Fede followed Tonx inside the hallway. The walls were a cheap poly-plyboard coated with a peeling latex. The composite they had used had fat chunks of plastic that didn't hold the paint well, leaving sagging, discolored pockets over its surface. The lights overhead flickered as they went, the growling hum of old transformers shuttling electrons through grime-coated wires.
"Listen, Fed" said Tonx, "I got practice tonight. You're welcome to stay, and you're welcome not to, but I don't want Mom riding down here on her broomstick either way."
"Don't worry about it" mumbled Fed. There was a blackness growing in his belly, an anger spreading over the tofu and fried vegetables and up through his throat. Tonx had been gone for two years, and in those two years Fede had spent almost every waking moment goggled in, sweating blood over prefabbed lessons and newsgroup HOWTOs. He'd lived and breathed code, and Tonx had been out… here.
"Fed." Tonx had stopped at a doorway set into the end of the hall. "I'm sorry."
"I always meant to come back and explain things to you, but whenever I talked to Mom she made it sound like you didn't want to see me. I don't know what changed, or why you decided to show up, but… I'm glad you're here."
Tonx had his hood pushed back, tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. He looked at his dirty shoes, at Fed. "Listen, why don't you come in and after practice we'll talk some more?"
"What practice?" asked Fed.
"Aikido" said Tonx with a sudden smile. "It's an old martial art based on joint locks. With all the free muscle you can buy out there these days it's one of the few arts left that'll still take somebody down. It doesn't rely on strength." Tonx stuck his arm out in front of him. "Here. Grab my wrist."
"You're doing kung-fu now?" asked Fed, raising an eyebrow.
"No, dude. 'Eye-key-dough.' I told you, it's an old martial art. It's sweet shit, for real. Relies on knowledge of physiology and timing instead of raw strength. It's for people with brains. Come on, try to grab my arm."
Fede grabbed his brother's wrist. Tonx's smile widened, and he gently put his free hand on top of Fed's. "It's easy," he said. He slipped the fingers of his bottom hand on top of Fed's and pressed softly.
"FUCK! YOU! BITCH!" yelled Fed, falling facedown on the concrete floor in front of Tonx's shoes. Tonx was laughing, doubled up against the wall holding his belly. The door behind him opened and the Chinese girl from earlier looked down at them. The floor she stood on was a foot higher than the floor of the hallway, thick blue mats covering its surface. She looked at Tonx and then down at Fed, now on his knees pressing his wrist between his thighs, tears welling up in his eyes.
"Tried that shit-ass nikyo on your brother, Tonx?" she asked. She turned toward Fed. "Don't worry about it, man. Your brother's the biggest wuss we got on the mat. Stick around and you'll see him get his."
Tonx reached a hand up and let her haul him through the gap, his hand lingering against her hip as he stepped in. "Hey there sweetheart" he murmured. "You dissing my nikyo?"
"Your nikyo ain't shit, baby," she murmured back, hopping down into the hallway and helping Fede to his feet. "Give me that," she said, grabbing his hand and pushing gently against the inside of his wrist with the ball of her thumb. She ran her fingers up his arm, pushing deeply into the muscle. Fed felt his arm relax, the pain dissipate. "One of the rules is, 'you break it, you fix it,'" she informed him. "So I guess this means your brother owes me."
She still smelled like smoke, and up close Fede noticed she was about his height. He pulled away, his cheeks hot, mumbled a thank-you as he scrambled up into the room. He heard her chuckling softly behind him.
The room was roughly forty feet square, no windows. Bare concrete bore witness to a poor job done steaming off wallpaper and paint, tiny knobs of colored polyplasticines clinging here and there. The blue mats covered the entire floor, and two plain white doors stood on either side of the far wall. There was a low shelf on Fed's right with a little picture of an old guy and a huge scroll with a single Japanese character splashed on it hanging above. Fede flipped on his goggles, scanned the scroll and ran a query, got a quick answer.
"Love" the scroll said. Fede wrinkled his nose.
"What's this?" he asked Tonx.
"You mean the kanji?" Tonx asked, waving his hand at the scroll. "It's Ai, means love. Aikido is called the art of love. Kind of funny at first, but it makes sense once you've been doing it a while."
