“What’d he say?”
“He had the softest voice. Almost delicate. He said, ‘Sometimes you have to cause suffering to end suffering.’？”
She was quiet for a while.
There was only the sound of a television in an adjacent room bleeding through the thin walls. The heat pump in our room cutting on again.
I wondered if her memory was as enhanced as mine. I had plenty of dark moments in my past that I could now relive with brutal perfection. But nothing like what she had just described to me.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I said.
“Me too.”
“Are you still in touch with the people who rescued you?”
Kara smiled. “They’re some of my best friends.”
* * *
—
Sirens roused me in the middle of the night. As I rushed to the window, Kara pulled her tactical shotgun from under her bed.
Through the icy window, I watched as several police EVs and a fire engine raced by on the main road. Though my heart pounded from the instinctive fear reaction, the colder, analytical part of my mind whispered that they wouldn’t bring a fire engine to arrest me, and there certainly wouldn’t be incoming sirens.
Kara came up behind me.
“It’s not for us,” I said.
I returned to my bed and killed the lights, allowing my mind to superimpose that DNA sequence on the popcorn ceiling.
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
There was something bothering me about it. Something staring me in the face that I was failing to comprehend.
I ran a frequency analysis in my head.
Twelve T’s.
Nineteen A’s.
Ninety-two C’s.
Thirty-three G’s.
Very C rich.
And were those numbers significant?
I let them drift through my mind like clouds on a summer day. I observed them. 12, 19, 92, 33, 12, 19, 92, 33, 12, 19, 92, 33. I reversed them: 21, 91, 29, 33, 21, 91, 29, 33.
Nineteen was a prime number. I noodled with that for a moment, to no avail.
* * *
—
My eyes shot open.
It was morning.
Kara snored lightly.
My mind must have been working the problem while I slept, because I knew what was bothering me about the sequence.
The T’s and A’s never repeated.
I jumped out of bed, turned on the light. Went to the table, which was covered in pages of failed attempts to break the code—if it even was a code.
I flattened the receipt Kara had brought back from the charge station and wrote down the nucleotide sequence from memory, removing the spaces between the codons and underlining every T and A.
TCCCCCCCGACCCGACCCACGCACCGCACCCCTCTCGTGGTCACCGCACCCACCCGGGACCCCACGGGTCCCCC-CCCCC-CCCCC-CCCCC-CGACCCGACCCACGCACCGCACCCCTGGTGTCGGTCGGTCGGTCGGACCCCGGGACACCCGCACCCC
“What are you doing?” Kara mumbled from bed.
“Just a second,” I said.
If my mother had intended to message me through my genetic code, she had a problem to overcome. How to communicate using only four symbols. And how to create a cipher with A, C, G, and T that only someone looking for it could detect.
Kara walked over, put her hand on my shoulder.
I looked up at her, said, “What if the T’s and A’s don’t actually represent letters or other symbols?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Because they never repeat. Maybe their purpose is to indicate the start of a word or…” And suddenly, I saw how I would create a substitution code based on the four letters of DNA. “Oh my god.”
“What?”
“If you had created this code,” I said, “what two base units of communication would be essential for this cipher to indicate?”
“Numbers and letters.”
“What if the T’s and A’s indicate what the next character will be? One of them—the A perhaps—means the character will be a number. And the T means that you have to go a step further and translate the number into a letter of the alphabet.”
“You mean like one equals A, two equals B, all the way to twenty-six equals Z?”
“Exactly.”
“So then the G’s and C’s represent numbers?” she asked.
“That’s how I’d do it. And if I only had two symbols with which to write any number, I’d use something like the Roman numeral system. Let the G equal five, and the C equal 1. Or the other way around. Look at the first sequence.”
I wrote out TCCCCCCCG.
“Assume T means that the CCCCCCCG is creating a number. The sequence could stand for twelve or thirty-six. Or the T could be designating that the sequence is creating a letter, which means we do one more operation to get a letter of the alphabet. So then it’s L or…wait, no.” I scanned the code again, smiling now. “Yep. If my theory is right, I know what C and G are. G is one, C is five.”
“You sure?”
“Look at the second sequence. ACCCG. Let’s assume C is one. You would not write the number eight that way with Roman numerals. You’d write it GCCC.”
“So G is one, C is five.”
“Let’s assume that for now. Which means the only outstanding question is, what do the T and the A stand for. Based on our assumption that G is one and C is five, I just have to solve this code as if T represents a letter, A a number, and then do the inverse.”
“The T’s can’t signal letters,” she said.
I looked at the first sequence again. “You’re right.” Seven C’s followed by a G is thirty-six. Too high to correspond to a letter of the alphabet.
I made a pot of coffee, and while it brewed, I glanced outside again through the curtains. The snow had stopped. It was eight in the morning, and the town was waking up.
I returned to the table and started the process of transposing the nucleotides, making the T’s signal numbers, the A’s letters.
The first nine characters translated to the number 36.
The next five sequences spelled out the word point.
I raced to transpose the rest.
36POINT5625NORTH106POINT217777WEST
“Kara. I solved it.”
I took a sip of coffee as Kara walked over and stared at the computer screen.
“Coordinates?” she said.
“Yep.”
She pulled a chair over beside mine, took control of the laptop, and opened a search engine.
Into the query box, she entered: 36.5625N, 106.217778W.
We leaned toward the monitor, waiting for the next screen to load.
A map appeared.
A GPS pin-drop icon affixed to a patch of green.
“I can’t tell where this is,” I said.
Kara zoomed out.
Until the screen encompassed the words CARSON NATIONAL FOREST.
Kara zoomed out farther, and finally, I saw a name I recognized.
Santa Fe.
The coordinates were located in a national forest about eighty miles north-northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
We zoomed back in on the pin drop and changed the screen to satellite view. It was an ultra-res image of evergreen trees with a few pops of yellow that suggested aspen.
I moved the image around, looking for something, anything, of interest.
“I just see trees,” Kara said.
“Same.”