070: GENETICS

Despite the captain’s paranoia, Celi’s recovery seems to go just fine. I still can’t believe that Lina and the Friend managed to pull off a rootrotting liver transplant with no apparent trouble, despite not being surgeons. We have the best doctors.

A week later, the next wave of revivals goes ahead (they only wake four, since the doctors are still somewhat busy monitoring Celi’s recovery), and it is, blessedly, boring. An unfortunate wave of bad luck this time, which we were probably due for – Heli Graf, a tall woman with a distinguished face and unusually green eyes, is the only survivor. Lina gets another braindead test subject, two more dead go in the freezers, and life goes on.

Heli seems nice enough. She accepts the situation as calmly as one can, seems to be recovering well from chronostasis, and most importantly, she’s a geneticist. With a background in human genetic engineering. As soon as she’s recovered enough, we take her to Network and Engineering Ring 1 show her the new CR5 genesets. She studies them both with a pensive frown on her face. Pulls up the gene database on the computer to compare to known genesets. Studies them some more.

“I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she says.

The entire crew (of course the entire crew found an excuse to be present) sag with disappointment.

“No idea?” Captain Sands presses.

“Not yet. Obviously I’ll keep looking until I figure out what the piss is going on. But my immediate impression here is ‘what the fuck’. Usually, a new geneset, especially one you’re going to put in human beings, is a variation of an existing, well-known geneset. For obvious reasons. But this isn’t similar to anything on record.”

“So they just invented new genes out of nowhere,” Tinera says.

“New DNA repair and immune system genes out of nowhere? No way. These are attached to some pretty basic housekeeping systems. Do you know why your DNA repair systems are so similar to those of a fly or a lizard? They don’t change much because if a change fucks them up, you die. You can fuck around and ‘invent’ variations on flower pigmentation or whatever. You can’t do that with this kind of thing. If these were built new, everyone affected would almost definitely be dead.”

“So do you have any conclusions based on that?” Captain Sands asks.

Heli shrugs. “Either they’re based on some very long term secret genetic engineering project that’s been kept out of public databases for some reason – and before you say ‘oh, sometimes corporations do that’, it would take literal decades to develop housekeeping changes as complicated as the length of this geneset suggests – or we’re making a bad assumption about what they do. The positions of these genesets seem to alter a DNA repair mechanism and an immune mechanism. But we’re only assuming that based on position. Just because nature put those genes in those places doesn’t mean scientists have to. Maybe the genes do something unimportant and easy.”

“Such as?”

Heli shrugs again. “Could be anything. Could be a weird aesthetic thing, maybe some eccentric with too much money wanted a society of people with weird coloured eyes or something and we’ll all wake up with blue or red eyes one day. Could be an attempt at expanding our metabolisms to digest more types of matter, for some terraforming quirk we’re expected to encounter, and they knew a lot of people would quit the program rather than consent to that. It’s impossible to say. Honestly, quite a lot of this looks like nonsense – look how long this repeating non-coding sequence is.”

“It really is long, isn’t it?” Lina notes. “I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be.”

“Might be necessary filler, depending on the transmission method used, but I really doubt it, given how enormous these genesets already are.”

“Non-coding sequence?” Renn asks.

“DNA’s main job,” Heli explains, “is to make proteins. It’s just a list of codes for amino acids. The cell starts at a ‘start’ codon, puts the listed amino acids in order until it hits a ‘stop’, and then those acids all fold up into a protein. Everything that you are depends on what proteins are made in what order, and when. But quite a lot of the genome doesn’t do that. It just sits there. Some of it could make proteins, but there’s no start point. Some is just garbled nonsense that couldn’t make anything. And there’s a big chunk of that in this new housekeeping geneset that I’ve never seen before.”

“So it doesn’t do anything?” Sunset asks.

“In nature, some of it is just leftover code that’s lost its ability to function, never selected against because it’s not doing anything. But some of it has important regulatory functions – it affects the folding of the chromosome, or the methylation of other parts, or just puts a bunch of space between a couple of genes, and these things can affect how often other genes are copied. You see it a lot in genetically engineered genesets too because they’re usually copied from something in nature, but this isn’t showing up in any databases, so we know it’s some garbled nonsense that was added to this geneset on purpose. Maybe for regulatory reasons. Maybe the genetic engineering method needs the genesets to be a specific size. I can get a better idea of the method, and maybe a reason, by studying the vector.”

“Why is it that every time we learn something new, we seem to know less about what’s going on?” I mutter.

“Welcome to science. Lina told me you know the transmission vector?”

“Kind of. We’re pretty sure it’s a bacterium that was grown in the chronostasis pods that did it.”

“You have samples? Or its DNA sequence?”

“Both, yes.”

“Fantastic. Can I see?”

Our hopes of an easy, immediate answer somewhat tempered, the rest of us leave Heli to her research and wander off to do other tasks. On my way out toward Greenhouse Ring 1, I spare a glance for our genetically engineered crew members. I want answers to all of this, of course, but probably not half as much as they do. It’s their bodies. Somebody went in and messed with their DNA without asking.

I can’t suppress a shudder. I can’t think of anything in the world that violating, except for Lyson projects I suppose. Not only that, but it’s a non-public geneset; probably experimental. It’s a fairly fundamental part of the Autonomy Accords that doing that kind of thing even to an embryo that’s going to be a person is one of the largest Accord breaches possible, let alone someone who’s already an adult! And according to Lina, the manipulation was unbelievably thorough, not the targeted stem cell line patch job that adult gene manipulation usually is, but changing every cell…

Not knowing what was done to them or why must be unbearable. These people already narrowly escaped having their brains hijacked by the computer through sheer luck (or, I reflect guiltily, escaped being ejected into space by me, in Tal’s case), only to learn that this still happened to them, and we have no idea how dangerous it is.

