Authors: Jupiter's Daughter
It took them an entire year, but they ultimately succeeded. And there, in those photographs, is the fruit of their labor. It looked like a Ford, it drove like a Ford, but it was not a Ford. It was a Japanese copy of a Ford.”
Mishima watched the faces. He saw they were beginning to get the point.
“Well, not quite exact,” he continued. “The Japanese Ford got five miles more to the gallon, generated more horsepower, had better brakes, a smoother shifting mechanism, a more reliable engine, better bumpers, and a more stable suspension system. The shop in Osaka made only that one copy. Because, of course, they could not mass-produce something so obviously stolen from an American design. No, they did something much better. They took their experience and went out to design and manufacture automobiles for Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, and Nissan.”
His listeners had become very quiet, hanging on every word.
Mishima beamed selfconsciously and went on.
“Those of you in this room today are faced with a very similar challenge-Instead of a Ford sedan to learn from, you will have the complete computer printouts of three human genomes, obtained from hair samples. One comes from a man, another from a woman, and a third from their young child. In this instance, the child is the 1951 Ford. Your task will be to construct the computer program that will duplicate her genome under the same set of circumstances. Your task is far more difficult than that faced by the men who copied that old Ford. The technologies involved are thousands of times more complex. But in many ways your task is similar. You will be given a product—the girl’s genome—to take apart and analyze. And from that analysis, you will work backwards—you will endeavor to reconstruct, by crossreferencing the girl’s genome with those of her parents, a copy of the same program that produced those results. It won’t be easy.
But you have some powerful advantages. You have superior knowledge, superior experience, superior technical skills, and the best computers in the world.”
Mishima paused and looked around the room. A woman in front raised her hand.
“Are we to assume that such a program actually exists?”
“Such a program did exist. And the girl is the first and only human being, as far as we know, to have had her germ line altered according to this program’s blueprint.”
“Did exist?”
“Yes. It was developed by Dr. Harold Goth, a Nobel laureate, whose name, at least, you are probably familiar with.”
Mishima heard some loud groans.
“Dr. Goth died in a fire in his laboratory on the island of El Coronado, in the Caribbean, on New Year’s Eve, 1999. We believe that all his records, including this genetic program, were destroyed in the fire. But we’re not sure. There is some recent evidence that a copy may have survived. An American and a German company may be collaborating on an effort to fieldtest it.”
“Can’t we get a copy?”
“We’re trying. But if a copy has indeed survived, it may well be flawed. It may not work at all, for many reasons. And as responsible scientists, you would hardly want to rely on a pirated copy of something as important as this. The whole point of our undertaking here is to reach a deep understanding of how this girl’s genome was created, so that we may construct our own working version of Goth’s program. And like the copy of the Ford, we will make one that will be better than the original.”
An older male on the right side of the room raised a hand.
“What results has Goth’s program produced in the girl?”
Mishima nodded. “That’s an essential question. I cannot answer it accurately now, but we’ll do our best to supply you with information as time and the success of our intelligence efforts permit. All I can give you at this point is a general answer. The program has apparently produced a child of markedly superior health and intelligence. That’s all we know at the moment.”
“Do we know this girl’s name? Or anything about her family?”
“For the time being, we consider that irrelevant.”
Mishima answered a few more questions, then closed his presentation with a strong dose of chauvinistic appeal:
“You all know, because each of you has been extensively interviewed about joining this project, that our government places the highest priority on the successful outcome of this endeavor.
Despite our success in building a peaceful, prosperous, and enlightened society, Japan remains a small island nation in a brutally competitive and increasingly hostile world. The enormous economic boom of the postwar period is well behind us now. We have become a mature, rich, and stable industrial democracy-one of the strongest on earth. But our preeminence is by no means assured. In fact, it may be dangerously fragile.”
Mishima turned the projector switch on again, and the Ford sedan was replaced by a new slide. It was a chart listing eighteen categories of productivity.
“I thought you might be interested in seeing how the three great industrial nations of the world—Germany, the United States, and Japan—presently stack up against each other in the key areas of national productivity. These figures may surprise you. Germany t leads in only one of the eighteen categories: finance, insurance, and real estate. Japan leads in four: chemicals, plastics, and synthetics; cars, planes, and transportation; steel, aluminum, and opper; and electric machinery and electronic equipment. The United States leads in all the rest—thirteen out of the eighteen i categories.”
There was an awkward silence. Mishima wasn’t sure whether t, it was because his audience was stunned by this revelation or because they considered his patriotic appeal heavy-handed. The last thing in the world Mishima wanted was to be thought of as heavy-handed, but the occasion demanded that he lay it on pretty thick. The government needed these scientific types to understand that this was a national emergency. They had to hit the deck running on this one. One lost day could make a difference.
Mishima turned off the projector, and the chart disappeared
; from the wall. “For a while we were winners,” he said. “But no longer. We coasted on our success through the nineties. Our economic triumphs made us fat and complacent. Now our economy and our standard of living are on the decline. Part of the reason
. for that decline can be blamed directly on the United States—on its increasingly hostile attitude toward the Japanese people, and
- on the punitive actions that a series of U.S. administrations has
: taken—trade barriers, product quotas, tariffs, and all the rest. I need not bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, we are now in a bitter race for our survival as a first-class world power. Since
‘ the Communist collapse back in the early nineties, we have witnessed an increasingly belligerent United States doing all it can to sabotage Japan’s effort to compete in the world’s markets. The psychology of the United States is such that it seems to require an enemy. And now that the Soviet Union is gone, that enemy has become Japan.
“To put it bluntly, we are once again at war with the United States.
