Gene Mapper Read online

  “Short pulses produce narrow lines. Longer pulses—several seconds, say—produce thicker lines. In this case, two circles have drawn a single line.”

  “I see. So it’s as much about controlling the environment as controlling the genetics. But …”

  Kurokawa was rolling the pencil between his palms, head cocked to one side. I knew how he felt. The first time I heard this explanation, I couldn’t figure out how gene mappers made the jump from straight lines to the complicated figures being produced in the real world.

  “Bear with me a bit more, Takashi. If we want a curved line, we just delay one of the messengers.”

  I reset the animation, this time with the green circle starting later. The orange circle moved outward to contact the green circle a bit closer to its tower. I used the blue marker to mark the contact points. Now the plot was a curve.

  Kurokawa leaned forward and started helping me, adding marks to the plot here and there, more or less at random, but accurately. He was getting the hang of it.

  “All right, I understand. With only two towers, you can draw straight lines of different widths or curved lines.”

  “Right. Say you add another orange tower to form an equilateral triangle. Release the messengers at the same time and you can draw right angles. Vary the timing and you can trace a variety of curved lines.”

  I got to work adding more towers and circles. Soon the table was covered with overlapping waves tracing complicated patterns. Both of us were busy adding marks to the intersection points when Kurokawa said, “So far so good. I think I grasp the principle. But can you really use this to draw a logo? The towers are fixed, and the terrain is uneven. I still don’t see how you could draw complicated figures like logos and letters.”

  “What I do first is build a kernel of the design with a few towers. I guess it’s easier if I show you.”

  I opened my workspace and pulled a preliminary sketch from the Mother Mekong project file. Zucca’s stage rendered it as an old-style blueprint. The layout showed fifty or so towers surrounding the letters L&B depicted in spidery lines. The design was far from a logo—all I had at this point was the size of the design and the rendering topology. For L&B, L had no enclosed space, while & and B each had two enclosed spaces.

  “The mapper has to specify the initial layout manually. First I create a sketch like this. Then I let the program figure out the timing needed to draw it with these towers.”

  Kurokawa wrote an equation in midair above the table—an exponential function that had an astronomical number of possible solutions.

  “Mamoru, with only four releases from each tower, there are several billion possible combinations. But there are a lot more than four towers. Fifty trillion combinations? No, even more. How do you derive the sequence you need?”

  “Gene expression programming. You break the random patterns into ‘genes,’ score them for fit, and make them compete. As stronger genes emerge, you add system noise and keep pitting them against each other.”

  “And what you’re hoping is that the release sequence to draw your logo evolves out of the noise?”

  “Right. It’s not accidental. Even with only fifty towers, the search space that contains all the possible messenger release patterns is practically unlimited. The solution is to apply selection pressure to drive the process in the right direction. Different gene mappers have their own selection algorithms.”

  “Interesting. Manipulate the evolution process to speed up the search. Okay, I’ve got it.” Kurokawa laid his pencil on the table and nodded. “Next question. Why couldn’t you render the logo in full color?”

  “They had to limit the number of towers to get Organic Covered Certification. The whole site only has about two thousand towers. With that, I have to render two logos and five cert marks. Even L&B’s total computing capacity probably couldn’t handle all the rendering calculations, and as the logos get more complicated, butterfly effects start becoming a problem.”

  “That makes sense. All right, I think we’re done. You’re an excellent teacher.”

  “You’re a fast learner. I’m surprised. It took me a whole semester to wrap my head around it.”

  “I’m ready for tomorrow. I owe you one. Now let’s deal with your request.”

  Kurokawa took an envelope from his briefcase. As he laid it on the table, I felt a slight pressure in my throat and ears. The environment turned grainy, like old 35mm film. That, and the AR feedback I was feeling, meant Kurokawa had switched to Private Mode. Zucca’s rendering approach was beautiful. It was like being in a Technicolor movie.

