Gene Mapper (16 page)

So much for the user manual. Now I had to find the specific code that was controlling the grasshoppers at Mother Mekong.

“Gene Analytics, show mission parameters.”

MISSION: OPERATION MOTHER MARY

MISSION TYPE: GENE PROPAGATION

DEPLOYMENT ZONE: UNRESTRICTED

MISSION TERM: UNRESTRICTED

TARGET: UNRESTRICTED

BREEDING: UNRESTRICTED

PESTICIDE RESISTANCE: INFINITE

Operation Mother Mary? It looked like Yagodo was on target. We were dealing with terrorism—unrestricted gene propagation across time and space, for all plant species, with no vulnerability to pesticides. The mission parameters were an elegant declaration of intent to cause serious harm.

Still, I was baffled. According to the user manual, a mission like this was impossible. The restrictions built into the genome kernel could not be overridden by the user, which meant that the person who coded this was an amateur. Hadn’t they read the files? The restrictions were spelled out in detail.

I decided to take a closer look at the code. Just as I thought, it was amateurish, almost childish. Whoever did this was no professional—giving variables names like “Variable A,” or leaving comment fields empty except for “Begin iteration” or “Define variable,” where even a cursory examination of the code made that obvious. Instead of selecting mission parameters from the drop-down menus, the coder had inserted invalid parameters by hand.

How people at this level got their hands on a DARPA development kit was a mystery. It looked like they’d grabbed the kit, skimmed the documentation, done a little slipshod coding, and unleashed the grasshoppers without even running a simulation.

“Who the hell wrote this, anyway?”

The coder’s name is John McCauley.

“He left his
name
? Display profile.”

JOHN MCCAULEY. BORN 2015. RESIDENT OF SYDNEY. EDUCATION: OUTLANDS POLYTECHNIC. GRADUATED 2036. EMPLOYER: GUARDIANS OF THE LAND (NPO).

I looked up Guardians of the Land. They were an environmental protection group operating out of Sydney. It also looked like they were camped outside Mother Mekong. There were aerial photos of the site on their wall and a blog bragging about their links to World Reporting.

There is a message to you from John McCauley. Shall I play it?

“Come again?”

It is a handoff message with a request for the next editor.

Handoff message? What was he handing off, his terrorist plot?

“Play it. Use the translation engine.”

A space opened in the wall above the desk. A man in a blue T-shirt sat against a green backdrop. The video was full 3D, which made no sense. I also wondered why he would bury a video in a genome. I grabbed the screen, resized it, and placed it over the sofa.

“Hi there. My name’s John McCauley. I do genetic coding for Guardians of the Land, an eco-protection group. Well, I’m not sure where I should start. Okay, why don’t I try getting right to the point.” He brought his cupped palms together and held them out for a few seconds, as if he was offering something. The gesture reminded me of the statue of Mary in front of Saigon Cathedral.

“Operation Mother Mary is a blow against genetic engineering overreach. One of our members came up with the name. It’s really cool. People all over the world love the Virgin Mary.”

“Get to the point, please.” I was already impatient.

“We’re all together on Mother Mary. Some of the team are really good at what they do—”

“Stop playback and summarize handoff.”

There is one location with handoff content.

“Play it back. Forget the rest.”

“So, um, I have this request?” This was twenty minutes into the video. What did he have to talk about for so long? If that wasn’t enough, there was another hour left.

“I want you to disable the grasshoppers. Operation Mother Mary is supposed to take all the SR06 at Mother Mekong and modify it to be Purple Dusk, this old kind of rice. The operation will prove distilled crops aren’t controlled and stuff, like people say. Gough got us this … this weapon from someplace, I don’t know where, but I kind of skimmed the tutorial, and, like, I just graduated last year, but even I could use it. It was a piece of piss.”

What a joke. Who was Gough and why would he hand a weapon like VB01G-X to a kid fresh out of school?

“So I did just like he said—made it so all the grasshoppers would die off after they changed SR06 to Purple Dusk. That way no one could prove that the grasshoppers did it. Except when I ran the debugger, I got all these error messages. Everything was unlimited or something.”

