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James sat on the metal step stool in his lab coat and latex gloves, trying to bribe Bertha to the top of her cage. She was obese, she needed exercise, but despite living in a great multilevel cage she never climbed to the top except for a peanut. Unfortunately she and Sadie were prescribed a bland diet by Dr. Letty right now, so all he could offer was a bit of banana. All that did was annoy her, and she gaped and shook the cage, her deep purple flicking with extra black. More black every day, she was getting more sick. Sadie was her normal violet with gray, and despite the fact that she too wasn't exactly svelte she dashed to the top and stole the banana. Bertha didn't like that either, and she gaped at the both of them, conspiring against her deserved peanutty goodness.

He liked to come in here, not just to say hello to the animals or even observe their behavior, but sometimes just to think. His brain went around and around sometimes, like a centrifuge with a broken timer, and it could take a long time to slow down without flying out of control. The arboretum was good for that too, but there were often other people in there relaxing too. And the flowers shouted excessive colors, it was distracting when he wanted to be inside his mind.

James started with an addition to his daily diary. Memorized of course. There were tons of notebooks around but the purpose of it was to keep track of time in a way that was easily organized and referenced. He started by mentally picturing the date: Year eight, week 20, day 1. The real year was fourteen, he was pretty sure, but he started counting after Sample Day eight years ago so that was the way the diary was organized. A red week, even numbers were red. Naturally the date was red too, a unique shade associated with those numbers. Then he assigned events to the date: Dr. Sydney arrives, give tour, flood wheat. Something else might happen later in the day, but odds were that would be it. The events influenced the color of the date, greenish for both wheat seedlings and Dr. Sydney, so the day ended up an earthy brown tone. He filed away the colored date, firmly imprinted in his mind now.

He contemplated Dr. Sydney then, studying what he knew so far. Dr. Sydney was hidden within himself, dark emerald on the outside and fiery orange in the inside, but only tiny sparks of that leaked out. James briefly considered the possibility he may actually be the donor. He pushed aside the colors for a moment and considered his real physical characteristics. Dark brown mostly straight hair, dark brown eyes, dual dimples. Possible. He couldn't tell from facial structure yet, he needed to grow a few more years first. But James was dubious. Dr. Sydney was clearly below Dr. Hansen in the hierarchy, who himself was below Mr. Raines. Surely the donor was above Mr. Raines, otherwise why would they have bothered to clone him? No, the most likely scenario was that he was dead. The arrival of Dr. Sydney did not change the analysis.

The door swung open and Ms. Hilary brought in her cart with one of the transgenic monkeys. Shiny brown, Cliff.

"Oh, hi, James. Aren't you supposed to be with your new teacher?" She attached the transfer box to the cage and Cliff shot in, then his cage mate Norm ran into the box to take his place. Ms. Hilary gave them both a piece of breakfast cereal for following the routine.

"He said I had a free day today. I don't think they gave him much time to look over my work before coming here." Dr. Sydney had mentioned other gifted young people. Where were they, why didn't they live with him at Donoterase? Wouldn't it be easier to train them if they were together? Maybe he was the only young one now.

"So, first impression, do you like him? Cracks the whip less than Raines?"

James tipped his head, analyzing the expression. A whip was a weapon intended to wound, he knew that from Beloved. Mr. Raines had never beaten him with a weapon before, so it must be a figure of speech.

"I don't have enough information yet to form an opinion" he hedged, and Ms. Hilary laughed.

"You've got a future in politics, kid." The gray-haired woman left the room with the new monkey for his daily cognitive tests, waving bye.

Politics. That seemed unlikely. You had to live in the world for that. But he had done some political sims, so maybe that was what she meant.

James rubbed his left knee, realizing he needed to stretch and walk. It hurt more with each flip of a week. He knew he should tell Dr. Hansen about it, but they would only order a painful biopsy that could make the inflammation worse. Let them discover it at Sample Day, more than half a year away; put off all their unconscious fretting over the multitude of ways he was not exactly like the donor. Whatever was going wrong was sure to show up on the mRNA probes. The first piece of his body to fail, but certainly not the last.

