The genetics building was locked up tight, but Nick had wrangled a key last semester while doing some research and they’d never taken it back. The door moved silently across the carpet as he let himself in. There were a few lights here and there, mainly from other students working on projects of their own, but the lab he wanted was empty. So far so good.
Stepping inside and switching on the lights, Nick allowed his eyes a moment to adjust to the glare of the fluorescents, then turned and headed for his desk. The surface was an untidy mass of papers and books, but he ignored that and started opening drawers instead. No, not in that one, nor that one either—hm, so that’s where his gloves had gotten to! He pulled out the items in question and stuck them back in his coat pockets, then tried the next drawer. Aha! The blood samples! Good thing Carmichael made every new grad run a thorough genetic sample of themselves for comparative purposes. The blood itself was long since gone, dried to a dark brown smear on the side of the tube, but his notes on the test were sitting under the rack of tubes and he snatched them out. Now to part two.
Heading over to the center table, Nick found a sterile needle, opened it, and jabbed himself in the little finger, gritting his teeth against the momentary sting. A drop of blood welled up immediately and he transferred that carefully to a slide, which he then carried over to the electron microscope.
“Hey, Nick, what’cha doing?” He hadn’t heard the door open and almost dropped the slide in surprise, but managed to hold onto it as he spun around. Tom Dresker, a fellow grad, was standing in the doorway.
“Hey, Tom—you scared the hell out of me, man! I’m just running a few tests—what are you still doing here?”
“Oh, I told Carmichael I’d turn my paper in by tomorrow, and I was just trying to finish it up—I saw the light on and figured I’d see who was around.” He had stepped fully into the room now, and let the door slide shut as he wandered over. “What’s on the slide?”
“You tell me.” Nick slid it under the scope, made sure everything was properly aligned, and hit the power. There was a deep bass hum from the machine, and an instant later the screen cleared, showing the drop in blue-white detail.
“Hmmm. . . .” Tom stepped over to the controls and flicked a few switches, and the scanner zoomed in a few degrees closer. “Well, it’s obviously an organic liquid of some sort—looks like blood. There’re the cell walls, there, and the antibodies are fully active, so it must be a recent sample. . . .” He grabbed Nick’s hands and examined them, first the right and then the left, and came to a stop on the left pinky, which still throbbed angrily from its earlier ill treatment. “Aha! A clue!” Tom let go and stepped back a pace. “So why are you running a sample on yourself, then?”
Nick had to laugh—Tom was a nice guy, but despite the fact that he was a scientist (or perhaps because of it) he was a raving paranoid when it came to disease, and the very mention of AIDS absolutely terrified him. “Don’t worry, Tom, I’m not infected!” Not as far as I know, anyway, he amended silently, and the echo in his head surfaced with Damn that Joey—he swore he was clean! Now I’ve got to get a shot of penicillin or something, and how am I going to hide that from Mom and Dad? They’ll kill me! He almost laughed out loud, but managed to repress it in time, since Tom was still eyeing him warily.
“So why are you doing it, then?”
He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage. “I don’t know, really—it just occurred to me today that the first scan I ever ran on this thing was from myself, and I got to wondering what I might have missed. So I figured I’d try it again, and see if I’d actually learned anything in the last two years.”
“Hmph! Not likely!” The slow study pace for graduates in the department was one of Tom’s favorite soapboxes, and the opportunity to harp on it was enough to make him forget his earlier fears. “You know they’re deliberately not teaching us anything significant while we’re here—it’s to prevent us from ever being serious competition for them!” Nick just shrugged and smiled, and Tom shook his head and turned back to the door.
“Well, I’ve got to go finish my bibliography—I’ll talk to you later.”
“Sure thing, Tom—good luck with getting done.” And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Nick thought as he watched Tom leave, then let out a sigh and turned back to the scanner display.
Well, everything looks normal on this level, he thought. Let’s go a little deeper and see what we find. He upped the scan to maximum depth, and waited while it adjusted focus to the genetic level. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, but if there was even the possibility of some physical cause to all this insanity, he meant to find it. The screen finally cleared again, and he studied the new image carefully.
