Double Helix Ch. 22

The excavators were currently being operated by two new arrivals. One of them was a Stan, and since no one could think of a workable permutation on it that wasn't taken, he went with Steve. The other was a Noctia who had chosen to use Tia. Unlike my Nock, she had not been gifted with multiple genetic enhancements, possessing only his reduced sleep requirement and night vision, in addition to the baseline disease resistance and anti-aging that nearly all genemods had. Norm had arranged for them to be transferred to the farm around the second week of January.

Steve had been an architect and Tia had been a civil engineer. I might have thought they would feel insulted at being asked to run the digging machines, but then I realized that they had probably cooped up inside someone's basement or attic for years with nothing to do. I had only been inside a safe house for a few months and had gotten a decent case of cabin fever.

Norm spotted us before we arrived, and came over to the near corner of the pit to meet with us. The whine of hydraulics and the clank of metal from the machines below made us all have to shout to be heard. I saw now that there was another person down in the pit. Stansy was at work monitoring the pumps and hoses that constantly drained off the water that would otherwise accumulate in pools at the bottom of the hole. One practical limit that we had was the groundwater. If we went much deeper, it would greatly complicate our construction efforts.

"Looks like you're hard at work watching everyone else work hard," Nock teased as we drew close. "How are things going?"

Norm ran a dirt-stained hand through his hair. "We're not far off schedule. It'll be a couple more days to finish digging this thing out. I think we'll be pouring concrete by the end of next week."

Nock had told me that everyone was expected to pitch in at that stage. I had never done any kind of construction work, but I was willing to learn. Though the building was several times as large as the lab, Norm expected to finish it in around the same timeframe, since we had four times as many able hands.

"Watch out, boss," Nock said in a flat tone. "Incoming."

Norm turned and looked down into the pit in confusion, completely missing the speeding figures coming in from his right. Wendy was the first to arrive, wrapping her arms around his middle in a ballistic hug that knocked him two steps back.

"Oof!" Norm said. "Damn girl, you hit like a defensive tackle. Is Nissi slipping you steroids?" He grabbed her under the arms and whirled her around in the air once before setting her back on the ground. Gabby and Kevin followed just behind. They came to a stop a few steps short of Norm, both breathing hard.

"Hi, Uncle Norm!" Gabby shouted. "Have you seen Ryan? We thought he'd be out here watching the machines digging."

Norm ruffled her hair. "No, I haven't seen him all morning. Did you check inside the big house?"

"I think I saw him heading over to the creek," Nock said.

"Race you there!" Gabby said, and took off, keeping a good buffer of distance between herself and the edge of the pit.

"Thank you, Mr. Norm," Kevin said. He was the youngest, at eight, but like Wendy his speech and manners were those of someone much older. Even so, he dashed after his adoptive sister with all of the speed he could muster. Gabby was half Standard Upgrade, so I doubted he would catch up to her unless she decided to let him. Judging by how fast she was moving, I wasn't sure I could either.

Wendy watched the two of them go with a wistful look before turning back to Norm. "Nissi asked me to tell you to come down to the lab when you get a few minutes. See you later!"

"Did she say why?" Norm asked, but Wendy was already twenty yards away, chasing after the other two.

I couldn't help staring at Wendy as she receded into the distance. I had last seen her two days ago, but I could swear she had grown taller in that short time. She had been about Kevin's height six weeks ago, when she had begun the regimen that would kick start her growth into an adult. Now she stood more than an inch taller than him.

"I think she's enjoying the last of her childhood before it's gone," Norm said.

"Can you blame her?" I asked. "It's a huge change."

"It is for all of us," he said with a sigh. He surveyed the construction area and nodded to himself, apparently satisfied. "Guess I ought to go see what this is about."

"Mind if we tag along?" I asked. It was always cool to see what Nissi or Tilly's research team were working on, even if I didn't always understand the jargon.

"What? Did someone give you the afternoon off?" he teased.

"Matter of fact," Nock said, "your little sis' here just finished and deployed her first mesh network."

