in all our interests, and I'm going to do just that. The United States will save the world. You will save the world.'

'Just like in the movies, huh?'

'Better than that.'

The President nodded bleakly. Then he flashed her a smile. It wasn't the broad grin of old, but there was still a hint of his indomitable spirit, for which she admired him. 'God be with you, Jude,' he said.

He hung up. Li stayed on her treadmill. All of a sudden she doubted that she could pull it off.

COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER

Whatever the message had to say about the creatures in the sea, Shankar's stomach was communicating his need of food so loudly that Crowe couldn't bear to listen to the rumbling any longer. She sent him to get something to eat.

'But I'm fine,' he insisted.

'You'll be doing me a favour,' said Crowe.

'We don't have time to eat.'

'I know. But a couple of skeletons aren't going to solve the problem. At least I've got my Lucky Strikes to keep me going. Go on, Murray. Come back fortified and see if you can belch out a few good ideas.'

Shankar left, and she was alone.

A bit of space was what she needed. It was nothing against Shankar – he was a brilliant scientist and a great help – but he specialised in acoustics. Second-guessing non-human thought patterns didn't come easily to him and, anyway, Crowe always had her best ideas when she was surrounded by nothing but smoke.

She lit a cigarette, and went through the problem again. H 2O . We live in water.

The message looked like a woven design on a rug. A repeating pattern of H 2O. The same motif again and again, yet each molecule of H 2O was linked to an ancillary piece of data. Millions of pairs of data, one after the next. In graphic form, they appeared as lines. The obvious assumption was that the ancillary data described a characteristic of water or of something that lived in the water.

What would a yrr have to say about itself?

Water. But what else?

Crowe turned it over in her mind. Suddenly she thought of an analogy. Two statements. First statement: this is a bucket . Second statement: this is water . When you add them together: this is a bucket of water . The water molecules would all look identical, but the same wasn't true of the data on the bucket. The data describing the bucket would differ according to its form, texture and markings. A description of a bucket, broken down into thousands of individual statements, would be anything but uniform. Stating that the bucket was full of water would be easy. You just took each of the individual bucket statements and attached an ancillary statement: water .

Or, to put it another way, the statement H 2O could be coupled with data describing something with no intrinsic connection to water. Like a bucket, for instance.

We live in water.

But where in the water? How could you describe the location of something that was devoid of fixed shape?

By describing what delimited it.

Coastlines and seabeds.

The empty spaces were the continents, bordered by coastlines.

Crowe's cigarette almost fell to the floor. She started punching commands into the keyboard. Suddenly she knew why the lines didn't make a picture: they weren't describing two dimensions, but three. You had to bend them to make them fit. Bend them until they turned into something three-dimensional.

A globe.

Planet Earth.

LAB

Johanson was still working on the tissue samples they'd taken from the yrr. After twelve hours of intensive work Oliviera had given up – she couldn't keep her eyes open, let alone look down a microscope. Over the past few nights she'd only had a few hours' sleep. Slowly but surely the mission was taking its toll. Their work was advancing in leaps and bounds, but the pressure was getting to them. Everyone responded differently. Greywolf had retreated to the well deck, where he took care of the three remaining dolphins, monitored the data from their sensors and kept himself to himself Some of the team were visibly tetchy, while others reacted more stoically. In Rubin's case, the stress seemed to take the form of migraines – which meant that once Oliviera had withdrawn for some hard-earned sleep, Johanson was left on his own in the half-light of the lab.

He'd switched off the main lights, leaving just the desk lamps and computer screens to brighten the gloom. The chamber hummed softly, generating a barely perceptible blue glow. The layer of jelly lay motionless at the bottom. The organism looked dead, but Johanson knew better.

If the jelly was glowing, the yrr were alive.

Footsteps rang out on the ramp. Anawak poked his head round the door. Johanson looked up from his work. 'Leon, good to see you.'

Anawak pulled up a chair, and sat down on it back to front. He rested his arms on the top. 'It's three in the morning,' he said. 'What the hell are you doing?'

'Working. You?'

'Can't sleep.'

'I think we've earned ourselves a drink. A glass of Bordeaux?'

'Oh, urn…' Anawak looked embarrassed. 'Thanks for offering, but I don't touch alcohol.'

'Never?'

'Never.'

'That's funny.' Johanson frowned. 'I usually notice stuff like that. I guess we're all pretty distracted at the moment.'

'You could say that.' Anawak paused. 'How's it shaping up?'

'Fine. I solved your problem.' He said it almost casually.

'Problem?'

'The one you and Karen were working on. Memory via mutating DNA. Well, you were right. It's possible, and I've found out how.'

Anawak stared at him incredulously. 'I can't believe you're not jumping up and down.'

'I'd turn a few cartwheels if I had enough energy. But you're right: we should celebrate.'

'Well, aren't you going to tell me how it works?'

You remember those hypervariable segments? They're clusters. The genome is covered with clusters that code different proteins. They're… Does this mean anything to you?'

'You'll have to help me out a little.'

'Clusters are a sub-class of gene. They're genes that take care of a particular function, like producing certain substances or coding receptors. If a section of DNA contains a high concentration of genes that serve the same function, you get a cluster. The yrr-genome has masses of them. And this is where it gets interesting: the yrr-cells are repairing themselves, but the repair process doesn't occur globally across the whole genome. The enzymes don't scan the DNA from top to bottom for mistakes, they react to specific signals. They're a bit like trains. If the signal tells them to go, they start the repair mechanism. But if the signal says stop, they don't go any further because otherwise they'd run into-'

'The clusters.'

'Right. And the clusters are protected.'

'You mean the yrr are able to shield part of their genome to stop it being repaired?'