Last Man On Earth (4)
Boy Mozart
Dr. Goodalgorithm continued to stare at the workstation of her recently-
deceased coworker. Carlos stared over her shoulder. She pressed down
on the screen, changing documents too quickly to follow, but Carlos'
Eye recorded everything. He was halfway across the room, so he had to
use the Zoom function.
"This Bruecker guy worked for one of the earlier incarnations of Bascome
before it got merged. I bet his personnel records are still on file,
too." She tapped on the monitor. "Shit, I was right. These people
NEVER throw anything away!" She tapped again. "Wow. He was employed
with that company for over sixty years. He died while he was still
working."
"So what was he working ON?" Schencker asked, a little impatiently.
"Stimulation of hormonal production. Like I said, pheromones."
Goodalgorithm pressed hard on the center of the screen for a full second
and it went blank. "All this research ties in to DNA. This Bruecker
guy must've thought that the body's production of pheromones was
dictated by its genetic makeup, and perhaps altering the DNA would
somehow increase production. It's totally ludicrous, of course. By the
time someone matured enough to actually care how cute they were, there
would be far too many cells that would need to be altered. The process
would take years, maybe decades, and by then they'd be far too old for
it to matter."
"Maybe he didn't want to alter the DNA," Schencker suggested. "Maybe he
was looking for a drug that would charge up the pheromones for a short
period of time."
"Then what's with all the DNA research that's been included?"
Goodalgorithm asked. "Short-term increases in pheromone production
could be created with a shot of testosterone. For that matter, why
bother trying to increase your pheromones when all you'd have to do to
make yourself more attractive is bathe every once in a while and have a
steady job. Lord knows it'd work for me.
"The sight of an attractive person can stimulate pheromone production in
someone else, and when that person's pheromones are detected they'd
stimulate it in another person, and so on. Pretty soon everyone in the
bar would be walking around in a haze of musk, and that's when the DJ
would start a good dance song...."
"I hate to interrupt your fantasy, Doctor, but that still leaves us with
one question." Schencker gestured towards the workstation. "What is it
about Bruecker's work that made that guy commit suicide?"
Goodalgorithm frowned and turned back to the workstation. She brought
up the documents that Carlos recognized as the ones containing
Bruecker's DNA research. "Huh," she said. "There's a chromosomal pair
sequence scanned in here. I could pump this through the quantum
computers downstairs--oh, he already did that."
Schencker's eyes lit up. "What did it say?"
Goodalgorithm pointed at the screen. "It decrypted all of the base
pairs. There's about sixty-four hundred lines here, all detailing the
bases. My guess is it belongs to Bruecker. Hmm," she continued, "they
ran a statistical analysis of the propagation of this particular strand.
Looks like the DNA pattern matches about one in four _billion_ people.
It's impossibly rare."
Schencker lit up a synthetic cigarette. Carlos could see his
frustration in the look on his face--it was the same look he had shortly
before they met Dr. Goodalgorithm, when they'd just finished
interviewing most of Bascome's staff. They still didn't have any idea
why the suicide occurred. Carlos watched Schencker watching the smoke
from the cigarette annihilate itself once it came in contact with the
air. "OK," Schencker said finally, "how would you go about increasing
pheromones in someone using DNA?"
"Short term, introduce mRNA nucleotides into their bodies using aerosols
or some other vector. Long term, introduce mRNA containing protein
repressors or lactose molecules, same method."
"What's a repressor?" asked Schencker. "What's mRNA?"
"What's an aerosol?" asked Carlos.
"An aerosol is something you spray that carries something with it,"
Goodalgorithm replied. "mRNA is the nucleotide that carries the code
for amino acids. A protein repressor connects itself to a specific base
on the DNA strand and prevents it from connecting to anything else, thus
effectively turning off that base. If a lactose molecule attaches
itself to a protein repressor, it changes the molecular structure of the
repressor and releases it from the base, turning it on."
"And a genetic test can determine which bases are turned on or off, so
that the subject can be sprayed with the appropriate mRNA to switch on
the genes that open the floodgates of his pheromones," Schencker summed
up.
"Well, yeah, I guess so," said Goodalgorithm. "At least maybe NOW we
could do it. But Bruecker was coming up with this stuff way the hell
back in the dark ages. It took them three or four hundred tries just to
clone a damn SHEEP, forget about identifying pheromonal base pairs.
This was way out of his league."
"So he left it for future generations, hoping that they'd be able to
decode it and use his research. That's what this guy did, and THAT'S
what drove him to jump."
