West of Nothing

33. Super DNA

"Lab results not disappoint you," Johnny spoke from the jumbo screen where he was conferenced in from the on-site chem-lab. In the background was a maze of stainless steel counters bearing machines with mounting trays and LED control panels. Now and then a white-coated lab assistant wandered past.

"All right, spill the beans," Doogie said. "Spider or insect? Skunkworks and I have a wager."

"Not spider or insect." There was the hint of a smile. "Specimen not appear on Darwin tree of life."

"So it's not alive after all?" Mason said.

"Quite to contrary," replied Johnny. "No mistake it is biological but—how you put—reality sometimes stranger than story. Cells not like other eukaryotes. Have many nucleus and mitochondria are very large. Some other structures not identified yet. Not possible for it to be product of natural evolution."

"Why not?"

"Most mutation is harmful. Chance that two good mutations happen very small, you lose money if place bet. But specimen have so many mutations it not possible to count them all. But this just the cream in the coffee. Real proof is in genetic code. It is like nothing we ever see before. DNA is modified, enhanced you could say. That explain why commercial labs not able to read it."

"Enhanced how?" Doogie said.

"All biology use four nucleic acids. Specimen DNA have thirty times this many."

"How is that even possible?" Doogie asked. "DNA bases fit together like jigsaw pieces. There are only so many shapes a jigsaw piece can take before it starts getting confused with others."

"We not have answer to this and many more questions," Johnny admitted. "Only know what analyzer machines say. We run tests many times, make sure there is no mistake. Count more than one hundred twenty DNA bases."

"Why would there be so many?" Mason asked.

I can offer an explanation, Gabby jumped in. Look at it from an information density perspective. It's like the address space in a computer. The larger the address, the more information it can store and the fewer instructions are required to read it. Biology has been working with a 4-bit address space since the dawn of time. It sounds like this bot—or creature—is using something on the order of a 128-bits, what you'd find in a modern computer.

Gabby's words must have been transmitted to Johnny's screen because he nodded along in agreement. "Human genome take three billion base pairs to hold all genetic information. This way only takes few million. All human DNA fit onto single chromosome."

"That's a neat trick, but why bother?" Doogie said. "Our DNA squeezes just fine into a nucleus with plenty of room left over for junk, long stretches of non-coding pairs."

"Fewer base pairs not only save space," Johnny said. "Accelerates all DNA operations in cell. One other interesting thing, specimen not have sex."

"You can tell that from its DNA?" Mason asked.

"He means as in no X-Y chromosome," Corny said.

"Correct. Specimen chromosomes not happen in pairs like in sex-reproducing organism. Cells have single short chromosome, like runt of litter, and many long chromosome. Some cells so full they look like inside of baseball."

"What could it be using all that DNA for?" Doogie said.

"That question worth million of dollars."

"If this super DNA is so much more efficient then why hasn't evolution gotten around to giving us more codes?" Corny asked. "After all, it's had a few billion years to work at it."

"Small change to DNA scheme have big ripple effect through entire system," Johnny explained. "Like what happen if you change one letter in alphabet. Then must rewrite all books since beginning of language. Evolution works same way. Would have to learn to read all over again." Johnny's focus shifted off-screen. He made some hurried hand gestures before turning back to face them. "I am needed for chemical assay. Will report back soon."

"This just keeps getting weirder and weirder," HotDamn said when Johnny had signed off. "We started with a pint-sized robot and now we have an entirely new organism on our hands."

"It's still a robot in my book," Skunkworks said. "Let's not forget it has graphene composite skin, a heat shield and a mechanical eye. No way this thing hatched out of an egg. It's got engineering written all over it."

"So it's some of both," Corny said. "But who would cook up that kind of combination? Take it from me, creating a microbot is hard. Creating a bug-droid from both organic and artificial parts—a week ago I would have said that was impossible."

"If what we have here is a miracle," HotDamn said. "Where's the miracle worker?"

We're making one big assumption, Gabby said. We're assuming it was made by a human, or a team of humans at least.

"You're not saying it was made by aliens?" Mason asked.

His question was greeted by eye rolls. No one had to say dumbass aloud but Mason could read their minds.

Perhaps the miracle worker is a little closer to home, Gabby said tactfully. I think we may be dealing with an advanced AI. In fact, if it turns out to have precisely 128 bases in its DNA, that would be pretty convincing proof. An AI would be naturally predisposed to a binary processing scheme.

"Even if such an AI did exist, what motivation would it have for building the X-Bot?" Doogie asked.

"To please its master, of course," HotDamn said. "Which is to say whatever human government created it."

"You would think a government would go in for something a bit higher on the awesome scale," Mason said. "Like maybe a Mark 7 Jaeger with a plasmacaster."

"Jaeger?" Skunkworks made the mistake of asking.

"A giant mechanoid robot for fighting Kaiju. Oh, and a Kaiju is—"

"Not important," HotDamn said. "If you'll excuse us, Peeper, I think anime club is down the hall."

Mason took a chug from his Mountain Dew to hide his embarrassment. He really should lay off the stuff. It tended to make him hyper.

Maybe the X-Bot was an accident or a kind of misunderstanding, Gabby explained. A poorly trained AI is like an idiot savant, brilliant when it comes to narrow intelligence like designing a skyscraper with a hundred floors but a real dummy when it comes to common sense things like making sure there are elevators since people can't fly. Consider what would happen if a country like China created such an AI savant and gave it the task of achieving world domination. A human might design a super weapon but an AI...

"Might create a bug-droid?" Doogie said. "Surely there are more direct ways of achieving world domination."

"Maybe not," HotDamn said. "Or else someone would have done it already."

"Someone already has," Skunkworks said. "It's called the good ole U-S of A. We built the biggest goddamn economic juggernaut the world has ever seen and the nuclear arsenal to protect it."

You're missing the point. The objective could be anything at all. It's what the AI makes of it that matters. We should not impose human concepts of simplicity and rationality on an AI. When computer programs started beating us at strategy games like chess and Go, they played moves that seemed messy and counter-intuitive, unnatural even. They weren't worried about whether they violated some preconceived notion of order. They were playing a deep game where the only thing that mattered was the final outcome. This could just be an early move in a long game we poorly comprehend.

"If that's the case, it sure would be nice to know what game it's playing at," Skunkworks said. "Because right now it feels like we're losing."