Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii

taste in coffee.
    “Um, sure.”
    Wait—Kurokawa was drinking it the same way, without batting an eyelash. I wondered if I could trust their choice in restaurants. Then again, if the food turned out to be as sweet as the coffee, I could always get Nguyen to take me somewhere later.
    Things were looking up after all.



6    Office
    A faint tone sounded from the other side of the heavy door as I touched the brass handle. The HMC lock recognized me immediately.
    My first full day on the job.
    The door opened smoothly, and the scent of okra flowers that Nguyen had decorated the office with wafted from inside.
    “Morning, Mamoru.”
    Yagodo’s cheery voice manifested from the vicinity of his desk. I blinked twice before I even saw him and entered his stage. The functionality was just like my workspace in Workers Heights. He had thought of everything.
    There was a cloud in the middle of the room.
    It was so thick I could barely see the desks on the other side. The cloud revolved slowly, shot through with vivid streaks of purple lightning. Each streak seemed to leave behind a small, bright point of red. Yagodo was working on something, obviously. But what?
    “Sorry, things are a little messy. I’ll have this cleaned up in a minute.”
    I could see him waving through gaps in the cloud. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
    “Isamu, can’t you do this in your own workspace? How can the rest of us get anything done? We’re sorry, Mamoru.” I could hear Nguyen from somewhere behind the cloud.
    “What is this?”
    “A molecular model.” Yagodo walked right through it. The cloud didn’t react, which meant he wasn’t using physical tags.
    “If we’ll be working with a two-hundred-gig gXML file, we’ve got to speed up the matching process. I’m just playing around looking for shortcuts. Want to take a look before I shut this down? I might be onto something. Hey, where’s Takashi?”
    “L&B collared him while we were eating breakfast. Another emergency meeting.”
    “It’s well after dinner in San Francisco. They’re keeping him busy.” Yagodo laughed as if he thought this was humorous.
    I remembered Kurokawa’s look when he got the call. He’d come back to our table from the buffet counter with twice as much food as me. When the call came, he knitted his eyebrows and sighed, “I don’t believe it.” He’d gone back to his room to take the call.
    They wouldn’t leave us alone. I wasn’t surprised. Four days had passed since Mother Mekong reported the mutation, and L&B still had no information to help them break the news to the world.
    I dropped my shoulder bag. “It’s already evening in San Francisco. I doubt the call will last long. Takashi keeps his stage activated, so he’ll find his way here.”
    Bolts of lightning kept flashing inside the cloud. Each flash left a purple streak about six inches long. Yagodo reached into the cloud, took a streak by both ends and held it up to the light.
    “Brute-force solution to a sixteen-character hash in zero point two seconds. Not bad. I’d like to multiplex the cell connections and up the bandwidth to the limit of cell-liquid potential, but I’m still trying to find something in my communications interface library than can handle it.”
    I looked closer at the streak Yagodo was holding to the light. I could actually see a tiny results log: A>B:loren_ipsum. “Isamu, what are you doing exactly?”
    He lowered his gaze and looked at me intently. “I didn’t mention this, did I? I took a stab at designing a bio-nanomachine. I’ve been working on it since last night. The idea is to do a brute force hash calculation.”
    “You’re kidding. You built this?”
    “It was easy. Calculating machines are assemblies of simple input/output circuits. They don’t have to be electronic. Proteins can do the job. If you have a set of operating rules, the approach is more or less the same. This setup isn’t super efficient, but if I can make it work, we won’t have to