Jungle (Colony Book 2), page 62
“I’m no botanist,” he said, shaking his head. “Just give us the simple version.”
“No,” Jane said, shaking her head. “That’s not what I meant. I mean the genetic code, or what we think might be the genetic code. The XNA. It’s complicated. Unlike anything I’ve ever heard of. So complex the computers are having issues even accepting it as XNA.”
“How so?” Anna asked, leaning forward with a curious—or somewhat hostile—look on her face.
“Well …” The botanist leaned back, her lips pursing as she stared down at her meal. “The best I can do is compare it to what we’re familiar with,” she said, looking back up at both of them. “We’re Terran, right? We have four nucleotides, right? The classic A-G-T-C?”
“I remember that much,” Jake said. “But if you go deeper, you might lose me.”
“Noted,” she said with a nod. “Well, on Earth, you can order those four types of nucleotides to produce codons—the genetic micro-instructions—and everything in our bodies—” She tapped at her arm with a finger, “—and I do mean everything, is built up reading off of those codons.”
“So what we’ve spent the last week looking for in the lab is some sort of ‘base structure’ similar to ours. Four bases, or something close to it. Primitive XNA.”
“I’m guessing from your tone, you had no luck,” Anna said.
“No,” Jane replied, shaking her head again. “We didn’t. Instead we started getting all sorts of conflicting reports—really strange ones. Mind you, most of this was dismissed as me not knowing my way around an analyzer by that arrogant ass Silva.” She scowled. “Like I wouldn’t know my way around a Razor. Anyway, like I said, we spent about a week at it—mostly at Silva’s insistence that it couldn’t be anything else—trying to find simple XNA structures and no results. So we tried more complex parameters.”
“We were still getting odd reports at this point, but to be honest, we were kind of dismissing it as noise. Not actual noise,” she added quickly. “Just … improper reports. Misaligned data.”
“It kind of sounds like someone was making something go wrong,” Jake suggested, only to pull back and lift both his hands as Jane shot him a fierce look.
“If anything’s gone wrong it’s the samples we’re feeding the machine,” she said, her accent becoming slightly heavier as her verbal pace picked up. “We simply give the machine the material and make sure it is catalogued properly.”
“Sorry,” he said, giving her an apologetic shrug. Right … Hair trigger temper at the moment. It was such a rapid, about-face from the quiet, more reserved woman that normally showed her face with the rest of the group. “I don’t know how it works, so I made an assumption. It was incorrect. I apologize.”
The fire faded from Jane’s face slightly, cooling to a more lukewarm pile of embers. “As I was saying,” she said, turning to keep her eyes on both of them once more. “We tried expanding our parameters with familiar patterns of XNA that have shown up on other worlds—even the rarer types. Tri-spiral, interlocked, vertical … None of that worked either. We started getting partial hits on some of it, but we’d run the test again or ask for a deeper analysis and … nothing. The machine comes back with more meaningless data.”
“Is that what set you off a bit ago?”
“Basically, yes,” Jane said. “We keep expanding the parameters, keep rerunning the same tests … but we keep getting different results. Like something’s screwing with our samples.”
“Could someone be?” Jake asked.
“What? You mean like another member of the team?” Jane asked, pulling back in surprise. “No! Of course not. First, they’d have to know what to sabotage in the first place; if they just started messing with settings or something, we’d notice. Well, I would. I have my doubts about Silva.”
“So could he be screwing it up?”
“Deliberately?” Jane shook her head. “He doesn’t strike me as the kind to do that. He’s an ass, yes, but he’s dedicated to the science. He’s a sci-purist, if you didn’t know.”
“Actually, I didn’t, but that does kind of rule him out,” Jake said with a nod. As well as explain both why it wasn’t in his file, and a bit of his indignation whenever something goes wrong. Sci-purists are notoriously touchy about the idea of science being improperly carried out. The religion still wasn’t recognized as such—not that the UN recognized any religions outside of their official state-sponsored catch-all—but it certainly counted given how devoted to its ideals its followers were. Despite their “doctrines of infallible truth” swapping every few years as new theories come into being, he thought. You’d think there’d be more holy wars between them than we’ve already gotten.
