071: HOUSEKEEPING

Everyone, of course, stares.

“First things first,” Lina says. “We don’t know the full knock-on effects of these genetic changes, but we… don’t think that they’re immediately bad. Nobody’s going to drop dead tomorrow, and we can keep an eye out for progressive problems over time.”

We all immediately relax a little, especially the affected crew members.

“But,” Lina continues, “I should warn those affected that you’ve been engineered to a greater degree than I initially thought. It’s… it’s not just the two genesets.”

“I knew it!” Tal exclaims. “They did fuck with our brains, didn’t they?!”

“Nope,” Heli says. “Our brains are completely untouched. They fucked with our blood.”

Most of us stare, bewildered. A Friend (the doctor one) swears quietly. “Immune privilege?”

Heli grins the delighted grin of an enthusiast with a chance to share something really cool. “Yep.”

“But that… no.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” Lina says. “I couldn’t figure out how they could do such a thorough job of engineering. A body’s thick, there’s a lot of cells; there is simply no vector that can get to all of them. A virus would kill the patient if it went through them like that, it’d be impossible to control. And a bacterium? Forget it. There’s simply no way that Aspen’s bacteria could get access to all of those cells without just killing them.”

“They’re not my bacteria,” I protest.

“But if it gets into the lymph nodes, well.”

“That doesn’t solve the issue,” the Friend protests. “A runaway immune system is a bigger problem.”

“Depends what you tell it to do,” Heli says.

“Hey.” Sam raises a hand. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Okay, so,” Heli explains. “The engineering is done via the CRISPR method. Old, old technology. As in, pre-Neocambrian technology.”

“I didn’t know they had genetic engineering back then,” Tinera frowns.

“Of course they did,” I point out. “The Neocambrian era was kicked off by widespread genetic engineering. How could they have established Arborea without genetic engineering?”

“Okay, point.”

“Our methods are a lot more refined than theirs,” Heli continues, “but still, it’s a classic method. It also makes it pretty easy to tell what DNA is inserted, if you know what to look for, when you examine the vector. Modern CRISPR technologies let you insert a frankly ridiculous amount of DNA with almost frightening precision,  so I had a quick look for the new genesets in our vector bacteria to see if they were using this method. And they were.” She grins. “But then I zoomed out a bit, looked beyond the CRISPR instructions, and you’ll never guess what I found.”

“Tell us,” Captain Sands says.

“Regulatory instructions for when to initiate the process. Instructions that… well, I can’t read them, obviously, I’m not a cellular mechanism, but they were totally unfamiliar to me, at least in a microbe. They were similar to some stuff I’ve seen in human immune genes, though. And then I zoomed out further, looked behind those. And there, I found… a second set of CRISPR instructions.”

Most of us stare uncomprehendingly. The doctor Friend puts its head in its hands. Tal breathes, “No fucking way.”

“They’re nested instructions,” Heli explains. “The bacteria in question only target and engineer white blood cells. And if you stick someone in a tank for months at a time with tubes in them, you’re going to get some leaking. You’re going to get minor infections around the IV ports. Those bacteria are going to find a way to come into contact with white blood cells. They engineer the white blood cells to pass on their engineering to other white blood cells, like an infection, until the body’s swimming with these engineered cells. And what it inserts into the white blood cells isn’t just these genesets, oh no; it’s the entire CRISPR mechanism for spreading these genesets. That’s a lot of DNA, to be clear; that’s something that white blood cells were never designed to do. There’s physical cellular apparatus involved.”

“We’re a little worried about the possibility that this impeded the white blood cells to do their job,” Lina adds. “Going forward it’s best to assume that all carriers of these changes are mildly immunocompromised. Also, although there’s been no previous incidents of crew-to-crew infection despite no precautions taken, we should going forward assume that crew-to-crew infection might be a possibility and behave accordingly when it comes to the blood of carriers. The chances are absurdly low, but just in case.”

“And that’s why the brain is clean,” the doctor Friend says. “It’s an immune privileged organ. Well. Parts of it are. It's kind of complicated. But under normal circumstances, very few of the affected cells should be getting in there.”

“Exactly,” Heli says. “But they do get into almost every other tissue. Where there’s blood, there’s usually white cells. Now, here’s the really cool part – that new immune geneset? Not an immune geneset. I mean, there is a new immune geneset, in the immune cells, but that’s not it.”

“But there is a different immune geneset?” I ask, confused.

“Affected white cells become very aggressive towards the vector species,” Lina explains. “I injected everyone with proteins from the vector’s cell membrane this week and checked the immune response. Most people didn’t react but the affected people showed a very strong response. Presumably the idea is for the vector to be basically invisible until it’s achieved its task, and then be fiercely resisted. Thus it can do its job without risking being the cause of fatal infection.”

“So… what does the geneset that we thought was an immune geneset do?” Sam asks.

“The opposite, essentially. It puts a protein in the cell membrane that tells the white blood cells not to CRISPR them. Tags them as already engineered.”

“So… wait,” I say. “I’m confused. I get the impression that this is all really novel and weird and basically never heard of, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Heli says. “Absolutely none of this is a publically available technique. I’ve never heard of any of this being done anywhere, and that’s not even getting into the vector bacteria themselves, which are, somehow, much weirder.”

“Okay, so there’s this big weird elaborate system designed specifically to insert a geneset that just says… not to insert the geneset again? What’s the point in that?”

