Luca (12 page)

But logic forces its way in. Mercer won’t hesitate to kill her, her family, anyone she’s ever known. Then again, they’ll be dead soon no matter what.

Confusion roils in her mind. What should she do?

Get back to work.

Without thinking, her fingers wander into the holo and probe the molecule, destroyer of worlds.

Could it be true?

With Mercer gone, she has time to digest all he’s revealed. Her hand slips into the pocket of her lab coat and closes around the memory cube. The one Mercer gave her.

He said it would verify his claims. Obviously, he wants her to view it. She better do what he says. For now.

Rising to her feet, she walks to a counter and drops the cube into the holo machine. A bluescreen pops up, floating in air.

The holo goes into auto-execution mode.

There’s grainy footage of a massive drill rig in Transvaal, South Africa. Each shot has a date and time in the lower left corner. Workers pull up the drill bit only to find it’s been sheared into pieces. They try again. The bit breaks over and over. More heavy equipment is brought in. A robot mole digs down thousands of meters, following the drill. Robot hands reach out into a dim-lit cavern and retrieve a chunk of rock.

A five-year-old boy carefully balances the slippery chunk in his hand. Qaara recognizes the rock immediately. It’s the same black chunk Mercer brought into her office.

A young Mercer smiles for the camera.

The next scene unfolds in a laboratory. The rock chunk is subjected to multiple tests. Titanium presses, industrial saws, boulder crushers. Time after time, the chunk emerges unscathed and unscratched. Drill bits and diamond blades snap in an effort to breach the surface. Brows furrow and heads shake under the glare of the lights. The videos continue year after year with no progress.

The little boy becomes a teenager and then a man.

Shots of a rainy day in a graveyard. Black umbrellas gather around a black monument that rises like a needle in the sky.

Mercer’s father is dead.

Mercer stands in the laboratory, alone. He opens the door of an electronic safe and wearing carbon gloves, takes out the chunk of rock and places it on a white cloth in the middle of a large table.

His eyes find the camera.

“A rock this hard must be hiding something. For thirty years, we’ve tried to open it with power tools, diamond saws and mining equipment. I know it sounds crazy, but maybe it’s time for a lighter touch.”

The table is strewn with feathers, pieces of wool, cotton swabs, raw watermelon, grapes, a slice of bright red fish. Random objects one might find around the house.

Qaara stares into the holo.

Mercer picks up the pink feather and holds it like a butcher knife, poised over the rock. Bringing it down, he presses the frilly edges into the black surface.

Bending closer, he observes the result.

Nothing.

He takes another object from the table and brushes it against the rock multiple times from numerous angles. Again, no result. He repeats the procedure with each object on the table. Each one fails. The rock remains unmoved, a solid mass that can’t be opened.

Mercer glances at the camera and raises his hand. “I admit it. That was stupid. But I had to know.”

Balancing the rock carefully on his palm, he brings his hand up close to his eye. “I wonder what this is. Definitely not of this world.” He examines the side. Carefully placing the rock on a white cloth on the table, he aims his index finger at a particular spot and presses.

The instant Mercer touches the mark, a black, rectangular piece slides out, like a miniature drawer.

Qaara stares at the holo; Mercer stares at the rock.

“Incredible,” the younger Mercer says.

For the next minute, Qaara watches as he frantically searches every cupboard and drawer in the laboratory, scattering stainless steel utensils and glass containers across the floor. Then he finds what he’s looking for: tweezers.

He dips the tip of the tweezers inside the small opening in the side of the rock and extracts a tiny jewel, a green crescent moon.

The same one he showed Qaara.

A mass of images flow by as the jewel is placed in machine after machine. Mass spectrometers. Quantum microscopes and scanners. Men and women in lab coats hover over it with transparent slates in their hands. Bluescreens fill with rivers of data. Mathematicians and cryptographers try to decipher the result.

As Qaara watches the holo, she knows what will happen next. Mercer will be sure to have included the moment of discovery.

“Wait!” A lab technician stares into a slate. “The algorithm found a pattern. It almost looks . . . genetic.”

