After On

by Rob Reid

  “Your yearbook?” she asks when he produces it.

  Mitchell wordlessly opens to a marked page.

  “Paul…Sanders?” she asks, peering at the one photo that’s surrounded by a long, scribbled note.

  “Aka ‘Pall,’ ” Mitchell says, finger-miming the jokey spelling. “I first read his note years after he wrote it.”

  “Years?”

  He nods. Many people don’t pick through their yearbooks until adulthood, if ever; and Mitchell was in grad school before revisiting this one. He’d all but forgotten about Pall, whose family moved away the summer after Kuba vanished. The length of the guy’s note was surprising. Mitchell knew him so faintly, it was odd he’d even asked Pall to sign his yearbook. But as the note itself reveals, he didn’t. Danna reads:

  Mitchell: Forgive this unauthorized graffito. You’re 4 feet away in Ms. Tharp’s class and I’ve “borrowed” your yearbook, which was way too easy (watch yer stuff more carefully in the future, young man). My family’s moving to Houston in two weeks so if you EVER read this I’ll be long gone. Making this a good time to solve a certain mystery.

  It goes like this: after a few days of sitting between you + Ellie it was annoyingly clear that you guys were madly in love but didn’t know it. I figured it would take you a week to figure it out. Then it’s October, November, December! WTF??? Finally in January I can’t take it anymore, so I swiped her cellphone. And yes I put that book in her bag. You’re welcome. I’d say you owe me a hundred bucks, only I stole it from the Darien Public Library, so send your check to them.

  You and I are pretty neutral to each other, but Ellie’s like an angel to me. She may have literally saved my life once. So I did the kindest thing I could think of for her (your own happiness was just collateral damage, ha ha). Though the romance didn’t last I’m pretty sure it was wonderful for you both nonetheless. Anyway, you’re a good guy as I write this, and I hope you’ve stayed that way.

  Best,

  Paul

  aka “Pall” (don’t think I didn’t know about that!)

  aka “Cyrano”

  Danna says, “My God, it makes perfect sense!”

  “Huh?” None of this ever made the slightest sense to Mitchell.

  So Danna has to apprise him of how cartoonishly impossible the Ellie of his texts always was. Not merely “top quintile” hot, she was carnally ravenous (at sixteen)! Not to mention bisexual (with countless eager fuckbuddy girlfriends)! Plus (a vital detail for any fella, here), she had a monogamous fixation on HIM ALONE when it came to heterosex! Such a lewd, solipsistic farce could only have been dreamt up and feigned so perfectly by a fellow sex-starved, knuckleheaded, adolescent boy!

  As Danna finishes explaining this, a printout of an Amazon review slips from the yearbook. “What’s this?” she asks. Rendered in fonts and a layout dating back to her early childhood, the review was apparently tucked behind the page bearing Pall’s signature:

  Mrs. Higgensworth’s eldest brother is a carpenter by trade, and upon hearing rumors that I’d taken up home improvement, he presented me with a gift-wrapped Palm Nailer—delighted, one suspects, that I’d acquired a more manly pastime than walking the family Bichon Frise. The sad truth is, I only “improved” our rickety pile for a few short hours one afternoon, until a home-wiring misadventure caused a minor neighborhood blackout. Lest Raul feel badly about his kind gift, I now repair to the cellar whenever he drops by, and set to audibly firing nails into plywood sheets procured for this purpose. I am delighted to report that the Palm Nailer packs a true “wallop” and can drive nails through walls, planks, and (no doubt) careless human hands with extraordinary power & precision. Speaking of which, Senco’s marketeers should be lauded for their admirable candor about the risks this device poses to novices. It’s rare to see such dangers called out in a product’s very name. Thanks to Senco’s bold frankness, I wield this potent appliance with outsized caution, and still boast two perfectly un-nailed palms.

  Mitchell smiles wanly. “Yeah, I keep that next to Pall’s yearbook page. Because they’re both part of a trio of codas to my high school years.”

  “A trio?”

  He nods. “A poignant one. Here’s part three.” He turns the yearbook page and reveals another loose sheet. An obituary from the Boston Globe, it recounts the tragic death of one Charles Henry Higgensworth III, of Beacon Hill, Boston.

