Junk DNA Read online

  “Sure, the Universal Turing Machine,” Janna core-dumped. “Foundations of Computer Science. Breaking the Enigma code. Reaction-diffusion rules; Turing wrote a paper to derive the shapes of patches on brindle cows. He killed himself with a poison apple. Alan Turing was Snow White, Queen and Prince all at once!”

  “I don’t want to get too technical for your limited mathematical background,” Veruschka hedged.

  “You’re about to tell me that Alan Turing anticipated the notion of DNA as a program tape that’s read by ribosomes. And I’m not gonna be surprised.”

  “One step further,” coaxed Veruschka. “Since the human body uses one kind of ribosome, why not replace that with another? The Universal Ribosome — it reads in its program as well as its data before it begins to act. All from that good junk DNA, yes Janna? And what is junk? Your bottom drawer? My garbage can? Your capitalist attic, and my start-up garage!”

  “Normal ribosomes skip right over the junk DNA,” said Janna. “It’s supposed to be meaningless to the modern genome. Junk DNA is just scribbled-over things. Like the crossed-out numbers in an address book. A palimpsest. Junk DNA is the half-erased traces of the original codes — from long before humanity.”

  “From before, and — maybe after, Wiktor was always saying.” Veruschka glove-tapped at a long-chain molecule on the screen. “There is pumptose!” The gaudy molecule had seven stubby arms, each of them a tightly wound mass of smaller tendrils. She barked out a command in Russian. The S-cube-enhanced Applied Biosystems unit understood, and an amber bead of oily, fragrant liquid oozed from the output port. Veruschka neatly caught the droplet in a glass pipette.

  “That pumptose is rockin’ it,” said Janna, marveling at the churning rainbow oil-slick.

  “We going good now, girl,” winked Veruschka. She opened her purse and tossed her own Pumpti into the vat. “A special bath-treat for my Pumpti,” she said. Then, with a painful wince, she dug one of her long fingernails into the lining of her mouth.

  “Yow,” said Janna.

  “Oh, it feels so good to pop him loose,” said Veruschka indistinctly. “Look at him.”

  Nestled in the palm of Veruschka’s hand was a lentil-shaped little pink thing. A brand-new Pumpti. “That’s your own genetics from your dirty fork at the diner,” said Veruschka. “All coated with trilobite bile, or some other decoding from your junk DNA.” She dropped the bean into the vat.

  “This is starting to seem a little bent, Veruschka.”

  “Well… you never smelled your own little Pumpti. Or tasted him. How could you not bite him and chew him and grow a new scrap in your mouth? The sweet little Pumpti, you just want to eat him all up!”

  Soon a stippling of bumps had formed on the tiny scrap of flesh. Soft little pimples, twenty or a hundred of them. The lump cratered at the top, getting thicker all around. It formed a dent and invaginated like a sea-squirt. It began pumping itself around in circles, swimming in the murky fluids. Stubby limbs formed momentarily, then faded into an undulating skirt like the mantle of a cuttlefish.

  Veruschka’s old Pumpti was the size of a grapefruit, and the new one was the size of a golf ball. The two critters rooted around the tank’s bottom like rats looking for a drain hole.

  Veruschka rolled up her sleeve and plunged her bare arm into the big vat’s slimy fluids. She held up the larger Pumpti; it was flipping around like a beached fish. Veruschka brought the thing to her face and nuzzled it.

  It took Janna a couple of tries to fish her own Pumpti out of the vat, as each time she touched the slimy thing she had to give a little scream and let it go. But finally she had the Pumpti in her grip. It shaped itself to her touch and took on the wet, innocent gleam of a big wad of pink bubblegum.

  “Smell it,” urged Veruschka.

  And, Lord yes, the Pumpti did smell good. Sweet and powdery, like clean towels after a nice hot bath, like a lawn of flowers on a summer morn, like a new dress. Janna smoothed it against her face, so smooth and soft. How could she have thought her Pumpti was gnarly?

  “Now you must squeeze him to make him better,” said Veruschka, vigorously mashing her Pumpti in her hands. “Knead, knead, knead! The Pumpti pulls skin cells from the surface of your hands, you know. Then pumptose reads more of the junk DNA and makes more good tasty proteins.” She pressed her Pumpti to her cheek, and her voice went up an octave. “Getting more of that yummy yummy wetware from me, isn’t he? Squeezy-squeezy Pumpti.” She gave it a little kiss.

