Double Helix Ch. 18

"I could use more data," he told us. "Lots more. Finer degrees of the factors we've identified so far, soil alkalinity and moisture, with a greater sample size. I wonder if we push the pH up to 9.0 if the trend line will continue. It might be enough to halt the plant's life cycle completely. That's not really my area of expertise, though."

"We've got that covered soon," Tilly said. "Ed will be here in a few more days."

In fact, we picked up two new people from Eugene at once. In a strange twist of fate, Ed and Dawn, the agronomist and microbiologist that Tilly had selected, lived on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay, about a hundred miles apart. Ed had worked on his family's large farming operation in California's Sacramento Valley, while Dawn had been a research scientist for an agricultural biotech firm in Palo Alto named Foodtech.

Ed gushed over the greenhouse operation as we gave them a tour of the farm. "You've been operating it for ten months without a single incidence of Rot?" He was an Eidetic who looked perfectly ordinary other than being more attractive than the average, courtesy of routine embryonic genetic cleansing. His enhancement gave him perfect recall, and his knowledge of crop characteristics and farming methods was encyclopedic.

"We've been lucky," Tilly said. "I'm thinking we'll lose about one crop a year on average, but as long as all of the protocols are followed, it shouldn't spread to the other compartments, so the damage will be minimal. Then we just sterilize the soil and any surfaces that might have been contaminated. I'm actually looking forward to our first infection as a stress test for the system."

Dawn was not at all what I had expected. A cute blonde about my height, which was shorter than average for a genemod, and classically bookish in appearance and manner, lacking only glasses to complete the portrait. Like Ed, she exhibited no obvious physical genemod characteristics. Hedonics like herself had enhancements to their limbic, endocrine, and peripheral nervous systems. She had been genetic engineering's very literal answer to parents who said, "I just want my child to be happy." Hedonics experienced pleasure nearly constantly and in a way that was almost spiritual in its depth and intensity. Those I had met had been bubbly, always smiling and touching others, and optimistic almost to the point of parody.

Dawn was not bubbly, and if she was optimistic, she didn't show it. On arriving at the genetics lab, she had made the rounds, inspecting the equipment up close, even to the point of getting an annoyed look from Nissi when she peeked into the refrigerator and checked over the contents of the containers inside. "It'll do," was all she said.

By the end of that week, Tilly's research project had grown in size many times, incorporating six different plant types, including two crops that were known to grow well in slightly alkaline soil. They would be pushing the limit on those to see if they could find a point where the Rot wouldn't take hold, but the plants would still survive and grow.

Ed spent the majority of his time either tending to and observing the testing plots, or in the greenhouse tending our crops. His reverence for the engineering work that Tilly had achieved began to give way to his own practical expertise, and he started to suggest ways to pull even greater yields from our limited growing space.

Dawn and Stanley split their time between the test field and the lab and seemed to have a great professional rapport. Dawn suggested that we run experiments on the Rot itself, tracking and observing its lifecycle in controlled lab conditions. All of the data they collected was fed through the darknet to other experts in Agency safe houses and in foreign universities. Some characteristics of Rot were well-known by most people in the civilized world. Its cross-species virulence, for example, and its ability to produce encysted spores that would saturate soil and remained in a state of suspended animation in harsh conditions. As Tilly had discovered, the depth of information that you would expect to be gathered and analyzed by experts was strangely missing. They sought to close those gaps.

The three of them slept in the lab's living quarters, but as I had done for Alice, and with help from my housemates, I worked on renovating the farmhouse to the west, seated on a farm on the other side of the orchard. Fees from Agora and donated money continued to come in at a rate of several thousand dollars a month, and I used a chunk of that money to buy solar panels and batteries to provide their home with power generation and power storage.

One morning I spotted Dawn working alone out in the test field. The research team had gone through several generations of plants, recording their infection, decline, and death. The closest thing to a success had been a batch of asparagus that had avoided Rot infection only by virtue of being planted in highly alkaline soil. The only problem was that alkaline soil inhibits the solubility of the soil, reducing the amount of nutrients available. Those plants had stopped growing and had eventually sickened and died because of it.

She looked up as I approached and went right back to her clipboard. "I'm busy right now, so if you need something, it'll probably need to wait."

I didn't let her curt tone dissuade me. "I noticed you were alone and thought you could use some help."

