Blood Music

METAPHASE

OCTOBER–DECEMBER


CHAPTER NINE

IRVINE, CALIFORNIA

It had been two years since Edward Milligan had last seen Vergil. Edward’s memory hardly matched the tan, smiling and well-dressed gentleman standing before him. They had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employee’s cafeteria of Irvine’s new Mount Freedom Medical Center.
“Vergil?” Edward shook his hand and walked around him, a look of exaggerated wonder on his face. “Is it really you?”
“Good to see you again, Edward.” He returned the handshake firmly. He had lost twenty to twenty-five pounds and what remained seemed better-proportioned. At medical school, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed kid who wired doorknobs, gave his dorm floor mates punch that turned their piss blue, and never had a date except with Eileen Termagant, who had shared some of his physical characteristics.
“You look fantastic,” Edward said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”
They stood in line at the counter and chose their food. “The tan,” Vergil said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sun lamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you.”
Edward looked closely, lifting Vergil’s lip with one finger. “So they were. Still discolored, though.”
“Yes,” Vergil said, rubbing his lip and taking a deep breath. “Well. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk in private, or at least with nobody paying attention.”
Edward steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three die-hard puffers were scattered among six tables. “Listen, I mean it,” he said as they unloaded then trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”
“I’ve changed more than you know.” Vergil’s tone was motion-picture-ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”
“Doing well. We’ve been married a year.”
“Hey, congratulations.” Vergil’s gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie. “Notice something else?” he asked, his voice cracking slightly.
Edward squinted in concentration. “Uh.”
“Look closer.”
“I’m not sure. Well, yes. You’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”
“No. I don’t need them anymore.”
“And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”
“Candice,” he said, grinning the old and familiar self-deprecating grin, but ending it with an uncharacteristic leer. “I’ve been fired from my job. Four months now. I’m living on savings.”
“Hold it,” Edward said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”
“I ended up at Genetron in Enzyme Valley.”
“North Torrey Pines Road?”
“That’s the place. Infamous. And you’ll be hearing more very soon. They’re putting out common stock any second now. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs.”
“Biochips?”
He nodded. “They have some that work.”
“What?” Edward’s brows lifted sharply.
“Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”
The angle of Edward’s brows steepened. “Jesus, Vergil. Bernard’s almost a saint. He’s had his picture on the cover of Mega and Rolling Stone just the last month or two. Why are you telling me all this?”
“It’s supposed to be secret-stock, breakthrough, everything. I have my contacts inside the place, though. Ever heard of Hazel Overton?”
Edward shook his head. “Should I?”
“Probably not. I thought she hated my guts. Turns out she had grudging respect for me. She gave me a call two months back and asked if I wanted to front a paper for her on F-factors in E. coli genomes.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”
Edward whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”
“If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time listening to me before rushing off to your broker.”
“Of course. So tell me more.”
Vergil hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “I got in on the ground floor about five years ago. With my medical school background and computer experience, I was a shoo-in for Enzyme Valley. I went up and down North Torrey Pines Road with my resumes, and I was Weed by Genetron.”
“That simple?”
“No.” Vergil picked at the cottage cheese with a fork, then laid the fork down. “I did some rearranging of the records. Credit records, school records, that sort of thing. Nobody’s caught on yet. I came in as hot stuff and I made my mark early with protein assemblies and the preliminary biochip research. Genetron has big money backers, and we were given as much as we needed. Four months and I was doing my own work, sharing a lab but allowed to do independent research. I made some breakthroughs.” He tossed his hand nonchalantly. “Then I went off on tangents. I kept on doing my regular work, but after hours…The management found out, and fired me. I managed to…save part of my experiments. But I haven’t exactly been cautious, or judicious. So now the experiment’s going on outside the lab.”
Edward had always regarded Vergil as ambitious and more than a trifle cracked. In their school years, Vergil’s relations with authority figures had never been smooth. Edward had long ago concluded that science, for Vergil, was like an unattainable woman, who suddenly opens her arms to him before he’s ready for mature love—leaving him afraid he’ll forever blow the chance, lose the prize, screw up royally. Apparently, he had. “Outside the lab? I don’t get you.”
