Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

“A,T,C,G,” he said aloud. There was something familiar about those letters. “And this just keeps repeating?”


Zavada leafed through the printout, nodding in the affirmative after a quick scan of each page. Then, without warning, he stopped and backtracked. “No. There’s a change here. It’s similar... Okay, it’s definitely the same four distinct values, but not in the same order.”



10100001010000101000101000010000000110000010000000110000011000001100000100000001000000010000000



“The first several iterations were to give us the key,” Soter murmured. “To make sure we would notice the pattern. Can you break it down into sets using these values?” He tapped his key.

Zavada, with the eagerness of a kid opening presents on Christmas morning, began converting binary to alphanumeric.



AAAAGCGCCCGGG



Soter gasped. Now he knew why the four letters looked so familiar. “I need to show this to Chris.”

He was certain that the team’s xenobiologist, would confirm his discovery. They had indeed received a second transmission, from exactly where the Wow! Signal had told them to look…a message cleverly disguised as fluctuations in background radiation, a message that no one would ever notice unless they were actively looking for it…a message that contained just four discrete values, but which could be assembled to create something marvelous.

The letters, ATCG stood for adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine—the four nucleobases that formed the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule.

Someone, somewhere out in space, perhaps hundreds of light years away, had sent them a message coded in DNA.





44



Over the Atlantic Ocean

Sunday, 8:50 a.m. (Atlantic Standard Time)



Jenna stood alone in the small galley, staring at the unopened bottle of water like she might gain some insight from the light refracting through it. Reality had become a very fluid substance in the last few hours. The revelations, each one more incredible than the last, had poured down on her, washing away the foundations of everything she believed about herself. She would have rejected every word, demanded to be given her life back, if not for the simple fact that, deep down, she knew it was all true.

Mercy came to join her a few seconds later. “You okay, honey?”

Jenna continued to stare at the bottle. “How did you…?” She didn’t know how to finish the question.

Mercy hugged her. Jenna did not resist, but neither did she return the embrace.

“I was the first,” Mercy began. “I suppose that’s obvious to you now. Back in ‘78, gene splicing was a completely new field. The Human Genome Project wouldn’t be started for several more years, but biologists had already started mapping DNA. Soter’s team was able to identify several of the gene sequences in the message and recognized that it was human DNA. They found human donors who were a close match and cultivated several in vitro embryos. A ready supply of genetic material. Of those, I was the closest match. In the years that followed, as gene science improved and computers got faster, they were able to fine-tune the process. Meanwhile, I grew up. I had a pretty normal childhood, I guess. It seemed normal anyway.

“We had a private compound in Arecibo on the other side of the island from the lab. I lived there, and when I was old enough, I taught the younger ones. They sent them over from the lab when they were old enough. Even though we weren’t like other people, Dr. Soter and the team thought it was best to have us live normal lives—education, careers, families—but I stayed there until…”

She gave a shrug. “Dr. Soter was with me, on the far side of the island, when the lab was destroyed. It looked like a natural disaster, but he knew better. We were a secret project—‘deep black,’ they call it. Someone in the government found out about us—someone who wasn’t supposed to know—and decided it was better to make us disappear. Dr. Soter knew they would be looking for us, so we scattered. Later on, when we realized that you had survived, we decided I should stay close to you, keep you safe if anyone ever figured out who and what you were, and when you were old enough, tell you the truth.”

Jenna listened without interrupting, but when Mercy fell silent, she said, “That’s not what I meant. I was wondering how you got on that helicopter. If you were in contact with Soter all along, then you must have known what was happening.”

“It was too dangerous to stay in contact with him. When you told me that someone had tried to kill you, I knew, but there was no way to make contact. When the helicopter showed up at the safe house looking for you, Dr. Soter recognized me. That was the first time we’d spoken in ten years.”

“But you must have known what was going on. You just let me stumble around on my own. You could have told me everything back home, before I went on that wild goose chase in the Everglades.”