The Wrong Fold

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Dreams are most often silent, yet there can be terror in the absence of sound.

She had an awful dream, about a tremendous boulder hurtling toward her, and yet she couldn’t move, as if she were paralyzed and had no command of her limbs. In the dream she was in the form of a bat, but her wings were frozen, so she couldn’t fly. The impact of the boulder should have wakened her, but instead it dissolved to a field of a strange, uniform, suffocating color. Rosy brown they call it, like the color of the universe as seen from a fetus in the womb. The color of being unborn. The color of death.

As Ariadne opened her eyes, the nightmare continued. Her body was stiff beyond all experience, and even drawing a breath required great exertion. But that is normal when waking from suspended animation. Her consciousness assembled slowly, like a salt crystal coming out of solution, and then she remembered.

The moon Europa was first seen by humans through the telescope of Galileo, and therefore became part of the proof that God had lied about the way the world was constructed. The moon of Jupiter (Zeus) was given the name of Zeus’s consort, a mythical Phoenician queen said to be the mother of the Minoan king, reflecting quite a bit of ethnic confusion. It is also the same name, feminized, as Europe itself, originally a designation of the western shore of the Aegean, just as “Asia” was a name for the eastern shore; all geopolitics is local. The moon Europa is unique in the solar system; it is bathed in a liquid ocean of water, capped by a thick shield of water ice, making the satellite smooth like a marble. Like earth, Europa is bluish-white with streaks of brown, streaks that look like the tracks of long-lost dogsled expeditions. The streaks, which form what looks like a labyrinth, are actually enormous cracks in the ice, splotched by evaporated salts from the ocean that have welled up through the cracks, a sign of violence among the calm.

The first human trip to Europa was hastily planned, spurred by the reptilian brains of politicians. Unlike other planetary bodies in our solar system, Europa is dynamic; changes in its oceans and ice cap are subject to tidal forces, and these changes can be seen from earth. The ocean of Europa, five times deeper than the deepest ocean on earth, has long been seen as the best chance for life in our solar system outside of earth, and fantasy has fueled imaginings of the fishes and squids and sea serpents that might inhabit those oceans. How poor is our ability to imagine alien life.

Then came the Anomaly. Astronomers were accustomed to tracking the tidal changes on Europa, but one day there was something else, revealed under high-power telescopy. It was ephemeral but definite. A flash of orange in a small sector of the surface, as if an enormous whale had surfaced for a long breath and then had dived again. There were many theories as to what this might have been – a crack in the ice that caused an odd reflection, volcanic activity, the result of a large asteroid impact. But the popular imagination, fueled on the internet, insisted that this was a sign of life.

Of course, the prudent step was to send a sampling robot. That was done in one six-year mission, but this only fueled the rampant speculations. The robot found abundant amino acids on the surface of Europa’s ice, and even protein chains, but the testing apparatus found no cellular life, not even microbes, nor were there any visible signs of creature activity. Europa seemed to be a barren moon covered in protein, which led to the obvious question of how the protein had gotten there. Amino acids are common in space and have been found on asteroids. But proteins, which are long chains of amino acids, require cellular organisms to make them. Or so they say.

That is when the politicians got involved, with polemics about how “men” can do what machines cannot, the old Trumpian appeal to scrotal impulses. And so the cautions of the scientists were overridden. America was going to send men, and a token woman, to Europa.

Perhaps the politicians would have paused, had they realized that a Europa mission could not be accomplished within the time-frame of populist politics. Jupiter and its moons are about a billion kilometers from earth on average, and efficient passage between them can only happen at times chosen for close approach. The Voyager missions past Jupiter’s moons were deceptive because those missions were accomplished each within about two years of launch, but those were fly-bys. The spacecraft had no need to slow down and so could accelerate to high-speeds, accomplished by using the gravitational fields of Venus or Mars as slingshot accelerators. A mission with humans aboard would have two big time drags: the need to slow down for a landing; and the need for a return flight, unless the crews are up for planned suicide. Such a mission would take anywhere from twelve to twenty years in flight including return. Utter insanity.

