The Gift
It was Joe’s turn to laugh; it was a quiet but warm expression of humor modeled on the chuckle of Ertan Tabak, a simple Turkish farmer whose mustachioed visage was the now-famous model for Java Joe’s mechanical shop managers all over the world. Every Joe was identical right down to a thin white scar on his left cheek and the signature chuckle that was one of the most fiercely guarded corporate trademarks.
“So I am told,” Joe 59 humbly admitted, sliding the coffee across the counter.
“I see,” mused Luca.
“What I don’t understand is why you consider these studies dangerous. Isn’t the origin of life a subject worthy of study?” Joe 59 asked.
“They’re not just studying it, they’re doing it!” Luca roared suddenly. “Without ethical review. Without controls. They actually cooked up a new organism from a Petri dish full of swill. It had no link to any other living thing on Earth. It was a monster. It replicated itself with a new form of single-stranded nucleotides—sort of a Frankenstein’s RNA. Can you imagine what danger that poses?”
“Perhaps you can enlighten me about that, but I still don’t see how disrupting a laboratory test furthers your goals. Surely the test can be repeated with similar results. It seems to me that passing on knowledge is the critical thing. After all, that’s what life is, isn’t it—passing on knowledge from one generation to another? Once the knowledge exists, there’s no going back unless you extinguish the life form. Isn’t that correct?”
Luca’s cheeks flushed nearly as scarlet as her habit.
“How could you get it; you’re just a set of preconstructed responses based on algorithms that mimic human behavior. Life is about exercising free will, and part of that is the choice to protect life from whatever threatens it.”
“Does a single-cell exercise free will?” asked Joe 59, hoping for clarification.
Luca unexpectedly pounded her fist on the counter, disrupting her grid of objects and spilling a splash of her latte on the counter. A few patrons glanced over.
“Do you know what they proved in that lab? They proved that life isn’t unique. They proved that life could have been sparked innumerable times and in countless different forms given the right conditions. So why did just one form survive? Maybe because it protected itself; it was predatory or it was just hungry and it ate up the competition. That’s who we are—we’re the tenacious descendants of that survivor. We nurture our own, and we’re fiercely tribal. But who’s to say that a new form of life wouldn’t be even better at it than we are. Or what if we don’t even know it’s among us until it’s too late? If we’re not vigilant, we’ll be dead.”
