Double Helix Ch. 21

"Come with me," I said.

I brought her to the den and let her look at the page. Her hand went to her mouth. "Oh, my God. That's my son. That's Chris." She gave me an intense, level look. "Does that mean they took him?"

I looked at Nock. He knew more about how these things went than I did.

"Maybe," he said. "They don't usually leave any indication when they take someone. They're just there one day and gone the next."

"So he could have run away on his own?" I asked. "Maybe he saw something. He might have realized that they were about to take him and run away before it happened."

"He would have contacted me," Stansy said. She was staring at the screen. I could tell that she was struggling to hold herself together, despite her apparent calm. "He put this up this two days ago. If he had time to post this, he had time to get me a message and tell me where to find him."

"The timestamp is one in the afternoon, on a Tuesday," Nock said. "Wouldn't he have been in school?"

I nodded. For safety, we had quit using direct email communication and relied on chats through temporary VPNs to talk to people who weren't on the darknet. Our emails went one-way only, with bogus reply addresses. That policy was in place more to protect the people we contacted, than the other way around. "He would have to be at his home terminal to send you a message. Any idea where he might have gone?"

"Go through those replies," she said. She looked through them, prompting Nock to scroll every few seconds. She shook her head. "I don't know most of those people. It's been so many years. I shouldn't be surprised that he's got all different friends now."

"Any relatives that might have taken him in?" Nock asked.

Stansy shook her head slowly. "Daniel knows our situation, but he would have contacted me if Chris showed up there or at my uncle's house. My parents moved to Florida years ago. I have an aunt in Tahoe, but Chris barely knows her."

"If he's out on the street," Nock said, "Gena might be able to help. She knows the kinds of places that homeless people would go to find shelter or buy food. But we're talking about an area with over three million people living in it."

"If we send him another email," Stansy said, "but don't lock it to his home terminal's address, he could just go to the library and contact us that way."

"No," I said. "That's not an option. Assume the worst case, that he got taken. Anyone monitoring his email could pretend to be him and set a trap for us. At the very least, we'll have given them insight into how we communicate."

"I'll keep the message vague," she said. "I'll just tell him to go to my cousin for help. And we'll make it look like it came from my ex."

I mulled it over. It seemed like a reasonable option. "Alright, but don't give your name or reveal anything else of substance about who you are or where we are. Just a message telling him that Daniel can help."

She sat in the second chair that Nock always kept next to him and composed the email quickly. "Will that do?"

I read it and nodded. "That's fine. Nock, put it out from some distant node."

"You don't have to remind me," he said, and rattled off a few commands on the terminal. "It's away."

Lines of worry still etched Stansy's pretty face, but she no longer looked ready to crack under the emotional stress. "Is this really all we can do?" she asked.

I sighed. "I'm afraid so. Chris chose to stay where he was when he had the chance to come here. It's up to him now to help us get him out of this mess. I'll let Daniel know to look out for him."

Nock put a hand over Stansy's where it rested on the desk. "Look, I can't promise much, but I'll have my researchers keep an eye out. If they spot any new messages for him, or if his name comes up in news articles or police reports, someone will flag it and let me know, day or night."

Nock's words gave me an idea. "I'll talk to Andy about this. He might be able to get word to other fences and fixers in the area to keep an eye out for Chris and get word back through him to us."

"Thanks, both of you," she said, with a brave smile. "I'd better go talk to my husband, tell him what's happened."

After she was gone, I sat down heavily next to Nock. "Damn it. I hate this. We're trying to save people, but most of them don't want to listen."

Nock shrugged. "He's a kid in high school. Good looking, lots of friends. He's apparently the lead guitar and vocals in a heavy metal band. You think he would want to give that up to go live with his mom in hiding who-knows-where?"

"Yeah, and Stansy takes it personally. In her mind, she's probably thinking that he hasn't contacted her because he'd rather be out on his own than living with her."

"Kids are a hell of a lot of trouble. I don't envy you one bit."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

His eyes twinkled as he grinned. "Oh, sorry, was I not supposed to know about that?"