He swung around, his arms taking in the whole room. "This is our dojo - it's actually the back of the shop. We've got practice later, you can try it out. But first I want to show you something."
"You going to show him your fishies, Tonx?" asked Cass, letting her hair down and pulling it up again into a ponytail.
"Yeah" said Tonx, turning to give Fede that familiar half smile. "I'm going to show him my fishies."
Tonx's room was a simulacrum of the one they had shared at their Mom's place. A futon sat on a frame covering the majority of the floor surrounded by a dense layer of clothing, printouts, discount reference books and bits of electronics. One wall was covered in gorilla racks, sturdy industrial-grade shelving. A thick data cable snaked out from a pair of rack-mount computers; pizza-box-sized systems Tonx had paired up to handle the throughput required for the VR he used to manipulate his bio work. A black plastic helmet of the same make as the one in the shop hung from a hook nailed into the wall over the bed, the data cable attached via rubber bands to nails in the wall.
What got his attention, though, were the tanks. The gorilla racks contained at least a dozen fish tanks of varying sizes. Each had a big metal canister like a coffee dispenser next to it, spiked metal sensor arrays protruded from each into the tank it accompanied. Tonx had glued recycled LCDs to the front of each tank and wired them to the canisters. As he watched, the displays cycled through a string of numbers and acronyms that meant absolutely nothing to Fed.
Tonx settled onto a stool in front of the shelves and thumbed on a strip light over one of the tanks. As Fede watched a fat goldfish swam into view over the blue pebbles covering the bottom of the tank. Tonx snickered.
"Watch this" he said.
He pulled out two film canisters from next to the tank, one white, one black, and emptied the contents of both into his hand. Then he dropped them into the water. The fish swam faster, darting around, poking at the canisters. It nudged and pushed at them until the air clinging to their sides tore away and they settled onto the bottom.
"You put food in those?" asked Fed.
"Nope" said Tonx, smiling. Inside the tank the fish seemed to have lost interest and was swimming around aimlessly. "Here. Drop one of these in."
Tonx handed him two small black rocks and a penny. Fed shrugged and dropped the penny into the tank.
Without hesitating the fish swam to the penny and grabbed it, wedging it into its mouth before swimming over to one film canister and then the other. The goldfish nudged the canister upright and deposited the penny inside.
Then the fish swam over to the side of the tank and looked out at him.
"Put in a rock" whispered Tonx, clearly enjoying himself. Fede did. The fish caught the rock before it hit the bottom and put it in the other canister, then returned to watching them from inside the glass. Tonx keyed in a sequence on the canister next to the tank and a thin slick of grayish fluid seeped out of one of the spines. Inside the tank the fish began to bob up against the surface of the water, sucking at the slick.
"What the fuck was that?" whispered Fed. Tonx just laughed and turned off the light over the tank.
"That, my little man" he said, "is a mutagenetically altered goldfish. Your brother here found a way to conjoin endomorphic neurological tissue with shocked brain tissue using genetically modified carcinogens." He smiled proudly.
Fede slowly raised his eyebrows. Tonx rolled his eyes and sighed. He was clearly enjoying himself.
"I cut and pasted some brains, and used a GM cancer to make it stick" he explained.
Fede let his eyebrows stay raised, waited for the long explanation that was sure to follow. Tonx strolled over to the futon and fell back on its rumpled sheets.
"The coursework I worked on at MIT focused on mutagenics. The big breakthrough I came into there was the use of endomorphic tissues - you remember that?"
"Yeah" said Fed, squinting as he remembered the hazy past, back when Tonx had been clean-cut, carefully clad, ready for his break into the corporate graduate schools. Ready to make it, big time. "Yeah, endomorphic tissue is from squids and stuff, yeah?"
"And a lot of other critters, yes. It's tissue that can readily change. Stuff like color, shape, firmness… that kind of stuff. Turns out that endomorphic tissue readily accepts mutagenesis."
"That is… " asked Fed.
"Meaning it's easy to hack its genetic code. Endomorphic tissue readily accepts changes to its base DNA sequences. It led to a bunch of patents Johnson & Johnson licensed off MIT for those T-cell multiplier Band-Aids. The ones they recalled because they gave a bunch of people a nasty rash?"