"It's only phase one," I said quickly. "There's still a lot more work to do."

"There's always more work to do," Norm said with a knowing smile. "Come on, let's grab a snack before we head down. You know how Nissi loves it when people bring food into her lab."

Norm made us all peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen. The peanuts, wheat, vegetable oil and blackberries that went into them were all grown and processed here on the farm. Alice had picked up machines to mill the grain, grind the peanuts and cook the bread from thrift stores some months back, and she and her kids did a great job of keeping us all supplied. I was amazed that anyone bothered to stock and try to sell those things at all, but apparently there was a small market for obsolete home appliances to be put on display at rustic restaurants and such.

We went from the kitchen down into the cellar and from there traversed the stairway and concrete tunnel that led into the lab. Dawn and Ed were eating at the little round table near the kitchenette when we entered. They were in a heated argument, something about soil drainage. We swept past them with polite greetings and waves, each giving us a few words of acknowledgement before diving back into their debate.

I had finished my sandwich by the time we entered the lab proper, but both Norm and Nock still had theirs only partially eaten. Nissi scowled at them. Then she noticed Norm's dirt-smeared clothing and gave a look towards the ceiling as if praying for strength. "At the risk of repeating myself, yet again, I'll remind you both that this is supposed to be a clean environment."

"Oh, it looks very clean," Nock said. "Don't you think, Norm?"

"Oh, it's fantastically clean," Norm replied, popping the last of his sandwich in his mouth and licking jam from his fingers. "Not a spot of dust anywhere."

Nisei gave a long-suffering sigh. "Alright, both of you, back into the living quarters. Nock, you can finish your--" she stopped as he opened his mouth and pushed in the remaining half of his sandwich, chewing expansively. "Never mind. Norm, you go get a shower and a change of clothes. Right now."

"Love you, my sweet elf maid," he said.

She shook her head. "Go."

"Well," Nissi said, once he had gone, "Gena, we haven't had much chance to talk in a while. Has Stan been treating you well?"

I nodded. "He really is a joy to work for. Way better than my last job."

"That's good," she said. "Norm always keeps me apprised of your progress. He's proud of what you've accomplished."

A flush of pleasure at the secondhand compliment swept over me, a giddy, tingling warmth that settled in my chest. I blinked quickly and cleared my throat to hold back the threatened waterworks, and quickly changed the subject. "Have you thought any more about what I asked you about?"

Nissi sighed. "I had a long chat with the genetic science group, but we didn't come to any solid conclusions about restoring you to your original potential. We have a full map of the G model genome. We can restore it with gene therapy, which should give you back your longevity and allow you to have children again. I could get you started on that just about any time."

It only took a moment for me to think that over. "Yes, I would like that. I would feel more..." I shrugged. "More complete, I guess. So what's the bad news?"

Nissi smiled wanly. "The bad news is that we aren't sure how to restore your lost brain tissue. Your case is a lot more complex than Nonna's. You had about 50 billion neurons in your cerebral cortex. The lesions that they induced on your brain reduced it to something like two-thirds of that. Still more than an unmodified human, but the inefficiencies the procedure introduced put you in the normal human range."

One of the challenges of designing a brain that surpassed the ability of all living humans was that neurons were already packed in so tightly in the brain. Short of increasing the size of the skull, you couldn't add more neurons than the 23 billion or so that already existed. But just like in semiconductors, one answer lay in making the component parts smaller, and biologists already had an example in nature to follow.

Birds, in general, display remarkable intelligence despite having relatively small brains. Avian brains have many more neurons than a comparably-sized primate brain. The neurons themselves are smaller, which allows for slightly more than twice as many to be packed into the same space. Adapting those avian genes gave G's that same neuron density. That is why the appellation "bird brain" had generally been applied to me in a good-natured ribbing by my colleagues at MIT.

"We could grow new tissue with stem cells," Nissi went on, "but we have no guarantee that it would properly integrate. They severed a lot of the interconnections that allowed the component parts of your brain to work together to solve problems. We need to map those connections very carefully. Also, there are specialized structures designed into your model to aid in certain types of thinking. Some of those were destroyed completely when they reverted you."