  “This doesn’t add up,” said Janna. “Let’s face it, an entire human body only has like ten grams of active DNA. But this Pumpti, it’s solid DNA like a chunk of rubber, and hey, it’s almost half a kilo! I mean, where’s that at?”

  “The more the better,” said Veruschka patiently. “It means that very quickly Pumpti code can be recombining his code. Like a self-programming Turing machine. Wiktor often spoke of this.”

  “But it doesn’t even look like DNA,” said Janna. “There’s scraps of it in all the labs at Triple Helix. I messed with that stuff every day. It looks like lint or dried snot.”

  “Pumpti is smooth because he’s making nice old proteins from the ancient junk of the DNA. All our human predecessors from the beginning of time, amphibians, lemurs, maybe intelligent jellyfish saucers from Mars — who knows what. But every bit is my very own junk, of my very own DNA. So stop thinking so hard, Janna. Love your Pumpti.”

  Janna struggled not to kiss her pink glob. The traceries of pink and yellow lines beneath its skin were like the veins of fine marble.

  “What?!” said Janna. She felt a sliver of ice in her heart. “Freeze my Pumpti? Freeze your own Pumpti, Vero.”

  “I need mine,” snapped Veruschka.

  To part from her Pumpti — something within her passionately rebelled. In a dizzying moment of raw devotion Janna suddenly found herself sinking her teeth into the unresisting flesh of the Pumpti. Crisp, tasty, spun cotton candy, deep-fried puffball dough, a sugared beignet. And under that a salty, slightly painful flavor — bringing back the memory of being a kid and sucking the root of a lost tooth.

  “Now you understand,” said Veruschka with a throaty laugh. “I was only testing you! You can keep your sweet Pumpti, safe and sound. We’ll get some dirty street bum to make us a Pumpti for commercial samples. Like that stupid boy you were talking to before.” Veruschka stood on tiptoe to peer out of the bank’s bronze-mullioned window. “He’ll be back. Men always come back when they see you making money.”

  Janna considered this wise assessment. Kelso was coming on pretty strong, considering that he’d never talked to her at school. “His name is Kelso,” said Janna. “I went to Berkeley with him. He says he’s always wanted me.”

  “Get some of his body fluid.”

  “I’m not ready for that,” said Janna. “Let’s just poke around in the sink for his traces.” And, indeed, they quickly found a fresh hair to seed a Kelso Pumpti, nasty and testicular, suitable for freezing.

  As Veruschka had predicted, Kelso himself returned before long. He made it his business to volunteer his aid and legal counsel. He even claimed that he’d broached the subject of Magic Pumpkin to Tug Mesoglea himself. However, the mysterious mogul failed to show up with his checkbook, so Magic Pumpkin took the path of viral marketing.

  Veruschka had tracked down an offshore Chinese ooze farm to supply cheap culture medium. In a week, they had a few dozen Pumpti starter kits for sale. They came in a little plastic tub of pumptose-laced nutrient, all boxed up in a flashy little design that Janna had printed out in color.

  Kelso had the kind of slit-eyed street smarts that came only from Berkeley law classes. He chose Fisherman’s Wharf to hawk the product. Janna went along to supervise his retail effort.

  It was the start of October now, a perfect fog-free day for the commercial birth of Magic Pumpkin. A visionary song of joy seemed to rise from the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay, echoing from the sapphire dome of the California sky. Even the tourists could sense the
sweetness of the occasion. They hustled cheerfully round Kelso’s fold-out table, clicking away with little biochip cameras.

  Kelso spun a practiced line of patter while Janna publicly adored her Pumpti. She’d decked Pumpti out in a special sailor suit, and she kept tossing him high into the air and laughing.

  “Why is this woman so happy?” barked Kelso. “She’s got a Pumpti. Better than a baby, better than a pet, your Pumpti is all you! Starter kits on special today for the unbelievably low price of—”

  Over the course of a long morning, Kelso kept cutting the offering price of the Pumpti kits. Finally a runny-nosed little girl from Olympia, Washington, took the bait.

  “How do I make one?” she wanted to know. “What choo got in that kit?” And, praise the Holy Molecule, her parents didn’t drag her away, they just stood there watching their little darling shop.