"I don't follow your logic," said Goodalgorithm. "This may destroy the
perfume industry as we know it--who's going to spend fifty bucks for an
ounce of smelly liquid when they can smell like the sexiest creature
alive? But I fail to see the connection. Was this guy deeply invested
in a fragrance company, or something?"
Schencker began pacing. Carlos stood perfectly still and watched,
expecting Schencker's theory to fill in a lot of holes and give him the
rest of the day off. "You said the DNA recorded in these files was
really rare, a billion to one or something, right? Why?" Goodalgorithm
blinked, then shrugged. "We all look different, behave differently, run
differently, but basically we've all got the SAME DNA--46 chromosomes,
a couple of million base pairs, whatever. Just a few minor differences
makes one guy brown and one guy pale, or one guy short and one guy
tall."
"Or one guy male and one guy female," Carlos chimed in quietly.
"I warned you about being a smart-ass," Schencker said. He continued.
"Something about Bruecker's history gave him an extremely rare set of
DNA. He inherited it from his parents, maybe his family produced
members that were so unattractive that they rarely mated at all, much
less produced offspring. You said so yourself, Doc, these pheromones
turn us all on sexually, thereby turning on our mating imperatives.
Bruecker could have been the result of centuries of low-pheromone-
producing people, perhaps he got SO low that he couldn't turn someone on
if they were both standing in a wind tunnel turned on high."
"You're coming to a point, I'll bet," Goodalgorithm observed.
"Yeah? Well here's another bet. I'll bet Bruecker DID figure out some
of the DNA structure--at least enough to determine which chromosomal
pair or pairs contain the genes that control pheromone production.
Check through his files again and see," asked Schencker.
Goodalgorithm tapped on the screen some more, unaware that Carlos was
observing this intently. "Well, I'll be damned," she said finally.
"There it is, marked big as life in red ink." She tapped again. "And
he's exactly right, our copy of the genome map correlates his findings.
That's where the pheromones are controlled."
"Bruecker didn't HAVE to know the exact sequence," said Schencker. "He
knew he'd never find it in his lifetime, so he went after a shortcut.
He wasn't looking to make himself more attractive--he was looking for a
way to make everyone else LESS attractive! All he needed was a way to
flood that specific area of the chromosomes with protein repressors, and
he was bound to--
"To turn off pheromone production altogether!" Goodalgorithm shouted
excitedly. "He must've been insane! There's no way to tell what kind
of affect that would have on people!"
"What did he care?" Schencker asked. "You said yourself he was pretty
old. Maybe he spent his entire life trying to find that special
someone, but he failed miserably because his pheromones weren't the
raging torrent his other hormones apparently were. He was probably
after one thing--revenge against the human race for being so damn cute
and smelly."
"So what's this all got to do with the suicide?" asked Goodalgorithm.
"This guy you assigned to the project must have discovered something,"
Schencker replied. "I bet it was that somebody else has gotten to this
research first, and used it."
"To do what? Kill the perfume business? If you shut down pheromones in
everybody you're gonna have a run at the counter in the department
stores."
"Right on the first, wrong on the second. Your conclusion originally
was that Bruecker came up with a way to super-charge pheromone
production. What if somebody else came up with the same conclusion, but
didn't follow through with the logic?"
"They'd have gotten a chance to use the restroom," Goodalgorithm said,
smiling sweetly.
"AND, they might have taken this and used it! Perfumes take up valuable
cargo space on the runs to the Reality Satellites. Cut off the need for
perfume, and you open up that cargo space. Anyone doing that would earn
the gratitude of a thousand different retail and production concerns
across the board."
"But you said this is a way of killing pheromones, not making more."
"Yeah. So if it gets released, no amount of perfume in the universe is
going to help us. It will make us all unattractive, therefore
effectively eradicating the human race."
Understanding dawned in Goodalgorithm's eyes. "So the reason why he
jumped...."
"...Was because somebody's already released the repressors," said
Schencker. "Probably into the O2 production facilities. Your coworker
must have run a test on the air somehow and found them floating around."
Goodalgorithm gasped, and then clamped a hand over her mouth
reflexively. Carlos merely stood by and watched, waiting for
Schencker's triumphant finish.
"Depending on how long this stuff's been pumped into our oxygen supply,"
he said, "we may only be a matter of weeks before every human being on
Klondike 5 is rendered unattractive. And if any of this stuff is
communicable, then we're looking at the end of the human race."
________________________________________________________________________
Boy Mozart
Klondike 5 Reality Satellite http://www.klondike5.net