The Soul of the Matter (28 page)

Chapter 56

A
s they approached the tour location, near Pioneer Square, Dan handed his tablet to Trish and said, “Look at this.”

On the screen was a map of the area around them. “See these,” Dan said, pointing to small icons of cameras with gray-shaded regions projecting out from them. “They mark every security camera around here, along with their corresponding field of vision. The flashing ones are programmable, and I can send commands to shift their direction or shut them off. For now, all we need to do is follow this zigzag path and we'll be outside the view of the cameras. This gives us the means to enter and exit without images of our faces being run through automated facial recognition programs. Of course, some day everything will be in the field of vision, and with social media databases having already tagged every face—”

“Stop,” Trish said. “You mean to tell me that right now, government surveillance programs are using facial recognition to track my every movement and put it in a database somewhere?”

“When you're in range of a camera with high enough resolution networked to the internet, they could be doing that. So could Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and so on. A retailer could be sending images to them and, with the technology and photos they already have, social media could send the name of the person back, along with a whole lot of other information. For a fee, of course. And all without violating their latest privacy agreement, which they retain the right to revise to their advantage at any time.”

“And you helped develop these types of capabilities?” Trish said with indignation.

“For international, not domestic, purposes.”

“You'd better not get caught tapping into this stuff. That wouldn't be too helpful to us right now,” Trish said.

“I installed trip wires that will let me know if anyone is on to me.”

“I don't know whether to be reassured or frightened by you.”

“You know all too well what to think about me,” Dan said, once again revealing more truth than he had intended. Though they had only been together a short while, and it
had
to be more his imagination than reality, Dan felt like whenever Trish focused her gaze on him, something new was being revealed to her. It did not bring him comfort. There was too much that wasn't the way it should be, and he didn't want others, especially her, to know it.

“I like it better when you're questioning yourself. It makes me think you're being properly cautious,” Trish replied.

“Around you, I'm always cautious.”

“Keep it that way,” Trish said, handing the tablet back to Dan.

“We'll be there in a few blocks.”

•  •  •

“Buy your tickets to Bill Speidel's Underground Tour. See Seattle as it once was,” the tour guide barked as Dan and Trish approached. They stepped inside the old building that served as the tour starting point, and Dan purchased two tickets.

The large room looked like it had once been a saloon. Rows of benches faced a bar that still dispensed alcoholic beverages for those who wanted one after the tour.

About two dozen tourists were scattered across the benches. They were a mix of older couples, parents in their early forties with teen children, and twentysomething singles. Given the early summer cool weather, most wore long sleeves or light jackets. Standing near the bar was a woman in her early sixties, Dan guessed, with brown hair fading into gray, a friendly demeanor, and animated facial expressions. After a few minutes, she walked to the bar, faced the rows of people, and announced that she was their tour guide. Then she began telling them about Seattle's founding.

Dan was anxious. As best as he could tell, there was no Galileo
here. And there was not much time. He'd gleaned from reading the brochure about the tour that they were going to explore remants of the old city of Seattle, now residing under the current city. Entering a confined underground space could be a trap. Once the introduction was over, they began descending steps to a level below, entering corridors underneath the present-day sidewalks. He half listened to the tour guide explain that Seattle had once been built in marshland and on steep hills that rose from them. That became a big problem as the city grew. A fire in the late 1800s burned everything in the low areas to the ground. Shop owners rushed to rebuild before the city could elevate the area. Later, ten-foot-high walls were built along the streets, the space in between filled in, and new roads paved above. What once had been ground-level storefronts became abandoned space as second floors were now at the new street level. Hollow spaces under the present-day sidewalks provided the walkways through which the past was toured beneath the present.

Dan didn't see any sign of Galileo. He followed the tour group, watching Trish carefully. There were lots of partial walls and doorways behind which someone could be lurking. After passing one recessed doorway, a man stepped out of the shadows.

Turning quickly, arms positioned for action, Dan stepped in front of Trish and faced the man. They were thirty feet behind the back of the tour group and hidden from their view. In the dim light, they sized each other up.

