“Hard to believe that some non-human intelligence would share our notion of copyright,” I said.
“Harder to believe they could create a code that could be rendered into something that looks anything like Indo-European, and store it in some of our chromosomes,” Jenna said. “But there it is. And the sense of property, possession, is very old, biologically.”
“You mean like mice pissing—urinating, sorry—to mark their territory?”
“Right,” Jenna may have smiled, first time. “And hamsters mark stones near their dens with secretions— ethologists say scent marks are chemical property signs. It’s all over the natural world. Birds, fish, even insects mark and defend their property. And the closer we come to human beings, the more abstract the notion of property becomes. Monkeys, baboons, chimps have all kinds of very complex expressions of property, aggressively excluding this or that member of the troop, family, whatever from the privileged circle of users.”
“So maybe the authors of your text were human,” I said.
“Well, could be,” Jenna said, “And who really knows what people—any species—were really capable of seven or eight thousand years ago.”
“That’s the first sign of Indo-European in human history?” I asked.
Jenna nodded. “Nostratic supposedly goes back even further—more than 12,000 years—and has some resemblance to Indo-European, but its existence is still hotly contested. Anyway,” she took another sip of tea, with steadier hands this time, “the chromosomal algorithms print out like Indo-European, or something very close to it”
“How do we know the linguistic DNA wasn’t inserted into the genome more recently?” I asked.
“We don’t—not for sure,” Jenna said. “But the 8 percent of X chromosomes with the odd material comes from people all over the world, many way off the track of usual scientific research. Doubtful that an insertion of recent vintage could have that kind of in-depth dispersion. No, I think we re on reasonable ground assuming that the authors of the text, whoever or whatever they were, were contemporaries of early Indo-European. Our problem then becomes how to account for such early people—if they were people—having any sort of gene-insertion technology. But like I was saying—like the message itself says—all we really know of the distant past is what has come down to us in obvious long-lasting media like stone, bone, petrified wood. People in Asia probably did things that would surprise us in bamboo, but all that’s disintegrated now. I don’t find it impossible to consider that some early human group, speakers and writers of an Indo-European root language, found a way to manipulate DNA. Even non-literate groups show enormous sophistication in deliberate breeding of animals and plants. And if our Indo-European gene-authors could do that, inserting a message that could play out on today’s computers doesn’t seem impossible either—DNA and computer codes operate in similar ways, both prescribe patterns of organization. Adleman’s already demonstrated that DNA in a test-tube can be used to compute solutions for mathematical problems. And they just had to do it once—encode their message into DNA and attach it to the X chromosome just once—all it required was one florescence of their culture. The knowledge to do this could have come and gone all in one or two hundred years. And after that the natural process of DNA replication would see that the message would live on and on. That’s the beauty, and the horror, of it. We have in DNA the most effective of all known replicative devices.”
“Your perception is impressive, for someone—”
“For someone just a few years out of grad school? For someone so young? Not really. This is my life. I guess in more ways than one.”
“I know," I said. “That’s the problem with most of these quests to understand who we are, where we were, where we’re going, isn’t it? Sooner or later all the fine science boils down to lives at stake.” I closed my eyes, opened them, focused entirely on Jenna’s face. “Until we can relate what that prehistoric Stephen Jay Gould or whoever wrote, connect that to Glen Chaleff’s body falling apart, maybe Manny Klein’s too, your life is the one at stake here in the short run. Doesn’t matter how appealing your DNA-to-Indo-European-ASCII hypothesis is, the cops won’t care. They’ll come after you for Chaleffs death. And in the long run…” I shuddered, “well, if something in those words killed Chaleff and Klein, then who knows how many others are at risk.”
“You believe in my work, then?” Jenna asked, for an instant more pleased to have an ally in her adventures in knowledge than frightened about where that knowledge might be taking her.
“Let’s just say I have a very open mind.” But the truth was my mind was set—on finding a way out for her.
“Two people are dead,” Jenna said. “There has to be a connection.”
The Lieutenant informed me the next morning about a connection that didn’t work to Jenna’s benefit at all. “Chaleff was dipping the wick with a blonde. Going on for at least a few weeks. Three witnesses saw Katen throw a glass of wine in his face and scream at him about it at a party week before last. There’s the motive.”
“Yeah? And how exactly did she do it? With a magic wand?”
“That’s for you to find out, Doc.”
I called Jenna and asked if I could come over. She lived in a new highrise in the West Village. She obviously had money.
Her face flushed when I told her about the witnesses at the party. “So what?” she said. “Lots of people fool around, lots of people scream and yell at each other. Doesn’t mean I killed him, for crissakes.”
“I’m more concerned that you didn’t tell me,” I said.
“What? You want a complete exposition of my life? You want a calendar of every fight I had with Glen?”
“No,” I said. “Look, this isn’t going well for you. I tried to tell you that yesterday. Cops are like hounds moving in concentric circles—once they get a sniff of the quarry, they go round and around, tighter and tighter, until they close in totally and arrest you. And don’t believe the movies and TV shows—once they arrest you your chances are not very good. You’re near the pit now. You’ve got momentum against you. We’ve got to come up with some sort of evidence of what you’re talking about, soon, or the situation may be out of my control.”
“What kind of evidence?” Jenna asked. “I’ve already told you what I know.”
“Real evidence,” I said. “Not just your rendition of the words on the screen. I’m talking about firing up your computer, putting a disk with a binary map of the chromosome stuff in the drive, running the ASCII/Indo-European transformation, and videotaping that whole process including everything on the screen.”
“And then what? Running it on HBO as America Under Cover and killing the millions of people who watch it?”
“Well, if it came to that, I could probably get some prisoners on death row to volunteer to read it, but I don’t think reading it can kill anybody.”
“Why not?” Jenna asked.
“Well, for starters, you obviously looked at it and you’re still alive. And I saw the words ‘Copyright Notice’ and I’m still in peak condition.”
“That was just one phrase,” Jenna said.
“Of course,” I said. “But your survival and my survival certainly suggest that whatever’s going on with the text, just reading it isn’t ipso facto lethal.”
“So where are you headed then? Back to proving by process of elimination that I killed Glen?”
“No, I don’t think that either. All I’m saying is that something more than just looking at a screen is the culprit here.”
“What, then?” Jenna asked.