Excerpt

one

I’m kneeling in front of the hundred-foot altar at the centre of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, my hands pressed together before me as if in prayer. Only, between my two hands, I am clutching two whole other hands. A second pair, with very slim fingers, and cool to the touch. This is because they are made out of bronze.

Also, a Swiss guard – and I mean a really burly, no-nonsense son of a bitch, despite the Bavarian schoolgirl outfit – is holding a halberd to my neck. This is not a playtime halberd; this is a no-shit, take-you-off-your-horse, send-your-head-on-its-merry-way sort of halberd.

And I’ve got an unshakable feeling the next few minutes are going to suck.

On the upside, my friend Helen has an extremely large-caliber handgun trained on the Swiss guy’s melon.

It is getting toward midnight. So even though we’re smack in the middle of Easter Week, St. Pete’s is not doing any business. The whole Vatican is asleep – including, presumably, His Holiness, who’s sacked out probably not three hundred yards from where I’m kneeling.

"She dies, you die," says Helen. The Swiss guy ratchets his scowl in response.

"I’d take that at face value," I say, without moving my head. "She’s a behavioral geneticist. She knows what a worthless pile of pre-programmed amino acids you are."

I’m perceiving a deep and fundamental irony about where this is all coming to a head. You want to know who gave you your soul? You want a personal relationship with God? Well, we found God. We’re all up in God. We’ve got God’s private number.

And so do you. Imprinted something in the order of a hundred trillion times – once in every living cell in your big dripping corpus. Of course, you can’t tell the religionists this kind of thing. They’ll have your head. On a halberd, evidently.

Did I mention the religionists? The cabal of Qabbalists? The horde of Hindu Naga cultists? They’re all here, too, in Christendom’s grandest church, flitting furtively around all the ornate pillars, the statues of the saints – and the shadows. Shadows like you wouldn’t believe. The Jewish and Hindu kids are on the home turf of the Papists, and so they’re a little edgy, right? But, you know what, in my book, the God guys are all reading from the same script.

The wrong one, as it happens. Only Helen and her very close friends get to look at the real Holy Text. Electron microscopes. Mass spectrometers. Shotgun gene sequencers. God’s infinite grace in a double helix. Word.

Yet somehow Helen has ended up wielding a very different sort of tool on this night. I can see the hammer of her nickel-plated .44 hauled back like a snake strike that’s all over but the nervous-system shutdown; and she’s distributing her gaze coolly around the room. This makes a stark contrast to the night I met her – when she was tearing up a nightclub in San Francisco, drunk, flirting with everyone. Including with me. And including with my monkey. That was three weeks ago.

Back up.

two

	From: A'hib Khouri 
	To: keq@ctake.com
	Cc: Helen Dolan 
	Subject: change of plans
	Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 03:38:42  (PST)

	Listen. What we agreed on. It’s all changed now. Those men, the same men you
	described, they’re on to me now. I saw the same black sedan. And when I went
	home last night, one was sitting in my living room -- I saw him through the
	window. I ran for it, and went back to the office.

	I’m starting to believe the sequence, the pattern we’ve found, is a HUGE deal.
	That it really means something. And that these people want it from us. Look,
	I’m attaching a zip file, ok? It’s got the HGP identifier of the specific
	genome we used, details on the sequencing method, and, mainly, the exact
	location of the sequence on the genome. I’ve DES encrypted the whole thing
	using the first 128 bits in the pattern (triplet values) as a key. You should
	easily be able to decrypt it -- but whoever’s been snooping our mail won’t.
	DON’T LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO THIS.

	I’m going to get out of the country, at least for a while, back home. If you
	don’t hear from me . . . actually, I have no idea what to tell you to do with
	this. But I for one am going to keep trying to decode it. Just somewhere safer.

	- A’hib

			

Hold on. I hadn’t seen this mail yet. Helen hadn’t seen it yet. We didn’t yet know A’hib was dead. Correction – we didn’t yet think A’hib was dead.

Back up.

three

Yeah, that’s it – right about there. I remember The Prodigy was playing. That song always makes me think of San Francisco. It was still big when I moved out there.

Swinging star-flashes, liquid sweat-diamonds arcing in strobe motion. Two hundred bodies heaving like thrown pistons. A club in the Mission District, I don’t even think it’s open anymore. I don’t know if it was open the following weekend.

But they had a liberal monkey-policy, which made the joint just alright by me.

Don’t leap ahead and get all anthropomorphic, though. The monkey isn’t a club kid. The monkey doesn’t even really dance. But he does enjoy a good groove. Usually, he stakes out a table or a bit of sofa, while I’m off shaking my bits, where he’ll squat and sway a little – and smile. Big smile. Happy guy. I love my monkey. Don’t fuck with the monkey. Do not fuck with the monkey.

