Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “No more bullshit like this, anything that leaks one word out into the real world needs to be run by me from now on. I can’t handle, well you can’t handle the freedom I guess, to just make these kinds of decisions. Let’s tighten the whole thing up. I ran on crime reduction, not releasing a fucking sociopath times 1 million into the world. That’s kinda the opposite of my campaign promise.”

  “Read my lips ,” Isaiah said and winked at the inmate.

  “Not gonna do it ,” the inmate responded in his George Bush voice.

  They both laughed quietly as the Governor fantasized about setting the room on fire. But the HALON system -he noticed- would douse the flames instantly.

  “I’m not a sociopath, I have a fully functioning limbic system and ventral and dorsal pfc ; I have empathy; that is to say I had it even before you mucked about in my genome and my enzyme production protocols. I was a carrier of a suite of genes dubbed the warrior-gene and some ancillary chromosomes that coded for impulsivity and low inhibition and disgust sensitivity, but I was never a psychopath, medically speaking,” the inmate said.

  The Governor looked at MO who was nodding his head in agreement.

  “Yeah, but you’re fixed now, I mean, whatever-the-fuck was wrong with you is fixed now?” Boyd asked.

  “Yeah, I’m a good little boy now Govna ,” he said with a cockney accent. Nobody moved. There was a lag. The inmate filled it with a question.

  “Mr. Sou, you know the science behind all this right? I mean, PraXis was your company, you were the chief scientists and geneticist, right?”

  “Yeah, but, that was three years ago, and I don’t 100% get the difference between psychopathology and the nuance of disgust sensitivity and hyper-moral reasoning within a high testosterone interoceptive milieu ; as you pointed out earlier. I fixed the genes and SNPs most associated with anti-social personality disorders, with a focus on recidivist subjects that presented easily marked alleles.

  “This was the 80/20 pareto distribution group. We didn’t have an answer for guys like this who were perfectly sane until they decided to kill every guy who had every looked cross eyed at them. The fact that you were our first test case was pure politics, and pure irony I think too considering you don’t fit the profile at all.

  “But, whatever, it worked, and the 908 cases that followed you worked also, and the 1,088 we’ve done year-to-date are working as well, right?” he said as he looked at MO and Isaiah who nodded in ascension.

  “So, crime has dropped by 34% so far, and by next year I suspect that will take another 30% dive. The recidivist rate is really the locus of our work. We intervene.

  “But anomalous events like you, Mr. MacLeod, were never the focus of our work, it just so happened that politically, you were something easy for the public to wrap their heads around. And look, I say this without contempt for the population, but they don’t understand science, it is not their wheelhouse, and so they need tangible examples. And it’s not like you are going to be released, that was never part of the deal; so they are at no risk.

  “There is no downside for you being the test case, other than this goddamn in-vivo debacle, which I still don’t understand why we used his genes for any of that, for even one of them?” the Governor mined them for answers that would never sate or slake; he knew it as soon as he asked.

  “He had a unique genome sir, this was explained to your chief-of-staff in detail. The phenomenon of psychopathology, specifically low or no empathy cannot just be fixed via the genome passed age 3-4. Training, empathy training, must be conducted co-laterally with the genome fix. And that requires a certain level of general, fluid, intelligence; we could not get the training to hold in subjects with anything less than two and one half standard deviations from the mean and with one and one half deviations of trait openness; there was exactly one prisoner in the Colorado department of corrections that fit that criteria,” MO said.

  The inmate waved slowly from his manacles in response to this reference to him.

  “Jesus,” the Governor said, “but what does that have to do with the implantation of his genome in kids we can raise from birth through the 4th year?”

  “We were concerned about re-training in the event of mal-adaptive childhood experiences; it was a failsafe just in case the in-vivo patients were not reared properly and developed psychopathologies as the result of bad parenting or,” MO paused.

  “Or whatever, life is complicated,” Isaiah added.

  “But why 1.5, or 1.6, million?”

  “Sample size,” Isaiah dead paned.

  “What?” Boyd asked, not really asking; he was just expressing vexation. He knew these questions were not helping his anger, and yet he kept asking.

