Terraform (an Ell Donsaii story #15) Read online

  The voice of the AI speaking in his ear startled him. It said, “That water was ported here from meltwater on Greenland. They take it from water that’s about to run into the sea anyway. You won’t always get your water from there though. Sometimes you’ll be getting water from desalination plants and that water won’t be cold. You can actually request warm water if you prefer. Or you can ask for cold if that’s what you want. Usually, either one can be provided.”

  Cabo cautiously cupped his hand and dipped it back in the water. Pulling his hand out, he slurped at the cold water. Wow! That’s good!

  ***

  Later, Jillian thought it odd that the whole thing about Donsaii’s kid started in a coffee shop.

  ~~~

  She looked up as someone hurried in the door. It was Barton.

  Jillian thought that, in person, Barton didn’t quite match the image he put forth online. There he seemed neat, styled, well-groomed and entirely… together. In person his hair—obviously intended to be perfectly disheveled—looked a little out of balance. His gut wasn’t sucked in and, overall, he seemed not-quite-put-together after all. “Andy?” she asked.

  His eyes found her, and he smiled enthusiastically. Nodding, he said, “Andrew, please. You’re Jillian Pardo?”

  They’d met through their AIs. Now they were sitting down to have coffee and see what they thought of each other in person. He ordered a sweetened cappuccino while Jillian had a plain espresso. Later, she thought the cappuccino should’ve been a tipoff that they weren’t really suited for one another. That and his pissy attitude about being called Andy. Nonetheless, they engaged in pleasant chitchat. He was a detective. With a shrug and an offhand comment about doing well on tests, he managed to let her know that he was young for his position.

  “I’m an investigative journalist,” Jillian replied to his query. “I guess we both make our living asking other people questions, huh?”

  He nodded, “But the people you question usually want to answer your questions, don’t they?”

  She narrowed her eyes, “No. I don’t do fluff. You’re not listening to the ‘investigative’ part of my job title. I ask the tough questions that people don’t want to answer, or I’m not doing my job.” She leaned back, “Besides, I’ll bet a lot of the people you talk to, for instance, witnesses, are happy enough to give you answers, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” he gave a little laugh, “it’s the accused that’re the problem.” He shook his head, “If only we had some way to tell when they’re actually telling the truth.”

  Jillian gave him a wink, “Better hope they don’t actually invent a reliable lie detector. Seems like you wouldn’t have much of a job if all you had to do was just ask every possible perp whether they did it or not.”

  ~~~

  It was after the coffee was finished that Jillian asked the question that changed her life. “So, what’s the biggest case you’ve ever worked on?”

  “Andrew” was watching a cute waitress walk by. Apparently without thinking, he said, “When Donsaii’s son got kidnapped.”

  His eyes widened, as if in dismay over what he’d just said. “Just kidding,” he said quickly.

  But he looked flustered.

  Despite a significant uptick in her heartbeat, Jillian schooled her face to stillness. She waited, hoping he’d fill the stretching silence. After a moment, he did, though not helpfully. “Not a very funny joke, huh?”

  Jillian waited a little longer. Though Barton fidgeted, he didn’t say anything else. Finally, Jillian spoke herself, keeping her tone even and quiet, “I didn’t think Donsaii had a child.”

  “She doesn’t!” Barton said, quickly and emphatically. “That was just a slip of the tongue. An imaginary case I dream about sometimes.”

  Jillian waited again, but Barton didn’t fall for it. She said, “How old is the boy?”

  Barton threw his hands up in frustration, but pinched his lips together and said nothing.

  “I will find out, you know?”

  Then he blew it completely. With an exasperated look, he said, “It’s a secret!”

  She regarded him coolly, “No shit?”

  “Come on. We’re talking about Ell Donsaii. Let that woman keep her secret for God’s sake.”

  “Rich people aren’t entitled to secrets.”

  “Sure,” he said, “not bad secrets.” He shook his head, “Keeping her child a secret’s not an evil thing to do.”