Fede remembered. "Yeah. Funny shit. Why was that?"
"Not everyone's body gets rid of mutagenic cells the same way - a lot of folks' skin freaked out and tried to isolate the cells thinking it was foreign tissue. Made lots of little bitty scars under the skin. Anyway, J&J got bit because they didn't test it well enough. They only used refugees from Serbia as a test base. They happened to have readily mutagenic-prone cell bases."
"So they didn't get the rash?"
"Exactly. But J&J imported the stuff here and slapped it on a bunch of people and all of a sudden the entire population of Irish Americans in New York started getting nasty zits. Biogenetics are like that, man. Got to take into account the entire variance of the human genome, you know?"
"So what about the goldfish?"
"Right. Lots of people had discovered that using endomorphic tissue as a base provided you with a ready chunk of material you could mutagenetically alter directly. But as a conversion vector it's got a lot of problems - mainly, the body thinks it's a virus.
"Just about the time I bailed from school some of my peers figured out that they could use cancer cells to create recombinants - cells that combine DNA sequences. The ability to hack cancer cells has been around a long time; you just set it up to create the cells of your choice and off you go. But the body readily identifies those cells as foreign, typically, and kills them. Cancer in the wild propagates because it finds a variety that's particularly virulent - whatever you end up mixing together at home is pretty easily taken care of by the immune system. So what we figured out was a marriage of the two - a genetically unstable cancer that sought endomorphic cells and was vulnerable to conjoining."
Tonx looked proudly up at Fed, his hands laced behind his head. Fede folded his arms.
"What the hell does that mean?" he asked.
Tonx smiled. "It means the cancer cells bust open the endomorphic cells and ingest part of their DNA. Makes a new cell, a combination of them both."
Tonx watched Fede for a moment, traced the slow steady vector of his thinking and pre-empted him. "The benefit of that is twofold. One, you don't have to try to introduce an entire DNA sequence into the cancer cell before you launch it. That shit's hard, and you usually get something too unstable to last long enough to get it into a new system. Two, the body starts out thinking it's trying to kill two things, and then suddenly those two things are gone and you have a third thing instead. Takes a little while for the body to adapt.
"The reason folks are so shit-hot to make this stuff work is for healing or replacing limbs or other tissue. If you could just stick a chunk of endomorphic base tissue onto the bloody stump of somebody's arm and have it grow back you'd have yourself some pretty powerful economic leverage.
"The way they've done it so far is by having the cancer cells look for two types of cells: stem cells, and endomorphic cells. Stem cells are endomorphic, so it's not as hard as it sounds."
Tonx paused, looked at Fede from the corner of one eye. "Stem cells are the ones that turn into whatever other kind of cells is needed."
"That's the stuff the breeders are used for, right? They get them out of embryos?" asked Fed.
"Yeah, but I'm not talking about that. Every body makes its own stem cells, it's part of the normal healing process."
"Okay" said Fed. "I got it." He was starting to enjoy himself now, the back-and-forth of his brother's stream of thought and his questions. Like old times. He found himself relaxing into learning, looking for holes in the logic, questioning his own knowledge and marking out things for later exploration.
"Good" said Tonx. "So you set up the cancer cells to ingest the transformative DNA sequence carried by the stem cell. That's the "message" the stem cell has about what it's supposed to turn into when it gets to the damaged part of the body. The cancer cell eats that, combines with the endomorphic tissue, and uses the message sequence from the stem cell to inform the final mutation. The result - if you're lucky - is a cell that's accepted into the body as a replacement for the damaged cell."
"So does the body accept it as native?" shot back Fed, seizing on a loose thread from earlier in the conversation. "You said that one of the benefits to the process was that the body starts out looking for two types of tissue, and then discovers a third."
Tonx nodded. "Bingo. The big problem is that no matter what you set up the mutagenic cells - that's the result of all this rigmarole - whatever you set up the mutagenic cells to be you end up with something that the host body thinks stinks. The delay you get by making it three-phase gives you time for the tissue to integrate, but eventually the body realizes it's permeated with shit, and attacks it. Right now my goldfish only last about two weeks. By the end of the first week they're pretty damn smart, but eventually I always end up with retarded goldfish. They're fucking Algernons. Most die - I damage their brains to prompt the production of stem cells, and because the mutagenic cells replace the stem cells that were sent to heal the brain it ends up scarred. The fish's body thinks its got a malignant growth and eats any local connected brain tissue. Its immune system eats its own brain."
