Greg Bear - Blood Music

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Blood Music
Greg Bear, 1985
Synopsis
Vergil Ulam, brilliant, unorthodox, has exceeded every ethical guideline for
genetic research to engineer blood cells that think for themselves. When his
illegal experiments are discovered, he makes a desperate attempt to save his
work - by injecting himself with his own creation.
He's infected. What he carries is contagious. Deadly.
Moving from the smallest blocks of matter to forces that could transform the
universe, Greg Bear's Blood Music is dazzling, apocalyptic, utterly engrossing
- a timeless SF classic.
INTERPHASE
Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things -- microbes, bacteria,
the peasants of nature -- are born and die, not counting for much except in
the bulk of their numbers and the accumulation of their tiny lives. They do
not perceive deeply, nor do they suffer. A hundred trillion, dying, would not
begin to have the same importance as a single human death.
Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as
humans, there is an equality of "elan," just as the branches of a tall tree,
gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal
the bulk of the trunk.
We believe this as firmly as the kings of France believed in their hierarchy.
Which of our generations will come to disagree?
PROPHASE
JUNE-SEPTEMBER
1
La Jolla, California
The rectangular slate-black sign stood on a low mound of bright green and
clumpy Korean grass, surrounded by irises and sided by a dark cement-bedded
brook filled with koi. Carved into the street side of the sign was the name
GENETRON in Times Roman letters of insignia red, and beneath the name the
motto, "Where Small Things Make Big Changes."
The Genetron labs and business offices were housed in a U-shaped, bare
concrete Bauhaus structure surrounding a rectangular garden court. The main
complex had two levels with open-air walkways. Beyond the courtyard and just
behind an artificial hummock of earth, not yet filled in with new greenery,
was a four-story black glass-sided cube fenced with electrified razor-wire.
These were the two sides of Genetron; the open labs, where biochip research
was conducted, and the defense contracts building, where military applications
were investigated.
Security was strict even in the open labs. All employees wore laser-printed
badges and non-employee access to the labs was carefully monitored. The
management of Genetron -- five Stanford graduates who had founded the company
just three years out of school -- realized that industrial espionage was even
more likely than an intelligence breach in the black cube. Yet the outward
atmosphere was serene, and every attempt was made to soft-pedal the security
measures.
A tall, stoop-shouldered man with unruly black hair untangled himself from the
interior of a red Volvo sports car and sneezed twice before crossing the
employee parking lot. The grasses were tuning up for an early summer orgy of
irritation. He casually greeted Walter, the middle-aged and whippet-wiry
guard. Walter just as casually confirmed his badge by running it through the
laser reader. "Not much sleep last night, Mr. Ulam?" Walter asked.
Vergil pursed his lips and shook his head. "Parties, Walter." His eyes were
red and his nose was swollen from constant rubbing with the handkerchief that
now resided,-abused and submissive, in his pocket.
"How working men like you can party on a weeknight, I don't know."
"The ladies demand it, Walter," Vergil said, passing through. Walter grinned
and nodded, though he sincerely doubted Vergil was getting much action,
parties or no. Unless standards had severely declined since Walter's day,
nobody with a week's growth of beard was getting much action.
Ulam was not the most prepossessing figure at Genetron. He stood six feet two
inches on very large flat feet. He was twenty-five pounds overweight and at
thirty-two years of age, his back hurt him, he had high blood pressure, and he
could never shave close enough to eliminate an Emmett Kelly shadow.
His voice seemed designed not to win friends -- harsh, slightly grating,
tending toward loudness. Two decades in California had smoothed his Texas
accent, but when he became excited or angry, the Panhandle asserted itself
with an almost painful edge.
His sole distinction was an exquisite pair of emerald green eyes, wide and
expressive, defended by a luxurious set of lashes. The eyes were more
decorative than functional, how- ever; they were covered by a large pair of
black-framed glasses. Vergil was near-sighted.
He ascended the stairs two and three steps at a time, long powerful legs
making the concrete and steel steps resound. On the second floor, he walked
along the open corridor to the Advanced Biochip Division's joint equipment
room, known as the share lab. His mornings usually began with a check on
specimens in one of the five ultracentrifuges. His most recent batch had been
rotating for sixty hours at 200,000 G's and was now ready for analysis.