“I want you to examine me. Give me a thorough physical. Maybe a cancer diagnostic. Then I’ll explain more.”
“You want a ten thousand dollar exam?”
“Whatever you can do. Ultrasound, NMR, PET, thermogram, everything.”
“I don’t know if I can get access to all that equipment, Vergil. Natural-source PET full-scan has only been here a month or two. Hell, you couldn’t pick a more expensive—”
Then ultrasound and NMR. That’s all you need.”
“I’m an obstetrician, Vergil, not a glamour-boy lab tech, OB-GYN, butt of all jokes. If you’re turning into a woman, maybe I can help you.”
Vergil leaned forward, almost putting his elbow into the pie, but swinging wide at the last instant by scant millimeters. The old Vergil would have hit it square. “Examine me closely, and you’ll…” He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Just examine me.”
“So I make an appointment for ultrasound and NMR. Who’s going to pay?”
“I have medical. I messed with the personnel files at Genetron before I left. Anything up to a hundred thousand dollars and they’ll never check, never suspect And it has to be absolutely confidential.”
Edward shook his head. “You’re asking for a lot, Vergil.”
“Do you want to make medical history, or not?”
“Is this a joke?”
Vergil shook his head. “Not on you, roomie.”
Edward made the arrangements that afternoon, filling in the forms himself. From what he understood of hospital paperwork, so long as everything was billed properly, most of the examination could take place without official notice. He didn’t charge for his services. After all, Vergil had turned his piss blue. They were friends.
Edward stayed past his usual hours. He gave Gail a bare outline of what he was doing; she sighed the sigh of a doctor’s wife and told him she’d leave a late snack on the table for when he came home.
Vergil returned at ten P.M. and met Edward at the appointed place, on the third floor of what the nurses called the Frankenstein Wing. Edward sat on an orange plastic chair, reading a desk copy of My Things magazine. Vergil entered the small lobby, looking lost and worried. His skin was olive-colored under the fluorescent lighting.
Edward signaled the night supervisor that this was his patient and conducted Vergil to the examination area, hand on his elbow. Neither spoke much. Vergil stripped and Edward arranged him on the paper-covered padded table. “Your ankles are swollen,” he said, feeling them. They were solid, not puffy. Healthy, but odd. “Hm,” Edward said pointedly, glancing at Vergil. Vergil raised his eyebrows and cocked his head; his “you ain’t seen nothing yet” look.
“Okay. I’m going to run several scans on you and combine the results in an imager. Ultrasound first” Edward ran paddles over Vergil’s still form, hitting those areas difficult for the bigger unit to reach. He then swung the table around and inserted it into the enameled orifice of the ultrasound diagnostic unit—the hum-hole, so-called by the nurses. After twelve separate sweeps, head to toe, he removed the table. Vergil was sweating slightly, his eyes closed.
“Still claustrophobic?” Edward asked.
“Not so much.”
“NMR is a little worse.”
“Lead on, Mac Duff.”
The NMR full-scan unit was a huge chrome and sky-blue mastaba-shaped box, occupying one small room with barely enough space to wheel in the table. “I’m not an expert on this one, so it may take a while,” Edward said, helping Vergil into the cavity.
“High cost of medicine,” Vergil muttered, dosing his eyes as Edward swung down the glass hatch. The massive magnet circling the cavity buzzed faintly. Edward instructed the machine to send its data to the central imager in the next room and helped Vergil out.
“Holding up?” Edward asked.
“Courage,” Vergil said, pronouncing it as in French.
In the next room, Edward arranged a large-screen VDT and ordered the integration and display of the data. In the half-darkness, the image took a few seconds to flow into recognizable shapes.
“Your skeleton first,” Edward said. His eyes widened. The image then displayed Vergil’s thoracic organs, musculature, and finally vascular system and skin.
“How long since the accident?” Edward asked, stepping closer to the screen. He couldn’t quite conceal the quiver in his voice.
“I haven’t been in an accident,” Vergil said.
“Jesus, they beat you, to keep secrets?”
“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. That’s not trauma.”