  The First Sale. For Janna, it was a moment to treasure forever. The little girl with her fine brown hair blowing in the warm afternoon wind, the dazedly smiling parents, Kelso’s abrupt excited gestures as he explained how to seed and grow the Pumpti by planting a kiss on a scrap of Kleenex and dropping it into the kit’s plastic jar. The feel of those worn dollar bills in her hand, and the parting wave of little Customer Number One. Ah, the romance of it!

  Now that they’d found their price point, more sales followed. Soon, thanks to word of mouth, they began moving units from their website.

  Janna’s dad, who had a legalistic turn of mind, had warned them to hold off any postal or private-carrier shipments until they had federal approval. Ruben took a sample Pumpti before the San Jose branch office of the Genomics Control Board. He argued that, since the Pumptis were neither self-reproducing nor infectious, they didn’t fall under the strict provisions of the Human Heritage Home Security Act.

  This was catnip for their business, of course. Magic Pumpkin’s website gathered a bouquet of orders from eager early adopters.

  But, paradoxically, Magic Pumpkin’s flowering sales bore the slimy seeds of a smashing fiscal disaster. When an outfit started small, it didn’t take much traffic to double production every week. This constant doubling brought on raging production bottlenecks and serious crimps in their cash flow. In point of fact, in pursuit of market establishment, they were losing money on each Pumpti sold. The eventual payback from all those Pumpti accessories was still well down the road.

  Janna was bored by their practical difficulties, but she had a ball inventing high concepts for Pumpti care products and Pumpti collectibles. Kelso’s many art-scene friends were happy to sign up. Kelso was a one-man recruiting whiz. Buoyed by his worldly success, he began to shave more often and even use deodorant. He was so pleased by his ability to sucker people into the Magic Pumpkin enterprise that he even forgot to make passes at Janna.

  Every day-jobber in the start-up was quickly issued his or her own free Pumpti. “Magic Pumpkin wants missionaries, not mercenaries,” Janna announced from on high, and her growing cluster of troops cheered her on. Owning a personal Pumpti was an item of faith in the little company — the linchpin of their corporate culture. You couldn’t place yourself in the proper frame of mind for Magic Pumpkin product development without your very own darling roly-poly.

  Cynics had claimed that the male demographic would never go for Pumptis. Why would any guy sacrifice his computer gaming time and his weekend bicycling to nurture something? But once presented with their own Pumpti, men found that it filled some deep need in the masculine soul. They swelled up with competitive pride in their Pumptis, and even became quite violent in their defense.

  Janna lined up an comprehensive array of related products. First and foremost were costumes. Sailor Pumpti, Baby Pumpti, Pumpti Duckling, Angel Pumpti, Devil Pumpti, and even a Goth Pumpti dress-up kit with press-on tattoos. They shrugged off production to Filipina doll-clothes-makers in a sweatshop in East L.A.

  Further up-market came a Pumpti Backpack for transporting your Pumpti in style, protecting it from urban pollution and possibly nasty bacteria. This one seemed like a sure hit, if they could swing the Chinese labor in Shenzhen and Guangdong.

  The third idea, Pumpti Energy Crackers, was a no-brainer: crisp collectible cards of munchable amino acid bases to fatten up your Pumpti. If the crackers used the “mechanically recovered meat” common in pet food and cattle feed, then the profit margin would be primo. Kelso had a contact for this in Mexico: they guaranteed their cookies would come crisply printed with the Pumpti name and logo.

  Janna’s fourth concept was downright metaphysical: a “Psychic Powers Pumpti Training Wand.” Except for occasional oozing and plopping, the Pumptis never actually managed conventional pet tricks. But this crystal-topped gizmo could be hawked to the credulous as increasing their Pumpti’s “empathy” or “telepathy.” A trial mention of this vaporware on the Pumpti-dot-bio website brought in a torrent of excited New Age emails.

  The final, sure-thing, Pumpti accessory was tie-in books. Two of Kelso’s many unemployed writer and paralegal friends set to work on the Pumpti User’s Guide. The firm forecast an entire library of guides, sucking up shelf-space at chain stores and pet stores everywhere. The Moron’s Guide to Computational Genomics. Pumpti Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts. Backing Up Your Pumpti. Optimize Your Pumpti for High Performance. The Three Week Pumpti Guide, the One Day Pumpti Guide and the Ten Minute Pumpti Guide. The Pumpti Bible, with the quick-start guide, walkthrough, lists, maps and Pumpti model index. Pumpti Security Threats: How to Protect Your Pumpti From Viral DNA Hacks, Trojan Goo Horses, and Unauthorized Genetic Access. And more, more, more!

