Winslow looked at Juan and frowned. Only after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence did he look down at the binder and pull it closer to him. “A pattern, you say?”

Juan’s body was tingling with nervous energy. He focused on slowing his breathing. He had to make his case. It was now or never.

“Sir, as you know, I’ve been sequencing and analyzing the DNA from extinct species for years. These graphs show the results of my comparative analysis between the samples of intact DNA I extracted from the various extinct specimens. It took two full years for the computers and I to analyze the sequencing data and I’ve spent the last six months—”

“How much data are we talking about?” Winslow glanced up as Juan flipped to another graph.

“Well, for example, the woolly mammoth.” Juan flipped a page and tapped his finger on a graph. “Its diploid genome has approximately 9.4 billion base pairs—that’s almost fifty percent more genetic material than humans, which the computer encoded into the equivalent of about 2.3 gigabytes of data. I did comparative analyses, normalizing the source to the same general vicinity in Siberia, and using various samples from different points in time along their evolutionary history. My oldest sample is nearly one hundred thousand years old, and I also have samples from seventy-five thousand years ago, forty thousand years, and fourteen thousand years. I mapped those changes against the local environmental conditions from where the samples were found.”

Juan took a deep breath. “I didn’t catch the significance of the changes until I saw the genetic evolution across the entire group. I ran all of the data through the computers—it took months given the volume of data—but eventually, a pattern emerged. And what I’ve found is… the mutations were not random.”

The room suddenly seemed warmer. The aroma of the lemon-scented wood polish coming off of Winslow’s desk left Juan feeling nauseated. Despite the trickle of the cool breeze coming from one of the air conditioning vents in the ceiling, he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead before continuing.

“I derived an algorithm to replay the mutation patterns, and then applied it to other species I hadn’t yet finished sequencing. I found the same pattern of changes when I finally began decoding the DNA samples from a cave lion, and then again in the Eurasian auroch. Once I made a few adjustments for the estimated length of each of the species’ generations, I managed to get a nearly perfect match between what I was decoding and what my predictive mutation algorithm said I should find. With what I have now, I’m able to predict within .001% the evolutionary patterns across thousands of generations.”