It’s a new kind of war-not the deadly military folly of the past but an economic struggle. The battlefield may seem far more benign and the suffering far less, but the longterm consequences are the same. The loser ends up in the ash bin of history.
“But we are not going to lose. We are a proud and industrious people, capable of rising to a great challenge. Fifty years ago, a previous generation rose from the ruin and despair of a humiliating military defeat to make us one of the richest, most productive societies on earth. We can repeat that miracle again. And this time the task falls to you, the men and women in this room, to lead the way.
It will demand commitment and sacrifice, intelligence and hard work.
But if you are successful, the reward will be priceless. It is not an exaggeration to say that the re-creation of this genetic program will ensure the Japanese race a place of leadership in the world for many generations to come.”
Mishima sensed that his audience was getting restless. It was time to wrap it up.
“The prime minister and the emperor have both asked me to pass on to you their warmest personal appreciation and their deep conviction that once you know the importance of the task before you, you will not let the Japanese people down. I join them wholeheartedly in those sentiments. Now, I thank you very much for your time, and I understand that there will be several more speakers who will answer the many questions I know you must have, and lay out for you in more detail the specifics of the project.”
Mishima left the conference hall in a thoughtful mood. He wondered whether this effort was really an example of Japanese foresight and longterm planning, or if it was the beginning of another great folly.
If this genetics project was successful, what would the government do?
Cash in on it by franchising it worldwide? This is what the prime minister had told him Japan intended to do. But Mishima didn’t believe it. Mishima thought it likely that his country would use the program on itself—initiate a nationwide eugenics program to improve the quality of the Japanese race.
This would be a dangerous course, Mishima thought—a thoughtless plunge into a medical, social, and moral wilderness.
No one could predict where such a course might lead the Japanese people, but of one thing he was sure. The rest of the world would never forgive them.
It would probably be better if the project failed.
Unfortunately, his reputation depended on its success.
Anne sat crosswise on a chair in the corner of Paul Elder’s office, her head resting against the wall and her legs draped over one of the chair’s arms. She was reading a thick textbook called Modern Genetics.
She had been at it for most of the past three hours and had reached only page 15. Still, she hardly minded. She felt quite happy.
Indeed, she felt almost blissful, curled up in this cozy, cluttered little office, alternating her attention between the book in her lap and the man hunched over his desk a few feet from her.
Elder suddenly banged the desk with his fist and let out a howl of frustration. “Damn it! I just can’t make any sense out of it!”
He was stationed in front of a powerful desktop computer he had borrowed through a friend from a nearby hospital research lab. For the last three hours he had been exploring the copy of Goth’s Jupiter program. Anne could see that he was exhausted.
It was after eleven r.M and his day had started at five. He swung his chair around and rubbed his eyes. Anne shut the book and looked at him.
“Something’s missing,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is. Either I don’t understand the genetics or I don’t understand the program—or both. Probably both.”
“Please don’t try to do any more tonight.”
“I’d like to accomplish something.”
Elder had explained to her what he was doing each step of the way. He had started out with what he thought was the most traightforward approach. He had obtained from one of his labs 271 several disks with copies of what the lab called “generic” genomes—ones that didn’t come from anyone in particular but were useful as test models. He had fed the data from a genome into the program’s software as it instructed him to do, and then asked it to alter the genome’s DNA code according to its master plan.
“This is the third time I’ve gotten the same result. I feed the genome data in, the program grinds away on it for a few minutes, then produces a new genome—exactly like the one I just fed it.
Somehow I don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to do.”
Anne had been thinking about the problem herself. She wanted to make a suggestion but felt intimidated.
Elder was studying her. “What?” he asked.
She looked at him, confused. “What?”
“You wanted to say something. What?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing.”
He grinned. “Yes you do. Tell me.”
“Well, I was just thinking…. Maybe you need to feed it two genomes.”
“Two genomes.”
“Well, after all, it takes two genomes to make a baby—the mother’s and the father’s. Maybe the program needs the same ^‘i number.”
Elder rubbed his chin and gazed into the middle distance. Anne felt embarrassed; she wished she had kept her mouth shut. Then his eyes lit up. “You’re a genius,” he said. “And I’m an idiot.
You’re right. I’m sure you must be. Let’s try it.”
Elder bent forward, grabbed the stack of disks he had borrowed from the hospital, and sifted through them. He found a male and a female genome, popped the disks into the computer, and fed their data into the program. When it had accepted all the data, a question appeared on the screen:
MALE OR FEMALE (M/F)?
“Look. It’s acting differently already. It’s asking us whether we want a boy or a girl.” Anne came and stood behind the doctor, peering at the screen over his shoulder.
“Let’s have a boy,” she said. She felt an impulse to rest her hand on the doctor’s shoulder, but resisted it.
Elder punched the “M” on the keyboard. A new message appeared: SELECT PARAMETERS (or strike ENTER for preselected norms).
Elder struck the “Enter” key through a long list of coded parameters that meant little to him. When the list was exhausted, the program followed with these questions:
STORE TO DISK? (Y/N)
PRINT OUT? (Y/N)
Elder punched “Y” for the first, “N” for the second.
TEST TRIAL OR APPLICATION? (T/A)
Elder punched “T.”
“Please Wait” flashed on the screen, and Jupiter began working on the data.
“I’m worried about this taking up so much of your time,” Anne said.
Elder shrugged. “I don’t need much sleep. Even if I did, I couldn’t pass this up.”
“I was thinking—maybe I could help you.”
“You already have.”
“No. I mean with your work. Help you around the office. File things, type things. You need a secretary desperately. Carmen’s a great nurse, but she spends half her time answering the phone and looking for misplaced records. I could do that. And I could keep your appointments book for you.”