The man was average height, slightly pudgy, with rumpled clothes and wild, graying hair. He hardly looked like a threat. But when he moved his hand toward his coat pocket, Dan sprang forward, grabbed the arm, twisted it behind the man's back, and spun him a half turn, pinning him against the wall.

“There's no need for that. I'm the person Stephen called Galileo. In my right pocket is an envelope with a medical analysis of Ava in it and a USB thumb drive. I'm here to help
us
carry out Stephen's wishes, to finish his work.”

“How can I be sure of that? Who are you?” Dan replied as he took the envelope and handed it to Trish.

“My name is Sam Abrams. Until a few months ago, I worked at
The Broad Institute, researching the human genome. Before that, I worked at HBC. Like Stephen, I've seen God's handwriting,” he answered.

Looking at the bedraggled, frightened man in front of him, hearing the phrase Sam had said, Dan felt the odds were strong that Sam and Stephen's Galileo were one and the same.

“Octavio Romanov said you disappeared. What happened to you?”

“Outside Stephen, I couldn't trust anyone, though if we hadn't been able to find each other, I was considering seeking Romanov's assistance.”

Meanwhile, Trish had opened the envelope and started reading. She exclaimed, “It's the same analysis of Ava's genome that I have!”

“We need to keep up with the group in front of us but keep out of earshot,” said the skittish Sam Abrams. “Dreadful powers are aligning against us, and they have eyes everywhere.”

At the words, shadows seemed to shift shape, and a chill passed over Dan, leaving him questioning his state of mind once again.

Without waiting for a response, Sam hurried after the tour with Dan and Trish in tow.

Dan whispered, “What was your relationship to Stephen and his work?”

“I was one of his first hires at HBC. When Stephen realized something extra was encoded
in
DNA, he had me leave HBC and join The Broad Institute. They're an endowed collaboration between Harvard and MIT that researches genomics. They have fantastic connections to all genome-related research. He thought it would be good to leverage their resources while splitting us up to avoid detection and reduce risk.”

Trish looked quizzically at Dan when Sam said “encoded in DNA,” then said to Sam, “You make it sound like he found more than genome information.”

Both Dan and Sam shot Trish a look that said
Don't say anything more
.

Cautiously, recognizing he'd have to explain what he had withheld from Trish, Dan asked, “Why the cryptic name? Why didn't Stephen tell me about you?”

“He wanted to protect those around him by minimizing what and who they knew. He described it as each person being a spoke in the wheel. I focused on the biology side of things, including medical treatments,” Sam said with a knowing look toward Trish. “Last December, right after Stephen's big breakthrough and Alex's death, we became aware of activity that made us very nervous, so I went into hiding. When Stephen died, I followed a plan that we had prearranged, came here, and waited for a safe way to contact you. I better have done a good enough job,” Sam said solemnly.

“How did you know we were here?” Trish asked.

“I knew who Stephen had reached out to, thought you might think to reach out to them, too, and had a friend at the Discovery Institute keep an eye out for you. I wanted to meet in an out-of-the-way, but still public, place to make sure who you were, so I picked this.”

Anxious to know, Dan cut to the chase and asked, “Do you have access to Stephen's work?”

“Together we will, but not here. We are going to see it all for the first time
together
. No more solo acts,” Sam said. “Stephen gave me a security-protected thumb drive. There are buttons on it for entering codes. Once I enter the code I have, a prompt will appear asking for information only you can provide. Once you do that, we'll both have the other codes needed to access the information Stephen stored on your network.”

Dan was frustrated. He wanted to unlock the encryption and see
now,
with his own eyes, what Stephen had claimed was scientific proof for the origin and meaning of human existence. He also didn't like sharing it with Sam, though he thought that Sam would probably be a good guide through Stephen's work. Still, Dan would find a way to control it. Too much was at stake.

“Yes, from here on out, we all have to be on the same page,” Trish asserted, looking at Dan with an expression that reflected her displeasure with Dan for keeping things from her.

“Then let's go. We'll skip the Discovery Institute,” Dan said.

“No. Go there. You may hear things that could turn out to be useful. And we should separate before regrouping to make sure none of us were followed,” Sam said.

