Gene Mapper (2 page)

I will notify you when the upload for file 070939-collapsed-SR06 is complete.

The guys at Mother Mekong must have their own headaches this morning, but couldn’t they handle a simple upload? Were these the people I would be working with?

So, we wait. I decided to review where I stood so far. “Search last year’s projects for Mother Mekong. Map all Kurokawa meetings onto the calendar. Add summaries.”

The calendar for 2036 appeared in the center of the workspace. I pinched the ends in both hands, stretched them to arms’ width, and swept the video thumbnails into a row arranged by date. AR let me stretch my workspace to fill my field of vision. You have to be your own boss to have this kind of freedom. It’s pathetic that salarymen are limited to the width of their cubes. How do they get anything done?

It took a few more seconds for the summaries to fill in. The virtual Post-its floated into place on their thumbnails, each in a different position to make it visually distinct from its neighbors. Now I could easily survey the whole timeline.

I use my contact lens–projected workspace every day, but it never ceased to amaze me. Everything—the interface, the virtual Post-its, the other widgets—was shaded as if real ambient light were falling on a real object. The sense of physical presence was seamless.

“Play third movie.”

Conference for October 15, 2036. Topic: Final project specifications.

The interface disappeared, and the wall pulled back. I was a fly on the wall of a spacious conference room with Kurokawa to my left, on the near side of the table. My avatar was on the far side. The video was nine months old, but other than the weave of his suit, Kurokawa looked identical to the man I’d talked to just a few minutes ago. Everything was the same down to the length of his hair. We each had a binder open to the same agreement.

“Just so you know, Mother Mekong SR06 is going to be the world’s first five-star distilled cultivation site,” said Kurokawa.

“Five? Then there’s a lot on my plate.”

“Yes. Mother Mekong is guaranteeing Full Organic and Water Cycling certification. L&B is funding site construction for the Active Ground Cover and Zero Emissions certificates. The project guarantees local hiring, so they get Fair Trade too. You’ll be mapping all five marks and the logos for both companies.”

I understood why L&B was ready to hand us a blank check. Mother Mekong was a test bed to prove that synthetic biology could drive sustainable yields to new heights. The logos and cert marks could be monitored with TerraVu’s satellite imaging service. They would stand as proof, on a twenty-four/seven basis, that this synthetic life-form was under total genetic engineering control. If the logos were disintegrating, L&B would panic, that was certain.

In a few more days L&B’s competitors, the certification agencies, and the FAO would wake up to what was happening. If we didn’t pinpoint the cause of the mutation and come up with a way to knock it out, L&B’s position at the top of the distilled crop heap was going to be in jeopardy.

“Play logo color meeting. Start with the specification chapter.”

Conference video for October 27, 2036. Personal profiles are available for any individuals mentioned during playback.

The video started. Again Kurokawa looked the same. It could have been a continuation of the previous meeting.

“Mamoru, the partners want fluorescent green.”

“Excuse me, did you say ‘fluorescent’?” Even with Behavior Correction, my stunned surprise was noticeable.

“Yes. This is a joint request from L&B and Mother Mekong. Please use the GFP protein listed in the style sheet. That should give us a nice fluorescent green effect.”

Now I remembered. That vile hue was another example of Barnhard’s meddling.

I could understand having fluorescent green in the daytime as a genomic control indicator. But the protein they wanted to use was derived from jellyfish DNA. The stuff actually glows blue-white. What the site looked like at night I couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to. A hundred square clicks of rice glowing in the dark.

I called up the profile for Lintz Barnhard. A text block and a 3D minikin about eight inches tall popped up, suspended above the table. The avatar had the full mane of swept-back white hair, the bespoke suit, and the perfectly hemispherical gut, as if the man was pregnant with a balance ball. Even in miniature, the aura of power—Barnhard was about six-foot-five in RL—was palpable. This was someone I wouldn’t want to hang out with even in augmented reality.

