“Why?”
“Because I might damage something vital. Suddenly an organ stops working. Or the genetic mutations give you cancer or ALS. If Mom did this to us—still a big if—she probably would have inserted her message into a genomic safe harbor.”
I could tell she had no idea what I was talking about.
“Think of our body as a massive biological computer program,” I said. “If you jump in there and start messing with the code, something important might break. Safe harbors are natural regions of the genome that scientists discovered can accommodate the integration of new genetic material without harming other genes or causing bad alterations to the host genome.” I started typing. “I think I’ll write a query for all locations where my genome was changed, but limit the search returns to putative safe harbor regions. That should narrow things down dramatically.”
It took a few minutes to build the SQL to query the database. Because we were working with a laptop instead of a supercomputer, I suspected it would take some time for the search results to come back.
Kara and I sat on the bed, scarfing down a couple of charge-station burritos.
One hour later, we had our first report.
After Denver, my genome had been altered at several well-documented genetic safe harbors, including AAVS1, SHS231, hROSA26, and CCR5.
I ran a report for each DNA region to highlight the extent of the edits performed.
CCR5 is a protein on the surface of white blood cells, involved in the immune system. There were extensive edits to my CCR5. I couldn’t tell what they were, but upward of 89kb base pairs had been inserted—a veritable novel’s worth of code.
Next, I opened the report for the changes to AAVS1, an ancient, harmless genomic hitchhiker and an ideal site to add DNA without harm.
Huh. I leaned forward. The changes to AAVS1 were minuscule—a brief line of new genetic code inserted on the long arm of chromosome 19.
It was a mere 156 base pairs long.
Perhaps fifty-two codons if translated into a protein.
And according to the gene-sequencing reads, the code had been inserted into the genome in every cell of my body—a challenging feat, and an unusual one. Though the entire genome is contained in every cell in the body, the portions of that code that are actually expressed by each cell are determined by its specialized biological function. Every cell in a person’s body contains instructions for their eye color—but a Scythe intervention for eye color would target only the tiny portion of cells actually affecting iris pigmentation.
So why target every cell? To make it unmissable?
“This could be it,” I said.
Kara stared at the new DNA sequence.
TCC CCC CCG ACC CGA CCC ACG CAC CGC ACC CCT CTC GTG GTC ACC GCA CCC ACC CGG GAC CCC ACG GGT CCC CCC CCC CCC CCC CCC CCC GAC CCG ACC CAC GCA CCG CAC CCC TGG TGT CGG TCG GTC GGT CGG ACC CCG GGA CAC CCG CAC CCC
“You really think these letters are a message?” she asked.
“Maybe. The other safe harbor edit was an insertion of almost a hundred kb. That’d be a very long message. This one is too short to be a new gene, and the protein it encodes doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s next?”
“DNA can be read in two directions, and three reading frames per direction. I’m going to assume, for now, that this follows convention for insertions, which means we should read it left to right. So now we have to figure out how to convert the biological message into a human message.”
“Any ideas?”
“Not a one.”
* * *
—
My brother’s death was the first rift in a chasm that would swallow my family whole. I was thirteen, and two years later, my father took his own life on a foggy morning on the summit of Mount Diablo, east of the Bay Area. That my mother had subsequently faked her own suicide, despite all the loss I’d already experienced, was unfathomable to me.
After Dad was gone, Kara dropped out of Cornell, where she’d been pursuing an information technology degree, and enlisted in the military. She made special forces. At the time, all she’d said was, “I want to actually do something.”
Then it was just Miriam and me, until our locusts inadvertently unleashed a famine upon the world.
And following my mother’s death and my incarceration, it was just me.
All of which made tonight something special. While the circumstances were less than ideal, it had been years since I’d gotten to spend time with my big sister.
We ate good-bad food on our beds and talked. She’d only met Beth and Ava twice, and I told her all about them. She told me about her life in Montana.
I’d been there once with Nadine. We’d stopped by Kara’s cabin after a raid in Helena. Sat out on her porch listening to elks bugling across the valley. It was summertime, a cool night, the sky luminous with stars. We’d talked about life and work and family. It’d been nice to see Nadine and my sister hit it off.
I’d felt it that night and I felt it on this one—being with Kara quenched some evolutionary thirst. A primal, genetic need to belong to a tribe.
She was the only other human being who really understood the transformation I was experiencing. She was also the only human being who truly understood my past.
“Ever think about settling down?” I asked her.
“Kids? A wife?”
“Something like that.”
“Does it bother you that I found a different path to happiness?” she asked.
“You assume I think kids and marriage equal happiness. Correlation? Sure. Causation? No. Are you happy?”
“Before all this, I was as happy as I’d ever been. I lived in a cabin I had built at seven thousand feet in the mountains above Butte. I skied in the winter. Fly-fished in the summer. Hunted in the fall. You’ve been there.”
“I wish we’d seen each other more,” I said. “I would’ve liked to have been more a part of your life.”
“Dude, I am not the older sister who used to play hide-and-seek and build Legos and forts with you anymore.”
“Who are you?”
“Now? That’s an interesting question. Before the drone bit me, I thought I was a woman in search of peace in a place of my own.” Then she looked at me strangely. “You want to know, don’t you?” The scar started at the outer corner of her left eye and zigzagged down her cheek to the tip of her chin. She touched it, said, “Hydrochloric acid.” She swallowed. “It was a training camp in Kachin state, high in the Himalayan foothills. We came at night. They had infrared surveillance and their snipers took out everyone but me. I got pinned down. They’d never seen a female special forces soldier. I was something of a novelty.
“I was held in a metal cage barely large enough to stand in. Most of the time, I was blindfolded. They put me through four mock executions, and worse. Much worse.”
I moved over to my sister’s bed and sat across from her.
I tried to hold her hand, but she pulled it away.
“One of them spoke English. He’d been born and educated in London. We talked three times. The last, I asked how he could do the things he was doing to me. To the others they had burned, drowned, stoned, beheaded. These were Buddhists, after all. It’s one thing to torture and kill in the name of a god you think created the universe, but their core belief is that nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent. They’re supposed to believe in ending suffering.”