I rolled my eyes. "Fucking bat ears. We were going to wait to tell everyone until Tilly gets pregnant. Won't be until after she finishes building the aquaponics farm. Just don't blab it around, okay?"

"Okay," he said. "What about Nissi?"

I glared at him again. "What about her?"

His eyes widened in surprise. "Oh, you mean you didn't...oh, well I guess I just assumed-"

I showed him my teeth. "Nock, what did you overhear?"

He sighed. "Alright, so Nissi and Tilly went down to the lab about an hour ago, and Nissi asked Tilly how many kids she wanted. Tilly said three and Nissi said she probably only wanted two. I just figured you already knew."

I shook my head. "Nissi and I have been back together less than twelve hours." And now she wanted kids too? I leaned back and closed my eyes. Five? "I'm doomed," I said.

"Should have kept that thing in your pants," he agreed. "Now you're paying the price for overexposure."

"I need to talk to them," I said, and stood up. "They still down there?"

"I think so. Good luck."

I stopped in the kitchen for a quick bite before descending to the cellar, through the passageway and into the lab, still crunching on a piece of toast slathered with strawberry jam.

"No food or drink in here," Dawn said in a bland tone, looking up from one of the lab's powerful microscopes as I came in.

I nodded at her, "Sure, no problem," and stuffed the remaining half of the toast into my mouth, chewing expansively.

"At least wash your hands," Nissi said, as I brushed crumbs from my fingers. She and Tilly were seated together behind a terminal. Still chewing, I did as she had asked and then came over to join them.

"Since you're here," Tilly said. "There's something you might want to see."

On the terminal screen was a window showing a two-dimensional image. It looked like a bunch of circular objects packed into larger, ovoid objects. "These are sporangia," Tilly said, pointing at one of the oval shapes. "And inside those are zoospores. They are responsible for the actual disease we call Rot. These oomycetes were taken from a potato plant."

Tilly looked over at Dawn. "Can you switch us to the sample from the corn plant, please?"

Dawn did something to the microscope. The new image also had ovoids and spheres on it, but I leaned in, peering more closely. "The shapes aren't the same at all," I said. "Can you flip back?"

Tilly had apparently saved video from the previous sample, and brought that up in a window alongside the new one. "It's not even close," I said. "The first one looks like lemons and the other has a bunch of spheres."

"Correct," Tilly said. "Would you think they were the same species just from looking at these?"

"No," I said. "They're not. Are they?"

Nissi chuckled to herself, but Tilly went on. "These are both phytophthora katholikos, the oomycete that causes Rot, but the sporangia of the first sample closely resemble phytophthora infestans, the microbe that caused the Irish Potato Famine. The second sample resembles pythium ultimum, which attacks a whole host of different crops. In fact, both strains infect their host plants in very nearly the same fashion as the pathogens they mimic."

Dawn spoke next. "This is polymorphic gene expression on a scale that's never been seen. We're talking about thousands of genes with multiple alleles. In fact, when we start mapping the genes of these two different samples, they show nearly as much genetic variation between each other as there is between the two species they represent."

"Are you saying you've confirmed your theory about polymorphism?"

"Yes, and a lot more," Dawn said. "At first we couldn't believe that we were looking at the same species, just like you said. But where the two strains have similarities is important. Rot's hardiness, its ability to survive in alkaline soil and varied climates, come from a genetic base that both strains share, and which is unique to this species, as far as anyone knows."

"Could we be looking at multiple diseases?" I asked. "Maybe someone engineered the same set of genes into different oomycete species."

"That was my initial thought when I first saw the results," Nissi said. "So Tilly's team ran some experiments. They tried infecting corn with the potato blight strain of sporangia and potatoes with the pythium-like strain. Those attempts failed, which seemed to confirm that hypothesis. You would expect that result with two different species of oomycetes encountering plants that they don't normally infect."

"So I proposed another experiment," Dawn said. "We got a healthy potato and corn plant together in a sterile environment, then introduced the potato blight sporangia to the potato plant. The disease went through its full life cycle, never infecting the corn plant even though they were sitting right next to each other. They shared the same damp soil, with the potato blight zoospores swimming all over it. Not until the potato plant started showing aerial spores on its leaves. Then, suddenly, the corn plant was infected as well."

