Jana was startled awake by the ringing of her phone. The voice on the other end was tenor and the man spoke quickly as if he had to get every word out in ten seconds. She didn’t understand a thing he was saying and then she heard the name Stephen Kesl. This brought her upright and fully aware.
“Who?” she asked.
“This is Stephen Kesl.”
“Yeah and I’m Chelsea Clinton. Look is this Corporal Richter? It is, isn’t it? You can shove it up your ass. I still won’t date you.”
In the silence that followed, Jana regretted the lack of landlines anymore. It would have been good to slam the receiver in Richter’s ear. Then, the voice, slowing and calmer, said, “I’m not Corporal Richter. I really am Stephen Kesl, Jana. Don’t hang up … sorry to be blunt but you need to listen to me. You probably don’t know who I am, a lot of people do, of course, that’s beside the point. You’ve been wasting your talents that’s beside the point, too. I–”
Jana stopped him. She wasn’t going to waste any time on this prank and she had a sure fire way of telling if it was him or not. “If you’re the famous Stephen Kesl? Prove it. What was the topic of your last Ted Talk?”
“I’ve never given a Ted talk … I never give Ted talks … I don’t like them … they were good in the beginning but now.” He paused and she heard chuckling. “I see what you’re doing. Smart woman.”
“Yeah smart enough to test you and you’re smart enough to pass. So tell me what’s this all about. Why would the Stephen Kesl call me?”
“I know about your experience with the Sasquatch, I’m impressed … good job … glad you’re alive. Can we talk about what went on?”
Maybe it was the earnestness with which the voice on the other end of the phone was speaking, but Jana found herself trusting it, believing it was Kesl. She told him what happened. When she reached the point where she collected the material in a sample bag, Kesl interrupted.
“Fantastic, this changes everything, you’re a microbiologist right?”
Jana’s guard went up again. Few people around here knew about her days at the university. Marge was the only one and she let everyone know she’d hired Jana because she was a vet. “How do you know that?”
“Umm … It’s on the web … I have a security team that can find out everything about someone, personal privacy is a myth, you know that. Look, it’s important. I figure you haven’t forgotten what you’ve learned. What’s your assessment of the Sasquatch material?”
Jana quickly went through in her mind all the scenarios she could come up with. Nothing really made sense. She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was just after midnight and she really didn’t want to wait until Marge got in to take the next step. “It was deteriorating rapidly so I put it in our freezer. There is really nothing here to examine it with.”
“Sit tight. I’ll figure something out and get back to you shortly.”
Jana was about to end the call when a new voice interrupted. “Ms. Erickson, this is Saul McBride. Mr. Kesl forgot to inform you that you are in danger. If we can track you, the people who shot at you can do the same. They’ll want to keep this secret, keep it away from the public. They’ll be coming for you. Is your facility secure? Do you still have your gun with you?”
Jana felt the blood drain from her face. She remembered the trail cam. Whoever this Saul guy was, he was speaking the truth. “I have my gun,” she replied, knowing it was still locked in the bottom drawer of her desk, where regulations demanded she keep it when she wasn’t in the field.
Kesl came back on the phone. “Who was that?” she demanded.
“Saul’s my head of security … you’ll like him … well probably not … he’s good at what he does … you don’t have to like him.”
“I dislike him already.”
“Hang tight.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Saul says no.”
* * *
Kesl took less than ten minutes, which was fine as far as Jana was concerned. The phone call had intensified the creepy feeling she’d had earlier. His fast talking tenor voice was a relief. “Jana here’s what I want you to do … take the sample from the freezer … walk outside … you’ll see someone you know … it’ll be safe to go with that person.”
Jana couldn’t imagine who it would be unless it was Marge, but her mentor would have called to find out what was going on. Whoever it was, Jana would be glad to see him or her and get out of the lab.
“Roger that,” she said.
“Wait! Wait!” Kesl yelled before she could hang up. “Saul says to ditch your phone … the bad guys will be tracking you through it.”
The line went dead. Jana couldn’t leave her phone at the lab because the shooters would track her here for sure. She decided she would turn it off and throw it in a garbage can. Today was trash day and the Marquette city sanitation workers would haul it to the municipal dump.
Jana grabbed the Sasquatch sample from the freezer and went outside. The dumpster was located on the side of the lab, which also gave her a clear view of the street and anyone approaching the building. She dumped her smart phone into the opening and marveled how the dumpster didn’t smell like the one at her apartment building, which stank like a Department of Defense experiment gone bad. She noted the time. It was almost one in the morning and the waste removal truck would be here in another hour. Good, she thought. By then anyone chasing my phone will be following it all over Marquette.
The temperature had fallen near freezing. She pulled her vest closer about her and waited in the shadows. She didn’t have to wait long. She heard the car before it made the turn into the parking lot of the lab. Whoever it was probably wasn’t security conscious because he parked the car under a mercury vapor light, making himself a great target for anyone watching.
Great. They send an amateur.
