Ancestor Page 4

  “Sorry, I can’t wait,” Bobby said. “Besides, Doc Rhumkorrf doesn’t really need any more lessons. I’ll take him out next time.”

  Colding checked his watch: 10:50 A.M. Rhumkorrf & Co. had been at it for three hours now and would soon finish. Colding hurried inside, leaving Brady and Gunther to get Bobby turned around quickly.

  Hopefully this time, unlike the last fifteen embryonic runs, Colding would be able to report to Danté with some good news.

  NOVEMBER 7: SHE’S GOT BALLS

  THE TINY, FLOATING ball of cells could not think, could not react. It could not feel. If it could, it would have felt only one thing …

  Fear.

  Fear at the monster floating close by. Amorphous, insidious, unrelenting, the monster reached out with flowing tendrils that touched the ball of cells, tasting the surface.

  The floating ball vibrated a little each time one of its cells completed mitosis, splitting from one cell into two daughter cells. And that happened rapidly … more rapidly than in any other animal, any other life-form. Nothing divided this fast, this efficiently. So fast the living balls vibrated every three or four minutes, cells splitting, doubling their number over and over again.

  The floating balls had begun as a cow’s single-celled egg. Now? Only the outer membrane could truly be called bovine. The interior contained a unique genome that was mostly something else.

  The amorphous monster? A macrophage, a white blood cell, a hunter/killer taken from that same cow’s blood and dropped into a petri dish with the hybrid egg.

  The monster’s tendrils reached out, boneless, shapeless, flowing like intelligent water. They caressed the rapidly dividing egg, sensing chemicals, tasting the egg for one purpose only:

  To see if the egg was self.

  It was not. The egg was other.

  And anything other had to be destroyed.

  JIAN KNEW, EVEN at this early stage, that failure had come calling once again.

  She, Claus Rhumkorrf, Erika Hoel and Tim Feely watched the giant monitor that took up an entire wall of the equipment-packed genetics lab. The monitor’s upper-right-hand corner showed green numbers: 72/150. The rest of the huge screen showed a grid of squares, ten high, fifteen across. Over half of those squares were black. The remaining squares each showed a grainy-gray picture of a highly magnified embryo.

  The “150” denoted the number of embryos alive when the experiment began. Fifty cows, three genetically modified eggs from each cow, each egg tricked into replicating without fertilization. As soon as a fertilized egg, called a zygote, split into two daughter cells it became an embryo, a growing organism. Each embryo sat in a petri dish filled with a nutrient-rich solution and immune system elements from the same cow: macrophages, natural killer cells and T-lymphocytes, elements that combined to work as the body’s own special-ops assassins targeted at viruses, bacteria and other harmful pathogens.

  The “72” represented the number of embryos still alive, not yet destroyed by the voracious white blood cells.

  Jian watched the counter change to 68/150.

  Rhumkorrf seemed to vibrate with anger, the frequency of that vibration increasing ever so slightly each time the number dropped. He was only a hair taller than Jian, but she outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds. His eyes looked wide and buglike behind thick, black-framed glasses. The madder he became, the more he shook. The more he shook, the more his comb-over came apart, exposing his shiny balding pate.

  65/150

  “This is ridiculous,” Erika said, her cultured Dutch accent dripping with disgust. Jian glared at the demure woman. She hated Hoel, not only because she was a complete bitch, but also because she was so pretty and feminine, all the things that Jian was not. Hoel wore her silvery-gray hair in a tight bun that revealed a haughty face. She had the inevitable wrinkles due any forty-five-year-old woman, but nothing that even resembled a laugh line. Hoel looked so pale Jian often wondered if the woman had seen anything but the inside of a sunless lab for the last thirty years.

  61/150

  “Time?” Rhumkorrf asked.

  Jian, Tim and Erika automatically looked at their watches, but the question was meant for Erika.

  “Twenty-one minutes, ten seconds,” she said.

  “Remove the failures from the screen,” Rhumkorrf said through clenched teeth. Tim Feely quietly typed in a few keystrokes. The black squares disappeared. Sixty-one squares, now much larger, remained.

