Page 134 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Adjournment

Perversity Tinderstack shrugged.
“My turn? I haven’t anything solid left. I did have an idea for a
story about monkeys and bananas, tentatively titled ‘Jumping Gene’.
Maybe silly, but all the news about viruses hopping between species
and the reports of scientists meddling with life at the chromosomal
level started me thinking about chimeric organisms. I mean, we are
going to make the Greek mythologizers look like pikers! Well, you
may know that virtually all the commercial banana cultivars in the
world are Cavendish clones. Now, transposons are genes that can
shuffle around on a genome. My little fiction is first that a gene or
two has literally jumped from Cavendish to wild bananas
somewhere in the Tropics. No big deal in itself: genetic drift goes
on constantly. But monkeys eat those wild musa sapientum. Yes, the
fruit of wisdom, owing to its tryptophan content. Let us suppose
the Cavendish has been bred to produce a lot of that crucial amino
acid for brain function, the way wheat has been altered to have high
gluten content. Further, that the jumping genes are precisely those
related to tryptophan production. Voilà! Suddenly some very smart
monkeys are on the loose. But that’s where I stopped. Maybe next
time I’ll have this ready for presentation.”
“I think I’d like to be one of those monkeys,” chortled Izzy
Azimuth. But he chortled alone. “I, too, have been cogitating about
a story idea—a parody, perhaps; or more charitably, bringing a
classic up-to-date. With apologies to Edgar Allan Poe, here are the
bare bones of ‘The Tattling Ticker’: crematoria must remove all
electronic devices from corpses prior to incinerating them; they
might explode in the flames, otherwise. And any of them may have
many more years of life, as it were, than their owner. So a domestic
murderer may seek to bury his or her victim deep in the cellar, and
cover it with cement, but if a pacemaker is still going through its
paces, as it were, inside the decedent, a weak signal might be
detectable with the right equipment. Those battery-operated
purveyors of minuscule electric shocks to the heart—dead or

133