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  Interestingly, back in 2016, the Trim28 protein had been reported to regulate a network of other genes. Trim28 expression varied in certain strains of mice causing them to be either obese or lean. Researchers had also found a series of identical twins where one member of the pair was obese. The obese twin didn’t express as much Trim28 as the non-obese twin.

  There was also some evidence that zbo might upregulate the secretion of ghrelin, a hormone secreted by the GI tract when the stomach is empty. Ghrelin spurred eating.

  So, Zage believed his HA-36 infection had left him with a gene expressing zbo, and zbo was keeping him from making as much Trim28 as he should be. Alternatively, or in addition, it might be making him secrete more ghrelin, an agent that would stimulate him to eat more.

  So, one possibility was that a lack of Trim28 and an excess of ghrelin was making him fat.

  The other option was that he was just a slothful glutton, a possibility he didn’t like contemplating. He found it hard to stick to his diet and when he did he only lost a little bit of weight. He’d prefer to think that his genes were the cause and to hope that maybe he could find a cure, not only for himself, but for hundreds of millions of other obese people.

  The obvious thing to do would be to remove zbo from his DNA. It wasn’t supposed to be there and it might be the root cause of Zage’s obesity. Zage had read at length about CRISPR V systems and intellectually understood how he could use that type of gene editing to remove the unwanted zbo gene. He wouldn’t even have to remove the gene. He could just have CRISPR edit it into a nonfunctional state. However, he was a little reluctant to try to modify his own genes when he hadn’t even practiced on a bacterium yet. That idea was fraught with possibilities for horrible outcomes.

  Suddenly that thought helped him recognize a path forward. The first thing to do was to get some experience using CRISPR. If he practiced using CRISPR in a bacterium, he could actually get that practice by trying to modify a bacterial strain so that it made Trim28.

  Then he could try treating himself with Trim28, rather than actually trying to modify his entire genome. If it didn’t work, he wouldn’t have suffered much more than a few injections of Trim 28 and there’d still be the possibility of trying to do something about the possibility that he secreted ghrelin in excess.

  As opposed to what might happen if he screwed up trying to modify his own genetic makeup…

  ***

  Ell said, “So, what do we know so far?”

  Emma and Roger looked at one another. Hesitantly, Emma said, “Well, we know a lot about the Virgies, but I’m assuming you’re asking about the big picture? Asking if they’re a threat?”

  Ell nodded.

  Sounding exasperated, Roger said, “They’re primitives! How can they possibly be a threat?!”

  Slowly, Ell said, “I assume you’re calling them primitives because they don’t seem to use machines?”

  Emma had turned to stare at her husband, “I’m not so sure. Every damned one of them looks like it belongs to its own species! Even if they didn’t come from other star systems, how in the world are there so many different kinds of Virgies?!”

  “We’ve got hundreds of thousands of different species here on earth. What’s so remarkable about some other planet having lots of different species?”

  “Roger,” Emma said, speaking as if she thought her husband was particularly dense that morning. “They all seem to be intelligent!”

  Ell interjected at this point, “That’s not completely true. There were those minnow-sized fish, and the insect-like things.”

  Emma said, “You know what I mean. Everything of any significant size has hands and they all seem to talk to each other. Even the fish! You saw those dolphin and whale sized sea-creatures—they had hands too! And the land creatures that live near the sea, most of them had adaptations for swimming—fins, webbed feet, blowholes.”

  Roger made a small throwing-up-his-hands motion, “So, what are you proposing? Do you think there’s some kind of high radiation background causing mutations? An environmental agent that causes rapid evolutionary divergence?”

  “What I’m proposing,” Emma said, glancing at Ell, “is that we need a biologist on this team! It’s just ridiculous for three people trained in physics to be trying to figure this out!”

  Ell grinned at her friend, “I thought you were one of those people who claim physics is the ‘science of everything.’ Surely you don’t need assistance from a non-physicist?”

  Emma looked down at the table with an expression that mixed a frown and a grin. “I say that kind of stuff to non-physicists to keep them in their places. But, I’ll admit that occasionally they have their uses.” She shrugged, “Radiation or chemical mutagens, or anything else I can think of, wouldn’t give you a wide variety of intelligent species on one planet. They would give you a huge number of sick freaks of nature, most of whom would be dying. The few that actually had beneficial mutations would rapidly outcompete the others and soon become the only ones you could find!”

  Ell said, “But, maybe once you got a mutation that gave you intelligence… perhaps they developed the social conscience to protect the ones that couldn’t compete as well. Thus you’d get… many different species that…” Ell had begun frowning as she said this and was practically wincing by the time she’d gotten to that point in her thought. “That idea has a lot of holes in it, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, the holes in that Swiss are so big there isn’t much cheese left.” Emma gave a little laugh, “It is really good to hear you roll out such a clunker though.” She waved a dismissive hand, “At the very least you’d have to ask where all the creatures with failed mutations are. If they have a social conscience that takes care of the ones that don’t compete strongly, where do they draw the line between those and the ones they euthanize because they can’t even take care of themselves?”