“The point isn’t that geneset,” Lina explains. “The ‘immune’ geneset, the one that expresses the tagging protein, isn’t the point. That’s just part of the mechanism to ensure a perfect, uniform, one hundred per cent insertion rate of the other geneset.”

“The DNA repair one,” I say. “This whole complicated system is about getting that DNA repair geneset into every single cell in a colonist’s body.”

“Except the brain,” Tal says.

“And other immune privileged tissues,” the Friend says.

“Exactly,” Heli says.

“Okay, so what does that geneset do?” Captain Sands asks.

“Does everyone here know what telomeres are?” Lina asks.

“This friend doesn’t,” says the non-doctor Friend.

“Me neither,” says Sunset.

“Okay. So, when DNA is replicated to split a cell, the copying mechanism can’t copy the very end of the strand. Just because of how it’s physically shaped. So every time it’s replicated, a bit is shaved off the end; your chromosomes shorten, just a little bit, with every replication. Obviously, you don’t want to be shaving important genes off over time, so every chromosome has a long bit of junk at the end, just a repeating sequence that doesn’t do anything, called telomeres. This greatly increases the number of times a chromosome can be replicated before it starts losing genes; as you age, your telomeres get shorter with each replication, and most people don’t start losing actual useful DNA until they’re at the end of their life. Once you do start losing genes, complications can result, which is the cause of some – not all, not even close to all, but some – of the problems associated with ageing. There’s simply a limit to how many times a cell can divide before it starts losing function. Telomeres also act as part of a biological clock for certain life processes, so for a long time now, people have been looking at mucking about with them as a sort of ‘fountain of youth’ miracle cure for ageing.”

“Which is, quite obviously, bullshit,” Heli says.

“So this gene affects our telomeres,” Adin says.

“Yes. There’s a long non-coding sequence inside the new geneset, just an apparently random string of DNA. Well, I took a more complete look at the DNA sequences I ran for all of you, including the bits that we usually snip off and don’t show in the sequence. I found this non-coding sequence exactly, on the very end of every chromosome, just stapled onto the end after your normal telomeres. This sequence exactly, same length, in every cell; I even took some of Zale’s skin and forcibly divided it in a petri dish, just random skin cells and not a cell line that’s supposed to be able to do this, and reran the sequencing several times. They don’t shorten. The cells just fix it on each chromosome. That’s what all of this seems to be about – your cells don’t age.”

“Um,” Tinera says. “This is… good, right?”

Lina wiggles her hand in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “In theory, it will probably shield you from some of the inconveniences of ageing. We’re not certain what exactly telomeres are used as an internal calendar for, but based on animal experiments you can expect to maintain wound healing and muscular resilience indefinitely, you might have some resistance to arthritis, and your skin should retain its current thickness and elasticity for life. There may or may not be some increased resilience of your circulatory system, we’re not sure. Ailments related to toxin accumulation, general physical wear, or unreplaced or rarely-replaced cells simply wearing out, won’t be affected. And of course there are some potential downsides.”

“Downsides.”

Lina nods. “When I first encountered this new geneset, I said it was somewhat similar to some of the DNA alterations we find in some cancers. That’s because cancer is essentially defined by unregulated cellular growth. Some cancers have telomere repair mechanisms that contribute to their growth. You are probably at increased risk of cancers, and of any disorders related to body clock disregulation. As previously mentioned, the engineered while blood cells might result in a less effective immune system… or maybe they won’t, maybe they still do their previous job just as well. All of this is very new, and the body is very complicated. But you’ll probably have really good skin and muscles when you’re old, so there’s that.”

“We might live a really long time, though,” Tal says. “That’s pretty cool.”

“The human lifespan is already such that if you don’t die in some accident on this ship, you’ll probably live past the limits of your brain anyway,” Sunset points out. “Unless you have a cure for dementia, I wouldn’t get too excited about eternal life.”

“Wear, tear, and toxin accumulation injuries are unaffected,” Sam says thoughtfully. “So. Apart from the cancer risk, this whole thing is something that could indeed massively increase the lifespan of someone who wasn’t moving, and whose diet was perfectly controlled, and who didn’t need higher brain functions.”

“Someone comatose in a chronostasis pod with the chronostasis field deactivated,” Renn finishes the thought grimly. “With their brain being used as auxilliary equipment by the AI. They could perform that service for far, far longer, with this geneset.”

“This spaceship is such a fucking horror show,” I mumble, putting my face in my hands. “What the fuck.”

“Do you think the Javelin people knew, when they put this together?” Sunset asks. “Do you think they lied to us?”

“I was just a third tier engine designer,” Captain Sands says, “but if it helps, this is all news to me.”

“Higher ups did not know either,” Denish growls. “Otherwise, Rynn-Hatson would not have had to sneak around outside of ship with bacteria, yes?”

“Good to know we got hijacked into someone’s creepy mad science project instead of always being planned to be someone’s creepy mad science project,” Tinera says bitterly. “Definitely makes a difference there to someone somewhere presumably. Jesus Christ.”

“Okay,” Captain Sands says, standing up. “All non-critical work is suspended for three days. If it’s not keeping us alive, you don’t have to do it. I’m ordering a shipwide mental health holiday. Renn, you’re still on the clock.”

“Of course,” Renn nods.

“Good man. Everyone else, take a few days and just… try to find a way to be okay with this. Somehow. I mean, fuck.”