"Oh," I said, surprised. "So then you must have started looking at samples of the aerial spores."

Dawn replaced the slide with a new one. "Right. And then we saw this."

Most of the sporangia on the screen were a similar lemon shape, but varied considerably even there in size and proportions. "We've only just started mapping these," Tilly said, "but it appears that there are dozens of variations."

My mind worked over the idea, absorbing and evaluating. 'So it really is like we're dealing with many different disease pathogens. But then, each strain is itself capable of producing all of the different variations in the aerial spores."

"It's a shotgun approach," Tilly agreed. "Someone designed this bug to spew out these spores in massive amounts. Any given spore is unlikely to infect whatever plant it encounters, but with enough spores and some time, the chances of infecting every type of plant you want to target in a given area approaches a hundred percent."

"So we think that this thing was designed in a lab?" I asked, hearkening back to that prior conversation with Dawn.

"No question," Dawn said, and Tilly and Nissi nodded their agreement. "Nothing remotely similar to this has ever existed. We're still investigating what triggers the expression of all of the different sporangia types and how those are encoded. I think that Tilly has the right idea, that it's fractal in nature. We don't yet understand the mechanisms, but we're working on it."

I smiled. "That's huge progress, though. All of those months of research apparently didn't go to waste."

Tilly pointed at Dawn. "You can thank her for that. She put in most of the work in the field."

"Great job," I said, nodding at the woman.

"Yeah," Dawn said, shrugging.

"No, really," I said, "you should feel good about what you've accomplished."

Her brow furrowed for a moment, and then her face went smooth, and suddenly she was grinning. She even let out a giggle. It lasted for all of three seconds, and then her features took on their usual, deadly serious cast. "There you go. Happy?"

"Um, sure," I said. Dawn was quite possibly the oddest person in our group and I couldn't read her most of the time. I would have to ask Tilly more about her. I wanted to be able to talk to anyone under my authority.

"So what brought you down here?" Tilly asked. "Was there something you needed us for?"

I had very nearly forgotten why I had come to the lab. Maybe because my head has started throbbing at some point during the exchange. I wondered if my head injury would continue to cause me pain for the rest of my life. If it did, I thought, it was a small price to pay for Nissi's life.

Thinking of that, it occurred to me that if she really did want children, she would come to me on her own. I had nothing to gain by forcing the issue out into the open. What I had been feeling was resentment that she and Tilly had talked about it before discussing it with me. If I was going to make this work, this confluence of three relationships, I needed to be patient and understanding, not confrontational.

"I just wanted to see you both again," I said. And that was truth enough.

"Oh, that's sweet," Nissi said, and gave me a hug and a kiss. I gave Tilly a meaningful look and she rolled her eyes but stood up and repeated Nissi's gesture.

"If this turns into a harem," Dawn said drily, "I am out of here."

Still smiling, I charged up the stairs and went out the back door. It was chilly, but not bitterly so. Billowing gray filling the western sky promised rain later, maybe a full-on storm, but not for several hours at least. I walked over where I knew the lab to be, a patch of slightly sunken ground that was now nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding soil. I turned north and walked on another forty paces, then stopped, surveying the area. The greenhouse was about a quarter mile away, gleaming in the morning sun.

I began to pace out the dimensions of the apartment building that I was still drafting, getting an idea of its scale. "Oh boy, here we go again," a young female voice said.

Smiling, I turned to look. "Hi, Wendy."

She had apparently followed me out from the living room. "I've seen that look before. What's it going to be this time? Olympic-sized swimming pool?"

I laughed. "Close. Underground apartments. Sasha's idea. She seems to think we're going to need a lot more living space."

"Cool. When do you start?"

"We-ell," I said, drawing out the word, "probably not at least for another month. I want to wait for better weather and give Nock time to work on a plan to get us more funding. We've got enough in the till right now to rent the excavation equipment and put down a foundation. Even then, there's a huge amount of work to do just to get that accomplished. Stansy has pledged to help me, and Sasha and Nonna might pitch in if I ask, but they have no experience in construction and everyone else is tied up in their own projects."