It was especially insane because of the radiation problem. On usual space missions, the crews have almost no shielding from cosmic radiation, shielding that is normally provided by earth’s atmosphere. The intense radiation dose is compensated by the shortness of the flights, yet astronauts are made aware that the increased radiation may affect their health. John Glenn would joke that this is what made him bald.

A twelve-year space flight would fry a person, almost literally, though perhaps that would make a return flight unnecessary. Even worse, a mission to anywhere near Jupiter would subject the crew to Jupiter’s own radiation. Jupiter is technically a star, meaning the so-called planet is mostly plasma and gas, with fusion reactions at its core. The only way to prevent lethal radiation effects would be to provide the astronauts on a Europa mission with thick lead shielding, but such shielding would make a spacecraft unflyable if provided around the whole craft.

This problem had been faced in an actual engineering project in a different context: the U.S. attempt to build an “Atomic-Powered Atomic Bomber” in the 1960s. This cold war concept was to have an airplane capable of delivering nuclear weapons that would be immune to counterattack because it would never land, kept aflight by on-board nuclear reactors, with crews changed mid-air. The design problem was that the normal shielding required for nuclear reactors would make the plane too heavy to fly. They tried to make the plane flyable by removing the usual shielding in ground experiments, but this would give the pilots an unacceptable radiation dose. They tried solving that problem by locating the reactor at the far rear of the plane, extending the length of the plane sufficiently to lower the pilot radiation dose. But the necessary extension also made the plane unflyable.

Thanks to hare-brained politicians, these experiments were actually conducted at the GE Jet Engine Plant in Cincinnati – the only time that a nuclear reactor was operated without shielding. The result was a grossly-contaminated huge building that remains at the center of the site, a building that ultimately had to be abandoned and filled with concrete. No version of the Atomic-Powered Atomic Bomber with a reactor aboard ever left the ground. The experience should have doomed talk of a human-staffed mission to Europa, but it didn’t.

There is a way to solve the radiation problem, which is to put the shielding around the astronaut, instead of around the spacecraft. That would mean that the astronaut couldn’t move; no weightless selfies floating about the cabin as the astronaut would be suited completely by a few feet of lead.

Luckily, this solution would solve the other big problem, which is how a space crew would maintain health and sanity over at least a dozen years in an isolated box. Such a mission, in other words, would require putting the astronauts in suspended animation in a thick shielded chamber, so to them the flight time would pass unconsciously.

NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission began research on “cryosleep” much earlier than most imagine, almost as soon as NASA was established in 1958. It was recognized that to go anywhere interesting in space would require cryosleep, to solve the duration and radiation problems in tandem. The early research focused entirely on bats, because bats enter a kind of cryosleep in their normal hibernation; they can literally be frozen and thawed back to life.

A national secret in the 1960s and 1970s was that some government scientists had frozen living bats in their home Frigidaires – secret perhaps because the idea of turning people into bats had undesirable promotional aspects. The wife of one AEC scientist reported that the first thing she did upon her divorce was to thaw out the freezer bats and set them free. In 2014, NASA announced an intensive cryosleep program in preparation for a mission to Mars, another whacky idea that was the fault of politicians. The Mars endeavor also spurred research into lighter radiation-shielding materials than lead, involving rubber and lead-laced composites, and this research also made a long cryosleep mission feasible.

The Mars mission fizzled when it became clear that Mars is a dead planet. Killing a few astronauts to explore a dead planet turned out not to have much political appeal. The Europa Anomaly was altogether different. The prospect of living Americans discovering dragons and sea serpents below the ice of Europa was every politician’s dream – that is to say, every politician with a brain the size of a dung beetle’s. So the mission was a go!

And Ariadne was the token woman. There were only three of them, with their cryosleep chambers nestled together to cut down on the radiation shielding required, the low crew number chosen to minimize potential casualties. The alarm was set to wake them only after entering orbit around Europa.

So there it was. That bluish brown marble in space that would be their temporary home. It was magnificent. Not an old gray lifeless moon that might be simulated in a TV studio, but a sparkling hydrous ice palace that might even be – alive!