“Look, there’s thickening here,” he indicated the ankles, “and your ribs—that crazy zigzag interlocking. Broken somewhere, obviously. And—”
“Look at my spine,” Vergil suggested. Edward slowly rotated the image on the screen.
Buckminster Fuller came to mind immediately. It was fantastic. Vergil’s spine was a cage of triangular bones, coining together in ways Edward could not even follow, much less comprehend. “Mind if I feel?”
Vergil shook his head. Edward reached through the slit in the robe and traced his fingers along the back. Vergil lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.
“I can’t find it,” Edward said. “It’s smooth. There’s something flexible; the harder I push, the tougher it becomes.” He walked around in front of Vergil, chin in hand. “You don’t have any nipples,” he said. There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations whatsoever.
“See?” Vergil said. “I’m being rebuilt from the inside out”
“Bullshit” Edward said. Vergil looked surprised.
“You can’t deny your eyes,” he said softly. “I’m not the same fellow I was four months ago.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about” Edward played around with the images, rotating them, going through the various sets of organs, playing the NMR movie back and forth.
“Have you ever seen anything like me? I mean, the new design.”
“No,” Edward said flatly. He walked away from the table and stood by the dosed door, hands in his lab coat pocket “What in hell have you done?”
Vergil told him. The story emerged in widening spirals of fact and event and Edward had to make his way through the circumlocutions as best he could.
“How,” he asked, “do you convert DNA to read-write memory?”
“First you need to find a length of viral DNA that codes for topoisomerases and gyrases. You attach this segment to your target DNA and make it easier to lower the linking number—to negatively supercoil your target molecule. I used ethidium in some earlier experiments, but—”
“Simpler, please, I haven’t had molecular biology in years.”
“What you want is to add and subtract lengths of input DNA easily, and the feedback enzyme arrangement does this. When the feedback arrangement is in place, the molecule will open itself up for transcription much more easily, and more rapidly. Your program will be transcribed onto two strings of RNA. One of the RNA strings will go to a reader-a ribosome-for translation into a protein. Initially, the first RNA will carry a simple start-up code—”
Edward stood by the door and listened for half an hour. When Vergil showed no sign of slowing down, much less stopping, he raised his hand. “And how does all this lead to intelligence?”
Vergil frowned. “I’m still not certain. I just began finding replication of logic circuits easier and easier. Whole stretches of the genomes seemed to open themselves up to the process. There were even parts that I’ll swear were already coded for specific logic assignments—but at the time, I thought they were just more introns, sequences not coding for proteins. You know, holdovers from old faulty transcriptions, not yet eliminated by evolution. I’m talking about the eukaryotes now. Prokaryotes don’t have introns. But I’ve been thinking the last few months. Plenty of time to think, without work. Brooding.”
He stopped and shook his head, folding and unfolding his hands, twisting his fingers together.
“And?”
“It’s very strange, Edward. Since early med school we’ve been hearing about ‘selfish genes,’ and that individuals and populations have no function but to create more genes. Eggs make chickens to make more eggs. And people seemed to think that introns were just genes that have no purpose but to reproduce themselves within the cellular environment. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, saying they were junk, useless. I didn’t feel any qualms at all with my eukaryotes, working with introns. Hell, they were spare parts, genetic deserts. I could build whatever I wanted.” Again he stopped, but Edward did not prompt Vergil looked up at him, eyes moist “I wasn’t responsible. I was seduced.”
“I’m not getting you, Vergjl.” Edward’s voice sounded brittle, on the edge of anger. He was tired and old memories of Vergil’s carelessness towards others were returning; he was exhausted, and Vergil was still droning on, saying nothing that really made sense.
Vergil slammed his fist on the edge of the table. “They made me do it! The goddamn genes!”
“Why, Vergil?”
“So they won’t have to rely on us anymore. The ultimate selfish gene. All this time, I think the DNA was just leading up to what I’ve done, you know. Emergence. Coming out party. Tempting somebody, anybody, into giving it what it wanted.”
“That’s nuts, Vergil.”
“You didn’t work on it you didn’t feel what I felt. It should have taken a whole research team, maybe even a Manhattan Project, to do what I did. I’m bright but I’m not that bright. Things just fell into place. It was too easy.”
