July 1987
Once upon a time long before Jack….
This time it was big. His plan was an ambitious one. And he was glad. He had been idle for a long time and found his recent preoccupation to be refreshing. And it was just so big! If he were able to experience fear, he would probably be terrified by the prospect of what he was about to attempt to create. But that was not the case. He was simply stunned by its size and complexity and the amount of work it would require. But the extra effort would not hurt him. In fact, he mused, it might actually allow him to become more involved than he had ever been before. His past creations had been simple. Too simple. Especially the past few. He had become tired with each of them very quickly; so to amuse himself he had terminated them all with sometimes absurd yet always comical acts of immeasurable force and destruction. He laughed again at the memories.
His humor quickly faded when he thought once again about how long he had allowed himself to remain inactive. He was left determined to tackle his new plan much more seriously.
It would be self-generating. He felt that was necessary. All that he had ever done in the past had required so much maintenance as to become infuriatingly tedious. This time he wanted to be entertained. This time he wanted to observe something without having to interfere. He wanted it to change, and even grow, on its own. He wanted it to remain a pleasant distraction for much longer than the others had.
He caught himself becoming more and more pensive. That was good. Lately it had become hard for him to focus his energies, and it was crucially important that he was able to concentrate. Clear thought was vital. Without it he might go mad. But he supposed that it really would not matter much either way. After all, what was madness in the absence of sanity? Was it possible? He wondered. Perhaps he was already insane. There was really no telling.
This kind of futile thought had been becoming increasingly bothersome during all the time he had been doing absolutely nothing. The inactivity had made it hard to avoid. For this reason he was excited by his big new idea. Thinking about it made his nebulous form shiver.
The plan had taken great pains to formulate. But he did not mind at all. It had been time well spent and the effort had invigorated him. Bit before initiating his plan, he decided to run through it once in his mind. He thought of how it might unfold. There were so many variables included that the possibilities were endless. He contented himself by thinking about only one of the possible paths the plan might take. He started with one premise, and that split in two. And of those alternatives, he chose one. And so he let his mind wander, and followed the plan unfold like the multiplication of a cell.
He thought, and thought, and time passed, and he was glad.
His thoughts continued, like cells dividing…
And then there was Jack…
Jack wrenched the last lug nut tightly into place and wiped his brow. An ugly black smear appeared across his forehead. Cursing under his breath, he put the flat in the trunk and stowed the tools. He was an hour and a half late and Roger was probably fuming. Let him, Jack thought. Jack was not about to let anyone try intimidating him. Especially not that small excuse for a man.
He got into his car and drove on.
Jack Laumer was not a handsome man. Behind his back he was often referred to as the carp. He knew this, but never let it bother him. He was short and he accepted that. His face was thin, gaunt, and, in all, ugly, and he accepted that too. He was comfortable with his shortcomings for the simple reason that the world needed him. Though ridiculed behind his back, in company he was treated with the utmost respect.
What he did not accept was his inability to attract women. Jack was thirty-eight. Jack was still a virgin. He might not have been, but the thought of paying for services of that sort repulsed him. There was no dignity in that.
He was a man of monumental genius and pride. He held the accolades of Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, and was the recipient of three Nobel prizes. His accomplishments cast a formidable shadow. Jack was a molecular biologist par excellence. His Nobel prizes were the results of years of work in cancer research. Unlike others in the past who had gained recognition for simply outlining the characteristics of the disease, Jack was on the verge of discovering a cure.
That was why Roger Caulfield rudely interrupted him at four forty-five in the morning. Roger, Jack’s associate, was dedicated. But according to Jack, he was a simple ass.
Roger had been characteristically excited on the phone with jack. He said he had found a gene cluster. And this, though it should have excited Jack too, did not. Jack knew all too well that Roger was famous for false alarms. Roger had needlessly cut his sleep short many times before.
The flat tire was the last straw. Jack’s patience snapped like a frayed climber’s rope. His knuckles whitened as he made a futile attempt at strangling the steering wheel. Caulfield, you’ve cried wolf for the last time! The words ran through the car’s chassis like a death knoll.
Moments after Jack had taken care of the flat tire it had started to rain. Now, as he approached the security booth in front of the research center, he was steering his way through monsoon conditions more typical of Bangkok than Vancouver. Jack grew even more dismal. He had an excitable bladder, and the rain was not helping that out too much either. Jack made a quick mental sketch of Roger’s notification of release.
Then his sunroof began to leak.
Jack pulled up to the waiting guard. He wrenched the window down and thrust his identification card out at (he shot a quick glance at the name-tag) Billy Smit. What a moronic name, thought Jack.