Come to think of it … He opened his mouth just as Jane was preparing to speak, beating her to the punch. “Do you know what sub-denomination he follows?” There were at least a dozen of them, but some of them were more radical or devoted to various theories than others. There might be an entry in the hab computers that’s up to date, he thought. Maybe.
“I don’t,” Jane said, shaking her head, and he shrugged.
“It does still put him out of the running for sabotage,” he said.
“Intentional sabotage, yes,” Jane said. “Willful ignorance, no. He did hold us up for almost a week by insisting that the XNA we were looking for had to be simple rather than complex.”
“Okay,” Jake said, nodding. “What about someone who wasn’t a member of the team?”
“Like who?” Jane asked, confused.
“Like an AI, or not even something that complex,” he said. “Just a computer program. Something that was screwing with your results.”
“I mean … it’s sort of possible?” Jane leaned back in her seat, frowning. “I don’t know what the point of it would be. I mean, something like that would probably be spotted in the long run, and it would show up in the archives, as well as the satellite dump. All it would really keep us from doing is getting an effective read on the XNA here and now—but that won’t matter to the next group they send.”
“What if they didn’t want to send one?” Anna asked.
“Then messing with our Razor would be a poor way to do it,” Jane said, crossing her arms. “It would simply invite UNSEC to send more expeditions, not … whatever it is you two are suggesting. You two are really paranoid, aren’t you?”
“Just examining all sides,” Jake said, offering her a grin that he hoped would mollify. “That’s … It’s kind of what we do. And neither of us know how this all works like you do, so we have to ask.” Jane nodded, his answer apparently satisfactory.
“Anyway,” he said, waving a hand. “What do you think is driving the results you’re getting?”
“Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here eating a lunch after having another shouting match with Dr. Silva, would I?” she replied, scowling and stabbing her fork into her meal once more. “All I’ve got are theories. Basic ones.”
“Like?” Anna prompted.
Jane opened her mouth, then paused. “You two are pretty curious. Have you done work with a team like this before?”
“Curiosity,” Jake replied. “It’s not our department, nor either of our fields, but it is interesting. Also, you and Silva have been sniping at each other since we got here in the morning summaries. Now both of us are finding out why.”
“That, and Jake loves a good mystery,” Anna added, nodding in his direction. He didn’t bother to disagree—though if he had, it only would have been to point out that she appeared to as well.
Well, maybe not enjoy, he thought, but she at least knows one when she sees it. It’s just through a different lens.
“All right, well I guess that’s a good enough reason,” Jane said, pausing to take a bite of her meal. She chewed for a moment and then swallowed. “Though it’s not much of a mystery. It’s just a case of Silva being too stubborn to accept that we’re seeing something new.” She paused again, as if waiting for them to interrupt, and then, when no interruption occurred, leaned forward.
“Look, Silva and I happen to disagree on this—no surprise there—but more and more I’m convinced I’m right,” she said quietly, glancing around as if worried someone was watching them. Probably Silva, given that everything the team said and did was monitored, recorded, and piped to the orbital satellite.
“The problem we’re having is twofold,” Jane said, continuing. “First, we’re getting mangled results back, results that don’t match up. We’ll give the Razor a sample, it’ll do its best to find what passes for XNA, give us results that don’t make sense, and even if we feed it the exact same sample and have it run the analysis a second time, we get a different result. Minutes apart.”
Okay, that is strange, Jake thought. Really strange. He almost opened his mouth to comment, but Jane was already moving forward with her explanation.
“So that’s the first weird thing,” she was saying. “The second is that what data we are getting back is … incomplete.”
“But it’s messed up,” Anna said. “You just said that. How can you know it’s incomplete?”