  The babble of voices around us faded to a soft, unintelligible drone. Private Mode in public spaces is usually dead quiet, but Zucca’s production values include background noise that sounds like people speaking Japanese. The customers were replaced by avatars instead of gray silhouettes. Zucca had a reputation to maintain.

  “Mamoru, I have the Mother Mekong cultivation logs and TerraVu photos you asked for. I also asked them to collect another sample. Thep wasn’t very happy about that, but she said she’d send you DNA from a full-grown SR06 plant too, just in case.”

  “Thanks, Takashi.”

  Kurokawa tapped the envelope, and it morphed into a standard folder. The security scan ran, and SCAN COMPLETE popped up.

  “They sent me the cultivation logs when they told us about the mutation. I should’ve given them to you then. Sorry about that. I thought it wasn’t necessary, so I held on to them.”

  He was right. The records didn’t contain much that was helpful. Everything jibed with the reference schedule. The intruder had been discovered about ten days earlier. Until then, the crop had been expressing the logos and cert marks exactly as specified.

  “I was hoping this was Mother’s mistake, but these logs look pretty professional. Lots of detail, well-organized.”

  “Thep is still young, but she used to do environmental agriculture consulting out of her own lab at Nankai Institute of Technology in Singapore. She knows her stuff. Mother Mekong couldn’t have gotten all five certifications without her help.”

  She knew her stuff? Two hundred gigabytes of DNA data?

  “So Thep is a woman,” I said finally.

  “All I needed from you was the style sheet. You didn’t need to deal with her.”

  “Yeah, I was too busy coding the damn plants to glow at night.” I held up one of the TerraVu satellite shots. The L&B logo stood out black against the faintly glowing fields.

  Kurokawa laughed cynically. “No one wanted that except Barnhard.”

  “Sorry, I’m off topic. I’m grateful for the materials, but this won’t tell me what caused the mutation. Without knowing the nature of the intruder, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “ ‘Intruder’? I like it. Let’s call it that until we know what we’re dealing with. No one expects you to come up with the answer right away. There’s something more important.”

  Kurokawa put the envelope under his arm and steepled his fingers. He peered at me intently.

  “Mamoru, one thing we’ll probably be discussing tomorrow is the investigation team. Sorry, but I need you to clear your schedule for the next month. Can you do that? I’m authorized to offer you at least twice your standard rate. You can push back the work on the SR06 sites in Hangzhou and Wakkanai till we’re through.”

  “A month? You think we’ll be finished that soon?”

  “There’s only a month until the first harvest takes place. If we don’t pinpoint the cause and figure out a solution before then, Mother Mekong’s five-star project will be a failure. SR06 will be discredited and discontinued. L&B itself could be threatened. Prototype SR06 sites are already being constructed in Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. If those go …”

  “Barnhard’s head will be on the block.”

  “This is no time for complacency. Did you forget that your name is in
the credits?”

  I felt suddenly dizzy. My avatar would not betray the effect this reminder had on me, but it knocked me back physically.

  “I guess I’d be finished as far as this industry goes.”

  “Let’s do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. My job is on the line too.”

  “Okay. Now I’ve got something for you. I need to salvage some data from the Internet. Know anyone you could recommend?”

  I explained that the intruder was a legacy cultivar with no resistance to red rust blight. As a first step to figuring out how to deal with it, I needed to salvage information buried on the Internet and compare it with the Mother Mekong data.

  “A salvager? I’m sorry, I can’t help you there. All I can suggest is to go to CoWorkingNet and make a backchannel offer. Internet salvage is strictly for freelancers. I don’t mind if you handle it yourself. You’ll be dealing with public information, so just cut an OpenNDA with a reasonable use-by date.”

  A faint shadow fell across the grainy “movie” table. Someone said something I couldn’t make out.

  The waitress was peering over my right shoulder, pitcher in hand. In Private Mode, she would see an alias avatar instead of the “real” me. More water? was probably what she said. The alias waved her away with the practiced gesture of a stage actor. The shadow of its “hand” transited the table.