  “All this discussion is well and good,” Roger said, “but none of it really affects the bottom line. I don’t care how many different kinds of intelligent species they’ve evolved on this planet. None of them seem to be smart enough to build a technology that could threaten us!”

  Ell shook her head, “There’s something about it that still leaves me really uncomfortable. I think I’m gonna have to show this stuff to Dr. Wheat.”

  Chapter Five

  Jamieson sat in an old beater of a Hyundai, keeping an eye on the main road leaving the neighborhood where Donsaii and her kid actually lived. He slouched low in the seat so his head wouldn’t be visible. His eyes were focused on the screen he held in his lap. It displayed the image from the AI -controlled telephoto lens mounted on his dashboard.

  A car came around the corner and the AI zoomed in on the driver. Blonde. At first Jamieson wasn’t sure who it was, but as the car approached he realized it was Kinrais, the presumed father of Donsaii’s kid. He stayed slouched.

  A couple of cars passed that Jamieson didn’t recognize, then a dark blue Ford Focus came out with a brunette woman driving. His surveillance of the Kinrais place had shown a dark blue Ford Focus coming and going, so Jamieson perked up. He had the AI check the passenger seat, but there didn’t seem to be anyone there.

  Jamieson had the AI shift the view to the cameras he’d mounted in trees on either side of the road so that he could get a view down into a vehicle and look for the kid. The cameras were panning along the roadway under AI control, following the car and, as the car came up beside them, he saw a fat little kid sitting on some kind of booster seat in the back.

  The car went by and Jamieson sat up to pull out, going the opposite direction. He turned at the next corner and went around the block on manual, pushing the vehicle well above the speed limit so as not to lose too much ground. He rejoined the main road a couple of blocks behind the Focus and turned control back over to the car’s AI.

  Jamieson didn’t try to tell the AI to follow the Focus, instead, he directed it verbally to turn onto each road the Focus turned on. Eventually they pulled
up in front of a small cluster of buildings with a line of vehicles out front. When Jamieson went by, kids were getting out of cars and running inside. Jamieson stopped about 100 meters down the road and queried his AI for the name of the facility.

  It was the “Chapel Hill School for the Gifted.” Pompous asses, Jamieson thought, probably don’t think their kid’s shit stinks either. No big surprise that Donsaii would think her kid had to go to a school like that!

  Donsaii didn’t get out of her vehicle. The Ford Focus stopped momentarily to let the kid out and a teacher greeted him. The car drove around the circle and back out the other way. Jamieson could tell that some of the cars didn’t even have adults in them. Apparently the parents just sent the kid to school in the car, counting on the AI to take the kid to the right place and drop them off. Jamieson shrugged, it didn’t seem unreasonable since driving from one location to another was one thing AI’s were really good at.

  He wondered why Donsaii went with her kid. Maybe the kid hates school and she can’t count on him to get out when the car arrives?

  Jamieson pulled back out and followed the Focus as it left the school. He didn’t notice either of the two cars that had settled in to wait, one just past the school and one near the approach to the school.

  Unfortunately, the three members of Ell’s security team sitting in those cars didn’t notice Jamieson either.

  ***

  Ms. Binder looked out over the kids in her kindergarten classroom. They were working some simple math problems. Adding or subtracting the number of dots on dominoes that were pictured on the screens built into their desks. They were doing very well, as you might expect in a school for the gifted.

  Every one of the kids in there had tested high or they wouldn’t have been present. Still, some were smarter than others. She kind of felt bad for the kids who would have been the smartest children in their classrooms if they were going to a regular school, but here found it difficult to keep up with their classmates.

  And then there was Zage Kinrais. He’d already finished the exercise.

  That boy almost always appeared to be daydreaming. Staring off into space, not paying attention. You’d think he was a terrible student. However, whenever she called on him, he knew the answer to the question. She’d gone back to look at how he’d done on the testing to get into CHSG and he’d scored at the very top of the range for a child his age. This left her feeling conflicted. Sometimes she thought he couldn’t really be all that smart. That the test must’ve placed him so highly through some kind of a fluke.

  Other times, she wondered whether the test had failed to properly measure him because of the “ceiling effect.” Could it be that the test just didn’t ask hard enough questions to be able to tell how smart this kid actually was?

  On the other hand, could he be somewhere on the autism spectrum? Is that why he spent so much time staring off into space, yet did so well on math problems?

  She’d been wondering this for days. If he had such a problem, he should have some difficulty interacting with the other kids. Binder watched him during their play time though, and he seemed to get along fine with them. Though he gave her somewhat of a creepy feeling—as if he were out watching the kids and keeping them out of trouble just like she was.

  She started walking down the row, looking at what the kids were doing with their problems and offering suggestions for those few who were having a little trouble. She paused when she got to Zage’s chair. Her AI told her that he’d gotten them all right, so she didn’t actually need to look at his answers. He was staring off into space as if he hadn’t noticed her pausing beside his chair. She leaned down next to him, “Zage, what’s 234 times 475?”

  He immediately said, “111,150,” then he blinked, looked startled, and turned to look accusingly up at her. “Why’d you ask me that?”