She was ready to blast the driver’s ignorance, when to her surprise, the man who stepped out of the car was Olav Lassen, a Ph.D teaching assistant in the microbiology lab at the University of Michigan. She couldn’t have been more surprised.
Olav was tall and lean, with a red beard and the profile of a Viking. He claimed one of his ancestors had sailed with Leif Erickson to the shores of North America in 1000 and had been the first to jump ashore at Vinland. They had often joked about being cousins, though Olav had many times inquired if she wanted to go out with him and not as relatives. That was six years ago and looking at him now she realized she still had mixed feelings for the man.
He waved his arm at her and yelled, “Jana!”
It was all she could do not to shout at him to stop making himself a target. “Not so loud, Ole. You’ll wake the neighbors,” she said as she walked up to his car, a Ford Taurus that had to be twenty years old.
Olav knew better than to hug her as Jana had preferred handshakes and fist bumps to touchy feely stuff. He gave her a high five. “You look the same cousin.”
She smiled and said, “Back at you.”
They clambered into the vehicle. The interior was like Olav – clean and well kept, not even a gum wrapper in the ashtray. He had been an organized neat freak in college, unlike herself. He handed her a bio transport case with dry ice inside for the sample. “ So you really have a piece of Sasquatch here? Hard to believe they exist.”
“I didn’t either, but here we are.”
* * *
Once it was secure, he headed out of the parking lot into the Marquette night.
“You never told me you knew the great man himself,” Olav said.
“Just met him this evening.” Jana checked to see if anyone was following them. Olav drove as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“To my lab.” He chuckled. “I run a well-funded bio research laboratory at Northern Michigan University. You’re talking to Professor Lassen.”
“Congrats. You deserve it. You were a great teaching assistant. But I thought you were heading for Silicon Valley and the next tech startup when you graduated. What’s with the biochem stuff?”
“Wait till you see the set up,” Olav said enthusiastically. “You won’t believe it. Kesl’s investment company is funding my research in using machine learning to simulate rapid cellular evolutionary pathways for the production of ethanol from genetically manipulated cells. I then use an evolutionary model of learning to select the perfect cells for the task.”
Jana waved her hand over her head. “I always knew you’d do something important.”
“What about you. The CRISPR-Cas9 undergraduate gene editing phenom? You just sort of disappeared.
“I went to war. It wasn’t good.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sure you haven’t forgotten how much you loved being in that sparkling clean University of Michigan genetics lab. Steve says you’re in danger. Should I be afraid?”
“The people that killed the Sasquatch tried to kill me less than six hours ago.”
Olav drove onto the Down Campus and the academic mall where the Seaborg Science Complex was located in silence. He pulled into the parking lot and stopped in a parking space. The Taurus’ headlights shone on a sign that read Professor Olav Lassen.
Jana looked around to see if they had been followed as they exited the vehicle. She saw nothing and the silence of Marquette late night was deafening. “I think we’re good.”
“This is rather strange,” Olav said as he grabbed the transport case and walked toward the entrance. “I’ll do anything to help Steve out. Steve’s funding for my lab exceeds the budget for the chemistry and biology departments combined.”
She grimaced. “I get it.”
“What I told you in the car is the tip of the iceberg of what we’re working on now. Machine learning is beginning to supercharge the evolutionary process in a wide range of microorganisms. You couple that with CRISPR/Cas9 and we start processes that build new biosynthetic organisms.” He paused and his face reddened. “If that’s what we wanted to do. Personally, I’m for it but others think it’s the most dangerous enterprise science has embarked upon.”
He held the door open for her and Jana recalled he’d always been a perfect gentleman, a throwback to 20th century principles of chauvinism in manners. Otherwise, he treated women as equals in whatever field they competed.
Jana wasn’t in the mood to ponder deep ethical questions and changed the subject “How’s your personal life?” she asked.
“Still haven’t found the right woman yet. She’ll come along.”
He led them at a brisk pace down an antiseptic hallway illuminated brightly by fluorescents every six feet. The harsh glare, so unlike the dim lighting at the US Wildlife and Forest Service facility made Jana wince. They reached a set of locked double doors. The security here was even tighter than her lab. Olav leaned over and put his right eye to a retinal scanner. She heard a sharp click and the lab doors swung open.
“State of the art,” Olav said. “Everything we do has to be protected not only against accidental contamination, but the occasional thief who thinks he can score psychoactive chemicals. As you know, one of the biggest problems up here is drug overdose.” Olav shook his head ruefully. “Of course, Steve insists all of our results are open source, available to everybody to build on.”
The inside of the lab was pristine and the equipment was beyond anything Jana had experienced before. The machine used to perform CRISPR/CAS9 gene editing must have cost a hundred grand easy, and Olav’s lab had two of them.
