51
As Cash walked down the path lined with electric tiki torches, the sonorous croaks of the American bullfrog filled her ears and fireflies flitted around the marsh that surrounded Strickland’s isolated house. It was around ten p.m. when Cash rapped on his door.
The scientist answered wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Cash noticed he had more tattoos than she had realized, all of which looked like chemical structures.
“Didn’t know you were a Deadhead,” Cash said. She stepped around a brown kitten that had scurried up to her ankles, mewing fiercely.
“I’m fostering the little bugger. Local shelter’s a little overrun,” he explained.
“Good on you. Noisy little fellow.”
Strickland chuckled. “No kidding. But sometimes a little ruckus is nice when I’m all the way out here by myself. To avoid the quiet, I used to stay late in the lab. Any more news of Reno’s death…?”
He trailed off, and Cash noticed with surprise there were tears in his eyes. For such a tough-looking guy, Strickland was really quite open with his emotions.
“I’m sorry, no. But we’re gonna find the bastards, I promise you.”
They settled into Strickland’s living room, which was awash with brown fabric and leather décor. Wild 3D art hung on the walls. Sitting in a manila file on the driftwood coffee table was the DNA analysis. Next to it was the vial with the piece of the skull of Saint John the Baptist.
“That’s all yours,” said Strickland, stroking his massive beard thoughtfully. She noticed he had a funny expression on his face.
She picked it up, and she thrust it into her pocket. She would secretly return it to the lab tomorrow. “You want to summarize it for me?” she said. “In layman’s terms.”
“Sure,” Strickland said in an odd tone of voice, his face unreadable. He hinged open his laptop while Cash flipped through the report, trying to make sense of the graphs and numbers.
“I’m going to get right into it,” Strickland said. “In the first round of testing, I received some strange results. I figured the sample must have been contaminated somehow. All it takes is some stray DNA from somewhere to screw everything up. I ran the tests a couple of more times and received the same results. Endlessly frustrating.”
“How many more times?”
“Six runs. It’s extremely rare when I have to do that, but of course, this sample has been handled by countless people over thousands of years, subjected to greasy fingers and God knows what else. Most of the aDNA we work with comes from burials, so it hasn’t had the kind of continuous contamination that this one has.”
“What were the results?” Cash said.
Dr. Strickland hesitated. “I’m afraid all the DNA runs proved to be thoroughly contaminated. I couldn’t make sense of it.”
“You didn’t find anything? Anything at all?” Cash squinted in frustration. What a waste of time—at such huge risk.
“Well, I did get consistent results.… There were a lot of inexplicable sequences. Nothing that made a lick of sense.”
“Tell me. Even if it doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, a fair amount of the DNA in the sample was similar to synthetic DNA, with new combinations that I’ve never seen either in nature or in the lab—”
“Synthetic DNA?” Cash asked.
“Yes. Scientists sometimes assemble artificial genes, strands of DNA that are not found in nature, to use in various applications, such as gene therapy, GMO crop improvement, and synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, for example, was used to create the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Itwas also used to integrate spider DNA into silkworms to produce lighter, more durable silk. Synthetic biology helped fabricate the protein SLH to make Impossible burgers—you know, the vegan kind that taste like real meat. It’s pretty good, bleeds and everything.”
“Right, right,” said Cash impatiently. “So what does it mean?”
“Well—look, the bottom line is your sample is hopelessly contaminated. It’s just not possible with our current technology to synthesize huge sections of the human genome, which is what this looks like, but obviously can’t be. Scientists can synthesize DNA in a lab, but only in short strands. The largest-scale synthesis project that I know of is the 1,005-base oligonucleotide sequence created just a few years ago. But that project is not evencloseto what I found here. That was only a thousand base pairs. The human genome is approximately 3.2billion. Scientists have never been able to synthesize the human genome due to numerous challenges: error rates in long sequences, ensuring proper folding and organization of the DNA, and, frankly, serious ethical considerations. There’s no way this is possible with our current technology.… No way. What we have here must be contamination resulting in impossible results. It’s the only explanation I can think of…” He trailed off.
“But wait. Are you saying it looks like synthetic DNA? And that’s why you think it’s contaminated? I’m not really understanding you.”
“Look, these sequences are totally bizarre. Patterns, chemical modifications, and methylations that have never been seen before. Contamination is the only explanation.”
“I see. And the age?”
He took a deep breath.
“Four carbon-14 runs show this sample is two thousand years old. It’s obviously been contaminated over the centuries.”
“So that’s it? The DNA is too contaminated to be sequenced? There’s no way to get around that?”
“Look, Agent Cash, aDNA sequencing often fails. Maybe not as bad as this, but DNA degrades over time, and sometimes you just can’t pull good data from it. Sorry I couldn’t do better. I mean, it issortof human—that’s what you can tell your friends. It’s certainly not from an animal.”
Cash thanked him, took up the report and sample, and bid thebearded scientist goodbye.Sort of human? What did that mean? Why had Khachatryan wanted her to sequence the DNA? She felt an almost unbearable frustration. Reno’s murder, the risks she’d taken, the trouble she’d gotten Romanski into—all for nothing.