  “Oh, gosh,” Danna says gently. “I’m sorry. I really got to like him from the stories you guys told me. Especially after I read some of his reviews! You know, they’re still up on Amazon.”*2 There’s a pause as Danna reads the obit. Then, “Seriously?”

  Mitchell nods.

  “A…home-wiring accident?”

  Afraid so. Though Charles never did nail his palm to a board, budgetary pressures put him squarely in harm’s way in the form of urgent and unaffordable electrical problems. Forced back to his home-wiring hobby, he soon triggered a far larger blackout—one tragically lethal to its bumbling progenitor. The funeral was heartbreaking. Back when Charles remarried, the gossips who whispered about the age gap called Carlotta a gold digger (ignorant gossips, as there was of course no gold, nor even tin, to mine from those veins). But she was bereft as any young widow, and of course the children were devastated. The extended clan rallied to pay its respects. The subsequent reception included so many loving and (often as not) thigh-slapping eulogies, it felt more like a rehearsal dinner than a funeral. Relatives also spoke of sheaves of letters received from Cousin Charles Henry Higgensworth over the years; and Carlotta, about thick binders of journals and observations in his archives.

  “Higgensworth? I love that guy,” Kuba says, spying the Amazon review as he and Tarek arrive. “He got me my shot with Ellie!”

  Mitchell rolls his eyes. “Ohhh, come on. She and I were doomed from the get-go.” This is so patently true that zero awkwardness remains from their long-ago romance. But Kuba’s quip bears some truth, in that Cousin Charles actively advised Mitchell to break up with Ellie. Yes, really!

  “What was he?” Danna asks. “Some kind of Brahmin Dear Abby?”

  Mitchell shakes his head. “He was an ethicist.” And Mitchell was an ardent fan of his values and writings (though he never grasped the mathematical reasoning that so fascinated Kuba). This delighted Mom, who then charmed Charles into becoming Mitchell’s mentor. They went on to spend most of their mentoring hours discussing what was right. Charles could translate the squiggles of propositional calculus into plain English aphorisms to fit almost any ethical question, and Mitchell sounded him out repeatedly, including about Ellie. After parsing Mitchell’s romantic ambivalence, his adolescent sex fixation, and the Kuba factor, Charles advocated a gentlemanly exit from the relationship.

  Now, this was going to happen no matter what. But Kuba playfully gives Charles full credit, being a lifelong Charles fan himself. Albeit, for very different reasons. “His proofs really inspired me as a programmer,” he reports. “In fact, several are built into AnimotionPicks.”

  “No way!” That’s Tarek, and AnimotionPicks is the software module that powered their gift recommendations. The subsystem that started executing eerily well several weeks ago. Kuba’s been encoding Cousin Charles’s syllogisms since he first read the man’s book—which he’s called “the very stuff of thought” ever since. Although I’m not so sure he’s right about this. My own theory is that Charles’s book became a talisman to Kuba after his deportation. A shiny relic of the lost world he sorely missed, he treasured it, and in my view, came to habitually inflate its significance. Packed with logical structures, it did help inspire Kuba’s idiosyncratic programming style. In this, its significance is undeniable. But “the stuff of thought”? For that honor, my money’s on motes.

  Regardless, Cousin Charles Henry Higgensworth III still remains something of a hero to both of the guys, years after death. And whether it’s Higgensworth logic, digital motes, or something else, there’s something undeniably spooky happening in the AnimotionPicks cod
e base—and there always will be. And yes, I do mean that literally. Always.

  Speaking of which: “I guess that means your cousin’s thinking is about to completely infest Phluttr,” Tarek says.

  “Why’s that?” Mitchell asks.

  “Because our CTO loves AnimotionPicks,” Tarek gushes. “He thinks it could become one of our most popular general purpose libraries, and he just pushed it into the common repo!”

  “Really? That’s amazing!” Saying this, Mitchell catches Kuba grinning sheepishly at his feet. Like Danna, the man shies from positive attention. But he better get used to it—because his work’s about to reach a massive audience! With an open engineering culture, Phluttr maintains a common code base whose best modules are available to everyone company-wide. Core libraries, in the main shared repository (or “repo”), end up in software with hundreds of millions of users. Just a few nights back, Kuba vowed to “turn Phluttr into a sea of digital motes” in a quest to crack Falkenberg’s disease. Now, already: Ta da!

