“Of course.” She wondered what he could have found that would bring him halfway around the world. “What about it?”
“First off, did anyone else perform an analysis on these bones?”
She shook her head. “Just carbon dating at the AMS outfit in Rome, and that sample’s been incinerated.”
“How about the rest of the skeleton?”
She pictured the ancient bones reassembled on top of the black rubber matting. Yesterday morning they had disappeared, along with the ossuary and its relics. “The Vatican still has it.” Or did they?
“Good.” He was clearly relieved. “Cause when you see what I have to show you...” Aldrich uncapped the tiny flash drive that dangled off his key ring and inserted it into the laptop’s data port. Flipping up the screen, he brought up a media player window and activated a file. A video clip began loading for playback. “I thought the scanner was malfunctioning when I saw this,” he explained. “Almost gave me a heart attack. Turns out the scanner’s working just fine. It’s the sample that can’t be right.” The clip finished loading.
She leaned closer.
“Here we go. The first thing you’ll see is the karyotype. I’ll pause it when it comes up.” As playback began Aldrich froze the image.
Charlotte’s eyes trained on the wormlike chromosomes, arranged side by side in order of length. Fluorescent dyes assigned different colors to each pairing, labeled 1 to 23, X and Y.
“Even here the mutation is evident.”
“Which pair is the anomaly?”
“Look closer,” Aldrich instructed. “You tell me.”
She scrutinized the image. As soon as her eyes alighted on the twenty-third chromosome set, she spotted something odd. Under a microscope one expected each chromosome to exhibit visible bands along its length. Pair twenty-three didn’t have any banding. “What’s with twenty-three?”
“Exactly. Let’s keep moving and hopefully it’ll start to make some sense.”
Aldrich brought up another screen showing a super-magnified cell nucleus, as it would appear in microscopic view. The chromosomes and nucleotide material were present in their natural, unordered state. The cell’s nuclear wall was barely visible along the screen’s periphery.
“I marked the twenty-third chromosome pair.” Aldrich pointed it out. “See?”
Bright yellow circles were drawn around the two anomalous chromosomes.
“Got it.”
“Watch closely, Charlie. Here comes the extraction.”
“What?”
“I’ll explain in a sec.” She noticed that Aldrich’s left leg was bouncing up and down.
On the screen a hollow glass needle penetrated the nuclear membrane, its sharp angles in stark contrast to the natural cellular construct. Next some chromosome pairs—though not the twenty-third pair—were extracted.
“I was removing the chromosomes for the karyotype.” On top of the media window, the extracted chromosomes appeared along a black bar, in size order and he pointed to them. “Here are the extracted pairs. So far, so good?”
“Yeah.”
On the screen, the needle retracted from the nucleus and the membrane shrank back over the puncture.
“Now watch this.”
That’s when she saw something remarkable unfold. The unbanded twin chromosomes—still inside the cell’s nucleus—instantly began to divide, churning out new chromosome pairs to replace the extracted material. The spontaneous regeneration stopped once the nucleus had reached its odd equilibrium—forty-eight chromosomes.
“What did I just see?” She tore her eyes from the screen. “Evan?”
He looked up at her intently. “A huge biological discovery. That’s what you just saw. I’ll play it again.”
Playback was reset to the point where the needle was extracted. The black bar with the missing chromosomes was on top of the screen again. And then there it was, just as Evan had said—the most remarkable biological process she had ever witnessed—spontaneous genetic regeneration.
Charlotte covered her mouth. “But that’s completely impossible.”
“I know.”
Nothing on earth could explain what she’d just witnessed. “It’s absolutely scientifically impossible for any human chromosome to replicate exact copies of other sets. There’s DNA from the mother, the father...a complex genetic code.”
“Violates everything we know as scientists,” he stated flatly. “I had a very difficult time coming to terms with this myself.”
Silence.
“Want to hear more?” He flitted his eyebrows and was beaming again.
“You mean this gets better?”
