Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

They had this advantage over natural hibernators: they didn’t need to get all their energy from stored body fat. Lipids were dripped in dermally to provide ATP. But body fat was getting metabolized anyway.

Signaling. Perhaps the antisenescents were signaling the fungus not to die. Slowing not its growth but its morbidity. If it were a fungus. Sure it was, it had to be. But confirm it.

After she came to the Lab, Fang learned that her adoption was not so much a matter of her initiative, or of Caitlin’s, or of good fortune. Roger had pulled strings every step of the way—strings Fang had no idea existed .

He’d known of Fang because all student work—every paper, test, email, click, eyeblink, keystroke—was stored and tracked and mined. Her permanent record. Corps and labs had algorithms conducting eternal worldwide surveillance for, among so many other things,promising scientists. Roger had his own algorithms: his stock-market eye for early bloomers, good draft choices. He’d purchased Fang’s freedom from some Chinese consortium and linked her to Caitlin .

Roger, Fang came to realize, had seen in Caitlin’s needs and infirmities a way to help three people: Caitlin, who needed someone to nurture and give herself to, so as not to immolate herself; Fang, who needed that nurturing; and himself, who needed Fang’s talent. In other words: Roger judged that Caitlin would do best as the mother of a scientist .

He wasn’t wrong. Caitlin’s nurture was going to waste on James, who simply sucked it in and gave nothing back. And Fang needed a brilliant, loving, female example to give her confidence in her own brilliance, and learn the toughness she’d need to accomplish her work. That’s what Caitlin herself had lacked .

If Fang had known all this, she’d have taken the terms; she’d have done anything to get out of China. But she hadn’t known; she hadn’t been consulted. So when she found out, she was furious. For Caitlin, for herself. As she saw it, Roger couldn’t have the mother, so he took the daughter. He used their love and mutual need to get what he wanted, and then he broke them apart. It was cold and calculating and utterly selfish of Roger; of the three of them, only he wasn’t damaged by it. She’d almost quit Gypsy in her fury .

She did quit the Lab. She went into product development at Glaxo, under contract to DARPA. That was the start of her hibernation work. It was for battlefield use, as a way to keep injured soldiers alive during transport. When she reflected on this move, she wasn’t so sure that Roger hadn’t pulled more strings. In any case, the work was essential to Gypsy .

Roger had fury of his own, to spare. Fang knew all about the calm front. Roger reeked of it. He’d learned that he had the talent and the position to do great harm; the orbiting bombs were proof of that. His anger and disappointment had raised in him the urge to do more harm. At the Lab he was surrounded by the means and the opportunity. So he’d gathered all his ingenuity and his rage against humanity and sequestered it in a project large enough and complex enough to occupy it fully, so that it could not further harm him or the world: Gypsy. He would do a thing that had never been done before; and he would take away half the bombs he’d enabled in the doing of it; and the thing would not be shared with humanity. She imagined he saw it as a victimless revenge .

Well, here were the victims .

A day later, Pseudogymnoascus destructans was her best guess. Or some mutation of it. It had killed most of the bats on Earth. It grew only in low temperatures, in the 4 to 15° Celsius range. The ship was normally held at 4° Celsius.

She could synthesize an antifungal agent with the gene printer, but what about interactions? Polyenes would bind with a fungus’s ergosterols but could have severe and lethal side effects.

She thought about the cocktail. How she might tweak it. Sirtuins. Fibroplast growth factor 21. Hibernation induction trigger. [D-Ala2, D-Leu5]-Enkephalin. Pancreatic triacylglycerol lipase. 5’-adenosine monophosphate. Ghrelin. 3-iodothyronamine. Alpha2-macroglobulin. Carnosine, other antisenescents, antioxidants.

Some components acted only at the start of the process. They triggered a cascade of enzymes in key pathways to bring on torpor. Some continued to drip in, to reinforce gene expression, to suppress circadian rhythms, and so on.

It was all designed to interact with nonhuman mammalian genes she’d spliced in. Including parts of the bat immune system— Myotis lucifugus —parts relevant to hibernation, to respond to the appropriate mRNA signals. But were they also vulnerable to this fungus? O God, did I do this? Did I open up this vulnerability?

She gave her presentation, in the open, to DARPA. It was amazing; she was speaking in code to the few Gypsies in the audience, including Roger, telling them in effect how they’d survive the long trip to Alpha, yet her plaintext words were telling DARPA about battlefield applications: suspending wounded soldiers, possibly in space, possibly for long periods, 3D-printing organs, crisping stem cells, and so on .

In Q&A she knew DARPA was sold; they’d get their funding. Roger was right: everything was dual use .

She’d been up for ten days. The cramped, dark space was wearing her down. Save them. They had to make it. She’d pulled a DNA sequencer and a gene printer from the storage bay. As she fed it E. coli and Mycoplasma mycoides stock, she reviewed what she’d come up with.

She could mute the expression of the bat genes at this stage, probably without disrupting hibernation. They were the receptors for the triggers that started and stopped the process. But that could compromise rousing. So mute them temporarily—for how long?—hope to revive an immune response, temporarily damp down the antisenescents, add an antifungal. She’d have to automate everything in the mixture; the ship wouldn’t rouse her a second time to supervise.

It was a long shot, but so was everything now.

It was too hard for her. For anyone. She had the technology: a complete library of genetic sequences, a range of restriction enzymes, Sleeping Beauty transposase, et cetera. She’d be capable on the spot, for instance, of producing a pathogen that could selectively kill individuals with certain ethnic markers—that had been one project at the Lab, demurely called “preventive.” But she didn’t have the knowledge she needed for this. It had taken years of research experimentation, and collaboration, to come up with the original cocktail, and it would take years more to truly solve this. She had only a few days. Then the residue of the cocktail would be out of her system and she would lose the ability to rehibernate. So she had to go with what she had now. Test it on DNA from her own saliva.

Not everyone stuck with Gypsy. One scientist at the Lab, Sidney Lefebvre, was wooed by Roger to sign up, and declined only after carefully studying their plans for a couple of weeks. It’s too hard, Roger. What you have here is impressive. But it’s only a start. There are too many intractable problems. Much more work needs to be done .

That work won’t get done. Things are falling apart, not coming together. It’s now or never .

Probably so. Regardless, the time for this is not now. This, too, will fall apart .

She wrote the log for the next steward, who would almost surely have the duty of more corpses. Worse, as stewards died, maintenance would be deferred. Systems would die. She didn’t know how to address that. Maybe Lefebvre was right. But no: they had to make it. How could this be harder than getting from Guangzhou to Dublin to here?