“Because I’ve compared the skewed results we’ve gotten over the last week. Or rather, I’ve been comparing them. Behind Silva’s back. He runs the samples, he gets data that makes no sense, shouts and accuses me of messing with it, and I grab the results and feed them into a suite of pattern recognition software between my other projects. And I’m finding patterns.” She leaned forward, her eyes wide and eager, but Jake merely lifted one eyebrow and glanced at Anna.
“So … the analyzer returns regular gibberish?” he ventured. “Like it’s—”
“Yes,” Jane said, a look of satisfaction on her face. “Like it’s looking at parts of the sequence, but not the whole sequence. Maybe.” She pulled back, doubt clouding her face. “It’s hard to tell, since the patterns only match up on a grander scale—which may be in part why Silva keeps missing them. Even if I put two of the similar patterns together, once you look closely, they don’t match.”
“So … that means what?” Anna asked.
Jane shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t explain the discrepancies yet, and to be honest, if I could, I’d probably have to spend a good amount of time analyzing everything. I do have a theory as to why there’s the larger patterns, however.”
“And what would that be?” Jake asked.
Jane smiled. “I think Silva’s got it all wrong,” she said. “Despite the simplicity visually of the life we’ve seen here, I don’t think we’re looking at a young, simple genetic ecosystem. I think we’re looking at a very complex one.”
“How complex?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know,” Jane said, her eyes now wide with excitement. “But it makes sense. We’re scanning for simple XNA structures, or even what we call complex ones.” She lifted her hands, making quotes around the word “complex.” “What if the genetic code here is so massively complicated that the Razor is looking too closely? So all it finds are random repeating patterns that look like they could be XNA, but doesn’t reach a conclusion because the XNA is too complex for it to recognize?”
“So … really complex, then. How large would that have to be in order for the Razor not to notice it?” Anna asked.
Jane shrugged. “I don’t know. We already ran a test looking for the most complicated form of XNA we’ve found and got the same mess back. And, to be fair, it might not be largeness per se that we’re talking about …”
“I get it,” Anna said, holding up a hand as if physically staving off the botanist’s explanation. “It’s complicated.”
“Exactly. And Silva is determined to find something simple. Then, every time the test comes back, he accuses me of having done something to it to avoid facing his own failures. Or that the machine failed, or any number of explanations. I stopped trying to help him after the third day,” Jane added, her voice dry.
“That sounds like something Moria should know about,” Jake said. “Or the commander.”
“They both do,” the botanist said. “At the meeting tomorrow morning I’m making my piece for taking over operation of the Razor to try and expand the parameters past what Silva finds believable. He can spend his time cataloging mineral deposits in the local flora—Not that the job hasn’t been interesting,” she added quickly. “I’ve been over dozens of resonance scans, and it looks like the metal build up not only laces the material to support the size and structure, but also creates conduits through the canopy—”
“We heard about that,” Anna said. “That’s what interacts with the atmosphere to make all the interference, right?”
“Well, yes, but it’s so much more prime than that!” Jane said, her face lighting up. “These conduits contain island metals, just like the bark. Think of how many storms we’ve seen since we’ve come here. At least a few, right? They’re fairly common. Along with lightning strikes. And yet we don’t see any damage from those strikes out in the canopy, because the trees have evolved to be natural lightning rods!”
“Whoa, really?” Jake sat up. “You’re right, I haven’t seen any damage, but … Natural lightning rods?”
“It fits,” Jane said. “We still can’t explain a lot of other stuff, but at least that could explain why we’re not seeing fires after every storm. The metal content could go further, too. I mean, it’s almost laid out like circuitry. Naturally occurring circuitry. If we could cut one of those trees down …”
“Yeah … maybe if we broke out our survival saw from the emergency kit,” Anna said. “And even then that thing’s made for cutting metal, not a metal-laced tree.”