  “Why’s the kid a secret then?”

  “So people won’t try to kidnap him,” Barton said, as if he thought it was obvious in view of the fact he’d found out about it because of the boy’s kidnapping.

  “Which happened anyway.” She shrugged, “Plenty of rich people have kids they don’t keep secret.”

  “Yeah,” Barton said, “but the famous ones try to keep their kids out of the public eye and away from the paparazzi.”

  “But they don’t deny their existence.”

  Looking stiffly angry, Barton stood up, “I guess we won’t be seeing any more of each other.”

  Jillian leaned back in her chair and picked up her espresso, “That doesn’t break my heart.”

  Stiffly, Barton strode out. Jillian thought he’d have banged the coffee shop door if it wasn’t on a hydraulic damper. “Bye, Andy…” she said sarcastically. In her mind she was already working out how to find Donsaii’s kid.

  ***

  Lindy Thompson looked up from the remains of her lunch and eyed Mark Wilson, “No rest for the wicked my good doctor. Time to receive our mice.”

  A twinkle in his eye, Mark sighed and stood up. “And here I thought I went to medical school so I could take care of people. Instead, I find myself working on rodents.”

  “Aw, don’t worry. Mice’re way cuter than people. You’re gonna love em’.” She did a back flip out of her chair. That wasn’t terribly difficult on Mars, but it took skill to land it without stumbling.

  ~~~

  They went to the section of tunnel they called the “transporter room” because it had a large number of ports that connected back to D5R or NASA. They’d received and assembled the cages for the mice yesterday. Today D5R was porting them the actual animals. The mice would arrive, having been under a gas anesthetic delivered into their little chambers back on Earth. The anesthetic was the new one that’d been used to send Phil Zabrisk to Earth and back. Ordinary inhalational anesthetics diminished the seizures, postictal lethargy and diminished mental acuity associated with passing through a port, but this new one was far more effective. With the previous anesthetics, it’d been important to keep the subject anesthetized for a while after they passed through the port. In fact, they’d kept Phil under for days. However, after numerous animal trials using this new gas, it’d been decided that it was okay to discontinue the anesthetic as soon as the mice passed through.

  The mice’d be breathing out the anesthetic in their system after they arrived. Because the animals were small, it wouldn’t amount to a lot of anesthetic per mouse. However, since they were taking delivery of hundreds of mice, Mark set up a port over the middle of the table that vented out to Mars. This’d suck up a lot of the anesthetic breathed out by the mice, hopefully keeping it from affecting Mark and Lindy. Turning on the port, he said, “I’m ready.”

  Lindy nodded and spoke to her AI. A minute later a long tube, containing 25 mice in little individual chambers shot out of the port up near the ceiling, down a pair of rails and out onto the table.

  It felt like the speed they sent the tube through the port was reckless. This despite the fact that Mark knew that the longer an animal spent transiting the port, the more severe port-transit symptoms tended to be. The people back on Earth had a set of steeply inclined rails the tube accelerated down. It was flying by the time it came through the port.

  The chambers had been changed over to oxygen and flushed out as soon as they came through. Lindy and Mark carefully watched the mice to make sure they were all breathing. Mark opened a port t
o flush more oxygen through the chamber of a mouse that seemed to have suppressed respirations, then popped open the chamber and stimulated the little fellow with a finger. In a minute or two all of them were starting to wriggle. He and Lindy began popping open the chambers and lifting the mice out into the heated cage they had waiting.

  When all of the mice were up and walking around, Lindy signaled D5R and they delivered another tube of twenty-five mice.

  The whole thing went pretty well. In fact, he thought, getting 200 of the mice into a vacuum-proof carrier so they could take them up to their cages in the domes was significantly more difficult than getting them from Earth.

  The mice consisted of 400 genetically identical clones—except that half were male and half were female. Half of them had then been subjected to some kind of genetic modification that was supposed to make them radiation resistant. Stepping out onto the surface in his Mars suit, Mark shook his head, But, they claim this gene modification was performed when the mice were eight weeks old. It’s hard to imagine a post-embryonic modification making a significant difference. Even if a gene changed the cells it affected and actually made them radiation resistant, you’d only be able to get the gene into a small percentage of the cells. The rest of the cells, the ones the gene didn’t penetrate, they’d still get cancer.