  With everyone now here, they enter the PhastPhorwardr. Inside, wide warehouse windows admit boundless cheery sunshine, blunted by a smart form of glass that moderates temperatures, keeps the UV out, and presents an opaque face to nosey outsiders trying to peer in. The seating is largely open-plan. There’s also a smattering of cubicles, and an occasional Chinese wall delineates work-group turf. Big enough to seat a couple hundred comfortably, the place is not quite at capacity. “Welcome to Phluttr’s science project,” Tarek says as they enter.

  “Science project?” Danna asks.

  “Not literally, of course. But the whole setup’s almost academic, y’know? Apart from a couple giant development efforts.”

  “Like the augmented reality glasses you’re working on?” Mitchell confirms.

  Tarek nods. “WingMan. There’s that, and this huge robotics operation we’ll visit in a bit. Otherwise, it’s a bunch of micro-startups, mostly still chasing their preacquisition dreams. And it’s all the cool new-ish stuff. Synthetic biology, blockchain, drones, quantum computing—that sorta thing. None with any connection to the main Phluttr service, by the way.”

  “The idea is to let Phluttr keep tabs on emerging technologies,” Kuba says. “Like, all of them.”

  “I guess that…makes sense?” Mitchell says, not really believing this.

  “Yeah, only it doesn’t,” Danna declares. “Sure, keeping an eye on the rest of the Valley’s smart. But wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to read a bunch of TechCrunch articles?”

  Tarek just shrugs. “Don’t look at me. I’m the one who told you it’s weird around here.”

  “And ya’ll must be Team Giftish.ly!” The booming voice is very friendly and very southern. They’re at the edge of the synthetic biology, or “synbio” realm, where the presiding ex-founder is a middle-aged Georgian with the awesome name of Buford Bragg. He leads them past meticulously airtight barriers to a small assembly line. To the clueless eye, it’s all humming rectangles, so Buford narrates. “These boxes resemblin the lovechildren of washin machines and rice cookers’re Eppendorf centrifuges,” he states. “They can pellet cells or DNA with the best of em. And that pregnant-mailbox-lookin thing over there? Goes by the Wu Tang–worthy name of Agilent Bioanalyzer!” Mitchell guesses the accent is at least half affectation, and that the guy’s upping the down-homeness to make his field seem a bit less intimidating.

  “Heard of the Human Genome Project?” Buford asks, strolling over to something resembling a desktop printer. All nod. “Soaked up thousands of bioscience’s best minds for thirteen years and cost $3 billion.” He points at the box beside him. “Now this sucker’ll do that same amount of work in less’n a day, at a net cost of a few hundred bucks! And the Human Genome Project wasn’t that long ago. I mean, Law & Order was still on the air. W was in the White House. Almost feels like yesterday, don’t it?” Bottom line, genetic science is accelerating and cheapening even faster than computing. Way faster.

  For instance: “It cost about a buck to read a single letter of genetic code back when I’d guesstimate you were a schoolboy,” Buford says, pointing at Mitchell. “Now, we read millions of letters for a buck. It’s like goin from mappin a newly discovered continent on foot, to using satellites. Which is a huge deal! But fun as cartography is, would you rather build continents?” Well, Buford sure would. Which is why he’s not mapping but synthesizing DNA, letter by letter. “And synthesis is now movin down the price curve as fast as DNA readin did! Not long ago, synthesizin a base pair cost the same buck that readin a base pair cost in the nineties. Today, synthesis rounds to a nickel a pair, though some folks’ll quote you less.”

  “So how long until you can synthesize me?” Danna half jokes.

  “I’d give it a decade or three,” Buford says, not joking at all. “A human-scale genome weighs in at about 3 billion base pairs. And today, we couldn’t synthesize a tenth of one percent of that! Top labs, like this’n, crank out strings runnin into the tens of thousands of base pairs. And though we’re all marchin upward pretty steadily, there’ll be a huge barrier around 100K, which no one knows how we’ll cross. DNA starts gettin real brittle at those lengths, and we’ll need to come up with novel ways of compacting and protecting strands while they’re under construction.”

