Spiral

When Dylan built his first bacterium.

Liam thought the technologies of synthetic biology would be a tsunami, one that would make the electronics revolution seem like ripples in a pond. Jake could barely imagine it. What would it be like when companies manufactured creatures instead of products? When disaffected kids used the tools of the synthetic biology revolution to hack into life instead of into computers?

Jake felt himself sagging. He tried to shake off the exhaustion. All he knew for sure was that the new revolution would be messy. There were no simple equations for something like life. It was a completely different kind of problem. A random mutation and the smallest player could suddenly take down the largest, multiplying again and again, growing exponentially. A virus jumps from a monkey to a human and you have the AIDS epidemic. Ebola escapes the jungles of Africa and a hundred million could die. A dominant player like Homo sapiens could be laid low in an instant. It was madness, a wild, crazy war with billions of warriors, millions of different sides. No one could predict the outcome, not even Liam Connor.

Joe emerged from the CNF, looking beat.

“And?” Jake asked.

“We checked everywhere. We opened every storage bin. Every wafer cassette. Looked in every sample box.”

“And you found?”

“Not a Crawler out of place.”

JAKE WAS JUST ABOUT TO DISMISS ANY SINISTER SIGNIFICANCE to the missing Crawlers. No matter how he turned it over in his head, no matter what angle he looked at it from, he couldn’t see how the missing Crawlers could be connected to Liam’s death. And Jake had a rule: never blame conspiracies when mischief or happenstance would suffice.

But then came two new pieces of information.

The first came from Vlad Glazman, Jake’s friend and scientific colleague, a fifty-two-year-old Russian émigré and tenured professor of computer science. Vlad had asked Jake to stop by his lab. “For a drink,” he said. “In honor of our lost friend.” He wouldn’t say more, but Jake knew there was more. Vlad knew Liam as well as Jake did, maybe better.

Jake arrived at Vlad’s lab just after midnight to find the Russian working his way through a bottle of Gorilka Nemiroff-“a nice Ukrainian vodka,” Vlad said. He was a squat man, with a square head and broad shoulders, as if he’d been compressed by a vise. His hair was dark, like his eyes, and his lips were surprisingly full, almost sensual. He was married to a woman he’d met at a conference in Europe, as blond and tall as he was dark and squat. They were having problems.

Vlad poured Jake a drink and said, “You think Connor was sick?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

Vlad grunted. “He was not sick.”

Jake took a swallow and found the vodka pleasantly harsh, the burn on the back of the throat a welcome fire. He let his gaze walk around the room. Vlad’s lab was a mashup of science, with UNIX boxes and Cat5 cables next to PCR machines and rows of thumb-activated pipettes. Nearly every bit of available counter space in Vlad’s lab was covered by stacks of papers. He had cleared them off a spot, carefully allocating the displaced papers to other piles.

Vlad lifted his glass, took a drink. “You know what I think?” Vlad said.

“Tell me.”

“He knew secrets.”

“What kind?”

“Secrets they didn’t want him to tell.”

“ ‘They’?”

“They.”

“Vlad the Paranoid,” Jake said. Which was true. Vlad saw darkness everywhere. In Moscow, he’d spent his nights building CPUs out of salvaged parts while toiling away during the day as a low-level technical staffer for Directorate T-Scientific and Technical-a part of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Vlad’s status as a Jew kept him from achieving a formal position of any significance, but he got out, and the West had no such restrictions. Since coming to Cornell, he had become a major player in asynchronous information processing, writing code that kept different computer processors happily talking to one another. Five years ago, Vlad had switched fields to synthetic biology, drawn by the promise of programming in the code of life. He plied his trade with money leaking across the dark boundary of classified research. He had contacts throughout the military-funding universe: at ONR, AFOSR, DARPA, you name it. He had never lost the sense from his days in the Soviet Union that someone was looking over his shoulder.

Jake thumbed a paper on a pile next to him, something on micro-RNA gene regulation. The piles looked haphazard, but Vlad knew exactly what was in every one of them. Jake had seen it many times: He’d reach into a pile, pull out the exact article from Science or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they’d been discussing. “The fossil record,” Vlad would say.

Jake said, “You’re saying someone killed him? But the video showed him jump.”

“I’m saying nothing. I am letting vodka talk.”

“Let it talk more.”

Vlad took another sip. “I had conversation with friend at DTRA.”

“Ditra?”