  And that cancer’d still kill you…

  Mark wondered whether the reason he was so pessimistic came from the impression he got every time he stepped out on the surface of Mars. Even though he knew it couldn’t be true, he had the feeling that he could sense the radiation sleeting through him.

  They set up a double colony of 100 of the mice—fifty radiation-resistant and fifty without the gene—in the dome that had a meter of water shielding it from radiation. Another colony of 100 mice went into the dome that wasn’t radiation shielded and a third colony stayed in the tunnels beneath the surface of Mars. One more colony had stayed home on Earth. In theory, only the colony in the dome without radiation shielding would have trouble, but there was some concern that even the ones in the tunnels and in the shielded dome might have unexpected problems. There were concerns about the effects of Mars’ low gravity on subsequent generations. So, they intended to follow the mice through several lifespans.

  Trying to keep a positive outlook, Mark said to himself, If this gene mod does work, maybe it’ll be something they can give me to keep me from feeling crazy every time I step out on the surface. Or, even if the modification doesn’t help, maybe we’ll find out that the radiation here doesn’t cause as many problems as we think it might.

  ***

  Carley woke in a panic. It took a few seconds for her to realize she’d been awakened by a loud thump outside her bedroom. It reminded her all too much of the way she’d often wakened as a child—when dad came home drunk.

  She rolled over and looked off the edge of her bed to see whether the sound woke up her brother Eli.

  Eli’s sleeping mat was empty.

  Gritting her teeth against the sinking feeling in her stomach, Carley got up and went to the door. Steeling herself, she opened the door and stepped out into the main room. She shared a two-bedroom apartment with another grad student. Other than the two bedrooms and a shared bathroom, the apartment only had one other large room. That room had the kitchen at one end and a living area on the other end. There was a dining table in between.

  In the dim light, she saw someone sprawled on the floor of the living area. A chubby someone. “Eli?” she whispered.

  He didn’t respond. She turned on the light and quietly walked over to him, not wanting to wake her roommate. Her roommate wasn’t happy about having Carley’s brother live with them, even though Carley promised it’d be brief.

  Leaning down, she confirmed that the sprawled person was, in fact, her brother. She shook his shoulder and urgently whispered, “Eli!”

  “Huh?” he said blearily, rolling enough to gaze up at her. He smiled, “Carleey.”

  His breath stank of booze, appallingly reminding Carley of their alcoholic father.

  The father who’d killed their mother in a drunken rage—thus orphaning Carley and Eli.

  “Get up!” Carley hissed, tugging at his arm.

  Eli rose to his hands and knees. He started to get up the rest of the way, then, apparently speaking from experience, said, “Better crawl.” He followed her to her room in that fashion.

  Just before they went into the room, Carley’s roommate cracked open her door and gave them a disgusted look.

  ~~~

  Carley lay awake the rest of the night, alternately horrified that her brother appeared to be a drunk like her father, then thinking that at least he didn’t seem violent like their dad.

  Yet.

  It was good she couldn’t sleep. That way she was awake and could guide him to the bathroom when he threw up.

  ***

  White House, Washington DC— In apparently unscripted remarks, President Stockton again expressed her hope that the group behind the Gordito website would come forward to be recognized. She mused that, before she leaves office next January, she’d like to award the nation’s highest honors to the group that stopped the modified smallpox virus. She appeared flustered when a reporter asked her whether there was any evidence that Gordito was actually based in the United States. Stockton admitted she didn’t know for a fact that Gordito was based in the US, but that some kind of award could still be arranged, even if Gordito turned out to be from another country. She said, “Those people saved billions of lives and should be recognized, no matter where they’re from…”

  ***

  Vanessa’s AI told her she had a call from Zage Kinrais. “Put him through,” she said, dreading the expected discussion of the status of his paper.