  Asked exactly what he’s creating, Buford answers, “Both everything, and nothing.” In other words, “We’re not doin any design work ourselves here at Phluttr. We’re just makin DNA, print-to-order. And we do that better’n anyone else in the world. So we’re leavin the sexy stuff to our customers. They’re the ones trainin white cells to whup cancer, turnin algae into fake meat that could fool a cattleman, and makin the blind see. To give you just three examples. Bottom line: the world designs it, then we build it.”

  “So you sell the DNA itself and not machines to make it,” Mitchell confirms.

  Buford nods. “No one’s really sellin machines for your lengthier DNA strands. Not yet. And for the next few years, the market’ll mainly be folks sellin DNA as a service, like us. But that’ll change. I mean, there was a time when no one sold machines to read DNA, and that was a service! Now the guys who make this sucker’re movin billions wortha gear and reagents every year.” He points at the compact box that can read an entire human genome in a day. “And that’s a common pattern in tech. Goin clear back to printin on paper rather’n DNA! Back when I was a kid, you could spend a hundred grand on a jet printer the size a this room. And that sucker’d live in a central bureau, where ordinary mortals bought print runs by the page. And it was way less capable than the eighty-nine-dollar Epson special I got sittin on my desk!”

  “So will you make do-it-yourself machines someday?” Danna asks.

  Buford shrugs. “That’s a way’s off yet for our industry. But if I don’t end up doin that, someone will. And long before today’s grade-schoolers’re your age, cheap desktop boxes’ll be writin more DNA in a minute than my whole lab puts out in a year. I can almost guarantee we’ll have hundred-dollar custom viruses before the next Olympics, and thousand-buck bacteria.”

  “But is that safe?” Mitchell asks.

  “Course not. Printin presses aren’t safe. Just ask anyone who lived through the Reformation.”

  Tarek shrugs. “Nukes aren’t safe. But even in a world of 7 billion lunatics, nobody’s shot one off in anger in over seventy years.”

  “Yes, but practically no one gets to,” Mitchell points out. “So that’s not such a comforting data point.”

  “Assuming we’re now talkin about war and terrorism, a huge difference between bio and your traditional weapons is that bio’s real hard to target,” Buford says. “Just look at the flu. It doesn’t exactly respect borders! And ‘kill these guys but not those guys’ is a hard instruction to issue if you’re targeting human biology writ large.”

  The meeting ends when Jepson summons Mitchell to a late-breaking meeting connected to the FTC (what??). As he puzzles over this, Danna reminds him about the privacy investigation Jepson
mentioned on their first day here. Mitchell nods in vague recollection. Though just days ago, that conversation feels like ancient history.

  Rocketing out the door, Mitchell decides to find Buford’s closing argument comforting. Emerging synthetic biology tools are powerful, and scary. But even the most destructive crazies define themselves in opposition to something, or someone. No evil group—not the Nazis, not the Spanish Inquisition, not ISIS—has ever wanted to kill everyone.

  Right?

  CROSS-AGENCY INTELLIGENCE SYNOPSIS: JAYSH AL HISAAB

  * * *

  * * *

  OVERVIEW: Jaysh al Hisaab is an apocalyptic, nihilistic offshoot of Islam’s ultraconservative Salafi movement. It emerged in Central Africa around 2012. Its core precept is that any act of mass murder at any scale can be justifiable and desirable, as all of its victims immediately go to their “infinitely deserved” fates in either heaven or hell. Because the rewards and punishments of the afterlife are determined by infallible divine judgment, unjust outcomes after death are impossible. Also, “Perfect justice is a perfect blessing, and a blessing that arrives sooner is superior to one arriving later”; so speeding any soul to its ultimate fate is “unambiguously desirable,” regardless of whether the victim is bound for heaven or hell. In short, killing a good person is just as Godly an act as killing an evil one. And killing more people is better than killing fewer.

  For this reason, Jaysh al Hisaab is unique among exponents of terror in condoning the slaughter of believers and nonbelievers equally. It argues that all attacks should maximize the sheer number of victims, without regard to religion, nationality, gender, or age. Its supporters therefore tend to perpetrate attacks in their own communities, as distant foreign societies are harder to infiltrate and therefore likely to yield fewer casualties.