For such a large man, Vergil had surprisingly delicate and sensitive hands. He
removed an expensive black titanium rotor from the ultracentrifuge and slid
shut the steel vacuum seal. Placing the rotor on a workbench, one by one he
removed and squinted at the five squat plastic tubes suspended in slings
beneath its mushroom-like cap. Several well-defined beige layers had formed in
each tube.
Vergil's heavy black eyebrows arched and drew together behind the thick rims
of his glasses. He smiled, revealing teeth spotted brown from a childhood of
drinking naturally fluoridated water.
He was about to suction off the buffer solution and the unwanted layers when
the lab phone beeped. He placed the tube in a rack and picked up the receiver.
"Share lab, Ulam here."
"Vergil, this is Rita. I saw you come in, but you weren't in your lab -- "
"Home away from home, Rita. What's up?"
"You asked me -- told me -- to let you know if a certain gentleman arrived. I
think he's here, Vergil."
"Michael Bernard?" Vergil asked, his voice rising.
"I think it's him. But Vergil -- "
"I'll be right down."
"Vergil -- "
He hung up and dithered for a moment over the tubes, then left them where they
were.
Genetron's reception area was a circular extrusion from the ground floor on
the east corner, surrounded by picture windows and liberally supplied with
aspidistras in chrome ceramic pots. Morning light slanted white and dazzling
across the sky-blue carpet as Vergil entered from the lab side. Rita stood up
behind her desk as he passed by.
"Vergil -- "
"Thanks," he said. His eyes were on the distinguished-looking gray-haired man
standing by the single lobby couch. There was no doubt about it; Michael
Bernard. Vergil recognized him from photos and the cover portrait Time
Magazine had printed three years before. Vergil extended his hand and put on
an enormous smile. "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bernard."
Bernard shook Vergil's hand but appeared confused.
Gerald T. Harrison stood in the broad double door of Genetron's fancy for-show
office, phone receiver gripped between ear and shoulder. Bernard looked to
Harrison for an explanation.
"I'm very glad you got my message ... " Vergil continued before Harrison's
presence registered.
Harrison immediately made his farewells on the phone and slammed it on its
cradle. "Rank hath its privileges, Vergil," he said, smiling too broadly and
taking a stance beside Bernard.
"I'm sorry -- what message?" Bernard asked.
"This is Vergil Ulam, one of our top researchers," Harrison said obsequiously.
"We're all very pleased to have you visiting, Mr. Bernard. Vergil, I'll get
back to you later about that matter you wanted to discuss."
He hadn't asked to talk to Harrison about anything. "Sure," Vergil said. He
rankled under the old familiar feeling: being sidestepped, pushed aside.
Bernard didn't know him from Adam.
"Later, Vergil," Harrison said pointedly.
"Sure, of course." He backed away, glanced at Bernard pleadingly, then turned
and shambled back through the rear door.
"Who was that?" Bernard asked.
"A very ambitious fellow," Harrison said darkly. "But we have him under
control."
Harrison kept his work office in a ground floor space on the west end of the
lab building. The room was surrounded by wooden shelves neatly filled with
books. The eye-level shelf behind the desk held familiar black plastic ring-
bound books from Cold Spring Harbor. Arranged below were a row of telephone
directories -- Harrison collected antique phone books -- and several shelves
of computer science volumes. His graph-ruled black desktop supported a
leather-edged blotting pad and a VDT.
Of the Genetron founders, only Harrison and William Yng had stayed long enough
to see the labs begin work. Both were more oriented toward business than
research, though their doctorates hung on the wood panel wall.
Harrison leaned back in his chair, arms up and hands clasped behind his neck.
Vergil noticed the merest hint of sweat stains in each armpit.
"Vergil, that was very embarrassing," he said. His white-blond hair was
artfully arranged to disguise premature thinning.
"Sorry," Vergil said.
"No more than I. So you asked Mr. Bernard to visit our labs."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I thought he would be interested in the work."
"We thought so, too. That's why we invited him. I don't believe he even knew
about your invitation, Vergil."
"Apparently not."
"You went behind our backs."
Vergil stood before the desk, looking glumly at the back of the VDT.
"You've done a great deal of useful work for us. Rothwild says you're
brilliant, maybe even invaluable." Rothwild was the biochips project
supervisor. "But others say you can't be relied upon. And now ... this."
