Jack had two hands up now. He'd heard this kind of talk at the SESOUP convention last year. It had sounded crazy then, and it sounded crazy now.
"Whoa there! You don't happen to be into UFOs, do you? You're not going to start telling me one of those nut-job theories about aliens playing with our DNA."
"Of course not. But I can make a circumstantial case that somewhere along our evolutionary line something happened to it. I mean, this stuff's that different. So the big question is—where did this DNA come from? It's not found in chimps or any of the apes. It's not found in daffodils or butterflies, or sharks—humans share DNA with all of those, believe it or not—or even bacteria or viruses—and we have tons of viral DNA in our junk. How did it skip every other species since the dawn of time and land in ours and ours alone? If I were an intelligent design dolt I might say it's proof of God's guiding hand in evolution, but it was more likely the devil's. It's completely other. That's why I named it oDNA—other-DNA."
There it was, right out in the open: other.
Had the Otherness stirred something of itself into the human gene pool way back when—back in the First Age, when the Compendium was supposedly written? Or was this unrelated?
No… too much of a coincidence. And there'd be no more coincidences for him.
But to what purpose? A cosmic time bomb, set to explode… when?
Damn, he wished he still had that book. It might be able to tell him something.
"Why did you pick 'other' rather than 'alien' or something like that?"
"Because when you say 'alien,' people think of flying saucers and little gray men with big black eyes. We've got apes in our genome because we have a common ancestor. The Cro-Magnons live on in our genes, and there's recent evidence that Neanderthals do too. I suspect something happened in our ho-minid past to split off a subspecies from the main line. It developed this 'other' genome, and then was reabsorbed back into the main line, either by crossbreeding or some sort of introgression. I'm guessing about the how, but I'm sure of the what: We've all got a little oDNA in us."
A tingle ran over Jack's skin.
"All?"
Levy nodded. "To widely varying degrees, but yes. All. Summing up: At some time in the past another human race with altered DNA merged with ours. The DNA of the other race—the 'loser' race—joined the junk pile of the present human genome. You've heard of 'gone but not forgotten'? This oDNA is forgotten but not gone—and not necessarily junk."
The Otherness… part of the human gene pool… the implications staggered him.
He wondered if he should tell Levy what he suspected. But that would mean going into all the background he had gleaned over the past year about the ageless, ceaseless cosmic shadow war between two unimaginably huge and unknowable forces—one indifferent, and one, the Otherness, decidedly inimical—waging around them with Earth as one of the many marbles in play.
Yeah, that would go over well. Levy would stamp NUT across Jack's forehead.
So instead he said, "Why hasn't anyone heard of this? It's tailor-made for the tabloids."
"Other people have stumbled upon it, as I did, but the news has been suppressed. All I did was send out a few e-mails on some preliminary findings and suddenly a member of a government agency which I may not name was knocking on my door. And no, they weren't dressed in black suits and fedoras."
"That's good." Jack had dealt with the real men in black and knew they didn't work for any government. "What did they want?"
"My silence. I could A: come work for them; B: keep my mouth shut and direct my research to another area; or C: stay on my present path and find my reputation trashed to the point where the only place I'd ever get published was Fortean Times, if there."
"You chose A."
Levy nodded. "Just like a lot of others. It was a win-win offer. I got automatic funding to do the kind of groundbreaking work most researchers only dream of. No filling out reams of application forms or going around begging—just research."
Scary and fascinating, but a connection was missing.
"What's all this got to do with Bolton?"
"Jeremy Bolton is loaded with oDNA—the highest score on record."
"Where'd he get it all?"
Levy shrugged. "Who can say? He was born in Louisiana to Elizabeth Bolton. The father is listed as Jonah Stevens but there was no marriage and Elizabeth raised Jeremy alone."
"Could Jonah Stevens be the source of his mystery money?"
Levy shook his head. "He's dead. We traced him because we wanted to see if he was the source of his son's oDNA, but he died in a weird elevator accident."
"Weird how?"
"The police suspected foul play, but nothing was ever proven. Unfortunately for us, his body was cremated, so we never got to check his remains for oDNA."
"What about the mother?"
"Dead too. Cancer. We managed to get an order of exhumation to check her DNA. Elizabeth Bolton carried a significant amount of the o variant, but nowhere near her son's."
"So this Jonah Stevens, whoever he was, must have been a gold mine of the stuff."
Levy nodded. "He was most likely a human monster, because he was also a carrier of the trigger gene."
"What the hell is that?"
"As I said, the oDNA is a cluster of pseudogenes amid the other junk, but unlike most pseudogenes, these are fairly complete. Just dormant. And they remain dormant unless a certain mutation is present on one of the X chromosomes. In times of stress, this gene can awaken the oDNA and transform it from noncoding to coding."
"I don't understand what you mean by coding."
"Genes carry codes—templates, if you will—that the cell uses for making specific proteins. When the oDNA is stimulated from pseudogene status to an active gene, its codes start producing unique proteins that alter neurotransmit-ter levels in the brain, triggering violent impulses. We haven't worked out the exact mechanism yet, but we're pretty sure that's what happens."
"So you're saying these oDN A types can't help it if they're violent."
"I didn't say oDNA triggered violent behavior, I said violent impulses. There's a world of difference. One is the act itself, the other is a tendency toward the act. Other genetic and environmental factors that affect an individual's impulse control come into play here.
"The upshot is that all of us have some of oDNA in us, but the amount varies, so some are more 'other' than the rest. But the amount of oDNA has no effect on an individual unless he or she has the mutation that acts as a trigger.
"But take a large amount of oDNA, add the trigger mutation, mix with poor impulse control—or anything like alcohol or drugs which lower the impulse threshold—and you have a potentially lethal combination."
"Like Jeremy Bolton."
Levy nodded. "Jeremy Bolton is a perfect example."
"And that's why you need him for this clinical trial."
"Exactly. We don't know how to remove his oDNA—although someday we might be able to do just that—so we've targeted the mutated trigger gene. If we can suppress that, the oDNA will remain dormant, and Jeremy Bolton will be just like you and me."
"Speak for yourself, doc." Jack rubbed his eyes. "Your agency can't keep this oDNA a secret forever."
"It knows that. And when the news does hit, it will have devastating effects. Look at the problems caused by differences in pigmentation. Imagine what's going to happen when it's leaked that there are people among us with large amounts of alien DNA—and believe me, the o in oDNA will be quickly replaced by alien in the popular press. Not to mention what it will do to the criminal justice system. Chaos. Everyone behind bars or in court will be claiming their genes made them do it and will want to be declared not guillv hy reason of defective DNA."