"Like spatial reasoning," I said. "I used to be able to imagine complex objects derived from mathematical functions. I could rotate them in three dimensions in my mind just like they were holograms. Now..." I grimaced. "I can, sort of, but it's a lot harder."

"You learned to utilize other parts of your brain for that task that aren't specialized for it. That's how someone who has lost the ability to walk due to brain damage can sometimes regain it. If we were to act now without knowing more, you might be a little smarter than you are now, or a lot smarter, or you may see no change at all. Worst case, you could go into a coma, or degrade your faculties further. The more we know about all of the micro structures in your cerebral cortex, the better our chances. In my estimation, you were lucky. The failure rate for reversion of G's was unusually high." Failure meaning death or a persistent vegetative state. "We face some of the same uncertainty."

I thought about what she was saying. Could I be content if I were merely more intelligent? Maybe on the level of Stanford or Nissi? Would that make my existence more tolerable, or would I still be taunted by half-remembered knowledge and brief glimpses of my prior genius? And what about my life's work? That had been a labor that I kept locked within my own mind, that I dared never to share with another, or to record in any medium. That work had been effectively destroyed when my brain was picked apart.

"Are you telling me that it's not possible?"

Nissi frowned for just a moment, then shook her head. "No, I'm not saying that. I'm telling you that we still have a lot of problems to work out. I'll say that I do think it's possible. What we would need is to get hold of the research data and specifications that went into designing your gene model, so we have some way to recreate the features of that design through means other than genetic manipulation."

"There's something else to consider," Nissi went on. "She may not have mentioned it to you before, but Sasha says that her mother's personality is different. Not drastically, and we can't be sure how much of that is from the procedure itself, how much is due to her rejuvenation, or even how much is due to Sasha's memories of her mother when she was younger, but it was enough for her to comment on."

That gave me pause. People tended to think of their identity as being a product of the sum total of their experiences, but psychology and neurology said that the answer was more complicated. There was a large amount of biological determinism at work in a person's personality, and more often than not, the conscious mind shaped its perceptions of past events to fit its own ends as much as being shaped by them. Hadn't I changed quite a bit after my reversion? Then again, hadn't I changed just as much in the last few years? "I will definitely have to think about that," I said.

Nissi nodded. "Good. One last thing to consider. Reverts have been trickling into Agency protection. I've been thinking, if we could give them back their mods..." She trailed off, letting us pick up what she left unsaid.

"Could you do that? Maybe for the Stans?"

"I think so. We have more data about that model than any other. And reversion for them primarily meant downgrading their bones and musculature. I think that the damage done to them is reversible. It will likely vary between individuals, but even if we could restore someone to 90% of their original physical ability, I think most would take it."

The conversation turned then to other projects that were underway. Nissi's work fascinated me, though I only half-understood most of the science. The Alzheimer's treatment that Nissi had pioneered was of great interest to several of our donors in Europe and East Asia. One of them had offered to pay a ridiculous sum of money and arrange to smuggle Nissi to Hungary to personally treat his spouse. As an alternative, Nissi asked Nock to help locate someone with medical expertise through his contacts that she could advise and walk through the process.

"I'll make sure you get a cut of what he's offering," Nock said. At Nissi's disgruntled look, he added, "People with the money will pay a premium to be the first to get it, and that is the way it should be. In fact, it's the best way to do it in the long run. You serve them first, then you use that money to further develop the procedure, make it cheaper and safer and streamline the production and you'll be able to treat a whole lot more people later on."

Nissi was still frowning, but she nodded. "You're right, but I hate that there are people out there right now suffering and dying from this disease. I want to start opening clinics as soon as we can."