Tonx sighed, sat up and rummaged around under the edge of the bed. "The other problem is that you can only really make one kind of cell. If somebody gets their finger cut off the stem cells think they're supposed to produce a scab, and all the mutagenic cells absorb that message and you get a scab the size of the host medium - the endomorphic tissue - that you stapled on there. There's no way to make the mutagenic cells responsive to the variance of the host body's repair response." He pulled out a little golden jar and unscrewed it. The smell of strawberries swam through the room.
"That's the hurdle everyone's stuck on right now, except me - they keep ending up with one kind of cell, which is useless to them."
He began rubbing the contents of the jar into his lips with his thumb.
"Doesn't the goldfish have the same problem?" asked Fed.
"Nope. That's my brilliant discovery: brain tissue. Brain tissue is inherently mutagenic - it changes in response to use over time, like muscle, except electrolytic. So you can produce a shitload of the same type of tissue and integrate it into the brain, and the brain just thinks it's got new virgin brain to work with. It accepts it immediately and starts firing synapses like crazy to formulate usable neuropathways. You go from a genetic matrix to a neurochemical one - and the DNA base suddenly becomes moot. You sidestep the entire problem of DNA sequence variance, and just build a bigger brain. It populates itself."
Fede stared at his brother. "Let me get this straight. You smack the goldfish's brain to damage it, rub on some endomorphic tissue, shoot it up with your GM cancer, and the endomorphic tissue all turns to brain tissue?"
Tonx nodded.
"But how does that new tissue fit in its head? And how does the fish think with it?" he asked.
"One, you scrape out some of the bone. The brain is just lumped in a sack inside the skull, so once you have more room the endomorphic tissue swells to fit. Two, I don't know, but it seems to do okay. I think they see better, and they certainly learn better. Obviously size isn't everything - elephants aren't smarter than people - but the extra mass does seem to be used quickly as ancillary memory. In one case it grew out the visual cortex and the damn fish fit all the rocks in the bottom of the cage into a solid plate, just by sizing them. It doesn't much matter to me how it works, at least not yet. What matters is that you can make something smarter. If I could get this stuff to work on something bigger than a goldfish it wouldn't take much to test where and how to apply it for maximum results."
Tonx slowly leaned forward, his eyes glittering. "Can you imagine it?" he whispered. His brother's grin split wide across his face. It was the ultimate upgrade; it was the truest hack Fede had ever heard of.
"The big companies would never think of it" Fed said.
"Truer words were never spoken. They want marketability; they weren't able to make the leap. That's the advantage the undergrounds have got, Fed. We think outside the box because we ARE outside the box. Who would think of adding mass to your brain?"
Tonx's smile slowly faded. "The problem is that the changes never stick; it's just as vulnerable to immune system rejection as any other mutagenic recombinant. The worst part is that it's become a data-crunching problem. In a fish lumping on another gob of brain tissue isn't so big a deal. The genome's been mapped a bazillion times over, so finding combinations that are within a working range isn't so impossible. But even there it's taken forever to find something that will last two weeks. It's much harder to find something that'll pass as native to the goldfish's immune system - although I believe it's possible."
"Does that mean I can't become a genius here?" asked Fed.
"That's exactly what it means" said Tonx. "Trying to discover a working recombinant for three-way DNA mutagenesis in a more complex creature is orders of magnitude more complicated. It's just impossible."
Tonx leaned back on his elbows. "Each conjoined state needs to account for the entire genome's sequencing before and after that state's conversion, and the end recombinant needs to stay stable as usable tissue. The goldfish is about as dead simple as it gets - and it took me two years of processor time on every machine I could beg, borrow, or steal access to just to get this far."
"But isn't it just a matter of combination matching?" asked Fed. He realized his hands were shaking. It sounded impossible - but it wasn't. It was just very, very hard.
"Sure it's just a matter of combination matching" shouted Tonx. "But the combinations range in the millions of billions - and they all have to be cross-compatible. And any satisfactory result set needs to be cross-checked across the entire data set."