Forbidden Fruit
Elijah looked at the baby elephant. He envied it’s energy and enthusiasm. So unlike it’s parent, who moved glacially beside it in the zoo enclosure. He felt more like the old one; grey, wrinkly, full of memories that would never go away no matter how much he’d like them to. An elephant never forgets; neither does an old spy.
The young agent arrived late, and flustered. He sat down beside Elijah and began talking immediately in hushed but excited tones.
“I got it!” He shout-whispered, “I got the whole thing!”
“Really?” Elijah was skeptical. “That’s over seven thousand pages. Where is it?”
“It’s in my pocket.” The young agent smiled. “Once they brought me into the lab I had an idea- I translated the whole thing into binary code, then in turn I translated that into genetic code, Gs and As for zeros, Ts and Cs for ones.”
“You did that? All by yourself?”
“Well, I made a program to do it. It wasn’t that hard” the young agent made a face that suggested that this was actually very hard, just not for him. “Anyway, once I had that, I was able to hide it in a genome. It’s in here.” The young agent pulled something from his pocket.
It was an apple.
“Once we get this back to HQ, I can reverse engineer the whole thing.”
Elijah looked at the apple. He had to admit, this was pretty amazing. The information somehow hidden inside this innocuous looking piece of fruit would bring down half the governments in Europe, and save millions of lives in the other half. A potential nuclear conflict, averted by one piece of genetically modified fruit.
He was impressed.
And then the baby elephant reached out with it’s trunk, snatching the apple away, then scampered away munching happily on the lives of millions.
David Wynne
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