Upgrade(37)

“I was held in a metal cage barely large enough to stand in. Most of the time, I was blindfolded. They put me through four mock executions, and worse. Much worse.”

I moved over to my sister’s bed and sat across from her.

I tried to hold her hand, but she pulled it away.

“One of them spoke English. He’d been born and educated in London. We talked three times. The last, I asked how he could do the things he was doing to me. To the others they had burned, drowned, stoned, beheaded. These were Buddhists, after all. It’s one thing to torture and kill in the name of a god you think created the universe, but their core belief is that nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent. They’re supposed to believe in ending suffering.”

“What’d he say?”

“He had the softest voice. Almost delicate. He said, ‘Sometimes you have to cause suffering to end suffering.’?”

She was quiet for a while.

There was only the sound of a television in an adjacent room bleeding through the thin walls. The heat pump in our room cutting on again.

I wondered if her memory was as enhanced as mine. I had plenty of dark moments in my past that I could now relive with brutal perfection. But nothing like what she had just described to me.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” I said.

“Me too.”

“Are you still in touch with the people who rescued you?”

Kara smiled. “They’re some of my best friends.”



* * *



—

Sirens roused me in the middle of the night. As I rushed to the window, Kara pulled her tactical shotgun from under her bed.

Through the icy window, I watched as several police EVs and a fire engine raced by on the main road. Though my heart pounded from the instinctive fear reaction, the colder, analytical part of my mind whispered that they wouldn’t bring a fire engine to arrest me, and there certainly wouldn’t be incoming sirens.

Kara came up behind me.

“It’s not for us,” I said.

I returned to my bed and killed the lights, allowing my mind to superimpose that DNA sequence on the popcorn ceiling.

    TCC CCC CCG ACC CGA CCC ACG CAC CGC ACC CCT CTC GTG GTC ACC GCA CCC ACC CGG GAC CCC ACG GGT CCC CCC CCC CCC CCC CCC CCC GAC CCG ACC CAC GCA CCG CAC CCC TGG TGT CGG TCG GTC GGT CGG ACC CCG GGA CAC CCG CAC CCC



There was something bothering me about it. Something staring me in the face that I was failing to comprehend.

I ran a frequency analysis in my head.

Twelve T’s.

Nineteen A’s.

Ninety-two C’s.

Thirty-three G’s.

Very C rich.

And were those numbers significant?

I let them drift through my mind like clouds on a summer day. I observed them. 12, 19, 92, 33, 12, 19, 92, 33, 12, 19, 92, 33. I reversed them: 21, 91, 29, 33, 21, 91, 29, 33.

Nineteen was a prime number. I noodled with that for a moment, to no avail.



* * *



—

My eyes shot open.

It was morning.

Kara snored lightly.

My mind must have been working the problem while I slept, because I knew what was bothering me about the sequence.

The T’s and A’s never repeated.

I jumped out of bed, turned on the light. Went to the table, which was covered in pages of failed attempts to break the code—if it even was a code.

I flattened the receipt Kara had brought back from the charge station and wrote down the nucleotide sequence from memory, removing the spaces between the codons and underlining every T and A.

TCCCCCCCGACCCGACCCACGCACCGCACCCCTCTCGTGGTCACCGCACCCACCCGGGACCCCACGGGTCCCCC-CCCCC-CCCCC-CCCCC-CGACCCGACCCACGCACCGCACCCCTGGTGTCGGTCGGTCGGTCGGACCCCGGGACACCCGCACCCC



“What are you doing?” Kara mumbled from bed.

“Just a second,” I said.

If my mother had intended to message me through my genetic code, she had a problem to overcome. How to communicate using only four symbols. And how to create a cipher with A, C, G, and T that only someone looking for it could detect.

Kara walked over, put her hand on my shoulder.

I looked up at her, said, “What if the T’s and A’s don’t actually represent letters or other symbols?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because they never repeat. Maybe their purpose is to indicate the start of a word or…” And suddenly, I saw how I would create a substitution code based on the four letters of DNA. “Oh my god.”

“What?”

“If you had created this code,” I said, “what two base units of communication would be essential for this cipher to indicate?”

“Numbers and letters.”

“What if the T’s and A’s indicate what the next character will be? One of them—the A perhaps—means the character will be a number. And the T means that you have to go a step further and translate the number into a letter of the alphabet.”

“You mean like one equals A, two equals B, all the way to twenty-six equals Z?”

“Exactly.”

“So then the G’s and C’s represent numbers?” she asked.

“That’s how I’d do it. And if I only had two symbols with which to write any number, I’d use something like the Roman numeral system. Let the G equal five, and the C equal 1. Or the other way around. Look at the first sequence.”