Ell Donsaii 13: DNA Read online

  DNA

  An Ell Donsaii story # 13

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Copyright 2016 Laurence E Dahners

  Kindle Edition

  Author’s Note

  Though this book can “stand alone” it will be much easier to understand if read as part of the series including

  “Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story)”

  “Smarter (an Ell Donsaii story #2)”

  “Lieutenant (an Ell Donsaii story #3)”

  “Rocket (an Ell Donsaii story #4)”

  “Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5)”

  “Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6)”

  “Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7)”

  “Allotropes (an Ell Donsaii story #8)”

  “Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9)”

  “Wanted (an Ell Donsaii story #10)”

  “Rescue (an Ell Donsaii story #11)” and

  “Impact (an Ell Donsaii story #12)”

  I have minimized repetition of explanations that would be redundant to the earlier books in order to provide a better reading experience for those of you who are reading the series.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Contents

  Preprologue

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Author’s Afterword

  Preprologue

  An unusually gifted quarterback, Allan Donsaii had been widely recognized to be startlingly strong and a phenomenally accurate passer. During his college career he finished two full seasons without any interceptions and two games with 100 percent completions. Unfortunately, the pro teams never drafted him for fear that his size would allow him to be dominated by bigger opposing players.

  Extraordinarily quick, Kristen Taylor captained her college soccer team and rarely played a game without a “steal.” Usually she had many.

  Allan and Kristen dated more and more seriously throughout college and married at the end of their senior year. Their friends teased them that they were only marrying so that they could start their own sports dynasty.

  Their daughter Ell had Kristen’s quickness, magnified by Allan’s strength and highly accurate coordination. The child also had a new mutation affecting the myelin sheaths surrounding her nerves. This mutation produced nerve transmission speeds that nearly doubled those of normal neurons. With faster nerve impulse transmission, she had much quicker reflexes. Yet her new type of myelin sheath was also thinner, allowing more axons, and therefore more neurons, to be packed into the same sized skull. These two factors resulted in a brain which had more neurons, though it wasn’t larger, and a faster processing speed, akin to a computer with a smaller, faster CPU architecture.

  Most importantly, under the influence of adrenalin in a “fight or flight” situation, her nerves transmitted even more rapidly than their normally remarkable speed.

  Much more rapidly…

  Prologue

  Oxford, England— Professor Band Walla of the Oxford Department of Astrophysics today announced that their research team, upon further analysis of data previously collected, has found additional support for the theoretical work on galactic rotation published by Kinrais and Donsaii.

  Vince Buetow felt many conflicting emotions. He was excited to have qualified for his first US Open Tournament, but nervous that his game would collapse under the pressure. He’d felt irritated to realize that his foursome included Ell Donsaii, playing as an amateur who’d gotten in by playing her way through the sectional qualifying rounds. When he’d been walking to the first tee box he’d at first been surprised by the enormous crowd surrounding it. Usually the crowd surrounded the big name players who teed off later in the day. Then he’d realized that this crowd was here to gawk at Ell Donsaii. If he played well in front of these celebrity struck rubberneckers it might seriously increase his name recognition, which would be a plus. On the other hand, once Donsaii’s game collapsed, all these people would disappear. He shrugged, or they might not, they weren’t here to watch her play after all—they were here because she was beautiful, and the world’s best sprinter, and the world’s best gymnast. Being good at those kinds of high-speed sports wasn’t going to carry over into golf though.

  On the tee box, the foursome shook hands. Donsaii smiled at Vince and gave him a firm handshake, telling him she hoped he’d play as well as he had at Torrey Pines, the tournament that he’d crushed to qualify for the US Open. Surprised to realize that she was just as pretty in real life as she was in images, Vince found himself liking her despite his earlier pique. He’d never had another player wish him well like that. After all, Torrey Pines had been the best game of his life. Competitors didn’t wish the best game of their life on their opponents!

  Vince, carefully controlling his emotions, boomed a nice straight, plain-vanilla drive right down the middle of the fairway to a smattering of applause. He was a pretty big hitter and expected that drive to go more than 300 yards. It’d leave him with a relatively short approach shot to the 402 yard green. As he stepped away from the tee box a hush fell over the crowd. He felt annoyed to realize the crowd was more excited about watching Donsaii address the ball than they were about the nice shot he’d already made.

  She looked great, even though she’d dressed to match the men’s PGA dress code in navy blue slacks and a collared shirt. The only thing that might be considered flamboyant about her clothing was some narrow white piping down the outside seam of her pants. She teed up the ball, and to Vince’s surprise addressed it without even a waggle of a practice swing.

  He analyzed her swing as she brought it back. Too much backswing, he thought. Her wind up looked like a ballerina twirling. As the club head started forward, he had the distinct feeling it kept accelerating all the way through the ball.

  A loud noise make Vince flinch and he lost track of the ball. For the briefest of seconds, he didn’t know what had caused the “bang” that made him flinch.