He jumped off the stool, earning another monkey scowl from Bertha, and tenderly walked the perimeter of the central labs a few laps before heading into Ms. Mac's. The pain diminished to a dull ache with the gentle exercise. Ms. Mac was technically Dr. Rodhi's research associate, but she had worked at Donoterase so long that in effect she was her own investigator. Her real name wasn't Ms. Mac either, it was Gloria MacPherson, but everybody called her "Mac." She was sitting in front of her computer, her colors of deep azure blue with ribbons of neon green floating around her.

James waited for her to speak first, as was respectful. "Hey there sport. I know I said I was going to flood the wheat today, but can I have you look at something first?"

A little flash of disappointment shot through him. If she put off the flooding until tomorrow, he probably wouldn't get to help. But maybe the problem she was working on was interesting too, so he leaned over to squint at the screen. "Is this the rs005698 sequence?"

"Yeah. I'm definitely getting the allele into the damn plant in the right place, but it doesn't work. Zippo on transcription. What the hell's wrong with this sequence? Computer says it should work. Rodhi says it should work. I've stared at it for hours and my brain says it should work. What do you say, Brainiac?"

James pulled himself into a chair to get an even closer look at the monitor. The parade of little A C G T's filled the screen. In reality it was just black and white letters, but in his mind it was a sea of color, layers of information popping out at him. The base pair sequence, then the codons forming their amino acids like little shiny beads on a necklace. Then the amino acids called to one another to form the protein, folding and looping on itself to create a complex three dimensional molecular knot.

It was all very pretty. Except at the beginning, there was a tiny bit of black there in the transcription start sequence. James willed his eyes to focus on that section. It was only one amino acid, one tiny bead in the strand, but it caused a minute wrinkle that would make it difficult for the promoter to latch on. He deleted that bead, and the protein changed before his eyes, the wrinkle springing away from another side of the protein and lying down into a smooth curve. Better.

"It should work now," he said, turning away from the mad colors on the screen to the soothing blue in front of him. She looked both dubious and amazed.

"Seriously? One codon? Three little base pairs will make all the difference, huh?"

"I believe so, yes. Put it in the seeds and see."

She brought up the modeling program and ran the new sequence through it."Well the computer still says it will work. I'll give it a try tonight. How did you know what to change?"

"I don't know, I just read the sequence. Like reading a book. One of the words was wrong."

Ms. Mac shook her head again. "Well that bit of wizardry deserves a little reward, I think. Shall we drown a bunch of baby wheat plants for a fun afternoon?"

They walked over to one of the seedling rooms, where vast patches of three inch grass plants were growing in deep trays on expansive tables. They were trying out over three dozen variations on a gene that was supposed to increase waterlogging resistance in wheat. No one knew which version would work, if any. The two of them ran around the room taking measurements and samples, the "before" condition, then set up the hoses for the flooding.

James sat and watched in fascination as the water rose on the green spears, up up up, smothering the green with tranquil gray water reflected off the walls. Most of the baby plants were going to die in that gray now, but out of that death would rise a new plant, stronger than all of the ones that came before. Unless they got it wrong, and would have to arduously start the process, creation and destruction, all over again.

 

******

 

The next morning James was ready to go in the sim lab at precisely seven am, waiting for his first day with Dr. Sydney. He forced his outer face to be calm, but inside his stomach twisted with nervousness. Dr. Sydney hadn't talked to him again but had watched him all through dinner, observing and probing from across the room. Maybe he should have made himself a supplement drink like Mr. Raines would have wanted, but Dr. Hansen had told him spaghetti was fine.

The way Dr. Sydney had looked at him, James was increasingly sure he had known the donor. Mr. Raines often gave him the same look, although not with any affection. It the look that said they already knew how he was supposed to behave, because they had seen it all before. And nowhere was the pressure to perform to expectations stronger than during a sim. It had been made clear to him in a thousand subtle ways that there was only one correct way to do a simulation, and that was the way the mystery donor had done it. Only he had to pretend that it was his own invention. A pretend of a Pretend. Often these things had devolved into a mental loop, with James expending more effort trying to figure out what the donor would have done than derive the correct answer. And James had calculated it wrong on many, many occasions.