“Yes, let's do that,” Trish said.

“Here is my motel key and the address,” Dan said to Sam. “Meet us there in an hour. But first, turn off the location services of your phone, especially GPS, then power it down. Don't carry anything that can be tracked electronically.”

“After traveling cross-country by bus, staying in odd hotels, always being on the lookout, using prepaid phones, and all the other precautions I've taken, I ought to be safe now,” Sam said in voice that sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“Do it anyway,” Dan said, thinking of all that had already happened.

With that, the man who had gone by the name Galileo dropped back out of sight.

As Dan and Trish left the tour and headed toward the Discovery Institute, Dan questioned whether they'd find friend or foe there.

•  •  •

Sam got out of the taxi a few blocks from the motel. He decided to walk the rest of the way, ducking in and out of shops and alleys, finally walking beneath a row of trees. Emerging into the open, he saw one of the few old-style motels left. After ascending the exterior stairs, he walked along the external walkway toward the room number printed on the sleeve that held the room key. As he approached the room, an attractive woman, with long black hair, approached from the other direction and said in what seemed like a slight eastern European accent, “Could you show me how the key works? I can't get into my room.”

Chapter 57

S
o this is the place that causes such consternation and wrath,” Trish said as they arrived at a two-story, block-long, sandstone building. An exercise club occupied the first floor and the Discovery Institute spanned the level above it.

After being buzzed in, Dan and Trish proceeded through a glass entranceway, then walked up a flight of stairs to the second floor.

“This place is further proof of the power of words and the importance of ideas. The people on the second floor are leaders in the intelligent design movement, proponents of the belief that the actions of an intelligent agent were required to explain human existence, in fact of many features of living things. This makes them the villain of the mainstream science community, which accuses them of hiding a religious agenda in the guise of science,” Dan told her. As he explained the institute to Trish, he realized that his quest for truth was leading him to be more open and less judgmental of those also on the quest, whatever the answers turned out to be. One thing was for certain; Dan no longer saw it as an open-and-shut case in favor of materialistic Darwinism.

Reaching the lobby, they saw a small set of offices more befitting a small neighborhood business operating on a tight budget than an organization that had attracted the attention—and scorn—of most of the scientific establishment. “They hardly look like an establishment with the resources needed to challenge all the institutions and organizations they've upset. I don't see what Stephen could have gotten out of a place like this,” Dan said as they pressed a second buzzer, anxious to be done with the visit and impatient to meet with Sam later.

“Good thing appearances don't always tell the whole story,” Trish replied good-naturedly, lifting an eyebrow.

•  •  •

“I remember my discussion with Dr. Bishop quite well.” The conversation with Dr. Peterson had begun after an exchange of regrets over Stephen's death. There was nothing about Peterson that would indicate the venom he conjured up in the halls of Darwinism. His books, when not ignored by the mainstream scientific community, were often vilified as antiscience. But that had been changing. A few in the scientific establishment, while not agreeing with the books' conclusions, were acknowledging legitimate scholarship within them.

Taking the lead in the discussion, Trish said, “We'd appreciate it if you could share with us what had Stephen discussed with you and your reaction to it.”

“Certainly. His primary interest was what is commonly, but erroneously, referred to as junk DNA. He was looking for a relation between that and the human body plan, the genetic information that directs the shape, structure, and size of a person and everything within them. At present, the mechanism for the body plan is unknown,” Dr. Peterson said.

Trish said, “Did Stephen mention anything about the amount of instructions required to direct human development and the need for an algorithm to take a small amount of DNA and expand it into a large amount of instructions, including for the body plan?”

Smiling, Peterson answered, “That's right.”

“And what do people here think about that?” Dan asked.

“It makes sense to direct the body plan with what you described as algorithmic processing. This also presents a strong argument for intelligent design.”

“Why?” Dan asked.