"Bernard -- "
"Not Mr. Bernard, Vergil. This." He swung the VDT around and pressed a button
on the keyboard. Vergil's secret computer file scrolled up on the screen. His
eyes widened and his throat constricted, but to his credit he didn't choke.
His reaction was quite controlled. "I haven't read it completely, but it
sounds like you're up to some very suspect things. Possibly unethical. We like
to follow the guidelines here at Genetron, especially in light of our upcoming
position in the marketplace. But not solely for that reason. I like to believe
we run an ethical company here."
"I'm not doing anything unethical, Gerald."
"Oh?" Harrison stopped the scrolling. "You're designing new complements of DNA
for several NIH-regulated microorganisms. And you're working on mammalian
cells. We don't do work here on mammalian cells. We aren't equipped for the
biohazards -- not in the main labs. But I suppose you could demonstrate to me
the safety and innocuous nature of your research. You're not creating a new
plague to sell to Third World revolutionaries, are you?"
"No," Vergil said flatly.
"Good. Some of this material is beyond my understanding. It sounds like you
might be trying to expand on our MABs project. There could be valuable stuff
here." He paused. "What in hell are you doing, Vergil?"
Vergil removed his glasses and wiped them with the placket of his lab coat.
Abruptly, he sneezed -- loud and wet.
Harrison looked faintly disgusted. "We only broke the code yesterday. By
accident, almost. Why did you hide it? Is it something you'd rather we didn't
know?"
Without his glasses, Vergil looked owlish and helpless. He began to stammer an
answer, then stopped and thrust his jaw forward. His thick black brows knit in
painful puzzlement.
"It looks to me like you've been doing some work on our gene machine.
Unauthorized, of course, but you've never been much for authority."
Vergil's face was now deep red.
"Are you all right?" Harrison asked. He was deriving a perverse pleasure from
making Vergil squirm. A grin threatened to break through Harrison's querying
expression.
"I'm fine," Vergil said. "I was ... am ... working on bio-logics."
"Biologies? I'm not familiar with the term."
"A side branch of the biochips. Autonomous organic computers." The thought of
saying anything more was agony. He had written Bernard -- without result,
apparently -- to have him come see the work. He did not want to hand all of it
over to Genetron under the provisions of the work-for-hire clause in his
contract. It was such a simple idea, even if the work had taken two years --
two secret and laborious years.
"I'm intrigued." Harrison turned the VDT around and scrolled through the file.
"We're not just talking proteins and amino acids. You're messing with
chromosomes here. Re-combining mammalian genes; even, I see, mixing in viral
and bacterial genes." The light went out of his eyes. They became rocky gray.
"You could get Genetron shut down right now, this minute, Vergil. We don't
have the safeguards for this kind of stuff. You're not even working under P-3
conditions."
"I'm not messing with reproductive genes."
"There's some other kind?" Harrison sat forward abruptly, angry that Vergil
would try to bullshit him.
"Introns. Strings that don't code for protein structure."
"What about them?"
"I'm only working in those areas. And ... adding more non-reproductive genetic
material."
"That sounds like a contradiction in terms to me, Vergil. We have no proof
introns don't code for something."
"Yes, but -- "
"But -- " Harrison held up his hand. "This is all quite irrelevant. Whatever
else you were up to, the fact is, you were prepared to renege on your
contract, go behind our backs to Bernard, and try to engage his support for a
personal endeavor. True?"
Vergil said nothing.
"I assume you're not a sophisticated fellow, Vergil. Not in the ways of the
business world. Perhaps you didn't realize the implications."
Vergil swallowed hard. His face was still plum red. He could feel the blood
thudding in his ears, the sick sensation of stress-caused dizziness. He
sneezed twice.
"Well, I'll lay the implications out for you. You are very close to getting
your ass canned and sold for bully beef."
Vergil raised his eyebrows reflexively.
"You're important to the MABs project. If you weren't, you would be out of
here in a flash and I would personally make sure you never work in a private
lab again. But Thornton and Rothwild and the others believe we might be able
to redeem you. Yes, Vergil. Redeem you. Save you from yourself. I haven't
consulted with Yng on this. It won't go any further -- if you behave."