  Then he realized that it had been her club, striking the ball…

  The gallery didn’t seem to know what’d happened either. There was some oohing and ahhing, some confused muttering, and an uncertain smattering of applause like you got when the gallery didn’t know whether a shot was turning out good or bad. Vince leaned toward Ted Miller, one of the pros in their foursome who he vaguely knew. “I lost it. Do you know where it went?”

  Ted said, “It started right down the middle, but then I lost it too.” He gave Vince an awed look, “Holy shit though! She absolutely crushed it.”

  As they started down the fairway, murmurs started running through the crowd. This happened often in tournaments, as people’s AIs (Artificial Intelligences) fed them interesting tidbits about what was going on elsewhere on the course. However, they were in the second foursome. He wondered if something happened with the first foursome, or whether some other national or international event was causing the murmuring.

  Then they got far enough down the fairway that he saw a ball lying on the green…

  Vince hit a nice approach shot onto the green. He would have been proud of it, but, at twenty-four feet from the pin, it was three times as far from the hole as Donsaii’s drive. He two-putted for a par four.

  She drained her eight footer for an eagle.

  Sure, she’s a surprisingly big hitter, Vince told himself as they walked to the second tee box, but if she keeps trying to hit her drives that
far, her accuracy will be crap. She’s going to be all over the place. He couldn’t get over the fact, however, that she hadn’t looked as if she was straining to hit that drive with everything she had.

  The second hole was a little over 500 yards and Vince expected it to tame her.

  She almost drove the green again.

  Then she chipped to within three feet of the cup and put in her putt for a birdie.

  Vince shot a sixty-eight, probably the best round of his life when you considered how difficult the course setup was. Something about having her playing so much better than he’d ever even dreamed anyone could play seemed to take all the pressure off his game. He had to remind himself that he should be excited about how well he was playing.

  Instead, he felt more like just one more member of the enormous gallery that had gathered to watch this woman break every record in golf…

  ***

  Jamieson narrowed his eyes at the small Asian man across the table from him. After a pause he rose, “Please, come with me,” he said, trying to sound as polite as he possibly could.

  They both got up and left the coffee shop. Jamieson led the way to his car, which he’d driven manually and parked on the street. As they arrived at it, he pulled off his AI headband and lifted the PGR (Photon Gluon Resonance Communication) chip out of the back of it. Opening the back door of his car, he put the chip on the seat inside. He put the now useless AI headband back on so he’d look normal, then turned and looked at the man, raising his eyebrows.

  Wang stared at Jamieson in confusion for a moment, then realized what he wanted. He pulled off his own AI headband, removed the chip, and put his chip on the back seat next to Jamieson’s.

  Jamieson closed the door, told his car’s AI to lock it and started off down the street toward a little park. He turned to the Asian as they walked, saying irritatedly, “I can’t believe you wanted to talk about that with our AIs recording.”

  The man shrugged as if he thought it didn’t matter.

  “Look Mr. Weng…”

  The Asian man said, “Wang.”

  Jamieson waved a dismissive hand at him. “Wang. You’re asking me to kidnap this woman!”

  Wang shrugged, raising his hands palm up, “We just need her help for a little while. She’ll be returned to her life unharmed and well compensated.”

  “Still, if she ain’t going of her own free will, we call it kidnapping here in the States. Why don’t you just offer her all that compensation you’re thinking will make it okay?”

  “We’ve tried, she’s refused our offers.”

  Jamieson snorted, “Well, you’re probably gonna think my price is unreasonable then. Kidnapping is a serious crime here and I ain’t even gonna consider it unless there is a lot of money on the line.”

  Wang looked at him intently, “How much!”

  “I’d want at least twenty grand just to scope it out. Then I’d have to recontact you with a much higher price to actually do the job.”

  ***

  Marcus Turner said, “Go ahead and close the door Vanessa. I’d like to talk to you about something confidential.” When she’d seated herself, he picked up one of the ports they’d been using to sample microbiota in the gut. Holding it up, he said, “I’ve been thinking about these. I think we should be reporting them to the technology office because they may represent a fairly valuable intellectual property. I’ve done a patent search and so far no one’s patented their use in the treatment of obesity.”

  “Um, yeah, like a nonsurgical gastric bypass? I’ve been thinking about that, but have been worried that there might be some significant health effects from sucking stuff out of your gut. We wouldn’t just be removing the food they’d eaten, but also all the enzymes the body’s secreted in the process of digestion—enzymes that the lower part of the intestine probably reabsorbs.”

  Turner blinked a couple of times, startled with the realization that her mind had gone down a different path than he’d been considering. He gave a brief laugh, “I was thinking along different lines. A balloon that could be blown up in the stomach to make the patient feel full. Trying to alter the gut microbiota by inserting bacterial species associated with normal weight. Adding nutrients that support Bacteroides and inhibit Firmicutes.”