* * *
“Over here,” Olav said, leading her to the refrigeration unit at the back of the lab. He handed her a pair of latex gloves and donned his own. After putting the majority of the Sasquatch material in cryo-storage, he placed a small sample in the latest microfluidic system used for carrying out a wide range of biochemical test protocols. Immediately analysis began to run with the results displayed on a large screen. He stared at the magnified Sasquatch material for several seconds before turning to her with a puzzled grin. “This stuff is really cool and I have no idea what it is. No cellular structure, yet it shows many of the characteristics of organized living plant structures at the micro level and animal at the macro. Very strange.”
Jana peered at the screen. Her deep understanding of biochemistry came racing back to her. In particular, the lack of a cellular makeup surprised her. It was as if she was looking at an animal-plant hybrid. “Is this possible?” she asked breathlessly.
Olav nodded. “Living proof someone crossed an ape with a zucchini, cousin.”
“I’m serious. This is impossible!”
“I was being serious. Look, Sherlock Holmes said it best. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ But there’s a way to test this sample even more.”
Olav retrieved an electrochemical magnetic generator and began exposing the material to a series of intense electromagnetic wavelengths. “Will you look at that,” he said, his excitement rising as the biochemical analyzer relayed each new reaction result to the big computer screen. “I need to show this to Kesl.”
Pulling out his smart phone, he touched the screen. Kesl face appeared instantly. “I’ve been waiting for your call, Professor Lassen. Waiting too long in my opinion. What do you have for me?”
“I’d rather show you, Dr. Kesl. If you’ll indulge me for a second.”
It took only a moment to rig up his phone so that it could relay the results from the analyzer directly to Kesl.
“There are some amazing photochemical processes going on here. This is happening even though there is rapid deterioration of the core structures.
Jana looked on as fascinated as the other two at what the sequence of electromagnetic pulses, from infrared to ultraviolet stimulation, did to the biochemistry of the Sasquatch material.
After three minutes, Olav shut down the analyzer. He said to Kesl and Jana, “What do you think?”
Kesl’s image on the computer screen pursed its lips. Then, “I know this is going to sound strange, really strange. Any chance there could be some sorta neural network embedded in the material.”
Jana jerked in surprise and before Olav could say anything, she asked without keeping the incredulity out of her tone, “Are you suggesting a plant with a brain?”
Kesl shrugged. “Well, sort of. I see there are no ordinary cells but is it possible some sort of a neural net is embedded in that stuff?”
Jana was thinking Christ, no wonder everybody wants to keep this secret. “The Klapman Equation says that organic interactions can be represented by a chemogenesis web, especially when the events are triggered by photochemical spikes. In short, it could be the basis of some sort of a neural network. Given the range of electromagnetic energy we subjected the material to just now, I’d say it could work at the speed of light.”
Kesl grinned. “You haven’t forgotten your stuff, amazing, pretty damn cool. Olav upload everything you just showed me using this IP to my secure server back in my office, so Hangman can analyze it.” He smiled. “Hangman’s gonna love this … well I don’t know if he really loves anything.”
Hangman? Who’s Hangman? Jana asked herself, wondering what weird pit of strangeness she had stumbled into. Curiously, at the same time, she didn’t feel threatened and the urge to count backward from twenty to zero to calm herself didn’t arise at all. It was as if her PTSD had finally taken a vacation. She looked around at the lab, felt the comfort of being in academia again sweep through her. A curious thought came to her in this moment. Home. She knew she was home and in an eye blink she felt better than she had since returning from Afghanistan.
Olav, on the other hand, had a look like a deer in the headlights. He recovered enough to rasp out, “Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that the Sasquatch is some sort of AGI experiment?”
Kesl smiled. “An interesting thought, isn’t it? See you soon. Run some more tests and see if you can stop the deterioration. Protect that sample with your life. Just joking.” The communication broke off.
Jana had all sorts of thoughts mixing in her mind. Chief among them was that if the guys who shot at her killed the Sasquatch because it was some new order of learning creature and wanted to keep it secret, then they’d do anything to get the sample she took. She glanced at the clock. The night had flown past and it was already 7 a.m. Marge would already be at the lab. If the shooters went there first instead of following her smart phone around Marquette, her old mentor could be in trouble.
“I gotta go,” she said and headed toward the door.
“What’s so urgent, cousin? We just got started here. There’s loads more work to be done and you can help me.”
Jana shook her head. “I’ve got to meet a friend at the lab.”
“This early?”
Olav deserved an answer, though she didn’t want to frighten the man. An academic his entire life, he thought the most dangerous thing in his life was a bad peer review. “The tweet version is, she could be in danger because of me.”
“You mean because of this stuff,” Olav said pointing at the Sasquatch material.
Jana nodded. “There’s a lot more going on here your buddy Kesl hasn’t told you. When I get back with my friend, I’ll lay it all out for you.”
“Wait … maybe I should go with you.”
“Rescue the damsel in distress?”
Olav grinned. “Not really my style, huh? Take care of yourself.”
“I have my gun at the lab and don’t think I haven’t killed somebody before.”
He flipped her the keys to the Taurus. “This’ll get you there faster.”
She nodded and left.