Quantum radio, p.8
Quantum Radio, page 8
Bishop spoke before Ty could respond. “There’s also the obvious: these humans could have advancements that aren’t evident in a simple review of the genome. After all, if you compare a Neanderthal genome with one of our genomes, you’d find there’s only…” Bishop looked over at Helen. “How much difference?”
“We share roughly 99.7 percent of our genome with Neanderthals. Even chimpanzees have 98.8 percent of our DNA.”
“Exactly,” Bishop said. “And look at the massive differences those small DNA changes make. For all we know, these humans they want us to print will be a completely different subspecies. They may be capable of things we can’t even imagine.”
“Yes,” Ty said, nodding. “Even more reason not to print them. For all we know, they could be an invasion force. Granted, there are only four of them, but based on what you’re saying, it would be dangerous.”
“Precisely why we plan to do the printing on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific surrounded by a fleet of nuclear submarines with multiple warheads trained on it.”
Ty let his head fall back. “It’s a bad plan based on the wrong assumptions.”
“Well, what are your assumptions?”
“That whoever is broadcasting is trying to communicate with us. Think about it. They can only broadcast now. The first broadcast, logically, would give us the details of how to build a device that lets us broadcast back.”
Bishop pointed at Ty. “Now on that, we agree. And that’s how we think these humans are different. We believe that they have the innate ability to receive the quantum broadcasts—that the subatomic particles being detected by the LHC at CERN actually have an effect on the neurons in the brains of these new humans. Our working theory is that they are genetically capable of receiving quantum broadcasts, relaying them to us and sending return messages, perhaps thanks to entangled particles in their brains. As I said, they are representatives. A communication conduit.”
Ty shook his head. “It’s wrong. It’s the right idea, but you’re wrong on the specifics.”
Bishop snorted. “You can’t just say it’s wrong and leave it at that.” He turned to Richter. “This is what I mean—we have to move forward here. This is not some academic seminar where you debate and nothing happens. We need to act.”
Richter focused on Ty. “Tell him what you think the files are.”
“As I said, the first file is, in fact, a machine. And yes, I think it’s a device we can use to communicate with the broadcaster. Which makes it obvious what it is.”
Bishop shrugged, clearly annoyed. “Do tell.”
“It’s a collider. After all, that’s what we detected the broadcast with. But if my guess is right, this collider is more advanced—and much smaller.”
Bishop chuckled. “Right…”
“Why do you think it’s smaller?” Helen asked.
“Logically, it would be. Advancements in technology almost always feature miniaturization.”
Ty had always been fascinated with the history of computing and how far it had come so fast. The historical facts were lodged in his mind, and they came rapid-fire now. “Look at history: one of the first programmable, electronic digital computers, the ENIAC, took up roughly one thousand eight hundred square feet and used about eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. It weighed sixty thousand pounds. The ENIAC could do around three hundred eighty five multiplication operations per second. That was way back in 1946. Today, the average smartphone weighs less than a pound and the processor can do trillions of operations per second. To put it simply, making technology smaller is the natural arc of innovation. There’s another reason to make the device smaller: it makes it easier to hide and transport. Immovable objects are inherently more difficult to defend.”
Bishop looked skeptical. “It’s one thing to shrink a computer, but a particle collider? I don’t buy it.”
“It’s already happening,” Ty said.
“What do you mean?” Bishop asked.
“A few years ago, a team of researchers at Imperial College London described a way to accelerate particles using common equipment present in most physics labs—in a much smaller space. We’re talking about a system that would be just a few centimeters long.”
“They have a prototype?” Bishop asked.
“Not as far as I know. The work right now is just in simulations and computer models, but the principles are sound. They still need a large laser, which would occupy maybe three hundred square feet, but their collider would actually create exotic particles at a faster rate than the LHC.”
“Well,” Bishop said, “what you’re saying is all hypothetical, and we’ll know what the device actually is soon enough.”
“What about the genomes?” Richter asked, nodding toward Ty.
“If I’m right,” Ty said carefully, “the genomes aren’t of any alien representatives. They’re of people already here on Earth.”
17
The conference room fell silent. Ty was about to elaborate on his theory when Bishop broke the silence.
“That’s completely absurd.”
“Why?” Helen asked.
“Think about it,” Bishop said. “How would whoever is broadcasting even know the genome of someone on Earth?”
Ty opened his mouth to respond, but a knock on the door interrupted him.
Bishop jerked the handle and cracked the door. “We’re busy.”
A marine slipped his hand in, offering a sealed envelope.
It was clear to Ty then just how secure the Origin Project was being with communications—no digital messages or voice calls. Written notes only. Whoever had sent the message wasn’t even willing to call Bishop using the phone on the conference table.
The DARPA scientist took the envelope and closed the door without a word. He ripped it open and scanned it, eyes racing back and forth like an old typewriter. After reading it, he let the page fall back to his side, allowing Ty to see that there were only two lines written there.
