Her meds.
She looked at the bottle, then at her watch. She was two hours behind on her meds. “Ah. I am sorry.” She took the bottle and plastic cup.
He walked around the desk to stand next to her chair. “And what are you doing up? You should be in bed. How about you turn in?”
She shook her head, put the medicine bottle down and started reaching for the fridge under her desk.
“Got you covered,” Tim said. He pulled a can of Dr Pepper from his lab coat pocket. She smelled alcohol on his breath.
“Mister Feely, have you been drinking?”
“Just a shot or two,” he said. “And speaking of shots, the meds are yours, and this can is your chaser. So drink up!”
Tim made her laugh. He was a good assistant, although not as good as Galina had been. But where Galina had spent most of her time with Erika, Tim made sure Jian took her meds, slept, even ate. Sometimes Jian actually forgot to eat, in the times when the code took over and minutes turned to hours turned to days.
Jian poured the lithium citrate into the medicine cup, filling it to the five-milliliter line. She drank the medicine, then immediately drained the whole can of Dr Pepper. Carbonation bubbled up in her mouth, chasing away the lithium’s nasty taste. The bad taste was worth it, though, because it made her normal. Made her able to function without seeing… them. The medicine let her work.
She reached for the fridge again, but Tim produced a second can from his other pocket.
“Got you covered,” he said.
Jian blushed a little. Tim and P. J. took such good care of her. It almost made this place tolerable despite Rhumkorrf’s pressure and the constant mean comments from that evil bitch Erika.
“Jian, come on,” Tim said. “We’ve failed the immune test before. Give work a rest for a little bit. We’ll get back to it in the morning.”
“No, we must work. Did you come up with anything?”
“Yes,” Tim said. “A bitchin’ new high score in Tetris.”
“You must be very proud.”
“Not really. I reprogrammed it so I could win. Maybe you should try playing some video chess. Let your mind do something else for a little bit.”
She shrugged. She wasn’t about to lecture a grown man on the value of hard work.
“Come on, Jian. Go to bed.”
“I will,” she said. “Let me finish sequencing the four new samples first, then I will sleep.”
“Promise?”
She nodded.
“All right,” Tim said. “Then you’re on your own. I’m pooped. Cheating at Tetris will really take it out of you. Night.”
He turned and walked out of the room. She rubbed her eyes. She was tired. But it wouldn’t take that long to finish this process.
They’d long ago collected samples of every living mammal known to man. After that, Danté had started acquiring samples from extinct species. Each time they digitized one of those additional genomes, the God Machine’s viability rate went up. Would the four new samples Bobby had delivered take them over 80 percent?
The myriad forms of animals on Earth take many shapes, but every last one is made from a simple set of four nucleotides: adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. Those four basic nucleotides create the double helix structure that is deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Some people didn’t understand double helix, but everyone got Jian’s favorite description—the twisting ladder.
Variety between the strands, across the rungs of the DNA ladder, is limited even further, to just two combinations: adenine can only bind with thymine, and guanine can only bond with cytosine. But the combinations along the sides of the ladder, the four letters A, G, T and C, combine in infinite ways.
Those infinite combinations were what Jian wanted to analyze, to digitize, so the God Machine could see the full genome of each animal and compare it with the master ancestor sequence.
First, she extracted the cellular DNA of the four extinct mammals and placed each in a vial. To each vial, she added her sequencing master mix. The mix consisted of a DNA polymerase, random primers and the four basic nucleotides. The mix also included dideoxynucleotides, which were nucleotides with a slightly different chemical structure that contained a fluorescent section critical to the final stage of the process.
She slid the vials into a polymerase chain reactor, a machine designed to produce billions of copies of the target DNA. First the PCR machine “unzipped” the DNA by heating it to ninety-five degrees Celsius, which broke the hydrogen bonds in the rungs. That split the double helix, leaving two single strands of DNA. The machine then cooled the mixture to fifty-five degrees Celsius. This brought the prefabricated random primers into play. A primer is to a strand of DNA what a foundation is to a brick walclass="underline" DNA strands can’t form at random, they have to begin with a primer. Lowering the temperature allowed the primers to lock in to complementary sections on the single DNA strand, so that a primer with the combination ACTGA would make rungs that created a combination of TGACT on the other side of the ladder. A binds with C, T binds with G, and click, a starting point locks down.
Then, more heat.
As the temperature rose to seventy-two Celsius, the DNA polymerase started at the random primers and moved down the open strand, locking free nucleotides onto the open-ended single DNA strands—just like a train engine building the track underneath it as it goes. The end result was two perfect copies of the original DNA strand. From there, the process quickly repeated over and over—two copies became four, then eight, then sixteen, an exponential increase that added up fast.
In years past, there had been more steps she had to follow, but now the entire process was automated. Her machine created millions of identical copies, peppered with the little fluorescent dideoxynucleotide chunks that marked segments. The computer used a laser to make those chunks fluoresce, then counted off the segments. End result? A nucleotide-by-nucleotide analysis of the animal’s DNA. The millions of copies provided an extremely high degree of accuracy.
The resultant data fed automatically into the supercomputer known as the God Machine. There, Jian’s programming would take over. She closed the lid on the PCR machines and set them to run automatically.
In just a few hours, the four new DNA sequences would join the thousands they had already sequenced. She called up the current genome database.
GENOME A17 SEQUENCING: PROCESSING
PROOFREADING ALGORITHM: PROCESSING
PROJECTED VIABILITY PROBABILITY: 65.0567%
Over and over again the powerful God Machine processed trillions of combinations of DNA, looking for the magical set that would produce a viable embryo. They were close now. A few more samples, a few more mammalian species, perhaps, and they would have it.
She still had her secret experiment, the one she hadn’t revealed to Rhumkorrf. Colding had insisted on destroying all elements of the human surrogate mother program. Jian had saved just a little bit. A special little bit. She had an ancestor genome with 99.65 percent viability probability, one that would beat the immune response for sure.
Not a cow’s immune response… her immune response.
That had been her little secret through the human surrogate phase. She’d used her own DNA as the primary working template. The irony was that Colding’s insistence on eliminating the human surrogates had saved the company, but if they could use a human surrogate, they would have successful implantation on the first try. Jian had kept her own modified eggs, hiding them inside the waist-high tank of liquid nitrogen that also held the last sixteen rounds of God Machine genomes. They were her eggs, after all, and she couldn’t really bear to part with them.