  “Well, in order to quash the concerns of the scientific community we had to implement the new sample size requirements. It had to represent close to 1% of the population,” Isaiah began thinking there were 160 million males in the US, so 1.6 million male clones would satisfy that requirement.

  “Yeah, the sample population, so 1% of psychopaths, or 1% of prisoners,” the Governor rejoined.

  “Well, Lyndon isn’t a psychopath, he’s a normal American; so we erred on the side of caution and used 1% of the population, the total male American population,” Isaiah said with a smile. He had lied slightly there; but not that much.

  “Only a machine could do something like this and not think it was insane, Steven,” the Governor said as he looked at Steven who had remained mute for the entire time.

  “Yes, sir,” he barely choked out, clearing his dry throat.

  “You knew it was insane to create 1% of the American population out of this guy’s genome, right? I mean just tell me you knew it was insane but did it anyway,” Boyd asked .

  “I knew it was bold, but I figured it wasn’t my judgment to make, I mean Nathan and your CoS signed off on it, and it did meet the protocols of the AMA and PraXis corporation, and it made sense within the context of the parameters of the program and really, it,” he paused.

  “What?” the Governor asked with a grimace.

  “Well, it was the conservative thing to do, the more of them the more conservative; you see, increasing sample size was a sign of conservative thinking. We, we, well, the demanding -from the program- of a sample size robust enough to eliminate over-extrapolation and weak theorizing from small samples, seemed cautious, sane. It was the cautious thing to do, within the framework of science, rigorous science, you know?” Steven said as his tenor became more confident the closer he got to the end of each of these badly formed sentences.

  “Yeah, cautious,” the Governor said thinking only scientists could think like this; inverting reality as if looking at the planet from space meant there was no up or down on the planet itself.

  “These are voters, consumers and voters, sir,” the inmate said. “In 18 years they’ll be voting; maybe you could work on a platform that appeals to their interests; I mean, that’s quite a block of constituents; I think 72,000 of them are in Colorado alone; how many people voted in your election? 2 million?”

  “2.1 million yeah, 1.5 million voted for me,” he said off-handedly. He made no mention of how he had received those votes.

  “That’s 5% of the vote. That’s more than blacks in this state. That’s a whole constituency; above the raw numbers for African American voters. Not for nothin’, you could use a constituency that large, all with similar views and,” the inmate said as he was interrupted.

  “Yeah yeah, I’m not running for Governor in 2038.”

  “But you could run for president then. And if there are 1.6 million of them in 2040; 1.6 million of them of age, that’s almost 2.5% of the voting public; right? Again, quite a block. The current president won by 70,000 votes didn’t he? 1.5 million people, that’s the election right there.”

  “Yeah, but did you vote at 18?” the Governor asked with pique.

  “I did, yeah; for Ross Perot; then Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000 and 2004, 2008 then Gary Johnson in 2012 a
nd Trump in 2016,” the inmate said.

  “Jesus, your voting habits are as weird as you are,” the Governor said.

  “My genome is politically active; count on us voting in 2038 and 2040,” the inmate said.

  “And promiscuous, political promiscuous,” the executive said.

  “Four candidates over 25 years?” the inmate asked with attitude .

  “Yeah, four totally different types of candidates, I mean what do Perot, Nader, Johnson and Trump all have in common?” the Governor demanded to know.

  “They weren’t establishment douche bags; they had ideas, they weren’t ass-kissers. Which is why I voted for you in 2018 and 2020,” the inmate said.

  “What, you can’t vote, you were a felon, you are a felon!” Sou barked.

  “I got the special election ballot sent to my house, my mail is still forwarded to my PO Box and as per my agreement with PraXis before the election, when you were out there telling people that you had to be Governor to fix me because you could only go so far as a private citizen, remember all that?”

  “Yes,” Sou said.

  “Well, I told your people they had to get my mail or I wouldn’t participate. So, 8 weeks before the election this time, they brought me a ballot. I signed it and they mailed it in.”