Ariadne had been prepared for the psychological shock of waking up unaged after eight years had passed, but nothing quite prepared her for the video link to earth. She had a daughter on earth. Her daughter had been 17 when she left and would now be 25, and 33 when next they might meet, probably married, possibly with children. Her daughter would, of course, be waiting at the video monitor, bubbling with news. But it takes 45 minutes for a radio signal to travel between earth and Europa, so a “live” conversation it wasn’t. There was time only for a brief exchange of greetings, with Ariadne daughter saying that she had recorded weekly updates for her mom. But mission control had nixed the idea of any emotional exchange of family news – who had died and who had been born. There was a mission to complete.

The game plan was for Ariadne to stay in orbit while the two men took a lander down to the surface, right at the spot where the Anomaly had occurred. The men would take samples and bring them back to her for analysis. She was the exobiologist and medical doctor of the team, and the ship came equipped with a complete forensic laboratory for her use.

The ice on Europa is about twenty kilometers thick, the distance from Minneapolis to Saint Paul. How were the men supposed to get through it to explore the marvelous sub-surface ocean? They were equipped with ice-coring equipment, with a maximum length of three meters. It was like attacking a rhinoceros with a thumb tack. The whole thing was stupid. Everyone knew it was stupid. Most likely, they would only find the surface proteins that the robot lander had found, with no way to further explore what splendorous creatures might be swimming below the ice. However, the politicians would be happy, NASA would be funded, and the three astronauts would forever be famous – the first human beings to “contact” alien life forms, even if they were separated from those life forms by 20 kilometers of ice. Appropriations would happen, salaries would be paid, college tuitions would be funded, and little kids would get better video games, the American way. Exactly the same dynamic as the one that drove the Atomic-Powered Atomic Bomber.

And so the men took the lander and descended to the surface of Europa, where they dicked around. They took the best selfies in the history of selfies: throwing clumps of brown salt at each other while the huge banded face of Jupiter, with its big red eye, rose in the background. Europa is a bit smaller than the earth’s moon, but it’s denser and so has about the same gravity, allowing the same kind of visual tricks, like taking giant leaps that would kill a man on earth.

Unlike earth’s moon, Europa has an atmosphere, comprised mainly of oxygen from water vapor, and there’s nothing toxic in the air. The atmosphere is too thin to support a human for long, but after confirming that there were no nasty critters around, one of the guys broke protocol and removed his space helmet for a couple minutes, then took a swig of Mountain Dew he had brought along, all to please the libertarian audience back home. The best product placement shot in history. It had already been confirmed that there was no cellular life on Europa. Amino acids and proteins can’t hurt you. Or so they say.

Anyway, it was a mighty fun day, and the men returned to the mother ship with their samples. Now it was Ariadne’s turn to go to work. She sterilized the samples in a fancy-shmancy microwave oven, then analyzed them under microscopes and using special test kits designed for the purpose of finding any kind of organic life. All her tests confirmed exactly what had been known before. There were amino acids and long protein chains in abundance, but not a single cell or the hint of a cell or the fossil of a cell. No nucleic acids, no viruses, nothing near as sophisticated as blue-green algae. This, more than likely, meant that there were no creatures swimming in the ocean of Europa, because the cracks in the ice would have allowed any cellular life forms to leak and evaporate to the surface. Earth ice even in the Antarctic is teeming with microorganisms, and the ice of Europa should be the same, if life had gotten a foothold on Jupiter’s moon.

They retired in shifts to get the first good sleep they had had in eight years, sort of. They were happy. They were alive. No monsters had eaten them, no asteroids had obliterated them. Soon they would be on the way back to earth, where they would be heroes and where Pepsico, the makers of Mountain Dew, would likely give them contracts. Time for sweet dreams.

That night, Europa’s night, was peaceful, until pierced by a scream. It was the sleeping man who had removed his helmet while on the surface. The others rushed to him and looked at him in confusion. He had been fine for eleven hours, but now his entire face and head were covered with a severe rash and lesions. He had screamed himself awake while dreaming that he was being boiled in a pot by cannibals. Once awake, he felt that his face and head were on fire. He had no idea what was happening and he begged the physician to tell him what was wrong. Ariadne was baffled. She said, “I don’t know.”