  Binder looked up at her HUD and saw that her AI had confirmed 111,150 as the correct answer. She looked back down at Zage, “We aren’t actually teaching you anything here, are we?”

  Zage stared at her for a moment, then said, “You’re giving me experience in getting along with my peers.”

  A little shiver ran over her. He’d sounded like he was quoting someone else. Not knowing what to say, she turned to go back to the front of the room.

  ***

  Harald Wheat looked up at a movement in his doorway. Ell Donsaii! He stood, “Ell! What are you doing here at NCSU?”

  She gave him a little smile, “Came to consult. Wanna watch another little video with me?”

  “Sure!” he said, but feeling guilty that Ell had wasted her time traveling to see him, he said “But, why are you coming to me. You know I’d be happy to come to you wherever you want.”

  She looked around, “Wanted to see your new digs. The last time I was here… Well, I guess the only time I was here, years ago, was before the university had done all this building and remodeling. Nice office.”

  Wheat looked around at his large new office himself. “Yeah, I’ve kinda moved up in the world since someone offered me the opportunity to be the world’s first extraterrestrial biologist,” he said, giving her a wink. “But, you’re right, almost everybody’s office and lab is better than what we had back then. Some anonymous donor has been providing the University with huge amounts of money. Most of it goes to physics, but,” he shrugged, “some of it spatters on other departments—like biology.”

  “Yeah, I’d heard something about that,” Ell said enigmatically.

  “Well,” Wheat said, “since the first video you ever showed me changed my life, I’ll always be happy to have a look at whatever else you might have on tap. Is it something from BC4?”

  “I’d… rather not say where it’s from,” Ell said uncomfortably. “Is it okay if I close your office door?” she said putting her hand on the knob.

  “Of course,” Wheat said, starting to feel a bit on edge from the way Ell was behaving. In a moment, she’d put him even more on edge by getting him to swear to secrecy. This time, she wasn’t just asking him to keep it a secret for a few years before publishing, she was asking him to agree to keep it a secret forever if she deemed that what he learned was too dangerous. At first he rebelled, but then, thinking about who she was, he agreed.

  Ell said, “Please understand that my gut feeling is that you’ll be able to tell the world about this someday. But you have to go into it understanding that I might decide it’s too dangerous for the world to know about.” She spoke to her AI and a moment later the big screen on the wall of his office opened up a view on another world. Not BC4. Instead of BC4’s wildly competitive vegetation, what he saw looked more like a manicured park. Not exactly, because none of the vegetation he saw looked like it had been cut back with shears or lawnmowers or similar devices. It simply looked like it was growing… exactly where someone wanted it to grow. Plants appeared to be growing just as much as their horticulturists wanted, but no further. Plants that weren’t striving to gather sunlight at the expense of their neighbors by driving higher and higher into the air. Even the plants in a manicured park here on Earth would have been striving to rob their neighbors of the light, they just wouldn’t have been allowed to achieve those goals because of ever-vigilant trimming by landscapers.

  Then, just as Wheat was about to comment on the plant life, three animals appeared. Animals with different body plans! They were all bilaterally symmetrical, but they had different numbers of limbs! All of them had hands, which was surprising enough, but one of the three had four hands!

  And they looked like they were communicating with one another!

  Wheat closed his eyes tightly for a moment, then reopened them, but the bizarre aliens were still there. He wanted to accuse Ell of using sophisticated computer graphics to generate ridiculous and unreasonable aliens in an effort to test his gullibility. He would have accused her of that, if he hadn’t already done so when he and Ell first met, only to learn that she was showing him the reality of the world that was TC3.

  Th
e world that had changed his life.

  After a few more moments, he tore his eyes away from the screen to look at Ell. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that what I’m seeing is real. No one made it up, no matter how ridiculous it looks?”

  Ell nodded. Instead of looking amused like she had years ago when they’d first met, this time she looked completely serious.

  Wheat glanced back at the screen, then turned back to Ell. “Have you stumbled over some interstellar civilization or meeting place?” He looked at the screen once again, “‘Cause those… beings couldn’t have all come from the same place.”

  Ell shook her head, “We don’t think so.” She went over her thoughts on how unlikely it would be that intelligent beings from different worlds would be able to live in each other’s environments without significant adaptive devices. “Not only do we not see adaptive respiratory equipment, but we aren’t really finding any technologically advanced mechanisms on this world. We certainly haven’t seen any evidence that they’re scientifically advanced in ways that might allow them to travel interstellar distances.”

  “So… You’re saying that you think this one world has evolved three different intelligent species that are so different they don’t even have the same number of limbs or eyes—yet somehow, the laws of evolution have failed to eradicate the less successful and elevate the elite?”

  Ell let out a long sigh, “You’re going to have to watch more video ‘cause it’s more than three species… A lot more…”

  After some discussion, Ell left Wheat sitting in his office and watching video with more and more bewilderment. “Call me this afternoon,” she’d said, “after you’ve figured this out.” But, for the life of him, he’d never seen anything that fit quite so poorly with all that he knew.