  “You cannot be serious,” the Governor was thinking he could be both the angriest and least consequential person in the world right now. He felt as if he had zero control over anything anymore.

  “I’m deadly serious, that’s one of my endogenous traits,” the inmate said.

  “Steven,” the Governor asked with eyes closed and heart racing.

  “Yes sir?” Steven asked.

  “Steven did you mail in his ballot in November of this year?” he was hoping that the man had tossed it and said nothing and that someone, somehow, deus ex machina , had prevented this man, this inmate, this mass murderer from voting for him for Governor from prison.

  “I think Tania did, yes sir, we got it handled,” Steven said lifting his hand in a gesture, a vague shape of a finger gun, the thumb closing down as if fired. It, Steven thought, was a show of competence, ease, and, hey, I got your back, man , confidence. He wanted the Governor to know he was on top of things; that this other matter -of the clones- was a misunderstanding, but, he thought, the inmate’s mail went out reliably and on time .

  “Steven, I cannot over emphasize this enough, this man was not eligible to vote from prison serving 46 life sentences on 46 counts of murder, and we cannot have facilitated his voting, his fraudulent unsanctioned voting, by mailing in his fucking ballot!” he was up now and pointing.

  “Oh, well, it’s a secret ballot and so I couldn’t really interfere; that’s tampering with an election or something, right?” Steven asked MO, leaning in -toward- MO’s visual field as Isaiah nodded with mock gravity on his face. Isaiah looked at the Governor as if to say, election tampering is indeed a serious thing isn’t it Governor? and your chief scientist is also retarded, by-the-way .

  “Oh my fucking God, if the press gets ahold of this, I’m gonna ,” he was unsure of the nature of how bad it would be, he thought, only that it would be catastrophically bad .

  “The press won’t ever find out, they don’t do journalism anymore, they just read Twitter. Woodward and Bernstein are no longer the paradigm; it’s 22-year-old blue check mark dorks on Twitter reading each other’s tweets for news. My ballot is safe; I mean unless I tweet a pic of it out,” the inmate said.

  “I hate you,” the Governor said with almost no energy, adding, “thanks for voting for me, but I hate you.”

  “Best vote I ever cast,” the inmate said shrugging off that particular insult.

  30. Sleep

  Many Indians have asked these questions about the civilized. I have been asked these same questions about CEOs, corporate journalist, politicians. How do these people sleep at night? Soundly, in comfortable beds, in 5,000 square foot homes, behind gates, with private security, thank you very much. It is others who lose sleep over their activities

  Endgame Vol. II [Jenson, Derrick]

  The universe isn’t just queerer than we suppose; it’s queerer than we can suppose

  Possible Worlds [Haldane, JBS]

  The northern United States was settled by farmers -Puritans, Quakers, Dutch and German. These people were cooperative, like farmers everywhere... In contrast the south was settled primarily by people from the fringes of Britain -the so-called Scotch-Irish. These people had always been herders. The prevailing principle was lex talionis , the rule of retaliation

  Culture of Honor [Nisbett, Richard; Cohen, Dov]

  I. 2020 e.v.

  “No, that would only be true is we were adding pregnancies that would not have happened otherwise; if we added 1 million additional babies. But, 77% of the women were set to conceive and give birth in 2020 anyway, so we added almost 230,000 births to a total of 3.2 million, bumping it up to 3.4 million when additional miscarriages were added in or subtracted out however you prefer to put it,” he said.

  “Wait, additional miscarriages? What are the nominal levels year to year?” she asked.

  “About 3.9 million; there were an additional 500,000 miscarriages in 2020, which was 300,000 less than 2019; so, even with our additions, the numbers looked normal vis-a-vis the 3-year trend. We signaled nothing to the departments in charge of these numbers; it was all taken into account beginning in 2018 with the first series of additional miscarriages,” he said as he began making coffee.

  “Maybe I am missing something, but are you saying that in 2018 there were rates of infertility that increased or actual miscarriages that increased?” she asked as she eyed the black stream and felt a desire come over her for some.