“No kidding,” I said to the image floating over the sofa. “You can’t hand-code every parameter, even if the API lets you. The kernel just ignores it.”

“But we were running out of time, so I didn’t want to say anything to Gough. I thought it would be simpler to just bung the whole kit into the genome. There must be something in there that tells how to stop the mission. I hope you can do it.”

Huh? I can’t do it, so here’s all the tools, clean up my mess? What if the deactivation code wasn’t
in
this version?

“Once the grasshoppers have disappeared, the damage will be done. I wonder who you are. Military? Cops? You don’t have to agree with what we’re up to, but you don’t want the grasshoppers to keep spreading any more than we do, I guess. I’d say we share the same goal.”

“What the fu—”

“At least I’m sure that L&B guy from Japan will be wrapped when this is all over. Gough says he’s a real find. He’s coming to the site to check out our work.”

I almost fell out of my chair in mid-shout. What Japanese guy?

As McCauley droned on, I thought about Kurokawa’s plan. Terminate the grasshoppers as soon as possible. “Once the grasshoppers have disappeared, the damage will be done.”

But what other option was there? In the end it was the same. Even if Kurokawa was connected to “Gough,” I had to find a way to put the grasshoppers out of business.

“Operation Mother Mary? What a load of crap.”

I opened the user manual and started my search.

*   *   *

I was hungry. I checked the time. It was past eleven. That meant all I could get was the late-night room service menu. I pulled open the desk drawer and hauled the menu out. Sandwich and coffee.

You have a message from Shue Thep. Shall I open it?

“Go ahead.”

“I just got back from the field. Kurokawa-san told me what he wants. We need to talk. How are we going to exterminate the grasshoppers? Can we meet in half an hour?”

Thep had been out long past dark. We didn’t know what would happen if a human was bitten, but all she had for protection was that worn-out jumpsuit. The lady was brave.

I texted her that I’d found a solution using the messenger towers. I hoped that would give her spirits a lift until we talked.

Terminating the insects didn’t require specialized chemicals or equipment. DARPA’s safety features covered every contingency. The user had multiple options—strobe lights with a specific wavelength, sound waves, even delivery of common chemicals by aerosol in distilled crop environments. A solution for every tactical situation.

I decided to go with “Forced Deactivation: Chemical Messenger.” This involved releasing a messenger compound, trans-2-hexenal, in a specific sequence to trigger suicide. I wondered why DARPA would include such an option, but then I remembered the distilled opium farms the Americans were always searching for.

Coding the pulse timing was more complicated than for distilled crops, but I’m a veteran. It wasn’t long before I finished the dispersal code. The chemical would reach all the grasshoppers on-site and those within three kilometers of the perimeter.

I ordered coffee and a sandwich from room service. While I was waiting, I moved to the next step: simulation. I sized a 3D model of Mother Mekong to fit over the bed. It was hard to believe that only yesterday I had been walking the site while my suit played games with my emotions.

Just this morning we had no idea of the identity of the intruder or the cause of the mutation. We hadn’t dreamt it was terrorism. Now we knew quite a bit about the terrorists, and I was testing a way to exterminate the grasshoppers causing the mutation. A day packed with surprises and discoveries was coming to an end.

“Run suicide simulation.”

The two thousand messenger towers projecting from the landscape on my bed started releasing concentric yellow circles representing trans-2-hexenal in a sequence that varied from location to location. Gradually the entire site was blanketed. It was like drawing logos, just more complicated.

I was so satisfied with the first simulation that I threw myself on the bed before it finished. Coffee, a sandwich, and Thep would be arriving soon.

*   *   *

“Pretty impressive.”

Thep showed up on time. She stared, palms upturned in surprise, at the 3D model over the bed and the long data bar suspended above the desk.

Her off-hours avatar sported the same cargo pants, but without the Mother Mekong jacket. She must’ve been worn out after hours in the field, but her avatar didn’t show it.