“Thank you mister Laumer,” Billy said cheerfully as he handed back Jack’s card.
Jack grunted something incomprehensible and rolled up the window. His car disappeared into the confused mass of buildings that constituted the North Bend Research Center.
“What did you find?” Janice Delmar asked Roger.
Janice was Jack’s new understudy and was a graduate student working towards her doctorate in genetics. She had been putting a lot of effort into the Laumer project in the past few weeks and this was the third time in a row that she had worked through the night helping Roger. Recently she had been noticing the black stains under her eyes slowly growing, but despite her exhausting schedule, she really appreciated the experience.
Jack had recently decided to take Janice on as a full-time researcher. Unfortunately, she misinterpreted the act thinking that Jack really appreciated her abilities and efforts. She was wrong. Taking her on to the project was Jack’s idea of a sexual advance. He could really care less if she was a benefit to his research. The only thing Jack admired about her was her body. And though Janice was still blinded by respect for Jack, she would soon grow to detest the man. He would not mind. He would soon become humanity’s savior.
In the lab, Janice was starting to become concerned about Roger. His breathing was growing increasingly shallow, as if he were hyperventilating. His chest began heaving faster than what Janice thought was safe. Then he began to spout gibberish and appeared to try implanting his fingers into his skull as if trying to perform some strange form of self-mutilation inspired by a Vulcan.
“Are you alright professor?” Janice asked as her concern grew.
Roger stared fixedly into the neutrinoscope’s viewing monitor.
“Professor, please say something!”
“This is it!” he muttered and in one fluid motion slapped the recording mechanism into action and spun violently to embrace his bewildered assistant. ” I found it! I found it!” he screamed as he led Janice through a series of bizarre dance steps around the lab. “Jack was right! God-damn him, he was right…I didn’t believe him…I did, but…he was right…and I found it! I’ve got to phone him. Let go of me!”
He flung Janice into a wall closet, exhausted. Inside the closet something clanked. Something smashed. Roger ran out of the room whooping.
“I’m glad for you professor Caulfield, but what did you find?” She did not expect him to hear her. She straightened out her lab-coat and waited for the pain in her hip to subside. Janice thought of following him, but resisted. She would wait….
Jack drove up to West Wing Two and took the liberty of parking his car in the brightly marked no parking zone at the entrance. He climbed out of the car, got soaked, and as he began to damn Roger’s soul, he was cut short.
Roger burst through the glass doors still screaming his chorus of “I found it.” The hour and a half wait for Jack appeared not to have bothered him at all. His excitement had not subsided a micron. Jack was robbed the chance to speak until he had been dragged all the way to the lab. He had never seen Roger this wired before. His anger cooled a bit and he waited for Roger to explain.
He did not. Roger instead led Jack to the neutrinoscope and played back the recording he had made. He sat back and said, “It’s incredible Jack. Look.”
Jack watched. He saw the screen center on a cluster of six very small black strips. `So what,’ he thought. His anger reinstated itself and he was about to begin peeling Roger’s skin off when the magnification began to increase.
Roger spoke. “Jack, those six chromosomes are the ones that contain the gross physical properties codes. Watch them.”
Jack watched. The thin black strips grew until the left extreme of the third chromosome occupied the entire screen. Besides that, nothing happened. “Roger, just what the hell is this?”
“Wait…a couple more seconds…Jack, the gene clusters, they exist!” said Roger. “That’s gene B2106, the one whose function we haven’t been able to determine yet.”
Jack felt a chill travel down his spine. The gene clusters exist? Oh God, how he hoped Roger was right. He watched the screen in anticipation.
Then it happened. Jack’s jaw fell with an audible click. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever witnessed. The magnified gene split as if crisscrossed by a perfect grid. It appeared that the minute section of chromosome had been perfectly diced. And it happened so gracefully. It was not a violent fracturing, but rather a slow flowing separation. What had only a moment ago appeared to fill the screen like a solid black rectangle, now looked like two rows of five blocks each lying atop one another. A wave of dizziness passed over Jack and he reached to balance himself on the countertop in front of him.
Though Roger had played the tape back twice already for himself, he was again mesmerized by the sight. He did manage to say “wow.”
What happened next was, to Jack, completely incomprehensible. His theory of gene clusters was suddenly rendered so incomplete. So useless. He gazed at the viewscreen in abandon. The individual blocks, the fragments of the once solid gene, began to quiver. And it quickly became apparent that they were not simply quivering. They were…Moving! Rotating! “What in God’s name is happening?” gasped Jack.
In an instant, the blocks shifted once to the left. Then, as if nothing at all had changed, the divisions between the blocks disappeared. The gene was again a solid smear across the screen. Jack fainted.