He fixed Vergil with a stare from beneath lowered eyebrows. "Stop your
extracurricular activities. We'll keep your file here, but I want all non-MABs
experiments terminated and all organisms that have been tampered with
destroyed. I'll personally inspect your lab in two hours. If this hasn't been
done, you'll be fired. Two hours, Vergil. No exceptions, no extensions."
"Yessir."
"That's all."
2
Vergil's dismissal would not have unduly distressed his fellow employees. In
his three years at Genetron, he had committed innumerable breaches of lab
etiquette. He seldom washed lab glassware and twice had been accused of not
wiping up spills of ethidium bromide -- a strong mutagen -- on lab counters.
He was also not terribly cautious about radionucleides.
Most of the people he worked with made no show of humility. They were, after
all, top young researchers in a very promising field; many expected to be
wealthy and in charge of their own companies in a few years. Vergil didn't fit
any of their patterns, however. He worked quietly and intensively during the
day, and then worked overtime at night. He was not sociable, though neither
was he unfriendly; he simply ignored most people.
He shared a lab space with Hazel Overton, as meticulous and clean a researcher
as could be imagined. Hazel would miss him least of all. Perhaps it was Hazel
who had penetrated his file -- she was no slouch on the computers and she
might have gone looking for something to get him into trouble. But he had no
evidence for that, and there was no sense being paranoid.
The lab was dark as Vergil entered. Hazel was performing a fluorescent scan on
a gel electrophoresis matrix with a small UV lamp. Vergil switched on the
light. She looked up and removed her goggles, prepared to be irritated.
"You're late," she said. "And your lab looks like an unmade bed. Vergil, it's
-- "
"Kaput," Vergil finished for her, throwing his smock across a stool.
"You left a bunch of test tubes on the counter in the share lab. I'm afraid
they're ruined."
"Fuck 'em."
Hazel's eyes widened. "My, aren't you in a mood."
"I've been shut down. I have to clear out all my extracurricular work, give it
up, or Harrison will issue my walking papers."
"That's rather even-handed of them," Hazel said, returning to her scan.
Harrison had shut down one of her own extracurricular projects the month
before. "What did you do?"
"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather be alone." Vergil glowered at her
from across the counter. "You can finish that in the share lab."
"I could, but -- "
"If you don't," Vergil said darkly, "I'll smear your little piece of agarose
across the floor with my wingtips."
Hazel glared at him for a moment and surmised he wasn't kidding. She shut off
the electrodes, picked up her equipment, and headed for the door. "My
condolences," she said.
"Sure."
He had to have a plan. Scratching his stubbly chin, he tried to think of some
way to cut his losses. He could sacrifice those parts of the experiment that
were expendable -- the E. coli cultures, for example. He had long since gone
beyond them. He had kept them as memorials to his progress, and as a kind of
reserve in case work had not gone well in the next steps. The work had gone
well, however. It was not complete, but it was so close that he could taste
success like a cool, clean swallow of wine.
Hazel's side of the lab was neat and tidy. His was a chaos of equipment and
containers of chemicals. One of his few concessions to lab safety, a white
absorbent mat to catch spills, hung half-off the black counter, one corner
pinned by a jar of detergent.
Vergil stood before the white idea board, rubbing his stubbly beard, and
stared at the cryptic messages he had scrawled there the day before.
Little engineers. Make the world's tiniest machines. Better than MABs! Little
surgeons. War with tumors. Computers with hu-capac. (Computers=spec tumor HA!)
size of volvox.
Clearly the ravings of a madman, and Hazel would have paid them no attention.
Or would she? It was common practice to scribble any wild idea or inspiration
or joke on the boards and just be prepared to have it erased by the next
hurried genius. Still ...
The notes could have aroused the curiosity of someone as smart as Hazel.
Especially since his work on the MABs had been delayed.
Obviously, he had not been circumspect.
MABs -- Medically Applicable Biochips -- were to be the first practical
product of the biochip revolution, the incorporation of protein molecular
circuitry with silicon electronics. Biochips had been an area of speculation
in the literature for years, but Genetron hoped to have the first working
samples available for PDA testing and approval within three months.
They faced intense competition. In what was coming to be known as Enzyme
Valley -- the biochip equivalent of Silicon Valley -- at least six companies
had set up facilities in and around La Jolla. Some had started out as
pharmaceutical manufacturers hoping to cash in on the products of recombinant
DNA research. Nudged out of that area by older and more experienced concerns,
they had switched to biochip research. Genetron was the first firm established
specifically with biochips in mind.