"Hello, James. Come sit down." Dr. Sydney bade him over to the simple desk a chair. James liked his gentle accent. He wondered what part of the world he was from, and whether he would ever be allowed to tell him about it.

"I didn't bring with me the prompts for a full simulation, so we're going to have to make do until the next transport. Here." He pulled out a black and white photograph from an envelope. "Who is he?"

James picked up the photo and brought it close to his face. Without even glancing back at his instructor he recognized the figure as Dr. Sydney as a young man, smiling with dimples, bent over talking to a little girl in a polka dot dress. Only it wasn't Dr. Sydney. The colors were reversed, orange with green specks instead of mostly green.

"It looks like you, but it isn't you," James started slowly. "Your twin brother?"

"Very good. What can you tell me about him?"

Dr. Sydney had a twin just like he did. Only he probably knew his brother. They grew up together. James shook off these irrelevancies and stared at the photo again, trying to extract more information. Orange usually meant a forceful personality, driven, but the green broke it up. "He liked his work. Was obsessed with it. But also conflicted. He loves the little girl, is fascinated by her, but also feels deep guilt towards her."

Dr. Sydney nodded. "Mm-hm. And who is the girl?"

His daughter was the obvious answer, but not the correct one. "His student. She's one of the gifted ones." James hoped he wouldn't ask for many details on the girl, because her colors were not very clear. Most of what he saw was just the photograph, although that contained useful data too.

"Excellent. Here's another one, what can you tell me about her?" This photo, also in black and white, was a beautiful young woman with long straight hair and a headband, beaming at a baby in her arms. This time the child actually was the daughter. Although the woman looked happy in the picture, her colors were a maelstrom, flipping back and forth between dominant yellow and dominant black with complex undertones to both sides.

"She ... she has a mental disorder," James began uncertainly. Dr. Sydney's eyes widened slightly. James couldn't tell if he was on the right track or not, but decided to keep going. "Bipolar, maybe? Sometimes she is happy, creative, full of life. Other times her world is completely black. There are real reasons for her depression, but her mind amplifies them. She lacks control over her destiny, but does her best to take it anyway."

Dr. Sydney moved the two photos so they were next to each other on the desk. "Do they know each other?"

A stab of anxiety went through James. He decided to be honest instead of guessing, and take the consequences. At least he would know how his new teacher liked to punish. "I can't tell, Dr. Sydney. I need more information. I'm sorry." He tried to calm his breathing, prepare for whatever came next. Dr. Sydney seemed disappointed, but that passed quickly.

"They worked together at the same facility. Based on what you know of their personalities, do you think they would form a friendship?" His tone indicated he thought he had to spell it out a little too much, but he didn't seem angry over it.

James waited for the inevitable instruction to act out the scenario, but Dr. Sydney just waited for the answer. So he took a few seconds to think carefully about the question instead. Orange was consumed with his work, but such people tend to be lonely. And yellow had a joyous personality when she wasn't in the black. She would always pull the people around her into her orbit, like the gravitational pull of the sun. "Yes, if they met while she was in a manic phase. Her vitality would attract him."

"Attract? As in a romantic relationship?"

It was the sort of question where it was impossible to know the correct answer. This time James did guess, based on Dr. Sydney's body language. What did he want to hear? "More of a friendship on her side, but he may have been sexually attracted to her. She is very beautiful. But his feelings were not reciprocated."

Dr. Sydney was very difficult to read, but James thought he had hit on the correct answer. The older man considered him, putting his knuckles under his chin. Finally he put away the photos and said, "Very good. Let's do some visualization exercises next."

James internally let out a breath in relief, grateful he had passed the first test. "Dr. Sydney? May I ask a question?"

"Just call me Sydney, James. Of course you can ask anything."

"What happened to the people in the photographs? In the actual past, not a sim."

A brief look of grief flashed over his face, the fiery orange flaring up. Then Dr. Sydney went back to impassive. A mask. "They died. They both died far too young. Now put that aside, James. We need to work on other things."

 










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