Brushing a finger across the holo machine, Qaara fast- forwards through a series of images from a bio-lab. Large white vats line the walls. Technicians work on enormous bluescreens, moving data back and forth with their hands, tapping, swiping. Intuition tells her when to slow down the playback.

Another technician leans over a slate in the bio-lab. “We’ve synthesized the DNA fragment based on the genetic data from the green jewel.”

“The question is, have you synthesized
enough
of it?” Mercer moves into the picture, standing behind the technician.

“We have enough to produce a large sample. It’s in the bio-vat now with a few hundred gallons of host cells.” The technician motions to a white tank on the right. "The host cells will absorb the DNA frag and churn out the result.”

Mercer leans in. “How long until we know?”

“Two or three days.”

At last, Qaara is to the part of the holo she’s been waiting for. The part where she meets the molecule she’s labored over for six months.

The image blurs and then comes into focus.

The lab is engulfed in mist. Fumes rise from the floor. Red lights flash on and off.

“Tank breach!”

A lab tech scoops up his slate and moves back.

Fluid rushes out the bottom of the vat, spreading across the floor. It washes toward the lab tech, steam rising from whatever it touches.

“I’m not sure what’s—”

All at once, the walls of the tank rupture, sending waves of dark liquid rushing across the floor of the lab. It washes over the feet of the lab tech.

For an instant, he looks down at his feet. Mist rises around them.

And then his feet are gone.

Shrieks of terror burst from his lungs just before he collapses and disappears into the dark liquid.

It eats away the floor, carving out a hole. Stacks of equipment and shelves collapse.

The image switches to an outside view of a three-story concrete building. Half of it is melted away, as if a flame slashed through a wax sculptor.

Mercer walks into the holo frame. “How far down did it go?”

“It completely dissolved three floors, a twenty-foot concrete foundation and a few hundred feet of bedrock before it stabilized. Tests indicate that it seeped through and destroyed all organic life to at least a depth of five miles. That is as far as we searched.” A woman in a hardhat and white lab coat waits for Mercer’s reaction.

“And then it stopped?” Mercer says.

“Exactly forty hours after the tank breach.”

“What about the liquid? Is it still there, in the hole?”

The woman nods. “We dropped in sensors and found a pool at the bottom.”

“And your analysis?”

“The prior acidic material is gone. Its molecular structure has changed, or I should say,
is changing
.”

Qaara feels faint and stops the holo just as it pans over to Mercer. He’s frozen in time as his lips part to speak. Qaara realizes she’s been holding her breath.

Standing, she walks to the window to stare down at the neon world below. Manhattan in early dawn. A living organism of light and color.

After two deep breaths, she allows the holo to continue.

Mercer opens his mouth. “What do you mean,
is changing
?”

“Just that.” The woman glances at the slate in her hands. “Probe results are off the charts. Never seen anything like it. The molecular structure of the pooled materials is in flux. Like some kind of—”

“What?”

“Soup. Supercharged primordial soup. Amino acids. Sugars. Organic molecules.” The woman’s gaze drops to the ground. She kicks at the dirt. "Almost like something is about to be . . . born.”

The holo jumps to a conference room. Mercer sits in an open slot in the center of a round table. Men and women, some in business suits, and some in laboratory attire, sit around the edges.

“You’re sure it’s alive?” Mercer says.

“Without a doubt.” A man in a white lab coat rises from his chair and walks to the wall. The instant his finger touches the wall, it lights up to become a large bluescreen. “As you can see, the acidic material possesses a unique ability to break molecular bonds. It dissolves anything it touches until all that remains are primary materials, individual atoms. The process continues for forty hours and then suddenly stops. At that point, the resulting pool of liquid coalesces into organic materials. And then—”

“And then what?” Mercer says.

“The organic materials condense into the LUCA. The Last Universal Common Ancestor. Cellular precursor of all life. The first rung on the evolutionary ladder.”

“You’re saying the killer molecule starts with inorganic materials, breaks them down into an organic soup and spontaneously produces life?” Mercer's eyebrows rise.