Lintz Barnhard was legendary in the genetic engineering community for sheer tenacity. He was a genuine pioneer who had propelled L&B from a second-tier brewer to the king of distilled crops in under ten years. He was too senior to be down in the weeds with people like us, but L&B’s commitment to feed the planet was on the line with Mother Mekong. This problem was too important to leave to the experts.

I watched the video and paged through the documents. The specs for the logos had been challenging, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I sampled a few more videos but didn’t notice any unusual requests related to the developer’s kit L&B had delivered through Kurokawa. If someone screwed up, it looked like it wasn’t L&B.

Was it me? I was a logical suspect, unfortunately. I pictured Barnhard bursting into a meeting, pounding the table, and grabbing my avatar by the lapels. The image was depressing. I had to prove that my mapping hadn’t triggered a gene meltdown.

Upload for file 070939-collapsed-SR06 has begun. Estimated time to completion: forty-six minutes twenty seconds. I will notify you when the transfer is complete.

Was the pipe out of Cambodia that small? Anyway, the timing was perfect. It was time for a run. I needed to clear my head.

*   *   *

When I got back and checked the file, I rolled my eyes. Mother Mekong needed to hire better people.

The file was two hundred gigabytes. Now I knew why the upload had taken so long to start—the security scan was choking. Malware was getting worse all the time, and sterilizing two hundred gig would’ve taken a huge amount of time.

But the person who handled the upload—Thep, was that his name? He needed help. If he knew anything, he’d know that two hundred gigabytes couldn’t be right. Someone had messed up somewhere.

The
Oryza
genome only has around three hundred million base pairs. Even the 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome can be captured in a gigabyte. The entire genome, coded amino acids, and auxiliary information in a space-hogging format like gXML only takes up twenty-five gigabytes or so.

I wasn’t sure how closely I’d be working with these people, but maybe that Fair Trade certification was forcing Mother to cut corners. Where were they getting their people? The concept was nice, but the least they could’ve done was hire someone with a degree from somewhere real to handle external liaison. Someone who knew what he was doing.

The file was gXML. Right now, this was all I had to work with. I had no choice but to get on with it.

“Gene Analytics. Open 070939-collapsed-SR06.”

INITIALIZATION FAILED

INSECT AND PLANT CODE GROUPS FOUND

SELECT TEMPLATE AND OPEN IN MANUAL MODE

I didn’t have the voice plug-in, so the messages appeared in text. Gene Analytics could handle everything from fortune-telling via blood type to biological weapons design, yet for this genome it couldn’t decide whether the Kingdom was Animalia or Plantae. That meant the sample was contaminated—I was dealing with a mix of different organisms. The Cambodians had probably contaminated the mutated DNA with genetic material from grasshoppers or some other insect.

I mean, shit. No matter how primitive their equipment was, the basic protocol for handling samples was the same.

“Schedule. Include request for second round of samples in next Kurokawa message.”

New smart task created. Request for new DNA field sampling to be included in next Kurokawa message.

It looked like I was going to be spanking Mother Mekong a lot. The tasks were piling up. Who knew when they’d be able to deliver the next data set? I decided to see if I could get something out of what I had on the bench before I touched base with Kurokawa again.

I didn’t know whether I was dealing with rice or some other grass species, but if I could isolate the Plantae DNA buried in the sample, I could prove there was no connection with SR06. That would shoot down the gene collapse theory and give Kurokawa a bigger stick to beat Mother Mekong with.

“Gene Analytics. Open code using Oryza template. Send messages to workspace voice output.” The program drew a bar across the workspace and started reading out the data. The bar was six inches high and six feet long at least. I watched it fill in with
Oryza
DNA in green. Junk—duplicate data or anything the program couldn’t recognize as plant DNA—was gray.

The bar was coming in mostly gray. I wasn’t surprised. I watched the program do its best to take an impossibly long gene sequence and process it as if it were a single organism. “What kind of life-form has a genome fifty or a hundred times larger than Homo sapiens?” I muttered.

Reading data as Kingdom
Plantae, Angiospermae, Monokots,
Family
Poaceae,
Genus
Oryza
.

“Duh. That’s what I asked for.”