She looked at me as if genuinely surprised by the question. "Oh. Well, I suppose I have something for you to do." She flipped through the pages on the clipboard and extracted a sheet. "Go to the plants indicated on the grid and dig them up. Be careful not to harm their root systems if you can. You can use that wheelbarrow if you want."

"Doing a post-mortem?" I asked, taking the sheet from her.

"Something like that," she said, her expression never changing.

"Okay, I can do that." I said. I looked at the sheet, which had a string of letter-number combinations separated by commas. "Um..."

Dawn laughed. "Letter for column, number for row. Left to right, top to bottom, top is north."

I turned 90 degrees to face north. "Oh, that makes sense." I went to A4 and knelt, digging carefully with a trowel. "You know you don't do that very often."

"What?" she said impatiently.

"Laugh. I've known some genemods of your model, but you're kind of an outlier."

"Yeah, it took a lot of effort," she said.

I carefully extracted the potato plant and its roots, which had deep pockets of black on its surface and felt slightly squishy. The leaves had turned brown and started to fall off, and the stem was spotted black. "Nasty," I said, wrinkling my nose at the fetid smell. "What are you going to do with this poor soldier?"

She frowned, obviously annoyed that I was distracting her from her work. "We're going to take samples of the oomycete and look for genetic polymorphism by comparing it with the samples from other plants. Most water molds specialize in targeting one species of plant, and they do that by deceiving or otherwise neutralizing that particular plant's natural defense against pathogens. This thing acts like the Swiss army knife of plant pathogens. One way to do that is for it to adapt somehow on the fly to the plant it encounters to overcome its natural defenses. That's the dominant theory, and it's stupid. Evolution is driven by environmental pressures. Nothing in nature could pressure these little bugs to suddenly find a way to attack everything in sight."

"And your theory?"

"I think that the adaptation might be random or semi-random. I think that the parasite puts out many different versions of itself, perhaps hundreds of variations, and that each one is adapted to a particular species. If that's the case, it rules out Rot being a natural occurrence. It means that someone modeled the genome in multiple dimensions, perhaps incorporating recursive or even fractal principles into the design."

"What did Tilly say when you told her?"

Dawn shrugged. "She's the one who suggested higher dimensions. When I started to picture it that way, I could see the elegance of it. I'll tell you right out that I'm intelligent, very intelligent, but she is exceedingly brilliant. It's too bad we didn't see more G's born before genemodding was outlawed. They would have changed the world."

"My sister was a Gena," I said. "She was just like that: on a whole different level from the rest of us." Before Dawn could ask, I added, "She was reverted."

"Wow, that sucks," she said, the forcefulness in her tone commensurate with someone witnessing the destruction of a priceless piece of art. "I'm sorry."

"So am I," I said. I realized that I was neglecting the work, so I moved on to the next potato plant. "What did you mean a minute ago, about having to work at it?"

"What? Oh, that. It's simple, really. How many Dons have you known?"

I thought for a moment. "I've met three before you."

"How successful were they? Any of them wealthy or famous?"

"Well, no, I don't think so."

"Uh huh," she said, "And that's the problem. No drive. We're wired to be happy, no matter what life throws at us. When I was younger, I might get excited about some project, but it wasn't enough for sustained work. It's a bit like having ADD. What's worse is that other people tend not to take us seriously when we have a hard time staying serious about anything."

"So...what? You worked at being unhappy?"

She rolled her eyes. "Not exactly." She paused, frowning. "Okay, I guess you could say that. I have to constantly reframe to take the positive spin off of new events. I had to train myself to repress my excitement over new stimuli and focus on the negative consequences of failure to stay focused. I do it reflexively now."

It was crazy, like the inverse of every self-help book ever written. Think negatively. "Well, you don't have to worry about the people here taking not you seriously. You can relax and enjoy yourself more if you want to."

She chuckled wryly. "They warned me about you, you know. Wendy and Nock, anyway. They said you like to fix people."

"And I just got you to laugh again," I said.

She shook her head. "It's not like I don't know how to enjoy myself. I just keep a lid on it, for the sake of the work I want to accomplish."

"If you say so," I said.

"I do. Now you volunteered to help, so quit goofing off and get back to work."

I knew that I might be starting down a slippery slope when I agreed to allow Tilly's assistants to join us. Within days of the news that we had accepted Stanley, Dawn, and Ed, we began to get inundated with requests from more genemods who wanted to come to the farm, offering their help. Nock took care of those, thanking petitioners for their interest, but informing them that we were not taking applicants at this time.

