Free Blood Music by Greg Bear Page B

traced his fingers along the back. Vergil lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.
    “I can’t find it,” Edward said. “It’s smooth. There’s something flexible; the harder I push, the tougher it becomes.” He walked around in front of Vergil, chin in hand. “You don’t have any nipples,” he said. There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations whatsoever.
    “See?” Vergil said. “I’m being rebuilt from the inside out”
    “Bullshit” Edward said. Vergil looked surprised.
    “You can’t deny your eyes,” he said softly. “I’m not the same fellow I was four months ago.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about” Edward played around with the images, rotating them, going through the various sets of organs, playing the NMR movie back and forth.
    “Have you ever seen anything like me? I mean, the new design.”
    “No,” Edward said flatly. He walked away from the table and stood by the dosed door, hands in his lab coat pocket “What in hell have you done?”
    Vergil told him. The story emerged in widening spirals of fact and event and Edward had to make his way through the circumlocutions as best he could.
    “How,” he asked, “do you convert DNA to read-write memory?”
    “First you need to find a length of viral DNA that codes for topoisomerases and gyrases. You attach this segment to your target DNA and make it easier to lower the linking number—to negatively supercoil your target molecule. I used ethidium in some earlier experiments, but—”
    “Simpler, please, I haven’t had molecular biology in years.”
    “What you want is to add and subtract lengths of input DNA easily, and the feedback enzyme arrangement does this. When the feedback arrangement is in place, the molecule will open itself up for transcription much more easily, and more rapidly. Your program will be transcribed onto two strings of RNA. One of the RNA strings will go to a reader-a ribosome-for translation into a protein. Initially, the first RNA will carry a simple start-up code—”
    Edward stood by the door and listened for half an hour. When Vergil showed no sign of slowing down, much less stopping, he raised his hand. “And how does all this lead to intelligence?”
    Vergil frowned. “I’m still not certain. I just began finding replication of logic circuits easier and easier. Whole stretches of the genomes seemed to open themselves up to the process. There were even parts that I’ll swear were already coded for specific logic assignments—but at the time, I thought they were just more introns, sequences not coding for proteins. You know, holdovers from old faulty transcriptions, not yet eliminated by evolution. I’m talking about the eukaryotes now. Prokaryotes don’t have introns. But I’ve been thinking the last few months. Plenty of time to think, without work. Brooding.”
    He stopped and shook his head, folding and unfolding his hands, twisting his fingers together.
    “And?”
    “It’s very strange, Edward. Since early med school we’ve been hearing about ‘selfish genes,’ and that individuals and populations have no function but to create more genes. Eggs make chickens to make more eggs. And people seemed to think that introns were just genes that have no purpose but to reproduce themselves within the cellular environment. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, saying they were junk, useless. I didn’t feel any qualms at all with my eukaryotes, working with introns. Hell, they were spare parts, genetic deserts. I could build whatever I wanted.” Again he stopped, but Edward did not prompt Vergil looked up at him, eyes moist “I wasn’t responsible. I was seduced.”
    “I’m not getting you, Vergjl.” Edward’s voice sounded brittle, on the edge of anger. He was tired and old memories of Vergil’s carelessness towards others were returning; he was exhausted, and Vergil was still droning on, saying nothing that really made sense.
    Vergil slammed his fist on the edge