WARNING. LETHAL EXPRESSION SEQUENCES. MODELING OR EMBRYO-PRINTING PROHIBITED.

“Wha—?”

A clutch of vertical red sectors flashed around the center of the bar. I hadn’t seen a warning like this outside the classroom. I winked at the first red line and triggered another pop-up.

VULNERABLE FOR MALM-PUCCINIA ORYZIAS

“Bull
shit
!”

A plant with no rust resistance in the middle of Mother Mekong’s precious SR06?

By the time the red rust blight ended its long burn through the Asian rice crop in 2022, tens of millions were dead of starvation. The same year, the WTO had banned cross-border trade in nonresistant cultivars, and in less than two years most legacy cultivars had pretty much disappeared. If transmission had been happening through soil microbes or insects, it could’ve been eradicated with pesticides, but red rust was transmitted through swallow droppings. It had soon spread all over East Asia.

For free agents like Kurokawa and me who depended on distilled crops for a living, red rust and the Great East Asian Famine had a special significance. Natural strains of rice—leaves mottled with red-brown spots, seedless stalks slowly withering—were replaced by the first generation of plants that paid our bills.

L&B had always been an aggressive genetic modifier of rice cultivars for brewing beer. It soon turned out that some of their modified strains lacked the receptor gene for red rust. In fields of brown-spotted, dying plants, a few stood tall above the rest, heads heavy with golden grains.

This was an opportunity Barnhard was born to seize.

L&B was mainly known for beer, but thanks to his abrasive personality, Barnhard had been sidetracked into L&B’s sake sales division. He had no understanding of genetics, but when he heard about the resistant plants that had just been found on an L&B plantation, he convinced the government of Singapore, which was just getting back on its feet after the Internet imploded, to foot the bill for the development of a new variety of Super Rice Zero that would be safe for direct human consumption. Barnhard ran the project with a whip hand, and in less than a year L&B had a release candidate ready to launch.

Everyone in the industry knew about Barnhard’s presentation to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. His performance shed more heat than light, but his aggressive approach put distilled crops—rice, and later wheat and soy—on the map. “Our distilled rice, SR01, is more robust and safer for human consumption than cultivars produced through crossbreeding or mutation selection. It’s evolution-proof. We know every base pair in this genome. Every trait is under our control. SR01 is just the first drop from the distiller’s pot, but we’re certain it will be a very fine blend.”

Barnhard hammered away with “distilled” everywhere he went, and after a while the name stuck. “Distilled” became a brand that symbolized the difference between full-scratch genetic design and the GMO crops of the 2010s, which took natural plants and selectively modified them for traits like secondary infertility and resistance to pesticides.

L&B’s genetic “distillation” made such methods obsolete. Genetic engineers investigated every base pair in the target genome, jettisoned everything unessential, and added new traits. When SR01 burst on the scene twenty years ago, it was almost an artificial organism. The latest generation, SR06, had been scratch-designed with synthetic biotechnology and bore hardly a trace of its natural ancestor.

The scramble to adopt the new crops and farming methods spawned a huge industry. Organizations were set up to monitor and regulate protein content and allergens from the design stage. Specialized construction firms carved out growing sites configured for the crops. One-man research labs used embryo printing for high-speed prototyping, and for leaf and flower color, there were gene mappers like me.

I wondered how Barnhard would feel if he knew that SR06, which he probably thought would be the summit of his career, was contaminated by a legacy plant with
no resistance to red rust.
Would he explode with anger, his face turning crimson the way it did at the FAO? Or would he turn white and clutch his spherical gut?

“Gene Analyst. Task complete?”

I am completing my analysis of the data using the Oryza template. The data includes a complete natural genome for
Oryza sativa
subspecies
japonica.

“Sativa japonica?”

Oryza sativa japonica
was a family of rice cultivars formerly grown on islands off the east coast of Asia.

So the plant that had invaded Mother’s sanctuary was a legacy cultivar
vulnerable to red rust. I couldn’t fathom how this might have happened, but as long as I could demonstrate that the sample had no connection with the genome I delivered, I’d be in the clear.