Edward rubbed his eyes. “I’m going to take some blood and I’d like stool and urine.”
“Why?”
“So I can find out what’s happening to you.”
“I’ve just told you.”
“It’s crazy.”
“Edward, you can see the screen. I don’t wear glasses, my back doesn’t hurt, I haven’t had an allergy attack in four months, and I haven’t been sick. I used to get infections all the time in my sinuses because of the allergies. No colds, no Infections, nothing. I’ve never felt better.”
“So altered smart lymphocytes are inside you, finding things, changing them.”
He nodded. “And by now, each duster of cells is as smart as you or I.”
“You didn’t mention clusters.”
“They used to cram together in the medium. Maybe a hundred or two hundred cells. I never could figure out why. Now it seems obvious. They cooperate.”
Edward stared at him. “I’ve very tired.”
“The way I see it I lost weight because they unproved my metabolism. My bones are stronger, my spine has been rebuilt—”
“Your heart looks different.”
“I didn’t know about the heart.” He examined the frame image from several inches. “Jesus. I mean, I haven’t been able to keep track of anything since I left Genetron; I’ve been guessing and worrying. You don’t know what a relief it is to tell someone who can understand.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Edward, the evidence is overwhelming. I was thinking about the fat. They could increase my brown cells, fix up my metabolism. My eating habits have changed. But they haven’t got around to my brain yet.” He tapped his head. “They understand all the glandular stuff. Old-home week. But they don’t have the big picture, if you see what I mean.”
Edward felt Vergil’s pulse and checked his reflexes. “I think we’d better get those samples and call it quits for the evening.”
“And I didn’t want them getting into my skin. That really scared me. Couple of nights, my skin started to crawl, and I decided to take some action. I bought a quartz lamp. I wanted to keep them under control, just in case, you know? What if they crossed the blood-brain barrier and found out about me—the brain’s real function. I figured the reason they wanted to get into my skin was the simplicity of running circuits across the surface. Much easier than trying to maintain lines of communication through muscles and organs and the vascular system; much more direct I alternate sunlamp with quartz lamp treatments now. Keeps them out of my skin, as far as I can tell. And now you know why I have a nice tan.”
“Give you skin cancer, too,” Edward said, falling into Vergil’s terse manner of speech.
“I’ve not worried. They’ll take care of it. Like police.”
“Okay,” Edward said, holding up both hands in a gesture of resignation. “I’ve examined you. You’ve told me a story I cannot accept. What do you want me to do?”
“I’m not as nonchalant as I seem. I’m worried, Edward. I’d like to find a better way to control them before they find out about my brain. I mean, think of it. They’re in the billions by now, more if they’re converting other kinds of cells. Maybe trillions. Each cluster smart. I’m probably the smartest thing on the planet, and they haven’t begun to get their act together. I don’t want them to take over.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Steal my soul, you know? So think of some treatment to block them. Maybe we can starve the little buggers. Just think on it. And give me a call.”
He reached into his pants pocket and handed Edward a slip of paper with his address and phone number. Then he went to the keyboard and erased the image in the frame dumping the memory of the examination. “Just you. Nobody else for now. And please…hurry.”
It was one o’clock in the morning when Vergil walked out of the examination room. The samples had been taken. In the main lobby, Vergil shook hands with Edward. Vergil’s palm was damp, nervous. “Be careful with the specimens,” he said. “Don’t ingest anything.”
Edward watched Vergil cross the parking lot and get into his Volvo. Then he turned slowly and went back to the Frankenstein Wing. He poured a cc of Vergil’s blood into an ampoule, and several cc’s of urine into another, inserting both into the hospital’s tissue, specimen and serum analyzer. He would have the results in the morning, available on his office VDT. The stool sample would require manual work, but that could wait; right now he felt like one of the undead. It was two o’clock.
He pulled out a cot, shut off the lights and lay down without undressing. He hated sleeping in the hospital. When Gail woke up in the morning, she would find a message on the answerphone—a message, but no explanation. He wondered what he would tell her.
“I’ll just say it was good ol’ Vergil,” he murmured.