  “Hi Vanessa,” Zage said. Without any further pleasantries, he said, “Sorry to bug you, but I’ve been wondering about our paper on the weight-loss peptide. With everything that’s been happening in the last few months, I’ve just gotten around to realizing it’s been quite a while. I don’t know how long it usually takes to get a paper into shape for publication, but hasn’t it been kind of a long time?”

  “Yeah,” she sighed, “it’s a long time. Especially since Dr. Turner only made a couple of minor changes to the manuscript you gave me.” She sighed, “The holdup’s because the peptide presumably has some economic value. Dr. Turner felt it should be submitted to the university’s technology office for evaluation. I’m sorry, I should’ve told you about it before now.”

  “Oh,” Zage said thoughtfully. “I can understand submitting it to the technology office, but why would that keep it from being turned into the Journal?”

  “Um, you can’t get a patent on a technology after it’s been published. So, since the peptide might be commercially valuable, any patents have to be applied for before we submit it.”

  “Really?” he said dubiously.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So, has the technology office submitted a patent application yet?”

  “The last I heard they were using nondisclosure agreements to show it to a number of pharmaceutical companies. They don’t want to spend their own money getting a patent. They’d rather sell the rights to a big corporation and let the company pay for the patent with its money.”

  “Are patents really that expensive?”

  “They’re pretty expensive,” Vanessa said slowly. “I don’t know exactly how much they cost, but I think even patents on simple mechanical devices tend to run in the $15-30,000 range. I’ve heard patents on biological molecules can be a lot more expensive but I don’t know how much more. Also, we may have trouble because it can be difficult to get a patent on naturally occurring molecules or gene sequences. As I understand it, the argument’s that if I patented something like insulin, that’d be unfair since the patent would let me, in theory, charge you for having insulin in your bloodstream regulating your sugar levels.”

  “Oh…” Zage said, the pause sounding like he was deep in thou
ght. “But, since the peptide isn’t naturally occurring that doesn’t affect us, right?”

  “It isn’t?” Vanessa said, startled. “I thought you cited some obscure paper as the source of the peptide’s sequence.”

  “Um, no. It’s an amino acid sequence I thought would bind at the receptor responsible for flipping off Trim28 expression. The obscure paper’s about how a peptide from HA-36 flips Trim28 off.”

  “HA-36’s the obesity virus, right?”

  “Uh-huh. It’d be more accurate to say it’s associated with obesity. It’s actually a cold virus.”

  “But you got the sequence for the peptide from HA-36’s molecule that normally flips that Trim28 receptor, right?”

  “Not really. Flipping off that receptor’d be bad since reducing expression of Trim28 makes you obese. So, I came up with a different peptide. One I thought would be a high-affinity ligand that’d block that receptor.”

  “You ‘came up with’ a peptide?”

  “Um…”

  “How do you come up with a de novo peptide that’ll bind a receptor without activating it? I thought you found it in the literature somewhere?”

  “No.” Zage sighed. “It’s not in the literature. But, knowing the sequence that normally binds that receptor and activates it…” he trailed off as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say next.

  Feeling dubious, Vanessa said, “So, you know a sequence that binds the receptor and activates it. How does that get you to a sequence that binds the receptor but doesn’t activate it?”

  Zage brightened, “Well, I had a little help.”

  “From whom?” Vanessa asked with a sinking feeling. Whoever actually came up with the peptide’s sequence would have a strong claim to it.

  “You’ve heard of the Gordito website? The one that—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of Gordito and its vaccines,” Vanessa said, venting a little frustration. “I’m not some kind of clueless idiot.”