All right, there’s the DNA spiral . . . what the hell’s that? He held up the picture from his original test, but already knew that the shape he had just spotted wouldn’t be there—it shouldn’t be on anyone’s DNA, let alone his! At both ends of the double helix there was an ovoid attached, with a complicated spiral pattern of its own—it appeared to form out of the ends of the normal strands, and then loop around somehow, turning the separate cords into one unbroken chain of some sort. But that was impossible!
He hit the Print button on the microscope, and waited while it printed out a copy of the screen image, then compared the two sheets to each other. In every other respect they were the same (although the current image was clearer, so maybe he had learned something since then), so there was no doubt that they were both from him, but where the hell had that new shape come from? And what did it mean?
He glanced at the screen again, and noticed now how clean the picture was. The human genome was filled with little bits of unused code, floating around like meat in a stew, but his was almost completely empty. As if those new shapes had somehow formed from those unused fragments, coalescing together into a new, fixed form. But that was unprecedented—there were cases of people with fewer genes, and even a few people with more, but once a person’s code was set during the gestation process there was no way for it to alter, except for a few degenerative diseases. There had never been a case of anyone with regenerative genes, or with wholly original generative processes like this. And yet, here he was!
Nick sank down onto the chair next to him and rubbed his forehead, then toggled to focus back out to the cellular level. Okay, look for abnormalities here—but everything looked perfectly healthy, and the image matched that from his file. A few more antibodies, maybe, but he’d been working out more regularly this last year and had taken to watching his diet, so he was probably healthier, which would account for that. Everything else looked the same, and the cells were functioning normally. He watched a cell multiply, its core expanding and then splitting off into two equal parts, with one remaining at center and the other slowly traveling outward, taking part of the cell wall with it and wrapping the edges around it like some tattered cloak, and admired the beauty and simplicity of such a process before shutting the microscope off and letting the screen fade slowly to black. The slide he took and cleaned thoroughly before setting it to dry with a handful of others on the lip of the sink. The picture he’d printed went with him.
Well, now I know what’s causing all of this, Nick admitted as he shut the lights and locked the door again behind him. I’ve got some kind of weird genetic mutation in my system, and that must be playing havoc with my nervous system, which is sending out weird signals to my brain. Except that the compositional readout had shown normal, so there weren’t any new chemicals in him, or even any sort of chemical imbalance, although it had registered a drastic increase in a handful of proteins normally only found in minuscule amounts. And how could a change in his DNA even occur, much less affect his thought process?
Things aren’t exactly getting any clearer, that’s for sure, he conceded as he stepped back outside into the brisk night air. But at least it’s someplace to start—tomorrow I’ll hit the books, and see if there’s any sort of precedent for this kind of thing. He tried to shake the certainty that he wouldn’t find anything there—for the moment it was all he had to go on, and he clung to the possibility, because if it failed he wasn’t sure where to turn to next.
At least I know that it’s real, he reminded himself as he walked. That’s something, anyway—since there’s a definite physical change there has to be a reason for it, and a mechanism that caused it. If I can locate those, that’ll put me that much closer to figuring out what’s going on here. And if you can’t? he asked himself, but he refused to consider that possibility yet. Give this a chance at least, he insisted, and then go from there. For once the memories in his head were completely silent—probably because they couldn’t find anything to match with this insanity, he thought. He sort of felt that way himself.
Tuesday’s class was conspicuously quiet without Amy’s presence, and that afternoon Hillary asked him where his pet bon-bon was.
“Even bon-bons get sick occasionally,” Nick replied, trying not to think of the pile of ash in the stairwell, “or maybe there’s some sorority thing going on.” He headed to the library that afternoon, and checked out a stack of books on genetic mutation and abnormalities—there were a couple on latent tendencies that had possibilities, and he started in on those first.
He fell asleep while halfway through a chapter on pre-programmed switches, and dreamt of himself on a giant chessboard whose tiles had the double helix inscribed into them. Daniel was leering down at him and moving him haphazardly from square to square, and halfway through the game he turned into Amy and cartwheeled across the board.
Nick woke screaming.
The cop showed up the next day.