  Tim was Jian’s assistant, a biologist with impressive bioinformatics skills. He wasn’t on Jian’s level, of course, but his multidisciplinary approach bridged the gap between Jian’s computer skills and Erika’s biological expertise. He was bigger than Rhumkorrf, but not by much. Jian hated the fact that even though the project had two men and two women, she was always the largest person in the room.

  Jian focused on one of the squares. The tiny embryo sat helpless, a gray, translucent cluster of cells defined by a whitish circle. At sixteen cells, the terminology changed from embryo to morula, Latin for mulberry, so named for its resemblance to the fruit. It normally took a mammalian embryo a few days to reach the morula stage—Jian’s creatures reached this stage in just twenty minutes.

  Left alone, the morula would continue to divide until it became a hollow ball of cells known as a blastocyst. But to keep growing, a blastocyst had to embed itself into the lining of a mother’s uterus. And that could never happen as long as the cow’s immune system treated the embryo like a harmful foreign body.

  54/150

  Jian focused on a single square. From the morula’s left, a macrophage began oozing into view, moving like an amoeba, extending pseudopodia as it slid and reached.

  All along the wall-sized monitor, the white squares steadily blinked their way to blackness.

  48/150

  “Dammit,” Rhumkorrf hissed, and Jian wondered how he could speak so clearly with his teeth pressed together like that.

  The macrophage operated on chemicals, grabbing molecules from the environment and reacting to them. The morula’s outer membrane, the zona pellucida, was the same egg membrane taken from the cow. That meant it was 100 percent natural, native to the cow, something macrophages would almost never attack. But what lay inside that outer shell was something created by Jian … Jian and her God Machine.

  34/150

  “Clear them out again,” Rhumkorrf said.

  Tim tapped the keys. The black squares again disappeared: the remaining grayish squares grew even larger.

  Instantly, the larger squares started blinking to black.

  24/150

  “Fuck,” Erika said in a decidedly uncultured tone.

  Inside the morula, a cell quivered. Its sides pinched in, the shape changing from a circle to an hourglass. Mitosis. A macrophage tendril reached the morula, touched it, almost caressing it.

  14/150

  The macrophage’s entire amorphous body slid into view, a grayish, shapeless mass.

  9/150

  The squares steadily blinked out, their blackness mocking Jian, reminding her of her lack of skill, her stupidity, her failure.

  4/150

  The macrophage moved closer to the morula. The dividing cell quivered once more, and the single cell became two. Growth, success, but it was too late.

  1/150

  The macrophage’s tendrils encircled the ball, then touched on the other side, surrounding it. The tendrils joined, engulfing the prey.

  The square turned black, leaving only a white-lined grid and a green number.

  0/150

  “Well, that was just spectacular,” Rhumkorrf said. “Absolutely spectacular.”

  “Oh, please,” Erika said. “I really don’t want to hear it.”

  Rhumkorrf turned to face her. “You’re going to hear it. We have to produce results. For heaven’s sake, Erika, you’ve built your whole career on this process.”

  “That was different. The quagga and the zebra are almost genetically identical. This thing we’re creating
is artificial, Claus. If Jian can’t produce a proper genome, the experiment is flawed to begin with.”

  Jian wanted to find a place to hide. Rhumkorrf and Erika had been lovers once, but no more. Now they fought like a divorced couple.

  Erika jerked her thumb at Jian. “It’s her fault. All she can do is give me an embryo with a sixty-five percent success probability. I need at least ninety percent to have any chance.”

  “You’re both responsible,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’re missing something here. Specific proteins are producing the signals that trigger the immune response. You have to figure out which genes are producing the offending proteins.”

  “We’ve looked,” Erika said. “We’ve gone over it again and again. The computer keeps analyzing, we keep making changes, but the same thing happens every time.”

  Rhumkorrf slowly ran a hand over his head, putting his comb-over mostly back in place. “We’re too close to it. We’ve got to change our way of thinking. I know the fatal flaw is staring us in the face, we just don’t recognize it.”