Vergil picked up an eraser and rubbed out the notes slowly. Throughout his
life, things had always conspired to frustrate him. Often, he brought disaster
on himself -- he was honest enough to admit that. But not once had he ever
been able to carry something through to completion. Not in his work, not in
his private life.
He had never been good at gauging the consequences of his actions.
He removed four thick spiral-bound notebooks from his locked desk drawer and
added them to the growing pile of material to be smuggled out of the lab.
He could not destroy all the evidence. He had to save the white blood cell
cultures -- his special lymphocytes. But where could he keep them -- what
could he do outside the lab?
Nothing. There was no place he could go. Genetron had all the equipment he
needed, and it would take months to establish another lab. During that time,
all his work would literally disintegrate.
Vergil passed through the lab's rear door into the interior hall and walked
past an emergency shower stall. The incubators were kept in a separate room
beyond the share lab. Seven refrigerator-sized gray enameled chests stood
along one wall, electronic monitors silently and efficiently keeping track of
temperatures and CO2 partial pressure in each unit. In the far corner, amid
older incubators of all shapes and sizes (gleaned from lab bankruptcy sales),
stood a buffed stainless steel and white enamel Forma Scientific model with
his name and "Sole Use" scribbled on a piece of surgical tape affixed to the
door. He opened the door and removed a rack of culture dishes.
Bacteria in each dish had developed uncharacteristic colonies -- blobs of
orange and green which resembled aerial maps of Paris or Washington D.C. Lines
radiated from clusters and divided the colonies into sections, each section
having its own peculiar texture and -- so Vergil surmised -- function. Since
each bacterium in the cultures had the potential intellectual capacity of a
mouse, it was quite possible the cultures had turned into simple societies and
the societies had developed functional divisions. He hadn't been keeping track
lately, involved as he had been with altered B-cell lymphocytes.
They were like his children, all of them. And they had turned out to be
exceptional.
He felt a rush of guilt and nausea as he turned on a gas burner and applied
each dish of altered E. coli to the flame with a pair of tongs.
He returned to his lab and dropped the culture dishes into a sterilizing bath.
That was the limit. He could not destroy anything more. He felt a hatred for
Harrison that went beyond any emotion he had ever felt toward another human.
Tears of frustration blurred his vision.
Vergil opened the lab Kelvinator and removed a spinner bottle and a white
plastic pallet containing twenty-two test tubes. The spinner bottle was filled
with a straw-colored fluid, lymphocytes in a serum medium. He had constructed
a custom impellor to stir the medium more effectively, with less cell damage -
- a rod with several half-helical teflon "sails."
The test tubes contained saline solution and special concentrated serum
nutrients to support the cells while they were examined under a microscope.
He drew fluid from the spinner bottle and carefully added several drops to
four of the tubes on the pallet. He then placed the bottle-back on its base.
The impellor resumed spinning.
After warming to room temperature -- a process he usually aided with a small
fan to gently blow warmed air over the pallet -- the lymphocytes in the tubes
would become active, resuming their development after being subdued by the
refrigerator's chill.
They would continue learning, adding new segments to the revised portions of
their DNA. And when, in the normal course of cell growth, the new DNA was
transcribed to RNA, and the RNA served as a template for production of amino
acids, and the amino acids were converted to proteins ...
The proteins would be more than just units of cell structure; other cells
would be able to read them. Or RNA itself would be extruded to be absorbed and
read by other cells Or -- and this third option had presented itself after
Vergil inserted fragments of bacterial DNA into the mammalian chromosomes --
segments of DNA itself could be removed and passed along.
Every time he thought of it, his head whirled with possibilities, thousands of
ways for the cells to communicate with each other and develop their
intellects.
The idea of an intellectual cell was still wonderfully strange to him. It made
him stop and stand, staring at the wall, until he jerked back to attention and
continued his work.
He pulled up a microscope and inserted a pipetman into one of the tubes. The
calibrated instrument drew up the dialed amount of fluid and he expelled it
into a thin circular ring on a glass slide.