The monkey’s name, and by which he should probably henceforth be referred, is Erasmus D. And Erasmus, in all fairness, and just for the record, isn’t even really a monkey. He’s a chimpanzee – specifically, a bonobo chimp, humankind’s nearest living relative. An eye-blink six million years of evolution, and the merest handful of genomic base pairs, separates Erasmus from your mother. (Or, more aptly, your father. But you take my point.)

Helen hit it off with Erasmus like the kissing cousins that they are.

In fact, that night in the Mission, when I’d dripped a glorious sweat trail back to the table where I’d left him, I barged in on Erasmus and Helen kissing. Nothing kinky. (And you just never know with bonobos, who are the unrivalled booty monsters of the primate world.) Just an exchange of grandmotherly cheek pecks. Sweet, it was.

And that’s my initial, and enduring, image of Helen Dolan.

Kissing my chimp.

About Helen Dolan

Twenty-nine years old. American. Holds advanced degrees in behavioral genetics and biomedical informatics. Reserved, mysterious, garment-rendingly complex; got that icy professionalism/too-cool-for-school thing nailed. Unreasonably hot. Unreasonably. Dark, dark, dark – lots of Afro-Caribbean blood. Head full of wild creature curls, a moonless midnight thicket. Legs to next leap year. Waist you want to tape measure.

Works for GenenW, another Silicon Valley biotechnology revolution in corporate form. (The W reportedly stands for "Whatever".) Takes her work, which is heart-attack serious, seriously. Otherwise, doesn’t give a fuck. Just doesn’t give a fuck.

About Me (While We’re At It)

Twenty-seven years old. British. Terminal degree in cognitive science from Cal Berkeley, undergrad in computer science from Stanford. Came to the States for the universities, stayed in the Bay Area for the parodically perfect weather and the BPs (beautiful people). Redheaded, also curl-stricken, with defenseless English skin and melanomas-to-be in freckle form. Not too bad to look at. Figure oscillates between slim and slinky, but with well-inflected curves on the right surfaces. Pretend I don’t give a fuck.

Work for a video game software company called Complete & Total Ass-Kicking Entertainment, Inc. My job there mainly involves architecting and implementing advanced strong AI in the context of NPC bots for use in . . . but, then again, who gives a damn about work right now.

Me And Helen Going Home Together The Night We Met And, Kind of Inexplicably, Winding Up In Bed

"I’m not really gay," I told her at five in the morning when she woke me up sneaking out. (I left out the ". . . but you’re just so fucking hot" bit.)

"Hey, who is," she drolled, pouring herself back into her club outfit. After a brief-but-visible internal debate, she came back and kissed me – on the forehead.

That was when I knew we were only going to be friends.

But it was when she kissed Erasmus goodbye that I figured we were going to be good friends.

Mucho Mas On The Monkey

Handsome and self-possessed pygmy (aka bonobo) chimp, weight eighty pounds, stands two-and-a-half feet short. Black fur with a white tail splotch, wears his hair parted down the middle. Comic-book creature ears, but for all that with the solemn and serene gaze of a many-millennia-old soul. Biological age probably about the same as mine, at a guess, which has him flirting with monkey middle age.

Serene and self-directed. Can be left alone in the house for indefinite stretches as long as I stock the fridge. Watches cable, sleeps in his own bed, and flushes as appropriate. Even feeds the fish – when he’s not fucking with them by tapping on the glass, making goofy faces, etc.

Get this: only monkey ever to escape from the SF Zoo. Subsequently shown on local news (via heli-cam) climbing the western-most span of the Golden Gate Bridge, evading capture. Shot on home video four days later terrorizing art vendors in Union Square. Where he wasn’t caught on film: in a tree out front of my place busting into a bird-feeder. How I lured him inside: made him a better offer (bananas).

Why I had to have him: A month earlier I’d been to the zoo with my co-worker Thaddeus and his two small children. In the monkey house we found the older one, the girl, who is called Kennedy, frozen in place, staring at one of the chimps. The chimp sat staring back. Thad came up behind her.

"Hey, Kennedy. You okay?"

The little girl bit her fist. "Why is he here, Daddy?" she asked.

"What do you mean, honey. He lives here."

She paused again, maintaining eye contact with that disturbingly expressive set of eyes. "Does he know why he’s here? Why is he here? Why does he look like that?"

"Like what, honey?"

"Like . . . like he’s not supposed to be here."

It turned out later that this episode got to Thad like you wouldn’t believe. Me too, in honesty. Though I’ve no way of knowing if Kennedy’s monkey was Erasmus.

Why he’s called Erasmus D: possibly too obvious to belabor, but let’s just recapitulate Wordsworth’s suggestion that the child is the father of the man.

What This Story Is About

The origin of subjective higher consciousness on Earth. (Hint: It didn’t come from any of the places you might have been in the habit of thinking it did. Just a friendly heads-up.)

Pandora's Sisters Have Got a Secret