  Tim stood up and stretched. He ran both hands through his short-but-thick blond locks, looking directly at Rhumkorrf when he did. Jian wondered if Tim did that on purpose, to mock Rhumkorrf’s thinning hair.

  “We’ve been over this a hundred times,” Tim said. “I’m already reviewing all of Jian and Erika’s work on top of doing my own.”

  Erika let out a huff. “As if you could even understand my work, you idiot.”

  “You shut up!” Jian said. “You do not talk to Tim like that.”

  Erika smirked, first at Jian, then at Tim. “Such a big man, Tim. You need a fat old woman to fight your battles for you?”

  Tim’s body stayed perfectly still except for his right hand, which extended and flipped Erika the middle finger.

  “That will be enough, Mister Feely,” Rhumkorrf said. “If you’re not smart enough to contribute to the work, the least you could do is shut your mouth and focus your worthless brain on running your little computer.”

  Tim’s hands clenched into fists. Jian felt so bad for him. All his life, Tim Feely had probably been used to being the smartest person in the room. Here, he was the dumbest—something Claus never let him forget.

  “I realize we’re all frustrated,” Rhumkorrf said, “but we have to find a way to think in new directions. We’re so close, can’t you all feel it?”

  His bug-eyed glare swept around the room, eliciting delayed nods of agreement from all of them. They were close, maddeningly so. Jian just couldn’t find that missing piece. It almost made her long for the days before the medicine, when the ideas came freer, faster. But no, that wouldn’t do—she knew all too well where that led.

  Rhumkorrf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I want you all to think about something.” He put the glasses back on. “It took us an hour to conduct this experiment. In that hour, at least four people died from organ failure. Four people who would have lived if they had a replacement. In twenty-four hours, almost a hundred people will die. Perhaps you should consider that before you start bickering again.”

  Jian, Tim and even Erika stared at the floor.

  “Whatever it takes,” Rhumkorrf said. “Whatever it takes, we will make this happen. We’ve just failed the immune response test for the sixteenth time. All of you, go work from your rooms. Maybe if we stop sniping at each other, we can find that last obstacle and eliminate it.”

  Jian nodded, then walked out of the lab and headed back to her small apartment. Sixteen immune response tests, sixteen failures. She had to find a way to make number seventeen work, had to, because millions of lives depended on her and her alone.

  NOVEMBER 8: GAME … OVER?

  DANTÉ PAGLIONE SAT behind his massive white marble desk, watching, waiting. His brother, Magnus, sat on the other side of the desk, reclining in one of the two leather chairs, cell phone pressed to his left ear, eyes narrowed. Magnus’s nostrils flared open, shut. Open, shut. His thumb constantly spun the Grey Cup championship ring on his right hand. The office lights gleamed off of Magnus’s shaved head.

  To anyone else in the world, Magnus looked perfectly calm. In truth he was. Always. At least on the surface. But Danté had known Magnus all of his life, and he could tell when something chewed at his little brother’s guts.

  “Continue,” Magnus said into the phone.

  Danté looked to his office wall, taking in the series of original Leonardo da Vinci sketches. Da Vinci’s work was the epitome of control, of calmness, methodical execution of perfection. Things that Danté strived for in all phases of his life.

  “Elaborate,” Magnus said into the phone. His nose flared again, just a little. He sat up slowly until his back was perfectly straight. Separated by only a year and a half, Danté and Magnus looked extremely similar—both had violet eyes, a big jaw, both were tall and solid, but Magnus had spent far more time in the weight room and it showed.

  Although the two were instantly recognizable as brothers, the youngest had another key differentiator—he just looked dangerous. The thin scar running from his left eyebrow down to his left cheek was a big part of that look. And when Magnus focused like he was focusing now, staring off into nothing, that cold brain processing all the information, the truth was that Danté’s kid brother looked creepy as fuck.

  Magnus folded the phone, casually slid it into an inside pocket of his tailored sport coat, then sat back slowly and crossed his left leg over his right knee. “The Novozyme facility in Denmark blew up.”

  “Blew up? The animal rights activists bombed it?”

