Algorithm - Book 1 - The Medallion

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

            Adam stirred to life. He had dozed off on a tattered lounge in a lunch room just outside Percy's lab.  His blurry vision soon zeroed in on Linda snoring on a couch directly across from him.  The digital wall clock silently announced that it was approaching five-thirty. Without having windows for a clue, Adam guessed, or rather hoped, that it was the afternoon and not the next morning. They had decided on waiting for Percy's analysis, which was clearly taking a while. As he swung his legs onto the floor, he pulled over the laptop case and found an Ethernet port on the wall nearby. Within minutes, he was looking over the DNA analysis initiated what seemed like eons ago.

            Linda's snoring came to a sudden, staccato halt. "Hey. What time is it? Has Percy finished his analysis?"

            "I just woke up myself.  It looks like it's late afternoon and I haven't seen Percy. By the way, did you know you snore?"

            "Snore? Me? I think you got that backwards."

            Adam grinned. He looked back down at his screen and his mouth widened into a smile. "Guess what.  The DNA sequence analysis is complete."

            "And did you find anything of interest?"

            "It's not so much me as the software. But, yes."

Adam waited for a reaction, and failing that, added, "There are patterns, especially in the non-coding portions of the DNA, that are self-referential. And other patterns that seem to act as switching points, kind of like 'if this is true, then do that'." 

            "So, what does all that mean?"

            Adam eyes glazed over as he continued, speaking as if to himself. "And yet others that repeat themselves throughout the DNA as if they are commonly-used routines."

            He went on as if mesmerized, "Commonly used routines …"

            Linda waved her hand in front of Adam's eyes. "And?"

            Adam had drifted off for a moment, lost in thought. "These features … self-referential, switching points, repeated routines. I've seen this thousands of times before."

Adam put the laptop on the waiting room table and sat back with his arms folded. "They usually represent a set of instructions, lines of code, like in a computer program. The non-coding DNA looks like a program, an algorithm … a huge and complicated one, but an algorithm just the same."

            Linda sat up, her eyes wide. "So the coding portions of our DNA represent the proteins, the building blocks for our structure and function, while the non-coding DNA runs the show.  It makes sense, and is consistent with some of the current theory. Especially when you think about the amount of non-coding DNA we have compared to lower life forms."