“Pretty simple, actually. If you make even the slightest change to a complex algorithm, you get radical changes, not the small changes that Darwinism posits. And for the algorithmic expression to work, you need a lot of things: the algorithm, a translation mechanism, DNA that means something when translated by the algorithm, and a
mechanism to take the translated information and make something out of it. And that something has to work. All of this has to be there from the very origin of life. Taken as a whole, this is an example of irreducible complexity. If any one of these elements were missing, it wouldn't work. And an incremental path of small mutations, from a much simpler state to the present state, is extraordinary unlikely. More important, whatever algorithmic processing was there in the beginning couldn't change along the way as that would render everything else nonfunctional.”

“The more I hear, the more I still don't get it,” Trish said. “It seems so obvious that incredibly complex processing has to be going on, given the known amount of DNA versus all the instructions needed to make a person, yet nobody talks about it. I've never seen a scientific article about it.”

“When you've decided beforehand, as I once did, that everything must be explained by natural causes, that there can't be an active God, then there is no reason to look for questions you can't answer or that lead away from what you want to believe,” Dan said.

“A lot is acknowledged in pieces but not discussed as a whole,” Peterson said. “Even Richard Dawkins recognizes that the code had to be there from the beginning.”

“But ultimately it means that the code had to be able to lead to the creation of all species, even though they didn't exist yet,” Trish said.

Peterson said, “Evolutionists would say that information got added later, though that leaves out all that is required to go from single-cell organisms to multicell organisms with distinct body plans. And the kicker—with or without algorithms—is the multilayered coding of the epigenome. Based on the setting, the epigenome takes the same area of DNA to mean different things, at different times, for different purposes. Epigenetic factors can even influence the genome for future generations.”

“Why is that problematic with something working for one purpose layering on top another?” Trish asked.

“The thing is when one stretch of DNA codes for multiple things, if that area of DNA changes for one purpose, it changes for all its
purposes. What might make one thing work better is highly likely to make others work less well, or not at all. The odds that all DNA coding came about through unguided, unplanned means are astronomical. What we see are indications of intentional design. We are the most complex creatures to ever exist, and rather than look at it objectively and deal with what that implies, some people, including many scientists, have decided beforehand that God can't exist, and therefore we have to be here by strictly ‘natural,' material causes. That's bad theology leading to bad science.”

“But just because the standard Darwinian theory might have flaws doesn't mean that ‘God did it,' ” Dan said.

“Intelligent design doesn't say anything about God's existence or the identity of the intelligent designer,” Dr. Peterson replied.

Dan was confused and starting to get annoyed by what seemed like this man's evasiveness. Why wouldn't these people just come out and say what they must be thinking? Intelligent design had to be a euphemism for God. As much as Dan wanted to push things, he decided to hold back, both as a means to get as much out of Peterson as possible and to get out and see Sam sooner.

Trish wasn't that reluctant. “But isn't intelligent design being used to push the Genesis account of creation?”

“We're accused of that. But no, that's not our purpose. We're looking strictly at the science and not inferring anything about the intelligent designer, nor the means used to express that design,” Peterson answered.

“Come on. If not God, then who or what?” Dan said, his thoughts drifting to a world where creationists used their science to impose their religious dogma on others. Yet, at the same time, he was seeking something for himself that would prove whether God existed or not.

“I'm sure everyone has their own ideas. We represent lots of different views and beliefs at this center—and some are without specific religious affiliations or spiritual desire. While there are definitely people out there who are looking to prove the Genesis account of creation, and use intelligent design as one of their arguments, that has nothing to do with us or our work. We don't have to prove the
identity of a designer to show that we are the product of design,” Peterson answered, a trace of agitation in his voice.

“Let's get back to the purpose of our visit,” Trish said looking at Dan. Turning to Dr. Peterson, she asked, “What was Stephen looking for, and were you able to help him with it?”

“He wanted our help in decoding what he called the genome algorithm, but we weren't able to provide any. Dr. Bishop showed great interest in protein folds. We talked about the odds against functional proteins developing via undirected means, and that was the end of the discussion. We also discussed the evidence for gene regulation having multiple layers of controls to
prevent
genetic mutations from being expressed and propagating: in other words, biology working against Darwinian evolution. This led Stephen to speculate that providing different input parameters to genetic algorithms could generate new species rapidly, without requiring significant change to DNA. This would explain the Cambrian explosion.”