When he regained consciousness, he found himself lying atop a cot in a room adjacent to the laboratory. The door was wide open and he heard voices drifting in from the other side. Jack carefully got to his feet, rubbed his temples, and walked into the lab. “Roger, I just had the most amazing dream….
Roger cut him off sharply. “It was no dream Jack. The clusters are real.” He hesitated and continued, “You were right.”
Janice smiled at him. “Congratulations professor, doctor Caulfield just finished explaining. For a while I thought you had both gone nuts. In the excitement, I, well, didn’t really understand what I was seeing.”
Jack had not yet had the chance to become excited, so he did. He whooped with joy. Then he did something that would have not been possible if not through force. Jack grabbed Janice, cupped her left breast with his right hand, and kissed her long and hard.
The lab assistant was too shocked to resist her assailant. When Jack released Janice her face was flushed and her eyes blazed with anger. She stammered something that Jack and Roger could not quite understand and stormed out of the lab, the complex, and Jack Laumer’s fan club forever.
A few months later Jack would hear a rumor that she had changed her field of study to astronomy. She had also gained prominent standing on powerful women’s rights organization. Jack would feel disappointed, but not for the right reasons.
As soon as Janice left the room, Roger turned to Jack.
“You ass,” he said, though not really meaning it. He knew Jack well enough to realize how the action had been evoked. He allowed a conspiratorial grin to creep across his face.
Jack looked at Roger. He was still breathing heavily. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. My theory was right, to an extent, but how can we begin to explain what we’ve just witnessed?”
After he removed the cassette from the neutrinoscope’s recorder, he cradled it under his arm and turned again to Roger. Let’s get some sleep. We’re going to need all we can get.”
He turned to leave, but stopped. He turned to look once again at Roger. One more thing…” he held the tape out and pointed it at his associate. About God…”
Roger looked at him quizzically. Yes?” he said.
“Well, now he’s got some competition.”
Jack turned and left the room.
Ten years later Jack found himself sitting once again in front of his neutrinoscope. He looked terrible.
After their discovery, Jack and Roger had worked hard together. Interestingly, they grew to be very good friends. But when Roger married four years later Jack resented him for it. Granted, he was jealous of Roger, but his disappointment had deeper roots. He fell deep into the throes of self-pity and became blind to all but his own inadequacies. The only outlet Jack had was to continue his work, but even that failed to help him forget his despair.
He was further devastated two years later when Roger and his young family were killed. An Amtrack express rammed their stalled car and dragged it two hundred feet down from a crossing. Jack was left completely inactive for about six months.
During that period, geneticists all over the country started to criticize Jack’s gene cluster theory. Jack had not yet revealed his discovery. He wanted a solid explanation first. And his inactivity after his friend’s death allowed geneticists all over the country to conclude that he had arrived at a dead end. They all considered his idea of a gene cluster to be purely ridiculous. It was this that prompted Jack to ram the truth down all of their throats. He resumed his work.
Now, ten years later, he completely understood what he had witnessed with Roger that night in the lab. He switched off the neutrinoscope and smiled. Cancer, he thought contentedly (but for the wrong reasons), will soon be no more debilitating than the common cold.
He had easily proven his gene cluster theory. Individual genes, which were once thought to be single units, were not. But his original theory had also fallen short of the truth.
Jack had originally proposed that each gene was composed of two to four “blocks,” each of which dictated a different property of a single physical trait. For instance, the gene that controlled for hair color would have three sub-units. One for the actual color, one for that color’s hue, and one for its purity. In proposing his original theory, Jack based his suppositions on the idea that each individual physical trait was far too complex to be controlled by one single gene (or, as he termed it, unit).
His first theory correctly predicted the existence of sub-units, and postulated that there were only two to four per gene. But the truth was that a gene was actually composed of ten sub-units. Ten! But the need for ten sub-units took longer to understand. Jack labored for a long time over the problem and what he eventually revealed was exciting. Much the same as his theory, each of the ten sub-units controlled one different characteristic of the trait for which the entire gene was responsible. However, contrary to all past theory, each gene had the potential to create all possible cross-species variations of the single trait it controlled. A person with blue eyes also possessed the genetic material for brown, green, and hazel eyes. Jack also found signs of dominance and recessiveness among the sub-units themselves. Specifically, a child born of blue-eyed parents would have a blue sub-unit much more likely to affect his eye color than the also present sub-units of all other possible eye colors.
However, the real riddle Jack had tackled concerned the sub-unit rotation he and Roger had witnessed. That had baffled him the longest.