Protocol required that they all immediately don their space suits, on the presumption that the cause was an infectious agent. Then the sleuthing began. Since the bio tests had been extensive, the first suspect was some chemical agent in the air of Europa. Ariadne spent two hours reviewing her chemical data, reporting the incident to mission control, and waiting for the reply. Meanwhile, the man’s condition ruled out a chemical cause. The rash was spreading to parts of his body that had never been exposed, and was moving deeper into his tissue. Chemical rashes just don’t behave that way.

This meant that Ariadne needed a tissue sample to analyze, and waiting would only make matters worse. In hope that it was something that could be remedied or contained, the affected man retired to the most distant part of the ship, removed his helmet, and swabbed his spreading lesions.

As an exobiologist, Ariadne had been preparing for this moment over her entire career. Entirely new life forms were not expected to be friendly, and the possible risk of “unknown unknowns” had been the reason for limiting the crew to three. They were guinea pigs, but now one of the guinea pigs was charged with analyzing the experimental conditions.

When Ariadne looked at the swabbed samples under the microscope, she did expect to find some new kind of cellular pathogen, something that had been missed in all the sampling. And that pathogen should be plentiful in the sample, because of the rapidity of the victim’s lesion spreading and deepening, a rapidity only rivaled by pathogens like flesh-eating bacteria. She could find no such pathogen, however. In fact, she could find few normal-looking cells at all. She could clearly see the man’s cells, but it looked like the wreckage after a tornado hits a midwestern town – the cells were destroyed, in complete disarray, reduced to a kind of chaotic plaque.

OMG, of course, the word “plaque” in her mind triggered a flash of recognition, attenuated only by the horror of certainty that she would never be going back to earth, and would never be seeing her daughter. Perhaps Ariadne already had grandchildren, but she didn’t yet know, and that especially pained her.

What Ariadne was looking at was a form of rapidly-spreading spongiform disease, the kind of disease that caused “mad cow disease” and kuru, the latter a sickness of some cannibalistic tribes of New Guinea, who catch the disease by eating other people’s brains. These illnesses are spread by prions.

Ariadne was very familiar with prion disease, because her entry into exobiology had been in the military, helping to prepare defenses against bioweapons. Since the Iraq War of 2003, when Saddam Hussein was suspected of building a sophisticated bioweapons program, the US military has feared that some regime might find a way to weaponize prions, which, if possible, could cause holocausts on unprecedented scale.

A prion is a pathogen unlike any other. It is not a cell or microorganism or any kind of living thing. It is only a kind of molecule, a protein chain, but it has an insidious affect on other proteins because it is folded in a different way, and it spreads its own differentness to other protein molecules. On contact with a prion, a normally-folded protein can literally change its fold.

To understand how prions cause disease, imagine a nursery of twenty sleeping babies. Bring in a crying baby and soon all twenty-one babies will be crying. Bring in a laughing baby and soon all twenty-one babies will be laughing. But this is a biological example, difficult to apply to an agent that is not alive at all.

Dominoes may be a better example. One tipped domino can cause all of the others to fall, but now imagine that the tipped domino has some shape difference that it can pass along as it contacts another domino, and this shape difference can continue to propagate all the way down the line.

Here’s an even better example. At the ASEAN meeting of world leaders in 2017, some publicist had the idea of having all the leaders line up on stage and cross arms in a chain of handshakes. All of the leaders understood the directions except for Donald Trump, who crossed his arms the wrong way. Soon the crossing confusion began to propagate down the line. Trump was the prion.

The existence of prions and the diseases they cause relates to the handedness of the universe. As symmetrical as the universe seems to be, there are frequent violations of symmetry in the way things are oriented or folded. In the 1950s, a biologist named Rosalind Franklin, with a little help from her advisers Watson and Crick, discovered that DNA has a spiral shape called a double helix. But all of the DNA she analyzed spirals one way, a way that came to be called right-handed, because it spirals the way your fingers curl if you hold out your right hand with the thumb up. All life on earth is based on right-handed DNA, one of the tell-tale signs that all life on earth evolved from a single cell, but in the 1970s, left-handed DNA was discovered that seems to have been invented by organisms to serve special functions, specifically so it won’t interfere with the function of right-handed DNA.