“I know how to eradicate the grasshoppers. We don’t need special chemicals or equipment. We’ll just use the towers. I already have a first draft of the code.” I handed her a copy of the user manual. “Our friends are designed animals. This is a bioweapon. We’re actually lucky it’s from DARPA. It’s unbelievably well-designed. If I can’t make it work with the towers, there are backup options.”

Thep sat on the sofa and started paging through the manual. After a few minutes she nodded and looked up.

“A lot of this could be applied to agriculture. It would be revolutionary. It’s sad we can’t use it.”

“I know. Well, at least we can stop them.” I started the simulation. “I’ll need you to load trans-2-hexenal into the towers. According to the manual, with the right timing the messenger will signal all the grasshoppers in range of the yellow concentric circles to self-destruct. They’re programmed to decompose into soil.”

Thep got up and sat on the bed. Her avatar merged with the mountains around the site. “All right. I’ll reprogram the towers. By morning there won’t be a trace left—what’s wrong?”

“There was a message buried in the code from one of the people behind this. He said ‘the damage will be done’ once the grasshoppers are exterminated.” I gave her the gist of the message from Guardians of the Land.

“So the grasshoppers vanish and the mutated vegetation is heirloom rice. Is that their goal? Why haven’t they issued some kind of statement?”

“A statement … Wait a minute!” I remembered the
HELLO WORLD!
tutorial. “Maybe this is what we need.”

I pointed to the page in the manual that dealt with changing missions on the fly. “Before we terminate the grasshoppers, I want to alter the mission code.”

“How would we signal the grasshoppers to change the mission? You know how hard it was to develop the signaling for SR06, and that was just to get the plants to change color.”

“I know, but DARPA found a way. Let me explain.” I showed Thep the tutorial.

Delivering new mission code to the grasshoppers with simple pulses from the towers would be impossible because the shortest pulse frequency was 0.2 seconds. Transmitting a megabyte of data that way would take nineteen days. During the entire time, every grasshopper would have to receive every byte of data with no errors or signal loss in an environment where constantly shifting winds were affecting the dispersion pattern. The wind also kept the rice stalks in motion, varying the precise distance between the grasshoppers and the towers.

DARPA’s engineers solved this by loading the mission codes into the grasshopper genome itself. The user ran a 64-byte Secure Hash Algorithm to output a unique hash value—in effect, a mission activation signal using unbreakable encryption—and sent it to the grasshoppers along with a four-letter code indicating the precise length of the mission code. That was the whole message. Once the grasshoppers received the hash value, they used several hundred million code-breaking cells to run a brute-force attack on the hash value and look up the mission code.

As I was explaining this to Thep, I remembered Yagodo’s molecular model. I didn’t understand what he was doing at first, but now I realized that he and DARPA were after the same thing: a brute force approach to looking up specific data.

“I don’t get it. The calculations would take millions of years.”

“That’s what I thought—at first. But the grasshoppers have a secret weapon: collaboration.”

If the mission codes were written in an “alphabet” of 256 letters, there were 65,000 possible codes with two letters. An eight-letter code would have eighteen
quintillion
possible combinations. A one-megabyte code had more possible combinations than the number of particles in the universe. Even if a grasshopper had thousands of trillions of code-breaking cells, the odds of hitting the jackpot and finding the right mission code would be vanishingly small.

To solve a problem that would have taken one grasshopper the lifetime of the universe, DARPA’s engineers used collaboration to zero in on the solution.

“The grasshoppers can communicate to avoid redundant calculations. In effect, one of them says, ‘I’m only looking for codes starting with A.’ Another will say, ‘Okay, then I’ll only look for codes starting with B.’ When a search hits a dead end, that grasshopper sends out an alert. The first grasshopper to find the correct code tells the rest how to narrow their search, so they can confirm for themselves that the code is correct.”

“How do they do that? They don’t have transmitters.”

“They can tap on each other’s bodies to pass the message on.”

“Sounds pretty primitive.”

“They can also spread the message farther by signaling with light. I tried it myself. Let me show you.”

I closed the suicide simulation and launched the mission I’d written to get a feel for the tutorial. The whole thing was just a few kilobytes of code. Each grasshopper acted as a search node, transmitting its results to the others with light signals from its bioluminescent wings.