It had become apparent that sub-unit rotation was a property unique to the B2106 gene. B2106 was the one in which Jack and Roger had first witnessed the rotation, and not only was it unique to B2106, but it was the only function that B2106 seemed to possess. That particular gene appeared to be otherwise useless. Though it also had ten sub-units, they appeared to serve no purpose at all.
His initial attempts to solve the problem of B2106 were futile. The mystery it presented did not become less. It became more mysterious the more Jack studied it.
The sub-unit rotation he and Roger had watched on that first occasion was that of a human gene. And Jack had soon discovered that all living things possessed B2106-like genes. Most of the ground he initially gained on the B2106 gene was from work with fruit flies. The sub-unit rotations occurred much more frequently in these insects.
Unfortunately, years of frustration had gotten him no further than this.
Then, one night, Jack had a dream. He dreamed of patterns.
It suddenly seemed so obvious to him. B2106 was the key to evolutionary change. It had to be.
In his work with the fruit flies he had discovered that sub-unit rotation occurred once every four hundred fifty generations. Any changes that befell the flies between those rotations became permanent characteristics after the rotations occurred. After each rotation, old forms became obsolete. And Jack soon realized that B2106 was the gene that allowed for minor genetic changes to become permanent. It was a locking device. It was incredible.
Since this discovery came from his work with fruit flies, Jack was forced to draw a parallel from them to humans. If rotation occurred roughly once every four hundred fifty generations, then sub-unit rotation in a line of humans occurred about once every twenty thousand years. And the archaeological record supplied the evidence that Jack felt acted as the confirmation he needed. The characteristics of Cro-Magnon Man disappeared completely from the human lineage approximately twenty thousand years previously. And the sub-unit rotations prevented those characteristics from cropping up once again.
But what was it that allowed the sub-units to rotate? This was the last problem that Jack needed to solve. But he remained baffled until he managed to isolate and identify the substance he later coined Mutation Locking Sub-Unit Bonder. MLSUB was a chemical substance unique to the B2106 genes. Jack found that it was this chemical that allowed for rotation. It bonded the sub-units from, as he discovered, rotating freely and uncontrollably. MLSUB broke down precisely every four hundred fifty generations, and for only about three seconds each time. It would again bond the sub-units after they had been allowed to rotate once, but only once. It locked all changes until the next rotation occurred.
This final discovery allowed Jack to find the Holy Grail of medicine. The cure for cancer. After he had explained the function of MLSUB, he tested to see if it might play a role in the development of the disease. He was immediately rewarded. He found that cancer victims experienced uncontrolled sub-unit rotations. Their MLSUB had, for some reason, become defective, and any changes in the genetic makeups of cancer patients were being made permanent the moment they occurred. Cancer was not simply different sorts of useless growths. Instead, it was the result of useless physical changes being made lethally permanent.
Jack went on. He found that an increase in the chemical that MLSUB was composed of reinstated sub-unit bonding and terminated the spread of cancerous growths.
Jack was still smiling as he sat staring at the mass of metal and plastic in front of him. “You’re beautiful,” he said aloud.
He rose from his seat and kissed the neutrinoscope. He felt so infinitely powerful (but again for the wrong reasons) and two weeks later he revealed his discovery to the world.
We’re here today in honor of Doctor Jack Laumer. The human race truly owes its future to him.”
The president of the Nobel Foundation stopped speaking to wipe a tear from his chin. He looked over at Jack’s glowing face, and initiated a standing ovation. After a few moments, Jack began clapping himself. He had never felt such a surge of emotion. These assholes finally realize who they’re dealing with, he thought.
Slowly, the crowd hushed again.
The president continued, and this time spoke directly to Jack. “Humankind can never justly repay you. For what you’ve done and what you’ve given us we’re eternally grateful. I cannot think of more to say that would possibly be appropriate for this occasion…except thanks…from all of us. Will you accept this token?”
The crowd gave another standing ovation as Jack approached the podium. He was suddenly the most attractive man that had ever existed (or so he thought). He reached for the award in the out-stretched hand of the president…and disappeared…
as did the podium,
the crowd,
and the building,
Europe,
and the Earth.
It all simply vanished.
The cells stopped dividing and the Universe blinked out of existence.
He need not think about it any longer. It seemed as if it would work well. He was glad. Double-checking was always good, though not really necessary.
He hoped his plan would take the same course, but that was doubtful. There were too many variables and Jack was only one. That was all right though. He knew that any of the endless number of possibilities would prove equally entertaining.
He set to work.
He concentrated.
It was coming easily now. He spoke, Let there be light!
And there was….
Greg Culos,
1987, Vancouver