  “Oh,” Vanessa said, taking her own turn to be surprised by an unexpected idea. She tilted her head, thinking, “Maybe we should be trying to patent both ideas?” She frowned, “There’s been some experience with a surgical procedure somewhat similar to the idea I mentioned. Essentially, they put in a tube through the abdominal wall into the patient’s stomach that lets him or her suck out some of the food they’ve eaten. It seems kind of immoral to eat more than you need and then suck it out and flush it straight down the toilet, but I’m not sure that it’s a whole lot worse than eating more than you need and then carrying it around as fat. The patients do lose weight. There are some health effects, but they apparently aren’t severe. If it didn’t require surgery, that would probably make it safer and more palatable for a lot of patients.”

  After a moment’s thought, Turner said, “Yeah, what we submit to the technology office should incorporate all these ideas.” He frowned, “However, just because my patent search came up negative doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t been doing this somehow. Perhaps someone who bought some ports and used them for unauthorized treatment of their own obesity. If anything has been written up about their experiences, it essentially means this can’t be patented. So,” he lifted an eyebrow, “I’d suggest we both spend some time searching the medical and nonmedical literature, blogs, etc. to be sure that hasn’t happened.”

  “Okay.”

  Turner noticed that Vanessa looked uncomfortable. Rather than saying something he just waited a moment to see what she would say.

  Finally, she cleared her throat a little, “Um, I probably should have said something before, but the idea for using ports in the G.I. tract wasn’t really mine.”

  Turner drew back a little, “Whose idea was it?”

  “Zage Kinrais.”

  “Who?”

  “The kid whose dad is on the math faculty.”

  “The one you took on a tour of the lab?”

  Vanessa nodded, “He’s been over here several times actually.”

  Turner made a discarding motion with his hand, “Just because he said something that gave you the idea for using ports to survey the microbiota of the gut, that’s not the same as actually having the idea of using ports for that purpose.”

  Vanessa frowned, but didn’t say anything for a couple of moments. Then, apparently firming her resolve, she said, “No, it really was the kid’s idea. He’s a freaking genius.”

  “You’re telling me…” Turner shook his head doubtfully, “that this three-year-old kid actually said we should,” Turner lifted his hands and made air quotes, “‘have people swallow ports so we could sample their microbiota through them’?”

  Vanessa nodded reluctantly, “He did.”

  Still unbelieving, Turner said, “Really? He said it with full comprehension of what it meant and you think he’ll remember it later? The idea was truly his? So much so that we should make him a co-author on the paper?”

  Vanessa nodded again, though she didn’t speak.

  “Come on!” Turner leaned forward, “I don’t even remember anything from when I was three. Even if the kid said something like that, I’m sure he didn’t really know what he was saying.”

  “Actually, he’s four now. Maybe he won’t actually remember any of this, but I’d be surprised. And he really did know what he was suggesting. He’s the smartest person I’ve ever known—smarter than any adult I’ve ever known, not just kids.”

  Turner snorted, “Smarter than me too, I guess you’re saying.”

  Vanessa shrugged, not actually confirming that she thought the kid was smarter than Turner… but he could read between the lines.

  ***

  John Simon glanced at the President, “You should also be awa
re that D5R’s subdivision, Quantum Biomed, has successfully connected the optic nerve of a blind man to cameras in order to give him sight.”

  President Stockton’s eyes widened slightly, though Simon thought she tried to suppress the response. She never seemed to want to look too impressed by something done by Donsaii or her people. Whatever her internal reaction, nonetheless, she said, “That’s great. Those people are doing important work.”

  Simon thought to himself that, even though the President was kind of hardheaded, she seemed to have overcome her vendetta against Ell Donsaii. Mostly through force of will, she seemed to have controlled the emotional responses to Donsaii that she’d displayed in the past. He decided to present his final item. He gave her a querying look, “I assume you know that Donsaii qualified for the U.S. Open that started today?”

  Stockton gave a snort that seemed to encompass amusement, derision, and disgust all at once. “Yeah. She really sandbagged us that day we played with her. There’s no doubt that she’s a very good golfer. A lot better than she let on, but she won’t have a chance playing against the pros.”

  Simon stopped himself from saying anything more about Donsaii, instead standing up and saying, “That’s all I have.”

  The President’s eyes narrowed, “Wait a minute. Did you mention that because you know how she’s doing so far?”

  “Um, yeah…” Simon said reluctantly

  “Spit it out.”

  “Um, she was twelve under par.”

  Stockton’s eyes widened, “Was? Wait, on what hole?!”

  “Tenth,” he said quietly.

  The President looked like she’d been sucker punched. “You’ve got to be shittin’ me!” she said as she sagged back into her chair. After a moment she roused herself to speak quietly to her AI. Her eyes rose to her HUD (Heads up Display) and scanned back and forth a moment. She looked at Simon, “My God! She’s hitting drives well over 400 yards, right down the middle and onto the greens! She’s been putting for eagle on almost everything but the par threes!”