  “Somewhat bigger than that,” Magnus said. “Our little NSA hacker friend isn’t sure, but she thinks it was a fuel-air explosive.”

  Danté let out a slow breath. He didn’t have to ask what that meant. There was only one reason to incinerate a billion-dollar facility: a virus had jumped species. “What about Matal and his staff?”

  “Dead,” Magnus said. “He was in the facility. The entire main staff is gone.”

  Danté nodded. Novozyme was Genada’s primary competitor. Matal had been their answer to Claus Rhumkorrf. You could always build new facilities, but you couldn’t replace talent like Rhumkorrf or Matal. In the gold rush for viable xenotransplantation, Novozyme was no longer a factor.

  “This works for us,” Danté said. “Novozyme is out of the game.”

  Magnus smiled, just a little. “I’m afraid the game is over. For everyone. The G8 are cooperating to shut all of us down. Farm Girl says Fischer is in charge, and he’s starting with us.”

  Farm Girl. The code name for their NSA contact. She would never reveal her real name. Only Magnus spoke with her. Farm Girl’s information was always reliable, and she was right—if Fischer was coming their way, it meant major problems.

  Anger, annoyance and anxiety all flared up in Danté’s chest. Fischer had come after Genada when Galina Poriskova tried to blow the whistle on the surrogate mother fetal experiments. Danté had hired P. J. Colding and Tim Feely to clean up the mess and get rid of any evidence. If those two hadn’t succeeded, Fischer would have shut the company down and probably sent Danté and Magnus to jail.

  Magnus’s smile faded, his blank expression returned. “Kind of ironic, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “That we get shut down over a virus jumping species, and yet our specific line of work ensures that can’t happen. If only you hadn’t kept that a secret, Danté, the G8 would leave us be.”

  “We couldn’t announce our method. If we had, Novozyme and Monsanto and the others would have tried to copy it.”

  Magnus shrugged and raised his eyebrows, a gesture that said oh well.

  It was bad, but perhaps not that bad. Danté could find a way to make it work. “What if we tell them now? I can call Fischer. Or better yet, have Colding do it. They have a history.”

  Magnus laughed. “They’re not exactly poker buddies. And anyway, it’s too late now. They won’t believe our methods are safe, not after Novozym
e’s accident. It’s over.”

  Danté took a deep breath. He let it out, slow and controlled. There was always a way. He hadn’t made Genada one of the world’s largest biotechs by sitting around waiting for something to happen. He succeeded because he always thought ahead.

  “We knew it might come to this,” Danté said. “That’s why we have the plane.”

  Magnus stared for several seconds. His right hand rubbed at his left forearm, the fabric hissing quietly in the silent room. His nostrils were flaring again.

  “Danté, you can’t be serious about actually using that thing.”

  “Of course I’m serious. You think we spent fifty million dollars on something so we don’t use it when we need it most? Rhumkorrf is close. They could have an embryo within a few weeks.”

  “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” Magnus said. “Funny how I’ve heard the phrase within a few weeks for the last six months.”

  “Rhumkorrf produces results, Magnus. Venter’s artificial bacteria, bringing the quagga back from extinction … every project he touches ends in success. He’s been producing Nobel-quality work since he was ten years old.”

  “Has he also been racking up billion-dollar debts since he was ten years old?”

  “Screw the debt,” Danté said. “We’ve invested far too much money to abandon this.”

  “Invested? Is that what you still call it? We’re broke. The well has run dry. Do you have any idea what it costs to actually fly that contraption?”

  “I know.”

  “And what about Sara Purinam and her crew? That makes four new noses deep in our business. The more people, the more chance for infiltration.”

  “Now you sound like Colding.”

  The small smile returned. “A rare occurrence, I assure you, but sometimes Colding is right. Every person we add is a risk, or did you already forget about Galina?”

  Danté’s face felt hot. He didn’t like to talk about that girl, not with his brother. “No, I haven’t forgotten her. But we have to bring in Purinam and her crew. We just don’t have a choice.”

  “Of course we have a choice. We had a choice with Galina.”