Bishop seemed deep in thought.
“What is it?” Helen asked.
“They’ve constituted the first file—the schematic,” Bishop said absently, staring at the wall. “Ty’s right. It is a collider. A small one. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.” He looked up at Ty. “How’d you know?”
“I just… it just seemed obvious to me.”
Richter stepped toward Bishop. “If he’s right about the device, he is likely correct about the genomes.”
“Maybe.” Bishop slipped the page into his pocket.
“Sandy,” Helen said. “Even if you disagree, his theory is easy to test.”
He looked up at her. “No. It’s not. His assertion is many things. Surprising? Definitely. Brilliant? Possibly. Easy to test? Hardly. I mean, even decoding the quantum data at LHC was a monumental task.” Bishop glanced from Richter to Helen. “The two of you have no idea the stops we had to pull out—the sheer volume of computing power we had to requisition. Practically everything at DoD and NSA. CIA too. We even broke up the sorting job into batches and shipped it off to commercial grids—Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.”
Bishop paced the room. “What you’re talking about—comparing the genomes that were broadcast on the quantum radio with existing sequenced genomes—is on a completely different scale. And that even presupposes we had the genomic data to compare. We don’t. There are nearly eight billion humans alive on the planet. We—the United States government—between NIH data and other sources, might have a few million sequenced human genomes. At best. We’re talking about a data set that is one-tenth of one percent of the entire human population. The prospect of getting a hit is remote. It’s a needle in a haystack. But the other update I just got is that the president’s been briefed. The decision has been made to compare the president’s genome against the four. And the vice president, cabinet, and Congress.”
“Why?” Ty asked, then instantly realized the truth. “Wait—they think the genomes are of world leaders. Or future world leaders.”
“It’s the obvious conclusion,” Bishop said.
“Are they going to build the machine?” Richter asked.
“It’s being discussed,” Bishop replied.
That surprised Ty. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“The obvious,” Richter said.
Ty was still confused. “Which is?”
“You’re still thinking like a scientist.”
Ty couldn’t help feeling attacked by the comment. “Occupational hazard,” he muttered.
“One I hope you never lose,” Richter said. “Think about it, Tyson. They expected a genomic printer. What was actually received is a collider. Do you recall the uproar surrounding the initial start-up of the LHC? The concerns about how it might destroy our world?”
“Indeed I do.”
“Consider what they see now: another collider, smaller, yes, but that only heightens their suspicion.”
“Why?”
“If you wanted to make something look safe and non-threatening, what would you do?”
“Make it small.”
“Correct. In the same way that the files in the data stream were obvious to you, Tyson, what that machine represents to the Department of Defense is obvious. Or so they think.”
Ty saw it then. “A bomb.”
“Precisely. If you were an alien civilization intent on wiping out threats across space and time and universes, what would be the most efficient means? Sending ships with troops and guns to invade? No. Of course not. That method, while exciting on TV, is terribly inefficient in reality. It’s time-consuming, and the threat of your technology falling into your enemy’s hands is too great a risk. What would any sufficiently advanced civilization use?” Richter asked.
“Science.” Ty nodded. “And human nature. Curiosity. You could simply send your enemies the means to annihilate themselves and wait for them to destroy their planet. So, the DoD thinks the collider is a sort of quantum Trojan horse—a device that we will create, turn on, and destroy our planet with?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think it is,” Ty said.
“Why do you think that?” Bishop asked.
“Gut instinct.”
Bishop rolled his eyes. “Well, we can’t risk the extinction of the human race on your gut instinct.”
“But,” Ty said, “you can compare a few hundred or a few thousand genomes pretty easily against what was broadcast.”
“What are you asking?”
“Do you have sequenced genomes for the people working on the Origin Project?”
Bishop eyed Ty. “Yes.”
“Run the comparison.”
“Why? What do you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
After a long silence, Bishop said, “Okay. Let me make a call.”
When Bishop left the room, Richter moved close to Ty and whispered, “Do you know who the genomes belong to?”
“No. Not for sure.”
“But you have an idea.”
“The shape of one.”
18
The conference room at the DARPA facility was quiet, and it was growing more uncomfortable by the second. The tension was nearly unbearable.
Ty sat in a chair at the end of the conference table. His mother and Richter, his biological father, stood on opposing sides of the table, trying to act like nothing was weird. It wasn’t working. Ty was acutely aware of the awkwardness in the room.
He wanted to throw his hands up and yell, “What happened between you two?”
He also wanted answers from Bishop. He wanted to be in the loop. Part of the process.
He had asked to see the schematic of the collider. That request had been denied. The details of the device, he had been told, were a matter of national security. That annoyed him. He was the reason they even had the schematic. Now they wouldn’t even show him what he had found.
Something else was bothering him: Penny. Where was she? Was she still alive? Had the Covenant caught up to her? And why had she lied to him? What did they have on her?
Another thought occurred to Ty—a way at least to get more information about what was happening and possibly part of the key to understanding the genomes.
