Besides. He didn’t quite know how, but he was starting to guess some of the right answers.
He began again with the most obvious signpost: the magic washbasin, the defiant patch of grass that circled it like a green pupil. He sampled the water, scraped flecks from the stone, pulled leaves from the ground and ran them through his barcoder. He found a thousand common bacteria, a few purebred, most rotten with lateral transfer.
He only found one that glowed in the dark.
It wasn’t obvious, of course: it wouldn’t have lit up the night to any naked eye, not in the miniscule densities the machines reported. The only way he could tell it fluoresced was from the gene sequence itself: 576 nucleotides that shouldn’t have been there, an assembly line for a protein that glowed red in the presence of oxygen. A marker of some kind. A beacon.
He couldn’t read it at first. He had seen the light, but the genes to either side seemed unremarkable. It was a road sign in the desert, with no roads in sight.
He let his hands and feet guide him. The answer would come.
He explored corridors and wood-paneled chambers at the south end of the complex, more than merely intact: pristine, stripped bare, light rectangles punctuating the faded dumb paint where pictures had once hung. He found a pair of Masaso’s mahogany knuckles hiding in the corner behind a smashed door. He found what was left of his bike: a pair of mangled handlebars, an axle fork, a distended bladder of tire bulging from beneath a fallen wall like a hyperinflated football.
But it wasn’t until the dead of night that he found the body.
He hadn’t found any others. Most likely the authorities had disposed of them—or perhaps, against all the evidence of his own eyes, they had escaped somehow. Stranger things had happened.
But he woke in the night to the echo of rock falling nearby, and his memory was somehow able to pick a path through the ruins when mere starlight failed. His feet found their way through the wreckage without a missed step; his ears tracked the soft rattle of gravel flowing down new slopes in the darkness ahead. Eventually he came to a jagged shadow where none had been before, a fresh cave-in gaping through the shattered tiles. Brüks stood shivering at its edge and waited for the sky to lighten.
The corpse resolved in shades of gray at the bottom of the pit: a dim shapeless blob against darkness, a shadow extruded from jumbled debris, a bundle of dark sticks wrapped in a tunic on the basement floor. It lay on its back, buried to its waist by the cave-in. The body had mummified in the desert air, shriveled down to bones and brown leather. The eyes through which it stared at the sky had long since collapsed into empty sockets. Perhaps, once, the arms had been folded peacefully across the chest; now they were hooked and twisted as if bent by some disfiguring disease, wrists torqued inward, fingers clawing at the sternum.
It’s pointing at itself, he realized. At itself… And with the sparkling clarity of his newfound faith, Daniel Brüks finally saw the body for what it was.
It was a sign.
“It was a marker,” he told Valerie the next time she appeared (two nights later? Three?). “It was pointing at itself.”
So obvious, in the hindsight of revelation: the same sequence that coded for fluorescence contained other information as well, the same tangled thread of amino acids both serving a mundane biological function and spelling out a more esoteric message to anyone who knew the right alphabet.
Not just a marker, not just a message. It was a dialogue: gene and protein, talking to each other. It was a straight transposition of amino into alphabet: valine, threonine, alanine into t-h-e, phenylalanine-glutamine-valine-alanine into f-a-t-e, serine press-ganged into hard-space or hard-return depending on the iteration. The fluorescent protein spelled out a message—
the faery is rosy
of glow
in fate
we rely…
And the complementary codons directing its construction spelled out another, in a different alphabet:
any style of life
is prim
oh stay
my lyre…
A free-verse call-and-response packed down into a measly 140 codons. It was a marvel of cryptographic efficiency, and it was obvious once Brüks had seen the light.
“The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem.”
“Not for you,” Valerie said. “You’re looking for something else.”
No, he thought. You are.
“This is not a kink,” he said after a while, and ignited the campfire.
“You mean I don’t get off on keeping retarded pets.” Her eyes flared red orange. “I’m not Rakshi Sengupta.”
“And I’m pretty sure you’re not here for the sheer enjoyment of my company.” She did not cry out in disagreement. “So what is this?”
Valerie’s face was unreadable. “What do you think?”
“I figure I’m cheap labor. The odds of finding something useful here are too high to ignore and too low to waste much effort on. You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. So now and then you wait until the sun goes down, and drop by to see what I’ve dug up.”
She eyed him for a moment. Brüks looked back at that vaguely lupine face alive with dancing shadows, and wondered when he had stopped finding it so terrifying.
“Daniel,” she said at last. “How you underestimate yourself.”
The truth was, though, Valerie did seem to enjoy his company. The tone of their conversations had changed; no longer an inquisition, their forays into philosophy and viral theology were turning into something almost conversational. She no longer thought rings around him; occasionally, now, he even seemed able to challenge her. He still wasn’t sure where this newfound facility was coming from. His subconscious simply served up the right responses without bothering to show its work. It frightened him, at first—the way new thoughts spilled from his mouth before he could check them for veracity, before he could even parse their meaning. He bit down, to no avail, grew queasy—almost terrified—by his own insights, while Valerie cocked her head and watched from some prehistoric remove.
It was those same insights that eventually calmed him. After all, wasn’t this the way the human brain had always behaved? The bolt from the blue, the classic fully formed eureka moment? Hadn’t the structure of benzene come to Kekulé in a dream?
He began to have his own dreams. He heard voices in them, insistent whispers: She’s behind it all. She set it all up, can’t you see that? Broke out of jail, snuck through the nets and the ether, got past the best firewalls baselines could build. Flashed false ID to False Intelligences, snuck a carousel out of the garage with a whole squad of zombies on board and didn’t wake anyone up on her way out. She bluffed her way onto the Crown of Thorns. Conveniently made it back from Icarus when everyone else burned.