  “Both. And like I said, for 2020 the numbers looked better and the trend was reversing, which prevented the agencies from reacting, as they are on 3-year watch-reports. It was all taken into account, trust me,” he said.

  “MO, I do trust you, I trust that you got the numbers right and that nobody will be alarmed by the million births in 2020 of modified, IVF CRISPR cas-9 babies; that is not what I am arguing about. I am asking how you know about these miscarriages and how they are explained?”

  “I have data going back to 1924, and can get more if you like, but I figured 96 years of data was sufficient for this purpose,” MO said. He let the foam settle and then grabbed the small square cups; one in each hand .

  “I realize that, I am asking now, if we had anything to do with those miscarriages?” Tania asked as she took one of the cups from him.

  “The miscarriages were natural events likely due to some pathogen that has run its course in the population. If you look at 1956 and ‘57 there was a bump in miscarriages, and again in 1973 and ‘74. These things have occurred for unknown reasons, and like I said, they are not investigated until they reach a 3-year trend. It was just fortunate that our introduction of additional or rather accelerated pregnancy timelines was absorbed by the co-terminus elevation in miscarriages. We were not involved, but we are benefitting from it.”

  “Ok, because I am certain that we cannot be terminating pregnancies under the charter of the corporation to start with, and I personally cannot abide such things. As long as that is clear,” she said as she blew on the surface of the espresso’s caramel and black.

  “I’ve understood that from the beginning, I hope now we can move forward to the next phase of this,” MO said.

  “Ok, what,” she looked at her tablet, “what section are you on, 3.4?”

  “3.4 and the inset reveals that the distribution among states is not equal but it maps onto city demographics and rural demographics in the 40 states in which the pregnancies and births occurred. We took into account natural demographic trends and tried not to skew any data here as well. We have essentially a non-disruption policy and have 11% margins; we came in at under 9% for all areas,” MO said as he tracked her allostatic system to gauge her response.

  “Ok, what are our plans for e
ducation, are they still requiring non-traditional schooling?”

  “No, they can go to public or private education, but your team will visit with each family and child once a year beginning in year five, which requires 300 family visits a day, which obviously requires staffing up. I suggest 3-person teams who do three families a day each. Which will require 1,400 teams or 4,200 persons.”

  “Wow, ok, that is going to be expensive,” Tania said.

  “Each family has contributed either itself or from a fund set up to alleviate costs, a total of $108,000. That we,” he began and stopped as she interrupted.

  “Really, how did that?” she began as he broke in.

  “We set it up on crowd-sourcing sites,” MO said, eager to move on.

  “Well, that’s amazing, ok,” she said.

  “So, each non-medical staff member will require a salary of $44,000 and the MD of the team will require $116,000 annually. That is $204,000 per team and ancillary costs of an additional $98,000 for fuel, travel, per diems, et cetera , for a total of $302,000 plus 10% for overruns, equaling, $332,200 per team equaling approximately $500 million dollars.

  “The family funds have reached $107.8 billion to date; so, we are within budget. However, for the first five years, you can handle video conferencing and digital monitoring with a reduced force - we approximate 800 teams- as the children and parents have been outfitted with blood, serum and CNS nanobots to track all relevant homeostatic levels for optimal health.

  “The in-person visits being five years off, have allowed Isaiah and I to create an investment portfolio with 1.1 percent of the funds extant. With $1.1 billion in deposits, we believe with options trading we will lose 90% of that money, however, on the 10% we gain on we will gain exponentially by around 1,000%. So, we will lose $909 million and gain $100 billion so we net $99.3 billion.

  “This will allow us to further finance any medical, infrastructure or educational programs that are unanticipated or currently undesirable but maybe become desirable in the future,” MO said as he drank the espresso. He had adjusted the virtual soil composition for the beans, increasing guano correlate and drainage, and was noticing the nuances of the foot of the terroir . He had also simulated 44 days of rain for this crop, up from 39 days. This too -the head of the terroir - he noticed in the contraction of the tannins; it was as if the bean itself had coiled up for a few days and the flavor was thus concentrated in 1-3% of each mouthful. He liked the result and labeled this batch as Deluvian4.4.