That was something else we had discussed, building clinics in third world nations not bound by the Oxford Treaty. They would benefit local populations directly, and we figured once word got out, people would fly to those countries seeking care. Another reason we were likely going to slow-walk that plan was that it would take many people about five minutes to catch on to the fact that our treatments to reverse aging could apply to anyone, not just Alzheimer's sufferers. That was going to cause a lot of social disruption, and we were concerned what the implications might be if Americans or other citizens of Oxford Treaty nations started returning to their home nations biologically younger than they had left.

Norm came back, hair still wet from the shower and wearing a new set of work clothes. "Better?" he asked.

Nissi nodded. "It'll do. So let's get to why I asked you here." She punched a few keys on a terminal and two columns of letters came up, a series of A, C, G, and T. The window scrolled, showing that the sequence was maybe a few hundred pairs long. "The sequence you see here is the one coded into every genemod's DNA to identify us from genetic testing. Our genetic barcode."

The sequence coded a protein that was completely artificial, and present in the mucosal fluids of all genemods. A simple cheek or nasal swab could be used to identify a genemod if that protein were present. A more thorough DNA test would reveal their model, the entity that held the patent, and other information about the individual, all of it digitally encoded.

Nissi waited for Norm's question. "Okay, so why are you showing it to us?"

Nissi turned to him and hit another key on the terminal without looking. "Because I want to change it to this." She tapped the screen and a new sequence appeared. "It's a non-coding sequence. In fact, it's one variant of the sequence that the barcode replaced in our base genetic code."

I could see by Norm's expression that he got it at the same time I did. "You would make genemods no longer distinguishable by the protein test," he said.

"Exactly," Nissi said, smiling at me. "You could still use genetic testing to find encoding sequences for the various gene models, but that's not something you could do in ten seconds in the field. Highway checkpoints would become useless as a means to detect us."

My brother spoke up. "The government has birth records for all genemods, and probably DNA records as well. Then there are driver's licenses and such. And some gene mods wouldn't be able to pass for a human. Present company, for example."

Nissi sighed. "I've thought about that. A bit of cosmetic surgery could change these." She touched one ear, then an eyebrow. "Nock would be tougher. He'd have to give up his night vision, assuming we could find a way to alter or replace his existing eyes."

"I'll pass," Nock said at once.

"Me, too," Nissi admitted. "I don't want to change what I am. But for all the Stans, Dons, Eds, Ambers and Wendys out there, this could let them move around freely, as long as they were careful."

"It could take a lot of the pressure off of the Agency," Norm said. "Probably upwards of 90% of mods can pass as normal humans by sight. A lot of those people could be running the food supply lines, instead of relying on the criminal elements of society. That should cut down on corruption and graft, reducing costs."

"We're all criminals," Nock reminded him. "But I take your point."

"What kind of treatment would it take to remove the barcode?" Norm asked.

Nissi crossed her arms, thinking it over. "It would probably be faster and more efficient to target specific tissue types," she said. "It won't get every copy of the DNA sequence in every cell in the body, but all we really need to worry about are the mucous membranes. Even if we don't get all of those cells, if we can get it down to a small fraction of its former amount, it should be enough. If we decide to try it on genemods, we'll want to check our test subjects periodically to ensure that they pass the field test kits consistently."

"Were you thinking of anyone in particular?" Norm asked.

"I thought I would ask for volunteers," she said. "Probably two to start. We can't mass produce out of this lab, but I could probably easily make enough retrovirus to treat a few people every day. And before you ask, yes, it's safe. It should be safer than anything we've tried so far."

"Alright, then. Get your volunteers and get started as soon as possible. And I want you to start thinking about mass production and what we need to make that happen. We'll need to talk to the Agency," here Norm looked at Nock, "but I'm sure they'll be interested in distributing it to any genemods who want it."

Nissi had picked up a pad of paper while he spoke and jotted down several notes. "We can produce large amounts of the new sequence from our PCR workstation," she said. "The bottleneck will be producing the modified retrovirus. We'll need to cultivate the virus in laboratory conditions. For the projects we've undertaken so far, we've used roller bottles." She picked up a tiny bottle, about a half-inch in diameter, from a nearby countertop. "For large-scale production, we need a bioreactor. Preferably more than one."