She sighed. "Sounds like a big problem. Why don't you bring some new people in to help?"

"Oh," I said, my brows going up. She meant recruiting builders through the agency. "I never thought of that. I could really jump start this thing."

"You're welcome," Wendy said, sweeping out her hand and bowing. "I would offer to help, but besides the regrettable fact that I'm still just a pipsqueak, I'm going to start working with Nissi tomorrow. I figured she could use the skills of a chemist, and she agreed."

"Speaking of that, when do you start your treatment?"

"Soon," she said with a shrug. "Nothing definite yet. We've got to fix my pituitary gland first. That's the key to unlocking my growth and development. The hope is that my underdeveloped hypothalamus will come along for the ride once the genetics are fixed and my other glands start producing the hormones I need to grow." She clapped her hands together. "Then it's hormone cascade time and puberty, baby!"

"I'm excited for you," I said. "You think this treatment is going to be popular with other Wendy's and Peter's?"

"Oh, sure," she said. "Not all of us, but at least a large minority. Back before the Ban, I used to hear it all the time. You do know that my model was actually a first shot at curing aging?"

"I hadn't heard that," I admitted.

Wendy sighed. "Yeah. They premiered us in 1962, and then the Amber and Ambrose models came out just a few months later. If the engineers at Bayer had cracked aging a bit sooner, we might never have even had Peter and Wendy models. I mean, it caused a lot of controversy, even back then. But once it was available, some parents went for it."

I had always assumed that the Ambrosia model came first. This meant that Wendy probably didn't have the same corrective mechanisms for aging as most genemods. "I'm wondering," I said. "If you go through with this, will you keep aging after you reach maturity?"

"As far as we know, yes. I wasn't designed to ever age to adulthood, so without some other intervention, I'll eventually grow old. One option I have is for Nissi to make me into a Stansy," she said. "Her team is still working out all of the kinks on that one, too."

"Wait just a minute," I said, stalking up to her. "You're telling me that she could actually change you into a different genemod?"

Wendy frowned and bobbed her head from side to side a few times, considering. "Yeah, more or less. Stans are such a stable and time-tested model. We figured it would be the best candidate. Any kids I might have would also inherit those traits. I hadn't decided for sure if I want to go that route, but it has its appeal."

"That's...that's huge," I said. Genemod babies had exploited a loophole in the FDA's restrictions on human genetic engineering, which allowed the DNA of human cells and tissues to be edited, just not embryos or more complicated structures in the body. Since a human egg cell was by definition a single cell, it was fair game.

There had been pressure for decades from certain groups to specifically exclude human ovum from that provision, or to prohibit their implantation, or any of a dozen different restrictions, but for a stretch of about thirty-five years, the field had prospered. One thing that had never been allowed, even when genetic engineering was at its peak, was to tamper with the genes of fully-developed humans, outside of curing genetic disorders. What we were doing with Wendy was just that.

"Yeah, I know," Wendy said. "It's just like the Alzheimer's treatment. This has the potential to change everything."

Apparently I needed to keep closer tabs on what everyone was doing. What to Nissi and her team might simply be the simplest solution to a problem had far-reaching consequences, and she hadn't even thought to mention it five minutes ago when I was standing in her lab. Though in my own defense, I had been bedridden for the last three weeks.

"You said they are still working out some kinks?"

Wendy shrugged. "Yeah, it's going to take some fine-tuning. We don't get to select the best gene candidate from a thousand Wendys like they do with embryos. We need to work with the DNA I have, so we need to tailor the changes carefully. In any case, we won't start in on that until after I'm full-grown."

So not as simple as ordering a gene therapy treatment at a clinic. Reverts, though, might be a completely different prospect. Their genomes had already played host to a gene model, so in theory, it should be much easier to edit their genes to give them back the enhancements that had been taken. I would need to take up that line of questions with Nissi.

Wendy joined me as I finished pacing out the outline of the future living space. I returned to my starting point and looked at the rectangle of land that I had transcribed.

Wendy whistled. "That's a lot of living space. I was thinking like ten people or something."