From the very beginning, Vergil had known his ideas were neither far-out nor
useless. His first three months at Gene iron, helping establish the silicon-
protein interface for the biochips, had convinced him the project designers
had missed something very obvious and extremely interesting
Why limit oneself to silicon and protein and biochips a hundredth of a
millimeter wide, when in almost every living cell there was already a
functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement
of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information What was
reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous
complexity and reliability?
Genetron had not yet made the connection, and Vergil had long ago decided he
didn't want them to. He would do his work, prove his point by creating
billions of capable cellular computers, and then leave Genetron and establish
his own lab, his own company.
After a year and a half of preparation and study, he had begun working at
night on the gene machine. Using a computer keyboard, he constructed strings
of bases to form codons, each of which became the foundation of a rough DNA-
RNA-protein logic.
The earliest biologic strings had been inserted into E. coli bacteria as
circular plasmids. The E. coli had absorbed the plasmids and incorporated them
into their original DNA. The bacteria had then duplicated and released the
plasmids, passing on the biologic to other cells. In the most crucial phase of
his work, Vergil had used viral reverse-transcriptase to fix the feedback loop
between RNA and DNA. Even the earliest and most primitive biologic-equipped
bacteria had employed ribosomes as "encoders" and "readers" and RNA as "tape."
With the loop in place, the cells developed their own memory and the ability
to process and act upon environmental information.
The real surprise had come when he tested his altered microbes. The computing
capacity of even bacterial DNA was enormous compared to man-made electronics.
All Vergil had to do was take advantage of what was already there -- -just
give it a nudge, as it were.
More than once, he had the spooky feeling that his work was too easy, that he
was less a creator and more a servant ... This, after having the molecules
seem to fall into their proper place, or fail in such a way that he clearly
saw his errors and knew how to correct them.
The spookiest moment of all came when he realized he was doing more than
creating little computers. Once he started the process and switched on the
genetic sequences which could compound and duplicate the biologic DNA
segments, the cells began to function as autonomous units. They began to
"think" for themselves and develop more complex "brains."
His first E. coli mutations had had the learning capacity of planarian worms;
he had run them through simple T-mazes, giving sugar rewards. They had soon
outperformed planaria. The bacteria -- lowly prokaryotes -- were doing better
than multicellular eukaryotes! And within months, he had them running more
complex mazes at rates -- allowing for scale adjustments -- comparable to
those of mice.
Removing the finest biologic sequences from the altered E. coli, he had
incorporated them into B-lymphocytes, white cells from his own blood. He had
replaced many intron strings -- self-replicating sequences of base pairs that
apparently did not code for proteins and that comprised a surprising
percentage of any eukaryotic cell's DNA -- with his own special chains. Using
artificial proteins and hormones; a method of communication, Vergil had
"trained" the lymphocytes in the past six months to interact as much ;
possible with each other and with their environment -- much more complex
miniature glass maze. The results ha been far better than he expected.
The lymphocytes had learned to run the maze and obtain their nutritional
rewards with incredible speed.
He waited for the sample to warm up enough to be active then inserted the
eyepiece into a video pickup and switched on the first of four display screens
mounted in the rack over the counter. There, very clearly, were the roughly
circular lymphocytes in which he had invested two years of his life.
They were busily transferring genetic material to each other through long,
straw-shaped tubes rather like bacterial pili. Some of the characteristics
picked up during the E. coli experiments had stayed with the lymphocytes, just
how he wasn't yet sure. The mature lymphocytes were not reproducing by
themselves, but they were busily engaged in an orgy of genetic exchange.
Every lymphocyte in the sample he was watching had the potential intellectual
capacity of a rhesus monkey. From the simplicity of their activity, that
certainly wasn't obvious; but then, they'd had it pretty easy throughout their
lives.
He had talked to them on as high a level of chemical training and had built
them up as far as he was going to. Their brief lives were over -- he had been
ordered to kill them. That would be simple enough. He could add detergent to
the containers and their cell membranes would dissolve. They would be
sacrificed to the caution and shortsightedness of a group of certifiable
flatworm management-types.
His breath grew ragged as he watched the lymphocyte going about their
business.
They were beautiful. They were his children, drawn from his own blood,
carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic
material into at least a thousand of them. And now they were busily
transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on ...
Like Washoe the chimp teaching her child to speak in American Sign Language.
They were passing on the torch of potential intelligence. How would he ever
know if they could use all their potential?
Pasteur.
