Chapter 2

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Chapter 2

Adam picked up the mail and closed the door to his one-family two-story colonial. He lived just outside the Schill campus in a small suburban community on the outskirts of Scranton. Settling into his favorite easy chair, he sifted through magazines and letters. A voice from an upstairs bedroom made him jump.

"Adam. Is that you?"

It was Helen, his mother. She was visiting for a few weeks, and although she arrived a week ago, her voice still startled Adam. His dad had passed away a few years before, and the visit had become an annual ritual.

"Just me, mom."

Creaking stairs and a soft shuffle announced her arrival in the foyer outside the living room. She gave Adam a wide grin. Her silver gray hair was wrapped in a bun and wire-rimmed spectacles hung low on her nose as she peered over them.

"Your dinner’s ready. It's so late, and you didn't call."

It was indeed late.

Adam had spent most of the day setting up the computer equipment and software necessary to handle billions of bits of information. Pattern recognition techniques were well known, but not many such approaches could handle the enormous input represented by the human genome sequence data. He had set up the required processors on the university's extended network, which included the use of idle desktop computers scattered throughout the campus, as well as several sister campuses elsewhere in the state. Now that it was in motion, all he had to do was to monitor the process, and that he could do from anywhere along the network, even from his laptop at home.

He looked up at his mother and blew her a kiss. Just seeing her standing there, chiding him, gave him a warm feeling.

There was nothing like a mom.

"Sorry, mom. I'm involved in a new project and needed the time to set up a few things. Is that pot roast I smell? Be there in a minute." 

Pot roast was his favorite dinner and sorely reminded him of simpler times long ago. His mother mumbled under her breath and glided off to the kitchen while Adam returned his attention to the mail. Among the usual bills and junk mail, he came across an item of singular interest. It was a letter from his home town, Maplewood, a small suburban community along the northeast corridor of New Jersey. It was from Dr. Ben Wujciak. The last time he saw his family doctor was just before he went to prep school. All at once Adam felt a pang of guilt as he recalled his childhood promise to follow-up the mystery they shared together during an office visit two decades ago. Soon afterwards he had relegated the medallion to a night stand drawer as the excitement and challenge of prep school drew his attention away from the enigma. University and graduate school provided further distraction. Finally, when he secured a faculty position at Schill, he came across the medallion in a shoebox. He decided to re-adopt it as a good luck charm, something he really could use in the academically competitive world of grants and tenure. His fingers walked across his shirtfront, reassuring him of the medallion's presence. He tore open the envelope. A short note was attached to a folded piece of paper. Hand-written, it had the look of a hasty scrawl, like the scribbling on a prescription.

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