Intrigued, Dan asked, “Where would these parameters come from and what would cause them to change? How could they change without producing nonfunctioning junk, given what Stephen described about the complexity of the genetic algorithms?”

“I have no idea. Stephen started to mention a connection to the soul but then wouldn't discuss it further. It was not something we'd research, given what we've already been accused of. Anyway, it was the last we spoke. I'm sorry again about his passing.”

Lost in thought, Dan didn't acknowledge the condolences. Things were starting to add up, but only to lead to more questions. He felt like he was getting closer to Stephen's thinking. If all perceiving creatures had souls, and if there was a connection between mind and body, the attachment of a different type of soul, like one intended for a human versus an ape, to an existing species could conceivably change the input parameters of the genetic algorithms, via the epigenetic feedback mechanisms Stephen had described, and lead to new species. It would also mean that the algorithms were set up in advance for all the different parameters. And being able to generate new creatures by simply changing a small set of input parameters
would support the simultaneous emergence of a large number of new species, in close proximity, in a short period of time, explaining the Cambrian explosion. It would also mean the active participation of a designer, at strategic points in time. It also implied that within each person now, awaiting a trigger, could be the information needed for whatever humanity could become next. What would happen if that information were activated?

“How come materialist Darwinism isn't questioned more in the mainstream press and academia?” Trish asked.

“You're instantly vilified, ridiculed, and shunned if you do,” Peterson explained. “Eventually your funding is cut off, and you may lose your position. It would be funny if it wasn't pathetic, how wonderful scientific research papers that could easily be taken as evidence against materialistic Darwinism, have to say somewhere in the paper that in no way is it an argument against it.”

“It's amazing how political science is,” Trish said.

“It puts scientists with religious beliefs in the awkward position of saying the natural universe explains everything, even their own behavior, while they personally believe that God exists and has a meaningful role to play in our world.”

“Isn't that where theistic evolution comes into play?” Trish asked.

“For some,” Peterson said.

“The problem with that is it says evolution happened just as Darwin said, via purely naturalistic mechanism, not via intelligent design, yet God put evolution in motion with the explicit intent of producing us. That's quite a tightrope they're dancing on,” Dan said.

“That's right,” Peterson agreed.

“There are two major contradictions within it. First, if God intended it to turn out exactly as it did, that is a form of intelligent design whether there is visible evidence or not. Second, a person either has an immaterial soul or not. If they don't, theism doesn't make sense. If they do, materialist evolution can't explain its existence and the immaterial soul would play a role in a person's adaptability and selection, making it more than a strictly materialist process,” Dan said.

“You may see it that clearly, but try and get the theistic evolu
tionists to understand it. You would think theists would remember the parables about not being able to serve two masters and the truth shall set you free.” He leaned back in his chair. “How do you know so much about this? Why is it so important to you?” Peterson asked.

“I'm just looking for rational answers,” Dan answered.

“He's having trouble figuring out whether his existence matters. I've been considering that question as well—about his existence, not mine,” Trish joked.

“Have you come to any conclusions?” Peterson said.

“I am leaning toward believing that it does.” She gave Dan a wry look.

Dan hesitated, but decided that, given where the discussion had led, he could ask one more question. Dan pulled up on his smartphone the image of the symbol Stephen had drawn and asked, “Have you seen this before? Do you know what it means?”

Peterson looked at it intently, then replied, “No, I haven't. I'm sorry.”

Once again feeling anxious to get back to the motel and talk with Sam Abrams, Dan said, “Unless there is anything else you think we should know that would be helpful, I think we should be going.”

“If I think of anything, I'll give you a call,” Peterson said.

“Thank you very much for your time,” Dan said, and Trish added her thanks.

The trip to the Discovery Institute had been worthwhile, though in ways they didn't fully understand, and in ways that were too fantastical. Could the origin of human life really be that bizarre? Could humanity really be on the verge of a major transformation? He had clearly veered into the territory of religious ideas intersecting with scientific ones, and it wasn't something he'd state publically nor seriously pursue, at least not without rock-solid evidence.