Second Nature

Chapter 33

33

Cade and Jimi were still parked at the breakfast table an hour later, their coffee mugs long empty. Lana had taken Gen for a walk with the dog on a private jogging path through the woods of the estate. Neither of the men had spoken for a while.

Cade broke the silence. “Jimi, parts of this don’t make sense to me.”

“Just parts, huh?” Jimi gave a little laugh. “Hell, man, my mind is reeling like a drunkard.”

“Yeah, okay. We’re all in over our heads,” Cade said. “For one thing, I can’t understand how each teeny little organism—each mitobot—can contain all the genetic codes from all the species Gen has touched. How does one microscopic probe store that much information?”

“Good question, and I don’t know the answer,” Jimi said. “Remember, I thought it would take a swarm of trillions.  But my hunch is, the DNA itself functions as a computer.”

“Explain.”

Jimi shook his head. “Can’t. Don’t know how it would work. But I’ll say this much: Only about three percent of each DNA molecule contains the genes, the amino acid sequences that code for the manufacture of proteins. The remaining ninety-seven percent of the text doesn’t code for anything that we understand. Geneticists call it ‘junk DNA,’ which of course simply means—”

“They don’t know a damn thing about it.”

“Exactly,” Jimi said. “You and I each have 125 billion miles of DNA strands in our bodies, and nearly all of it has an unknown purpose.”

“So let’s just call it junk.” Cade felt disgusted with the all-too-common smugness of human beings—himself included. Just days ago, his notion of the “real” world had been so much smaller than today that to return to it now would give him claustrophobia.

“Some math dude at MIT showed that, in principle, DNA might be turned into a four-digit computer that would be trillions of times faster than a supercomputer. Instead of using the standard binary code of zeros and ones, the nucleotide base pairs would function as digits.”

Cade held up his thumb and forefinger as if measuring a sliver. “I’m getting about this much of what you’re telling me.”

“The nucleotides—the rungs of the DNA ladder,” Jimi said. “They’re constructed of four amino acids. That could give you a four-digit code to work with instead of a two-digit code like computers now use.”

“Okay. I guess.”

“DNA emits photons,” Jimi said. “The light given off is extremely weak, but at microscopic distances the light is coherent, like a laser. Maybe it’s a mechanism for reading and writing information onto the non-coding portions of DNA.”

“Man, you’re so far over my head I’m dog-paddling,” Cade said.  “But is that how Gen’s so smart? So many languages?”

Jimi twisted his mouth. “Not sure. That might be how the mitobots are so smart. I think Gen uses her own brainpower; maybe she just uses a lot more of hers than we use of ours,” he said, “or maybe her brain is a better design than ours.” He shrugged. “Really, who can account for genius? In the 1800s, there was a Jesuit, a linguist…Rusk?…Rask—Rasmus Rask, a professor at theUniversity ofCopenhagen—he could speak two-hundred-and-thirty languages. That’s close to Gen’s number.”

“Jesus.”

“No, Society of Jesus.”

Cade rolled his eyes.

“Look, Gen is not the mitobots, Cade. I mean, she is and she isn’t, okay? Her mind is not their mind. That hurt her when you said she wasn’t a woman.”

Cade shook his head, squeezed the empty coffee mug in his big hands. “I’m real sorry I said that.” He blew out a sigh with puffed cheeks. “Last night. We, uh…got intimate. But then, in the bathroom…she was this…the heat coming off her body singed my eyebrows!” He touched his thick, dark eyebrows; they had re-grown. “Well, they were singed,” he mumbled. “She just kept changing and changing, becoming so many different animals. Plants, too. Scared the royal crap out of me.” He wiped a hand over his whiskered mouth. “Man, I don’t know what she is.”

“Maybe not, but you know she’s scared, too. And she needs us. Keep in mind what she did for Lana. My god, she’s a miraculous healer—we know that much. We owe her our support.”

Cade thought of the miracle of Lana’s legs and felt ashamed of how he’d treated Gen. “But I don’t know how to help her.”

Jimi shook his head. “You don’t know how to fix her problem. It’s not the same thing, man. You do know how to help her—you can help her to not feel so alone.”

Cade sat quietly for a moment, chewing his lower lip, musing; then he got up to leave. “I need to go tell her I’m sorry.”

“Cade.”

He met Jimi’s eyes.

“You said you don’t know what Gen is. Neither do I—she’s a new form of life. But think about this: She contains within her own body the essence of thousands of species; it’s as if she’s pregnant with the life of the planet.”

“It’s true,” Cade said. He knew that Jimi’s eyes reflected his own amazement. 

“In ancient times people had a definite name for what Gen is—a spiritual name.”

Cade swallowed. “Goddess?”

Jimi smiled, nodding. “I was thinking, Great Earth Mother.”