Gene Mapper (21 page)

I watched Thep push through the undergrowth ahead of me. She stopped at the edge of the field, planted the big tripod in the grass, and looked back down the slope. The wind rising from the southwest whipped her ponytail across her face.

A memory came back to me from my first visit to Mother Mekong—sitting with Thep at the base of a messenger tower while she filled me in on the distilled crop business. The wind had whipped her hair across her face then too, but it had just been my mil-spec AR stage putting on a show. She hadn’t felt a thing.

“What are you staring at, Mamoru?”

Thep brushed the hair from her face with work-roughened fingers. They were patched with bandages. A few strands of hair clung to her smooth forehead. She pushed them away impatiently.

“I was just thinking how much nicer it is to see the real thing.”

“This isn’t me.” Thep grinned. “It’s RealVu.” Behavior Correction would never have let me hear that nasal laugh.

“It’s
almost
as good as the real thing.”

She smiled and nodded. Yagodo had configured his stage to blanket the entire site. His AR was nearly indistinguishable from reality.

“Nothing’s as good as the real thing,” she said. “Anyway, here we go.”

She quickly surveyed the terraces falling away behind her before turning back to her setup. I paused to take in the view. It was the same vista I’d been staring at for the last three months in my workspace.

The sparkling sea of green spread out under the noon sun, rippling in the breeze that caressed us. Mother Mekong had been reborn as a designed-animal test site.

Barnhard had kept his word.

L&B had set up the Institute for Gene Mapping Research in Singapore at the Nankai Institute of Technology, Thep’s alma mater. Barnhard had also licensed the code for VB01G-X from the US government. Yagodo’s network of freelance engineers had taken a bioweapon designed for the US Marines Corps and completely refactored the code. Kurokawa handled the negotiations with a reluctant DARPA, wearing them down with sheer tenacity until they capitulated.

Now L&B was on the cusp of releasing the first of its INAGO—“grasshopper” in Japanese—series of designed animals.

I had supervised the grand scheme for the enhanced organism. Over the past six months, I’d made the transition from gene mapper and style sheet specialist to the world’s foremost commercial animal designer. There had been an overwhelming amount to learn and adapt to, but Kurokawa’s superhuman management of the research institute let me focus all my energy on developing INAGO.

Now we were about to field-test it for the first time.

The first animal in the series was a grasshopper programmed to operate within a predefined area and eat only XSR01 rice, which now covered the site. Using code from L&B, Thep reengineered Super Rice into the ideal food for INAGO series insects.

Thep cocked her head and called to me as she went on setting up the camera.

“Feel like a little wager?”

“On what?”

“On whether it hits in sector C3. I’m betting it will.”

“I’m not that dumb. I didn’t check the latest tweaks with a simulation, but they always hit the jackpot in C3. You know that.”

Thep just smiled and hoisted the camera into place.

Six months ago, when the grasshoppers cracked the mission code to draw the Guardians of the Land logo in giant letters across the site, the one that hit the jackpot had been in sector C3, in the southeast corner of Mother Mekong. There was no particular reason that we knew of that it happened there rather than anywhere else; it was just where that particular grasshopper happened to be. Yet each time I simulated the brute force decryption later, the same thing happened—the first insect to crack the code was always in sector C3. After Yagoda joined the institute as my chief engineer, he became so intrigued by the unlikely phenomenon that he spent weeks on the mystery, but he never came up with a solution. I remembered the look on his face when he told me, “If it comes up C3 again, your simulation is buggy.”

I reached into my leg pouch and drew out a clear acrylic tube. “Ready when you are,” I called to Thep.

The tube held a single large grasshopper curled quietly like some museum specimen. Born ten days earlier from an embryo printer, it was an omega-class INAGO—in sleep mode, thanks to 500 ppm trans-2-hexenal.

As I studied the inert INAGO, Thep stood up.

“All right, I’m good to go.”

I put a fingertip on the latch at the end of the tube and took a closer look at the omega. With wings folded it looked pretty much like a natural grasshopper, except for the rhythm of its respiration and the calm pulsing of its bioluminescent wings.

I designed this life-form.

Now our world was its world. Artificial life was about to take its place in the scheme of things.

Thep’s giggle drifted down the slope.

“Getting cold feet?” She spread her arms joyously and spun around to survey the terraces of green that dropped away below us. “There are two billion alphas out there already, just waiting for a mission.”

“That’s true.” I popped the lid of the tube. The scent of trans-2-hexenal reached me, a smell of ripe apples.

The omega detected the GPS signal and twitched its antennae sharply, twice. The light from its wings pulsed brighter.

Power up.

Thep peered into the workspace in her palm. “I’m used to working with alphas. The omega signal is much stronger.”

“It needs to reach as many alphas as possible. That’s why its life span is so much shorter.”

Thep nodded gravely. “Until tomorrow morning.”

“Right. The alphas have eighteen hours to find the solution. If they don’t, I go back to the drawing board.”

“Come on. They get better every time.”

As if wanting to prove Thep right, the omega poked its head out of the tube and moved tentatively into the sunlight. Its tiny spurs pricked my palm lightly, leaving a slight tingling as it moved toward my fingers.

I raised my hand toward the sea of green, and the omega quickly clambered up my fingers. With typical insect behavior, it was aiming for the highest point to launch. Now its luminescent wings were bright enough to light up my fingers, even in daylight.

Ready, steady…

The grasshopper reached the tip of my index finger and spread its wings, flexing them. Their network of veins was filled with dense clusters of bioluminescent cells emitting a rainbow of colors—a signaling organ unique to the omegas, designed by me, implemented by Yagodo, and capable of transmitting up to several hundred megabytes of information to two billion alphas.

I felt the little kick as the omega launched with a low drone. It flew arrow-straight out over the field, a dazzling point of strobing color. The rice plants left and right of its path seemed to stir with life, and the soft glow from millions of points of light rose and spread outward like blue-white foam. The bio-nanomachines in the alphas’ thoraxes were already working to crack the code.

“Find it.” Thep’s voice was taut with anticipation. “Just once. Find the answer, and you’ll find your place in our world.”

I had no words, but my heart was sending the same message.

Find it.

You’ll have to find a way to coexist with us on a planet with limited resources. You’ll have to discover the rules of survival for designed animals. Not even your designers know what they are, or if they even exist.

The rules for survival of Life.

That was the institute’s mission. It was my mission too. I unleashed DARPA’s grasshopper on the world.

The omega was a point of light now, a rainbow flame in the sun-drenched sky.

“Do you think they’ll find it?” Thep murmured. She leaned close to me. The back of her hand brushed mine. A lean hand, toughened by the work to convert Mother Mekong into a petri dish for designed life.

“I don’t know.” I laced her fingers into mine. “We’re a foolish species, Shue. We have the power to destroy our environment many times over. Yet here we are, still surviving. We don’t need to be perfect. We just have to find a way to do the best we can.”

She squeezed my hand. This time, her warmth was real.

Taiyo Fujii was born on Amami Oshima Island—that is, between Kyushu and Okinawa. He worked in stage design, desktop publishing, exhibition graphic design, and software development.

In 2012, Fujii self-published
Gene Mapper
serially in a digital format of his own design and was Amazon.co.jp’s number one Kindle best seller of the year. The novel was revised and republished in both print and digital as
Gene Mapper–full build–
by Hayakawa Publishing in 2013 and was nominated for the Nihon SF Taisho Award and Seiun Award. His second novel,
Orbital Cloud,
won the 2014 Nihon SF Taisho Award and took first prize in the “Best SF of 2014” in
SF Magazine.
His recent works include
Underground Market
and
Bigdata Connect
.

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