"Pasteur," he said out loud. "Jenner."
Vergil carefully prepared a syringe. Brows knitted together, he pushed the
cannule through the cotton cap of the first tube and dipped it into the
solution. He pulled back the plunger. The pastel fluid filled the barrel;
five, ten, fifteen cc's.
He held the syringe before his eyes for several minutes, knowing he was
contemplating something rash. Until now, he addressed his creations mentally,
you've had it real easy. Life of Riley. Sit in your serum and fart around and
absorb all the hormones you need. Don't even have to work for a living. No
severe test, no stress. No need to use what I gave you.
So what was he going to do? Put them to work in their natural environment? By
injecting them into his body, he could smuggle them out of Genetron, and
recover enough of them later to start the experiment again.
"Hey, Vergil!" Ernesto Villar knocked on the doorframe and poked his head in.
"We've got the rat artery movie. We're having a meeting in 233." He tapped his
fingers on the frame and smiled brightly. "You're invited. We need our
resident kluger."
Vergil lowered the syringe and looked off into nothing.
"Vergil?"
"I'll be there," he said tonelessly.
"Don't get all excited," Villar said peevishly. "We won't hold the premiere
for long." He ducked out of the door. Vergil listened to his footsteps
receding down the hall.
Rash, indeed. He reinserted the cannule through the cotton, squirted the serum
back into the tube and dropped the syringe into a jar of alcohol. He replaced
the tube in the rack and returned it to the Kelvinator. Before now, the
spinner bottle and pallet of tubes had had no label but his name. He removed
his name from the pallet and replaced it with, "Bio-chip protein samples; lab
failures 21-32." On the spinner bottle he placed a label reading, "Rat anti-
goat lab failures 13-14." No one would mess with an anonymous and unanalyzed
group of lab failures. Failures were sacred.
He needed time to think.
Rothwild and ten of the key scientists on the MABs project had gathered around
a large-screen projection TV in 233, an empty lab currently being used as a
meeting room. Rothwild was a dapper red-haired fellow who acted as a
controller and mediator between management and researchers. He stood beside
the screen, resplendent in a cream-colored jacket and chocolate brown pants.
Villar offered Vergil an avocado-green plastic chair and he sat at the rear of
the room, legs crossed, hands behind his head.
Rothwild delivered the introduction. "This is the breakdown from Team Product
E-64. You all contributed -- " He glanced uncertainly at Vergil. "And now you
can all share in the ... uh, the triumph. I think we can safely call it that."
"E-64 is a prototype investigatory biochip, three hundred micrometers in
diameter, protein on a silicon substrate, sensitive to forty-seven different
blood fraction variables." He cleared his throat. They all knew that, but this
was an occasion. "On May 10th, we inserted E-64 into a rat artery, closed the
very small incision, and let it pass through the artery as far as it would go.
The journey lasted five seconds. The rat was then sacrificed and the biochip
recovered. Since that time, Terence's group has 'debriefed' the biochip and
interpreted the results. By putting the results through a special vector
imaging program, we've been able to produce a little movie."
He gestured to Ernesto, who pressed a button on the projector's video
recorder. Computer graphics flashed by -- Genetron's animated logo, stylized
signatures from the imaging team, and then darkness. Ernesto switched off the
room lights.
A pink circle appeared on the screen, expanded, and distorted into an
irregular oval. More circles appeared within the first. "We've slowed the
journey down six times," Rothwild explained. "And to simplify things, we've
eliminated the readouts on chemical concentrations in the rat blood."
Vergil leaned forward in his chair, troubles momentarily forgotten. Streamers
appeared and shot through the fluctuating tunnel of concentric circles.
"Blood flow through the artery," Ernesto chimed in.
The journey down the rat artery lasted thirty seconds. Vergil's arm-hair
prickled. If his lymphocytes could see, this was what they would experience,
traveling down a blood vessel ... A long irregular tunnel, blood smoothly
摘要：

BloodMusicGregBear,1985SynopsisVergilUlam,brilliant,unorthodox,hasexceededeveryethicalguidelineforgeneticresearchtoengineerbloodcellsthatthinkforthemselves.Whenhisillegalexperimentsarediscovered,hemakesadesperateattempttosavehiswork-byinjectinghimselfwithhisowncreation.He'sinfected.Whathecarriesisco...

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