Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii Read Free Book Online Page A

sigh of disappointment. Instead it motioned Yagodo to continue. Sometimes Behavior Correction does the opposite of what you want. Functionality comes with a price.
    “I guess you’ve never chatted with a dog before.”
    I froze. There was something wrong with my commstat bar. No information on where Yagodo was, which provider he was using, his nationality, nothing. Jackpot 7 used multiple cutouts to screen his identity, but on TrueNet you know your caller’s location, always.
    Now the bar was empty except for yagodo , the elapsed time in minutes and seconds, and the charges, which were adding up way too slowly, it seemed to me. Maybe he was using RealVu, which costs almost nothing to deliver to an AR stage. Or was his avatar so cutting-edge that it was hogging system resources and slowing everything down? It was spooky.
    “I’m sorry if I’ve unsettled you, Mamoru. Would I be right if I guessed you’ve never dealt with a salvager?”
    The voice was fiftyish and seemed to be native Japanese. It had a professional tone that didn’t fit the nonhuman avatar approach.
    “Yes, first time. I never needed to, until now.”
    “First time. I see. Well then, welcome to the lost world of the Internet. TrueNet has its points, but I’ve been poking around the ruins of the Internet too long to leave it behind. Almost thirty years, in fact.”
    “Not so fast. I haven’t made my mind up yet. As the ad said, I’m looking for legacy crop plant data. Let me give you some details and you decide if you’re up to the task. How you respond will affect my decision. Are you sure you want to do this interview as a dog?”
    “I know it complicates things, but I have my reasons. I just finished a job, and my new assistant told me there was an interesting project out there. I haven’t done any DNA salvaging for a while. Crops, is it?”
    I gave him the basic details: I was looking for data on an unidentified contaminant infesting a field of distilled crops, and the bizarrely large DNA sample in my hands contained, among other things, a complete Oryza genome. I was careful not to mention Mother Mekong, L&B, or SR06. Even if I had, my avatar’s NDA filter would probably have kept Yagodo from hearing.
    “I need to know what this intruder is. Almost all the data on legacy cultivars with susceptibility to red rust blight is somewhere on the Internet. For a start, I need you to find a DNA match with the intruder, and tell me the cultivar and where it was grown. Information on efficient ways to eradicate it would be a plus. Too tough? Maybe it’s over your head.”
    While he was listening, the dog kept tapping his front paws rhythmically on the desk. I could hear his tail as it kept hitting the back of the chair. His face was mostly unreadable, but he didn’t seem upset by my skeptical attitude.
    “Rice … hmm …”
    The dog lifted his nose and puckered his lips—at least it looked like puckering. His paws were side by side on the table. Now he looked like a philosopher-dog. Yagodo probably had his arms folded.
    “Rice, now there’s a hard one. With wheat, you could just pull the genome transcript and references from Cambridge Open Resources. Wheat wasn’t hit by a disease like red rust that made cultivar information irrelevant, so everything on the Internet is on TrueNet too, including DNA information for all the cultivars. It would be easy to narrow down the field by calibrating the genetic distance between what’s online and your intruder. For soy, with all the GMO variants, you could get modification location and sequencing data by accessing patents and academic papers. Then you’d compare them with the standard genome. You wouldn’t have to go Internet diving at all.”
    This was not the bullshit answer I’d been expecting. No one without specialist knowledge could have tossed that off without prepping first. It also hit me that if Yagodo was as old as he sounded, he might have a better grip on the state of things around the