“Essentially, yes.” The man returns to his seat. “The Holy Grail of biology ever since Miller-Urey.”

“Explain.”

“Back in 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey performed their famous experiment at the University of Chicago, passing electric sparks through a mixture of water vapor, methane, ammonia and carbon monoxide. The experiment produced amino acids and sugars, the organic building blocks of life.”

Mercer tilts his head. “But nothing you would call
alive
, correct?”

“Not in the classic sense.” The man motions to the bluescreen on the wall. An image of the killer molecule with its distinctive spiral shape slowly rotates. “For over a hundred years, evolutionary biologists have tried to do what this structure does. Turn dead matter into a living, reproducing cell. If nature can do it with nothing but a few raw materials and the laws of physics, the argument goes, then scientists in a lab of sophisticated equipment ought to be able to do it.”

“But the scientists could never get it to work, could they?”

The man shakes his head. “No matter how many times the experiments were done, dead matter has never been turned into living, reproducing life. Until now.”

“Which brings us to our next topic.” Mercer stands, fingers pressing into the table. “Earth is going to be awash in this killer molecule in a few months. If what you've told me is true, it’s the end of civilization. A catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions for the world. But for those who are prepared, the most rare opportunity.”

Qaara stares at the holo.

I thought Mercer said no one else knew about this.

The people at the edges of the table stare blankly, clearly not comprehending.

“The killer molecule.” Mercer points at the shape swimming on the bluescreen. “It’s going to rain down from the skies. You’ve seen what it can do. All that humankind has achieved is about to be wiped clean.” He swipes a finger on his jax. “Observe."

The molecule on the bluescreen fades into a pool of blue particles floating in space. Long tendrils radiate out from the central mass, as if grasping for a passing planet. Stars are faintly visible through it.

“We identified this some months ago. Genesis Corporation sent out a probe, in secret, of course. Any guesses on what it is?” Mercer looks around, smiling.

Nothing but blank faces stare back at him.

A man in a dark blue suit raises a hand. Mercer nods.

“The killer molecule?”

“No,” Mercer says. “But close. It’s full of the DNA fragment that
produces
the killer molecule. The one we synthesized from the genetic code on the jewel inside the rock my father dug up so many years ago. We have six months before this Cloud engulfs Earth. More than enough time to prepare. Any suggestions on what we should do?”

Silence fills the room.

One woman raises her hand. “We have to figure out how to disable the killer molecule. Stop it before it destroys the world. Find the chemical key to break it apart. Neutralize it.”

“Agreed. Who could perform such a task?” Mercer asks.

The scientists in the room remain silent.

“A materials expert,” the woman says. “The best in the world. There really is only one choice.”

Mercer opens his mouth to speak. “Qaara Kapoor. Inventor of Graff.”

Heads nod around the table.

“Very good,” Mercer says. “Thank you for coming today. You are my inner circle, the only group in the world to know about the Cloud and the killer molecule. You've all worked hard and performed admirably. But here’s the real reason I invited you all into this room.” All exits to the room seal shut. Lifting his jax in his palm, Mercer taps the end. "I’m no longer in need of your services.” At the same time, he slips a clear mask over his mouth and nose, pressing it into his face. One of the women in the room jumps up from her seat, screaming and running to the door, clawing to get out.

Green vapor shoots from holes in the ceiling. The room erupts in chaos.

In less than five seconds, Mercer is the only one standing.

Qaara stares into the hologram, witnessing the murder of the best and the brightest, the nobility of Genesis Corporation, her mouth hanging open.

15

MEAT LOCKER

Jedd wakes up.

He opens his eyes. The world is pitch black. Silent. He tries to get up, but his hands and ankles are bound together with warm, sticky ropes. The harder he pulls, the less he can move.

“Ricky, you there?”

No answer.

Then a hand slips over his mouth. Jedd struggles to get free, but the ropes on his hands and ankles suddenly go hard.

Lips come close to his ear. “It’s me. Ricky. Now please stop yelling. They might be able to hear us.”