“Right,” Jane said, some of her enthusiasm fading, but not much. “Either way, Silva should be able to worry about that just fine, while I try to salvage his genetic screw-ups.”
Yeah, that didn’t sound vengeful at all, Jake thought, nodding. Then again, after what Silva’s been putting her through, I can’t really blame her for feeling a little bit miffed.
“En fin,” Jane said, turning her attention back down to her meal and wolfing down the last few bites like she was starving. “I should probably get back to the bio-hab and get back to work now that he’s had some time to stew alone. I’ve got to put together my proposal for the morning meeting anyway.” She stood, taking the remains of her lunch and dropping them neatly in the disposal. “I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.” Then, without another word, she hurried out of the common area, her shoes slapping against the deck.
“Well,” Anna said, a curious look on her face as she turned to look at Jake. “That was enlightening. Interesting too.”
“I know,” he said, eyes flicking to the entryway Jane had fled through. “This place gets weirder by the minute. All kinds of weirdness.”
“Just like Pisces,” Anna said, and the faint sense of foreboding crawled back into Jake’s stomach.
“Yes,” he said. “Like Pisces.”
“It couldn’t be connected …” Anna said quietly. “Could it?”
“I don’t—” He caught himself before he could finish his sentence. “I suppose it’s unlikely,” he countered. “Wouldn’t be hard to check, though. We have that satellite. It should be able to take an accurate reading of the planet. But just as a check—Pisces was lifeless, remember?”
“Yeah,” Anna said, nodding. “This place is the opposite of that. But it’s strange like Pisces. Weirdness like that—” She motioned in the direction of the botany lab. “—just make me all the more nervous. Makes me wonder what other unexplained weirdness there is going on that’s just getting summarized for the morning meetings that we don’t hear about.”
“It wouldn’t be hard to check,” Jake said. “We are allowed to check through all the records, if only to make sure everyone’s staying safe.”
“We can just talk to people too,” Anna pointed out. “Since I’m not going to understand half of the techno-babble they use in those reports.”
“Right,” he said, nodding. “Hadn’t thought of that part.”
“The talking, or the techno-babble?”
“Both, really. More the second one. I’d like to get an idea of what’s puzzling them before I wander in blind.”
Anna nodded. “So … something new to keep us busy in the downtime?”
“It’s better than nothing,” he said. “And certainly better than staring out at this jungle all the time.” He turned and looked out the window once more.
He’d meant to turn back towards Anna after just a moment, his motion purely symbolic, but instead he paused, a small chill rolling down his spine for reasons he couldn’t fathom.
“Jake?” Anna’s voice called out to him, and the world snapped back into focus. “What is it?” she asked, turning to look out the window as well.
“I … I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. The … feeling … momentary as it was, of unease had caught him by surprise. Then it was gone. “I just …” He stared out at the forest frowning. “For a moment I was sure something was watching me.”
The good mood that had filled the room was gone once more as Anna nodded. “I know exactly what you mean. It’s like something out there is … observing us. The same way we are it. I can’t explain it any other way.”
“Nerves,” Jake said, though his voice sounded hollow to his own ears. He pushed himself up from his seat, grabbing the box his meal had been in. “Just nerves.”
“Yeah,” Anna said, her eyes flicking back toward him. “That’s gotta be it.” But she sounded no more convinced than he was.
“Anyway,” he said, walking around the table and tossing his garbage in the disposal. “I’m going to head back to the armory and start pulling up reports. See what other oddities we might want to know about.”
That, he thought, and I can check the security footage and see if there was something watching us from those trees. It felt almost unreasonably paranoid, but at the same time …
“I’ll join you,” Anna said, rising from her seat. “Two sets of eyes are better than one, right?” He didn’t miss the way her eyes flicked toward the distant tree line for just a bare second, before coming back to him. “Besides,” she said. “I need to make sure our gear is ready to go anyway.” There was an undercurrent beneath her words, a hidden subtext that said “Just in case we need it.”