  “If that’s it, I’d better be going,” said Kurokawa. “If I don’t get some sleep, I might doze through the meeting tomorrow.”

  “Take it easy, Takashi. Get some rest.”

  He stood up, bowed, and disappeared. He must have logged out from within Private Mode. The film grain effect dissipated and the surrounding conversational buzz faded in gently. Kurokawa’s alias was still sitting across from me. Zucca’s selling point was its AR stage. It wouldn’t do to have customers vanishing abruptly.

  The alias gestured invitingly toward the cake cart, stood up, and melted into the foot traffic on the avenue. I had no reason to stay now that the meeting was over, but I decided to write my recruiting ad then and there.

  One month. It wasn’t much.

  I guessed that Thep would collect the second sample carefully. Even if she hurried, I’d be waiting a few days. That would use up a week, more or less. If she was such a hotshot, I figured I should go ahead with the data I had to see what I could get.

  First I had to find a salvager.

  3 Internet Diver

  My call tone beeped again. It was late afternoon of the following day. The sun was turning the rear wall of my “conference room” a warm gold. The next appointment was a salvager who went by the handle of Ya-God-Oh. His screen name was an attempt at Japanese, at least.

  My call for salvagers generated a few dozen responses. I winnowed the field to five after checking track records and specialties. All the candidates used handles, unlike the mappers I was used to dealing with. I didn’t care what they called themselves if they could do the job, but this morning’s conversations with Bull’s-eye and Jackpot 7 had pretty much wasted my time. I’d had more than enough hacker bullshit for one day.

  Why did these guys spend so much time harping on the tools they used? The old Internet was fenced with cyber razor wire to keep it from contaminating TrueNet, but you didn’t have to be a genius to get onto it. What was left of it depended on which country or even which city you were in, but from Tokyo you could still reach old servers through any Meshnet wireless node run by Anonymous.

  Bull’s-eye was completely full of himself. “Leave it to me, old buddy. Give me the search term and I’ll track down whatever it is you want. What was it again? Right, DNA. Find it for sure. For sure, no problem. Give me the model number or some unique ID. There’s a cache somewhere. I can get it for you. Just give me a week or so.”

  If all I needed was to input search terms to a zombie server and fetch something from a twenty-year-old cache, I didn’t need a salvager. What I needed was a hell of a lot more complicated. I needed a specialist, not a script-kiddie.

  Ya-God-Oh claimed to have some background in genetic engineering. I wasn’t sure what to believe, but he had to be better than the two guys I interviewed that morning.

  “I’ve been waiting for your call. I’ll be recording, if you don’t mind.”

  I was sitting across from a dog.

  He had a red bandanna around his neck. Big and brown. Golden retriever? His front paws were on the table. He looked slowly around the room and smiled, if that was possible for a dog.

  At first I thought, This can’t be Ya-God-Oh. An assistant? Maybe an agent. Still, I was amazed by the resolution. I go out of my way to make my stage presentable, but this dog made it look like a cheap video game. The rendering was astonishing. At first I almost thought I might be looking at an actual canine in RealVu, but the long golden fur, with the tip of each hair glowing in the sunlight, was waving gently in the breeze from the air conditioner. If the fur was complying with my physics settings, this had to be an avatar. Maybe a commercial setup like Zucca’s could hit this level of realism, but I didn’t know it was possible to render so many frames per second in my environment. If he was sending his assistant with an avatar this good, I wondered if my system would choke when he showed up.

  The dog noticed the flashing AGREE button on the table and tapped it with a paw. He looked up and smiled.

  “Nice to meet you, Mamoru. My name is Yagodo. If you want to tape, go ahead. Sorry for the unorthodox avatar. I hope it won’t be a problem.”

  With their mouths open, dogs tend to look like they’re smiling anyway, but I had a feeling the man on the other side of the stage was actually grinning. So this was Yagodo’s avatar, and that’s how his name was pronounced. I’d heard about nonhuman avatars—animals, cartoon characters—used by some members of Anonymous and every one of the No ID fundamentalists who refuse to even connect to TrueNet.