Just as living things on earth are based on right-handed DNA, they also are based on protein chains that are folded a certain way, and these two facts are likely related since DNA codes for the production of proteins. It is probable that when the first living cell formed on earth, it selected a certain symmetry for the handedness of its DNA and the resulting folding pattern of its proteins. Once these patterns were established for a very large number of cells, they would out-compete any rival symmetry by sheer force of numbers. Prions, which can be thought of as wrongly-folded proteins, do appear randomly all the time; prions are even common in yeast. But normally, when prions appear, they are simply overwhelmed by correctly-folded proteins.

This system worked well for suppressing the rival symmetries for billions of years, but the system has its vulnerabilites, and one of those vulnerabilities is in the mammalian brain. For reasons not at all clear – perhaps related to the complexity of brain structure or the brain’s separation from the biological systems that have evolved prion defenses – mammalian brain tissue is especially susceptible to prion propagation. In these brains, a single prion can cause the propagation of wrongly-folded proteins, and that fills the brain with chaotic tissue called plaque, a condition inevitably fatal because it cannot be reversed. It thus became a rule of thumb that if you must engage in cannibalism, don’t eat the brains.

All of this flashed through the mind of the exobiologist circling Europa. Ariadne was looking through her microscope at plaque, exactly like the brain plaque she had studied when investigating possible defenses against prion bioweapons. This made immediate sense because a prion is just a long protein chain, and the surface of Europa is filled with long protein chains. The protein chains of Europa must be prions!

One by one, the other puzzle pieces fell into place. The robot sampler that had sent Europa data back to earth had correctly reported long protein chains, but had not been programmed to analyze which way those proteins were folded. It was never contemplated that the proteins on Europa could be folded the wrong way, because on earth, prions are rare, their numbers severely suppressed by correctly-folded biologically-produced proteins that enforce conformity, except in mammalian brains. Scientists on earth had gotten used to finding prions in brain tissue, not lying around on the surface of ice. And the folding of Europa proteins wasn’t realized, because no Europa samples had been returned to earth.

Why would Europa’s proteins be folded the opposite way from the predominant ones of earth? Because the initial symmetry break on Europa went the other way. The choice of folding direction is initially likely random, but once a folding direction is selected and propagated, it would naturally block the propagation of rival symmetries. Proteins on earth and on Europa simply chose different patterns.

But why were Europa prions able to so effectively destroy normal human tissue outside the brain? It appears that the proteins on Europa have evolved in a way similar to biological organisms. That makes sense because of the intense radiation from the star Jupiter, which sparks changes in the amino acids of Europia, just as some form of intense energy, like lightning, was necessary for sparking the creation of life on earth. Perhaps it is Jupiter’s intense radiation that prevents the development of cellular life on Europa, but the proteins still proliferate and their different forms compete for dominance. A kind of natural selection has produced super-selected proteins on Europa.

The dominant forms of Europa’s proteins, however, are folded a different way from the dominant proteins in organisms on earth. The Europa proteins are prions. They have a super-ability to force normal earth proteins to adopt their shape. This was not a problem until the American astronaut took off his helmet and took a swig of Mountain Dew.

It took Ariadne about fifteen minutes to figure this out. She was a smart woman. To confirm her deductions, she went back to check on the victim. Yes, he was dead. Unfortunately, there would be no way to dispose of the body, without potentially contaminating Europa in unacceptable ways. Even prions have indigenous rights. Nor was there a way to sterilize the ship, because, as had already been proved, prions cannot be killed with radiation; they aren’t alive to begin with, at least by previous definition. (Forcing other molecules to adopt your shape is indeed a kind of reproduction.) That meant that her attempted sterilization of Europa samples had likely been ineffectual. Ariadne herself was probably contaminated.

Perhaps she would have time now to send her findings to earth and to watch her daughter’s messages. But first, she was exhausted. Ariadne needed sleep. She collapsed in her cryosleep chamber, and dreamed that she was a bat, unfrozen and set free.