I was working on the house that the new recruits would be moving into when Stan came to talk to me. He found me upstairs installing the cabinetry for the master bath. "Looks like it's coming right along," he said, stepping over the pieces of water-damaged cabinets that I had ripped out and left on the bedroom floor. I was standing in the bathroom behind the new set of cabinets I had constructed.

I laughed ruefully. "After this is done, I get to replace all of the moldy carpet in the upstairs bedrooms and rip out a bunch of corroded wiring. Then there's the drywall ceilings."

"What happened to this place?"

"Mostly water damage from the leaking roof," I said. "That was the first thing I fixed."

"Good call," he said. "Hey, I had an idea that I need to run by you."

"Sure," I said, smiling, "but since you're here, you've gotta give me a hand with this. Hand me that drill there, will you?"

Stan passed the tool to me. "You know how Tilly's been so busy working on the new aquaponics thing and her Rot research. I'm still working on the next phase of the darknet and I thought-"

"You want to recruit someone to replace Tilly," I finished for him. I spun up the drill and drove a couple of holes into the wall, biting into the stud, before he could respond.

"Uh, yeah," he said once I stopped and the noise had died. "Two people, actually."

I shook my head. "That's five people total. Do you know how many bedrooms we have in this house?"

"Four," he said drily.

"Yep," I said, and drilled two more holes. "Have you talked to Tilly about our greenhouse production? How much will that dig into our excess output?"

"No, I hadn't mentioned it to her."

"Do that," I said. "And get back to me. Now give me a hand with this."

Stan helped me maneuver the cabinet against the wall so that I could anchor it. I was giving him a hard time, but I was serious about the food production. Every new person we brought to the farm cut into our supply and the amount of excess we could sell through Andy.

Stan returned a couple of hours later with Tilly. "All five together cuts our income from Andy by three thousand a month," she said, "but I think it's worth it, and we should get our first aquaponics facilities up and running in January or February of next year. Stan's working on a mesh network architecture that can remove us from the internet completely. I can remain in an advisory role, but I just don't have time to sit down and hack code, and we can't just leave things how they are. Don't forget we were almost hacked on Christmas day last year. We still don't know who did it or why."

"SamIAm seems to know," I groused. "He just doesn't feel like telling us without speaking in riddles. Anyway, you say it's worth it and won't make us starve. Let's do it. Have you picked your people yet?"

Stan nodded. "Yeah, there's two that are very interested. Sterling credentials. MIT and Berkeley graduates. One of them wrote an excellent postdoctoral paper on mesh networks."

"Sounds good," I said. "If you think they'll be a good fit, bring 'em aboard. Just make sure they know that one of them is going to have to sleep in the lab building for the time being. The next group we allow in might have to be a construction crew."

A few weeks later, in late September, Stan and Stansy went to meet our new people at the usual spot in Eugene, with Alice on scouting duty. I made sure to be back at the house when they pulled up in our spare truck, the one that had belonged to Jack, Alice's husband. Nock was there waiting as well. He had helped vet these two, so had spoken to them frequently.

Stan stepped out and released the seat to slide forward. A man climbed out and dropped to the ground, landing in a powerful and graceful crouch. He looked Japanese, with black hair down to his shoulders, but was nearly as tall as Stan. The other passenger had gotten out on Stansy's side, and I had seen a flash of blond hair as she stepped down.

"This is Stanford," Stan said, shrugging. The ubiquity of Standard Upgrade meant we were going to run out of names soon. Maybe it was time to start thinking about a change to that policy.

"Not my first choice of name," the new recruit said. I had heard about Berkeley and Stanford universities' long-running rivalry. "You must be Norm. I've heard a lot about you."

"I'm sure you have," I said. "But I'm really not that bad once you get to know me."

Stanford laughed and extended a hand. I started to do the same but froze when I saw who had just come around the front of the car. Pale blue eyes stared back at me, and her expression must have mirrored my own.

"And this is Gena," Stan said.

The young woman had stumbled to a stop when she saw me, and we stared at each other for several seconds. "Martin?" she said softly, her eyes narrowed. "How can you be here?"

Fear, disbelief and rage battled for control of my senses. "I belong here, Sharon. What the hell are you doing here?"

"You two know each other?" Stan asked incredulously.

I crossed my arms in front of me. "Yeah, you could say that. That's my sister." I looked straight at her, letting my anger speak for me. "She's a meth addict, an opportunist, and a traitor."

Nock looked between us and then smirked. "Well, what can I say? I guess she left a few details off of her resume."