“Poor little things couldn’t even read the damn text,” Jenna said, then rushed into the bathroom and threw up.
The lab report came back five days later.
“Phil, you know about circadian rhythms?” Johnny returned my call about the report.
“Well, as much as the next guy,” I said. “They control our waking and sleeping patterns, and are governed in some way by light. They seem to affect the brain’s sleep center through the optic nerve.”
“That’s right,” Johnny said. “So what seems to have happened to your little mice is some stimulus, likely some kind of light, switched their circadian rhythm to infinite awake—as in impossibly high blood pressure, instant heart failure, instant everything failure, adios muchachos.”
“And your evidence for that?”
“Like the report says,” Johnny replied. “Incredibly high residues of serotonin—natural chemical found in the brain, contributes to the sense of wide awakeness, well-being, also raises the blood pressure.”
“So at least the mice died with a smile in their hearts,” I said, and filled him in on all the details.
“Jeez,” Johnny said. “Likely Glen Chaleff died of that too, then But your guys must’ve missed it because serotonin’s a natural compound, on no one’s list as an abused drug. We missed it too on the first six mice. But there’s no doubt about it now. So my best guess for the full trajectory—assuming you didn’t administer serotonin to the mice yourself—is light provokes extreme circadian reaction, causing huge overdose of serotonin, causing lethally high blood pressure, causing heart attack and general system failure across the board. The only real mystery here is what the hell kind of light could do that?”
“We’re working on it,” I said.
“But how could a people eight thousand years ago know how to make our current computers emit a fatal light?” Jenna asked over dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant the next evening.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s no more a puzzle than that they could insert a special binary code in some of our chromosomes that could read out ASCII Indo-European—and you’ve been willing to believe that. We don’t understand the relationship of electricity to light in anything like its entirety even now. Maybe they did—or at least knew something we don’t yet. Maybe they had some kind of organic computers—that ran on DNA algorithms like Adleman’s math calculator—except rather than solving equations they caused electrons to form light patterns that in turn controlled circadian rhythms.”
“Lots of primitive people understand circadian rhythms,” Jenna said. “I can believe that. And the DNA computers—”
“Rotted away,” I said. “Or maybe they’re in us. Who knows?”
“Their media were life and light,” Jenna said, “more ephemeral, but also much more lasting, than just plain stone.”
And the red wine came and we both got good and drunk…
Some things are too bizarre for me ever to put in a public record—not if I want to keep my job.
Hertzberg called an end to that small project within a project, but Jenna’s going on. She and I contacted all of the original researchers, explaining our theories to them. Most thought we were nuts, a few believed us. Doesn’t matter if they believe us or not—the important thing is that those who pursue this aren’t likely to risk making a copy of the text any time soon. We can’t do anything more than alert them—to the enormous possibilities of this research as well as its dangers. The rest is up to them.
The problem is we don’t have any evidence. Videotapes, motion photography—all equipment seems to be blind to that deadly little light, able neither to transmit nor record it. We can make no record of what happens when Jenna’s chromosome text is copied, no record of that thin bright thread that’s emitted. Puts a crimp in any research program.
And of course we have no copies of the text. Videotapes, photographs of the screen, endless printouts—they all come out blank too, as innocent of DNA and Indo-European as the driven snow. The lethal light hadn’t erased the video-recording that first time; the recording hadn’t occurred to begin with.
“What kind of words can appear on a computer screen and defy recording, printing, on any other piece of equipment?” Jenna had asked.
“Maybe the kind that kills you if you try to copy them,” I’d replied. “Maybe the words don’t really exist on the screen at all. Maybe the program somehow projects them right onto our optic nerve.”
But the corpses existed all right. Three good people, and a pile of who knows how many rodents now. They, ironically, were the sole proof that the ASCII derived from the DNA not only looked like Indo-European, but was Indo-European or something much like it—stark confirmation that at least some of those words meant what they said. Jenna thinks that might be enough to give us a shot of getting something published, maybe in one of the fringier scientific journals.
We—Jenna—stumbled upon something, yes. A primordial copy protection scheme. A copy protection technique from Hell. DNA as ultimate shareware: use this little program to your heart’s content, enjoy it, be fruitful and multiply with it, implement it—let it implement you—but don’t copy its words without authorization. Not unlike many of our own computer programs and books, really. Except authorization to copy the Indo-European DNA program has likely been quite impossible to get for something going on eight thousand years or more.
I guess I was able to see this when Jenna didn’t because, well, my job is always at the intersection of science and the law, of life and property and the canons for its protection. And this canon was effective, I’ll give at least that to its authors.
Who were they? They apparently left their message in the far reaches of some 8 percent of human X chromosomes, their precious copyright notice in who knows what fraction of those. Maybe they were in some way responsible for setting the human species on the course it took.
Why would they attach such a deadly penalty to a violation of their notice? In that they were no different than organisms throughout the animal kingdom ready to protect their turf by deadly force. Jeez, didn’t I read just last week that even some trees emit a resin that kills any insects that tread too heavily on their bark.
Only further research will tell. And that, obviously, Jenna and her colleagues will have to do exceedingly carefully. Like they were researching a deadly new virus.
In the meantime, we’ll just have to take what pleasures with our DNA we more or less safely can. Those we are “free” to enjoy…
I ran my hand against the skin of Jenna’s back. She lay sleeping on my chest. She’d been cleared of all charges—Denise’s death had seen to that—she was no longer a suspect in any way.
I often wondered if somehow hers was the only one of the 8 percent of the X chromosomes that not only had the binary DNA material, but the DNA that yielded that brief meditation on modes of preservation, along with the copyright notice. Not likely, I guess. Further research would answer that question, too.
But in the meantime, the sensible course would be to assume that Jenna was the only one. She was the only one we knew about. And if that was so, then my responsibility to the human genome, the human species, was to see that Jenna’s special DNA survived. Not only in frozen storage, which Jenna had already taken care of, but in actual in situ living usage— the far more reliable and time-honored way of getting DNA into the future.
I, of course, knew, in spite of what I had told her that day in her apartment when we’d first glimpsed the light, that what she carried in her DNA was indeed both a blessing and a curse—a blessing in terms of the knowledge about our very origins that it could hold, a curse in terms of the price that three unknowing people had already paid in quest for that wisdom. A mechanism of beauty and horror, as Jenna had said herself. But to the degree that it was a blessing, I had to help it survive.