  I’d been hoping to avoid one of those types. It looked like I’d drawn another low card. This was worse than empty bragging about hacker tools. Yagodo was spoofing me—in a job interview no less. He had to be fake.

  My avatar concealed my sigh of disappointment. Instead it motioned Yagodo to continue. Sometimes Behavior Correction does the opposite of what you want. Functionality comes with a price.

  “I guess you’ve never chatted with a dog before.”

  I froze. There was something wrong with my commstat bar. No information on where Yagodo was, which provider he was using, his nationality, nothing. Jackpot 7 used multiple cutouts to screen his identity, but on TrueNet you know your caller’s location, always.

  Now the bar was empty except for yagodo, the elapsed time in minutes and seconds, and the charges, which were adding up way too slowly, it seemed to me. Maybe he was using RealVu, which costs almost nothing to deliver to an AR stage. Or was his avatar so cutting-edge that it was hogging system resources and slowing everything down? It was spooky.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve unsettled you, Mamoru. Would I be right if I guessed you’ve never dealt with a salvager?”

  The voice was fiftyish and seemed to be native Japanese. It had a professional tone that didn’t fit the nonhuman avatar approach.

  “Yes, first time. I never needed to, until now.”

  “First time. I see. Well then, welcome to the lost world of the Internet. TrueNet has its points, but I’ve been poking around the ruins of the Internet too long to leave it behind. Almost thirty years, in fact.”

  “Not so fast. I haven’t made my mind up yet. As the ad said, I’m looking for legacy crop plant data. Let me give you some details and you decide if you’re up to the task. How you respond will affect my decision. Are you sure you want to do this interview as a dog?”

  “I know it complicates things, but I have my reasons. I just finished a job, and my new assistant told me there was an interesting project out there. I haven’t done any DNA salva
ging for a while. Crops, is it?”

  I gave him the basic details: I was looking for data on an unidentified contaminant infesting a field of distilled crops, and the bizarrely large DNA sample in my hands contained, among other things, a complete Oryza genome. I was careful not to mention Mother Mekong, L&B, or SR06. Even if I had, my avatar’s NDA filter would probably have kept Yagodo from hearing.

  “I need to know what this intruder is. Almost all the data on legacy cultivars with susceptibility to red rust blight is somewhere on the Internet. For a start, I need you to find a DNA match with the intruder, and tell me the cultivar and where it was grown. Information on efficient ways to eradicate it would be a plus. Too tough? Maybe it’s over your head.”

  While he was listening, the dog kept tapping his front paws rhythmically on the desk. I could hear his tail as it kept hitting the back of the chair. His face was mostly unreadable, but he didn’t seem upset by my skeptical attitude.

  “Rice … hmm …”

  The dog lifted his nose and puckered his lips—at least it looked like puckering. His paws were side by side on the table. Now he looked like a philosopher-dog. Yagodo probably had his arms folded.

  “Rice, now there’s a hard one. With wheat, you could just pull the genome transcript and references from Cambridge Open Resources. Wheat wasn’t hit by a disease like red rust that made cultivar information irrelevant, so everything on the Internet is on TrueNet too, including DNA information for all the cultivars. It would be easy to narrow down the field by calibrating the genetic distance between what’s online and your intruder. For soy, with all the GMO variants, you could get modification location and sequencing data by accessing patents and academic papers. Then you’d compare them with the standard genome. You wouldn’t have to go Internet diving at all.”

  This was not the bullshit answer I’d been expecting. No one without specialist knowledge could have tossed that off without prepping first. It also hit me that if Yagodo was as old as he sounded, he might have a better grip on the state of things around the time of the Lockout than even Kurokawa and I did. He also handled the terminology correctly from the point of view of managing a data search. Progress in synthetic biology had changed the meaning of “GMO” since the period Yagodo was describing, but he used the term correctly, the way it was used at the time. This sort of contextual awareness would be critical for the salvaging work I had in mind.