The projections of Paris’s eyes closed. For a moment, she concentrated. “Yes, I can see your data. Thank you. I’ll try not to leave a mess.”
“You can’t be any worse than my first graduate student.”
The two of them shared a laugh, as if Paris had ever been a graduate student.
“Okay, are we ready then?” Tyson asked, but continued before getting an answer, “Good, let’s get this dog and pony show over with. Paris, put the board members onscreen, please.”
The overhead lights dimmed. One at a time, six ghostly figures materialized from the fog of the window until they resolved into something with the appearance of substance spaced equidistantly around the circular office window, theater-in-the-round style.
Tyson didn’t like the idea of addressing people he couldn’t see, so he held his arms out wide, toggled his forefingers, then scrunched everyone together in a neat row where he could engage with all of them at once.
The Chief Operations Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Logistical Officer, Chief Humanities Officer, and Chief Benefits Officer, sitting in lavishly appointed home offices, dens, and living rooms in penthouses atop the most exclusive residential towers in downtown Methuselah, collectively and expectantly stared back at him. Everyone except CHO Meadows, who preferred to live in a five-room hovel on the outskirts of the burber ring inherited from her parents some fifteen years ago. Foz always had been a bit of an odd one.
A spotlight cast a glow over Tyson’s head and shoulders for theatrical effect. He held his arms up in welcome. “Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining me tonight.”
“Cut the crap, Tyson,” COO Nakamura said without preamble. “We all saw that interview. What the hell were you—” He stopped midsentence as soon as he noticed Elsa standing behind Tyson’s right shoulder. “Who is that?”
“This…” Tyson moved aside and motioned for Elsa to step forward. “… is Doctor Elsa Spaulding. She’s one of the immunologists leading the effort to find a cure for our Teegarden plague, and she’s the reason I called this meeting.”
“But you didn’t call this meeting!” Nakamura complained.
“I have now, Takeshi. I cede the floor to Dr. Spaulding. And trust me, you’re all going to want to listen very carefully to what she has to say.” He turned around and leaned in to whisper in Elsa’s ear. “Remember, you’re the expert here. Try not to overwhelm them with detail. And don’t take any of their shit. Think teaching class at a primary school.”
“I haven’t been in a primary school in twenty years.”
“You’ll be great.” He hooked an arm around her waist and gently maneuvered her under the light, then stepped away.
Momentarily startled, Elsa straightened her blouse and cleared her throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I apologize in advance for the somewhat disjointed nature of this presentation. I didn’t know I was giving it until five minutes ago.” She shot Tyson a sour look, but continued. “As Mr. Abington said, for the last two weeks I’ve been working diligently with my colleagues both in orbit on the Preakness and in situ on Teegarden to develop a cure for the mystery bacteria infecting our people.”
“And how goes that fight, Doctor?” Foz asked. Her gentle tones stood in such stark contrast to nearly everyone else Tyson came in regular contact with.
“To be frank, slowly. We’ve managed to contain the outbreak and identify its vectors. We’ve even managed to start sterilizing the outer structures on Teegarden and set up labs and a treatment center on-site. But as far as working toward a cure, that’s been slower going. So far, the strain has proven resilient to all known phases of antibiotics, retro-viral therapies, even the bacterial phages we’ve thrown at it. Its mutation rate is higher than anything I’ve seen in more than a decade of work in the field. It’s almost like the strain knows our playbook and is anticipating our next move against it.”
“Are you saying this bug is intelligent, Doctor?” Nakamura said. “Because you have to know how crazy that sounds.”
“No. I’m saying it gives the illusion of intelligent action because, and here’s the big one, it’s been programmed to.”
“Walk us through that.”
Elsa ran a hand through her hair. “After sequencing its genome at several stages of its development, I retroactively isolated a series of snippets laying dormant, waiting to be triggered by environmental conditions or other outside stimulus. Further, these alleles were hidden among junk DNA after being lifted from wildly divergent orders of prokaryotes that—”
“Doc. English, please,” Nakamura pleaded.
“She was speaking English, Takeshi,” Foz said.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Regardless. Dr. Spaulding, biology wasn’t a primary focus of study for most of us in the corporate world. Could you shave it down for my associates, please?”
“Yes, of course. Alleles are just a science-y word for traits. We can track these traits backward through time by following their development and comparing it to known mutation rates and see points of divergence and speciation. But these alleles don’t fit into any single catalogued lineage. It would be like seeing a person walking down the street with an elephant trunk and dragonfly wings. Evolutionarily, those traits didn’t evolve together, so you’d instantly know they’d acquired them through gene-splicing, not any natural process. And even that metaphor doesn’t really do the job, because the genetic diversity of prokaryotes spans many hundreds of millions of years longer than the history of the vertebrate lineage.”
Foz held up a hand. “I think your point is made, Doctor. Thank you. You said the bacteria’s program is anticipating your steps to attack it. Have you tried something so unscientific as going out of order?”
“We have, but it’s less about the order and more just that the specimen has counters waiting for everything already in our toolkit. We need to develop a new tool from scratch, which we will, but it’s going to take some time.”
“We’ve already lost fourteen people, Dr. Spaulding,” Nakamura jumped in. “We can’t afford much more time.”
“We’ve just received a shipment of cryogenic capsules for the most