Most of them seem to be handling it well. Adin looks pretty on edge, but he’s been looking that way for almost three weeks now, since the captain cut off his neurostim treatment. I’ve been reading up on neurostimulators and I know that after the three week mark on a cold turkey detox (definitely not the best way to do things, but the fastest), things should improve for him, although whether he ever makes a complete recovery will depend on whether the initial abuse did any nerve damage, and how much.

I have to assume the initial abuse did nerve damage, or the Friend would’ve put him on a gentler detox program immediately, instead of medicating him. You only keep indefinitely medicating a neurostim addict with small doses of neurostims if you have to to preserve their nerve function.

He’s leaving the ring too, albeit in the opposite direction than me. I follow him.

“Hey,” I say, when we’re alone walking through Pod Launch Ring 2. “How are you holding up?”

He jumps, like he somehow didn’t realise I was right behind him, and turns to raise an eyebrow at me. “With what in particular?”

“With… all of it, I guess,” I sigh. “It sucks. Everything sucks right now. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” He rubs one hand with the other. They’re trembling a little, I notice. “Things are going to get better.”

Whether he means the neurostim recovery, or our new geneticist finding answers, or it’s just general optimism, I don’t know, but I nod. “How’s life in general?”

“Not bad. Oh, except that it’s Sam’s turn for movie night tonight.”

“So?”

“So they’re gonna show us fairy tales from around the world. I cannot think of a more boring subject.”

“Hey, we sat through your weird music.”

“My music is amazing.”

“There’s something else we need to deal with at some point, too. Captain Sands has been putting it off for ages, and he accuses me of not being proactive enough, but the new crew are going to learn about the convict thing eventually.”

“Oh, that? That’s handled.”

“It is?”

“Of course. Why do you think we wanted the full two weeks before waking more people? They don’t all know what we did, specifically, but everyone – except the new girl, I guess – is up to date on the whole ‘half of the crew came here from prison’ thing. We spent a couple of weeks breaking it to them gently once we were sure they wouldn’t freak out. Half of them already knew this was a convict ship anyway.”

“Does Captain Sands know that everyone knows?”

Adin shrugs. “Sounds like his problem, doesn’t it? If he’s the captain, he can put effort into figuring things out for himself.”

Adin’s tone is bitter. That’s understandable, given that Sands is responsible for his current detox. “And Heli?” I ask.

“We don’t really have the measure of her yet. We’ll break the news when we figure out how to do it best. But I think she might figure it out pretty quick, anyway; did you check the role priorities for this latest batch that Sands tried to revive?”

“Um, no? Why?”

“All four of them, including Heli, are in the group of non-convicts who we suspect all know what’s going on. Also, nobody he’s tried to revive has a higher priority for the captain’s position than him. Seems like he doesn’t want to give up that chair.”

I nod. Personally, I think that’s sensible – changing around who’s in charge too much is dangerously chaotic – but I don’t think that Adin wants to hear anybody defend any of Captain Sands’ choices right now.

Just then, an airlock opens, and Heli rushes into the ring. “Aspen!”

“Yeah?”

“What enzymes did you use for amplifying the microbial DNA?”

“Um. I just put in the ones the computer told me to.”

“Whole strand amplification, or did you cut it up first?”

“I don’t know? I just used the tubes the computer told me to?”

“Right, okay, I’ll ask the computer then.”

“Is something wrong with the sequencing?”

“Hard to say. Sometimes, microbes with unusual repeats can be…. fiddly… in sequencing. I might run a few different PCR techniques just to be absolutely certain we’ve gotten its genome right, especially since you amplified from a multi-species community. And do you know where Lina is?”

“Probably in medbay 1? She’s probably busy, though; is it anything I can help with?”

“That depends – can you take and analyse brain tissue samples?”

“Of the crew?!”

“No! Of dead colonists, silly.”

“Right. Um, no, I probably can’t do that.”

“I’ll go find Lina, then.” Heli gives us a little two-fingered salute and runs back off.

“Brain tissue samples?” Adin asks worryingly. “She thinks this DNA did something to our brains?”

“It’s best not to panic until we have all the information,” I say, trying very hard not to panic without all the information. But, come on. How do you hear something like that and not panic?

Fortunately, we’re not kept in suspense for long on that particular subject. I ask Lina about it later that day and she assures me that they’re not looking for something done to the brain; in fact, Heli specifically wanted to see if the CR5 patients’ brains were genetically engineered like the other tissues Lina had tested. And apparently, they weren’t; the DNA in the brain matched that on file for the colonists. I ask her what this means, and she says that Heli’s working on it and it would be best to explain when they have the whole picture. She then pulls a small vial of clear liquid out of the medbay refrigerator and asks if she can inject me with it and run periodic blood tests for the next couple of days. I agree without asking any follow-up questions.

The week or so is flurry of activity for both the science team and the medical team. Fortunately, I’m on neither, and am mostly left in peace to panic except when a scientist wants some information on previous work I’ve done or when a doctor wants some of my blood for unexplained reasons. The pattern is broken only by Sam’s fairytale night (which turns out to be pretty interesting) and one of the beehives in Greenhouse Ring 2 starting to swarm (which is a simple matter of installing a new hive). I reevaluate what we’re growing because we are clearly producing far too much nectar and have too many bees for a relatively small area.

Heli doesn’t tend to eat breakfast with the rest of us – she spends as much of her time as possible working. So we’re all somewhat surprised one morning when she strides in with Lina and sweeps the two picnic tables with a pair of eyes glittering with triumph.

“Okay,” she announces. “We have a pretty strong theory about what’s going on.”