“No,” I said. “This isn’t a disease— even though I said virus the other day. I mean, it could be a virus, it could be some early advanced variant of the human species, hell, it could be aliens from outer space after all. The point is that whatever, whoever rigged this booby trap, was an intelligence. And disease isn’t intelligent. Deadly sometimes, yes. But not intelligent. And this isn’t a curse either. We re dealing with fact here, hard science, not magic—something in your DNA. And that’s about as real a reality of life as you can get. You know that.”
“But what’s the booby trap?” Jenna asked, pulling herself away and drying her eyes. “You’re still alive. Even though Manny and Glen and now Denise…” She shook her head.
“The answer has to be in the words on the screen—the last two sentences if I’m right. The words of course are not exact—how could they be? Hertzberg says you have no way of confirming the accuracy of the transformation. He’s right in terms of the usual modes of linguistic confirmation. They can confirm the accuracy of the Indo-European to English part, but not the initial chromosome-ASCII to Indo-European part. How could they? It’s never been done before. We’re in a technological variant of Plato’s Meno paradox here—you have to already have knowledge to recognize, to validate, potential knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from? But the chromosome ASCII looks like Indo-European—not like Chinese or Korean. So, OK, it may be just coincidence, like Hertzberg thought, but let’s assume it is Indo-European, or related to it, and proceed from there. Where does that lead us? Hertzberg says there’s a high noise component. But no reason to think it’s evenly distributed throughout every word in the message. Some of the text on the screen may be way off from its original meaning, some may be right on the money. How do we tell which is which? What does the evidence suggest?”
Jenna held her hands up in an I-don’t-know gesture.
“Well,” I continued, “we’ve got three fatalities now as evidence. What part of the text could they possibly relate to? I don’t see anything in the history lesson, fascinating as it is, that could be the culprit. But I do see a possible suspect at the end—in the copyright notice. As allowed under our Copyright Notice.’ Let’s assume the noise in that section of the text is low. Let’s assume that Copyright Notice, or something close to it, is an accurate rendition. Now: Seen in that light, maybe the deaths make sense as punishment for what’s not allowed under their notions of property.”
“What’s not allowed under copyright?” Jenna asked. She cast a sideways look at the screen. I followed her gaze. The words were mostly gone now.
“Let’s think about what is allowed, first,” I said. “The text says it’s all right to ‘use’ the words, or maybe to use the ‘codes.’ What does that mean? How do we use printed words?”
“We read them?” Jenna asked.
“Yes,” I said. “And that seems to be OK—at least for me. I read the words and I’m OK. And I have no special connection to these words. They didn’t come from my chromosomes.”
Jenna nodded and looked at me, still not completely convinced that I would be OK.
“All right,” I said. “So let’s get to the ‘codes.’ How would we ‘use’ genetic codes?”
“Well, the most common way is we have sex, reproduce, and the codes create new versions of us. And the codes within our cells create new cells, as long as we re alive.”
“Right,” I said. “And that seems fine, too. I mean, people reproduce all the time, right, and few seem to die of mysterious natural causes. Most people’s cells reproduce OK too, for at least most of their lives. For that matter, Adleman used real DNA codes for his computations—I pulled some summaries of his work off the Net last night—and he’s all right. Though presumably he didn’t use yours.”
“True,” Jenna said, not in any mood for my humor. “So where does that leave us?”
“Where it leaves us is at a clearer answer to the question you just asked: What do those words on the screen forbid? Not reading the instructions. Not implementing the instructions—not implementing the genetic codes. Those things are OK. We re ‘free’ to do them. We can use the words and the codes. But what is that Notice saying, in some sort of implicit way, that we can’t do? What does a copyright notice seek to protect against?”
“Plagiarism? Theft of intellectual property?” Jenna asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but those wrongs seem too subtle for what’s going on here. The proscription has to be against something much more basic-more common. Something that Klein and Chaleff and Richter all did, no doubt in all innocence. Something that people do almost without thinking with computers all the time.”
Jenna held her hands up in frustration. “What?”
“Do you have a way of automatically making a copy of a file on your computer? You know, giving the command to copy in some sort of delayed way that would allow us to walk out of the room while the copying was taking place—rather than staring at the screen, or being anywhere near it?”
“Well sure,” Jenna said. “I can put the copy command at the end of a command chain—a long chain—that would definitely give us time to get out of the room. But—”
“OK, well could you do that right now then—for the chromosome text on the screen and its underlying program?”
“You think that making a copy of this triggered everything off?” Jenna asked, disbelievingly. “Making a copy killed Glen and Manny—and Denise?” “Well, it’s a copyright notice, isn’t it?”
She entered the delayed command string in the computer, and we walked quickly into the next room. I told her not to look anywhere near the computer screen. We looked at the opposite wall—at the hand-me-down shadows of Plato’s cave, like dogs baying at the Moon—and saw nothing. No effect at all. A brief play of light on the blue wall, like the heartbeat of a photocopy, maybe, and that was it. The paint didn’t even so much as peel.
But the camcorder, which presumably had been recording all this time, made a sharp whining noise and flashed an erratic red light. I turned it off manually, and did a digital scan of the tape. “Goddamnit. That pulse or whatever it was must’ve erased the whole tape. We’ve got nothing here.”
“What now?” Jenna asked, very tiredly.
“We call in the mice,” I said.
A half hour later, my friend Johnny Novino from the Berg Institute at the NYU Medical Center—an animal research lab—arrived with a cartload of white mice.
“What are they for?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so I won’t," I answered. “And I’d rather you didn’t know anything beforehand, so you can conduct a completely unbiased examination if need be.”
“Figures,” he said, gave Jenna a wink, and he left.
We set up a pair of mice in a cage in front of the screen, and Jenna entered the delayed copy command. We hurried out of the room, and saw the same light kiss on the wall.
But for the mice, it was the kiss of death.
We repeated the act ten times, and produced twenty dead rodents.
“Was that really necessary?” Jenna asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t like this anymore than you, but we’ve got to have redundancy to really pinpoint the exact cause of death here. Better them than us.”