  The doll costumes were badly sized. The Pumpti Backpacks were ancient Hello Kitty backpacks with their logos covered by cheap paper Pumpti stickers. The crackers were dog biscuits with the stinging misprint “Pupti.” The “telepathic” wand sold some units, but the people nuts enough to buy it tended to write bad checks or have invalid credit card numbers. As for the User’s Guides, the manuscripts were rambling and self-indulgent, long on far-fetched jokes yet critically short on objective scientific facts.

  One ugly roadblock was finally removed when the Genomics Control Board came through with their blessing. The Pumptis were deemed harmless, placed in the same schedule-category as home gene-testing kits. Magic Pumpkin was free to ship throughout the nation!

  But now that their production lines were stabilized, now that their catalogs were finally proofed and printed, now that their ad campaign was finally in gear, their fifteen minutes of ballroom glamour expired. The pumpkin clock struck midnight. The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness.

  Instantly, without a whimper of warning, Magic Pumpkin was deader than pet rocks. They never shipped to the Midwest or the East Coast, for the folks in those distant markets were sick of hearing about the Pumptis before they ever saw one on a shelf.

  Janna and Veruschka couldn’t make payroll. Their lease was expiring. They were cringing for cash.

  A desperate Janna took the show on the road to potential investors in Hong Kong, the toy capital of the world. She emphasized that Magic Pumpkin had just cracked the biggest single technical problem: the fact that Pumptis looked like slimy blobs. Engineering-wise, it all came down to the pumptose-based Universal Ribosome. By inserting a properly tweaked look-up string, you could get it to express the junk DNA sequences in customizable forms. Programming this gnarly cruft was, from an abstract computer-science perspective, “unfeasible,” meaning that, logically speaking, such a program could never be created within the lifetime of the universe.

  But Janna’s dad, fretful about his investment, had done it anyway. In two weeks of inspired round-the-clock hacking, Ruben had implemented the full OpenAnimator graphics library, using a palette of previously unused rhodopsin-style proteins. A whiff of the right long-chain molecule could give your Pumpti any mesh, texture, color-map, or attitude matrix you chose. Not to mention overloaded frame-animation updates keyed into the pumptose’s ribosomal time-steps! It was a techie
miracle!

  Dad had even flown along to Hong Kong to back Janna’s pitch, but the Hong Kong crowd had no use for software jargon in American English. The overwrought Ruben killed the deal by picking fights over intellectual property — no way to build partnerships in Hong Kong.

  Flung back to San Francisco, Janna spent night after night frantically combing the Web, looking for any source of second-round venture capital, no matter how far-fetched.

  Finally she cast herself sobbing into Kelso’s arms. Kelso was her last hope. Kelso just had to come through for them: he had to bring in the seasoned business experts from Ctenophore, Inc., the legendary masters of jellyfish A-Life.

  “Listen, babe,” said Kelso practically, “I think you and the bio-Bolshevik there have already taken this concept just about as far as any sane person oughta push it. Farther, even. I mean, sure, I recruited a lot of my cyberslacker friends into your corporate cult here, and we promised them the moon and everything, so I guess we’ll look a little stupid when it Enrons. They’ll bitch and whine, and they’ll feel all disenchanted, but come on, this is San Francisco. They’re used to that here. It’s genetic.”

  “But what about my dad? He’ll lose everything! And Veruschka is my best friend. What if she shoots me?” “I’m thinking you, me, and Mexico,” said Kelso dreamily. “Way down on the Pacific coast — that’s where my mother comes from. You and me, we’ve been working so hard on this start-up that we never got around to the main event. Just dump those ugly Pumptis in the Bay. We’ll empty the cash box tonight, and catch a freighter blimp for the South. I got a friend who works for Air Jalisco.”

  It had been quite some time since Ctenephore Inc. had been a cutting edge start-up. The blazing light of media tech-hype no longer escaped their dense, compact enterprise. The firm’s legendary founders, Revel Pullen and Tug Mesoglea, had collapsed in on their own reputations. Not a spark could escape their gravity. They had become twin black holes of biz weirdness.