“I have an idea,” he said, instantly drawing the attention of Helen and Richter, who seemed relieved for any distraction.
“Is it possible to get a sample of Penny Neumann’s DNA? And compare it?”
His mother frowned. “Who is Penny Neumann?”
Ty leaned his head back and studied the white ceiling tiles. “She’s… it’s complicated.”
Richter nodded. “It would be a simple thing to have an agent visit her apartment in Geneva and retrieve a sample.”
“She lives in Geneva?” Helen asked. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“Mom.”
Richter walked closer to Ty. “Why do you think she might be one of the four?”
“Logic. She’s connected to the Covenant. And me.”
Helen put her hands on her hips. “Ty, how is she connected to you?”
“That’s…” Ty rolled his head to the left and right. “She… we dated—”
“For how long? Dated? As in, it’s ended?”
Ty looked at Richter. The man clearly hadn’t told his mother about the incident in the alley behind the coffee shop, which Ty counted as a good call. It would have worried her sick.
Richter picked up the phone on the conference table and jabbed at the number pad while Helen eyed Ty, waiting for an explanation. He nodded to Richter, silently indicating that it was rude to interrupt. He was happy for the delay in the motherly interrogation.
“It’s Richter. We need to obtain a DNA sample from the Covenant agent who identified herself as Penny Neumann.”
Ty’s head whipped around. “What do you mean, identified herself as Penny Neumann?”
With the phone held to his ear, Richter listened, then said, “Yes, I think that would be fine. Also, please print an article from a newspaper called the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung dated approximately one year ago—”
Richter listened, then said quickly, “Yes, simply search her name. It will be the last article you find. Have it translated and bring it to this conference room.”
The second he hung up, Ty stood. “What article?”
Helen stared at Ty. “You dated a Covenant agent?” She turned her gaze to Richter. “Did you know about this?”
“Of course not.”
“She wasn’t a Covenant agent,” Ty said, hands held up. “Well, she was, but not at the end.”
“End of what?” Helen asked. “The relationship? So you’ve broken up.”
The door opened, and Bishop stepped in. Upon seeing the scene, he stopped cold. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Richter muttered. “What do you have? A DNA match?”
Bishop peered out the door at the two marines standing watch, then slowly closed it and moved closer to Ty, Richter, and Helen. “Neither the president nor any of the members of the administration were a DNA match. Same for Congress.”
Richter smiled. “I assume they were sufficiently crestfallen by this development?”
Bishop looked as though he were suppressing a grin. “Their disposition at the news is unknown to me. However, we do have a partial DNA match.”
“Partial?” Richter asked.
“For whom?” Helen said.
“Two people, actually,” Bishop replied, eyeing Richter and Helen. “Both of you.”
Ty cocked his head. “Which means…”
“Which means,” Bishop said carefully, “we can say, with a very high degree of certainty, that one of the genomes broadcast is a match to an offspring of Gerhard Richter and Helen Klein.”
Richter’s words came rapid-fire. “Male or female?”
“Male.” Bishop nodded toward Ty. “It’s you, Ty. Your genome is being broadcast.”
“Not necessarily,” Helen whispered.
“What?” Bishop said.
“I have a twin,” Ty said. “An identical twin. We share the same genome.”
“Not necessarily,” Helen said again, turning away from the three men.
“What does that mean?” Ty asked, surprised by her words.
For a moment, Helen seemed lost in thought. Finally, she looked up at them. “It means that, yes, identical twins—what we biologists refer to as monozygotic twins—do begin with the same genome. Monozygotic twins are created when a single zygote—a fertilized egg—separates into two embryos. At that moment of division, the genomes of those embryos are identical copies of each other. And for a very long time, we believed that two offspring born of this process had little if any genetic difference at the time of birth. That’s why twins have been used extensively in studies on the effect of environment on genetics—the nature versus nurture debate. However, a recent study in Iceland by deCODE turned that notion upside down. We now know that identical twins are not as identical as we once believed—genetically speaking. In fact, by the time twins are born, there are already differences in their genomes.”
“What do you mean?” Bishop asked.
“Mutations,” Richter said.
“Exactly,” Helen said. “After the zygote splits, the cells weave new strands of DNA and then split into more and more cells. With any cell division process, there’s the chance of replication errors. We now know this happens in the womb—enough to produce an average of 5.2 mutations between twins by the time of birth. In about one in every seven sets of twins, there are more significant mutations—ten to fifteen. The timing of the zygote separation has a significant impact on the number of differences. A zygote typically splits anywhere from one to seven days after fertilization. At this early juncture, there are fewer cells to split, and sometimes the cells don’t split evenly. In other cases, the zygote doesn’t split until up to thirteen days after fertilization. In those instances, there are more cells and typically fewer mutations in the resulting offspring.”
Bishop reached up and massaged his temples. “So…”
“Gerhard and I have two sons,” Helen said. “The sequence could be for either of their genomes.”
