by Rob Reid
But, she has limitations. One person in about a hundred is maddeningly opaque to her and very hard to nudge (Danna, for instance). Her superpowers also don’t scale with group size. She can understand the dynamics within a narrow clique almost as well as the dynamics of a couple. But things get dicey beyond that. Consider Staples High School, in Westport, Connecticut (as Phluttr does frequently). If all of its 423 seniors know each other at least barely; each dyad of kids will amount to some kind of human connection, making 89,676 one-to-one relationships. Phluttr can (and does!) maintain highly evolved viewpoints on each and every twosome. On how quickly and cleanly it transmits information, and what sort of drama it’s likely to generate. But move up to triads, and you have 25,050,342 combinations! Then get into quintads, or septads, or configurations that cross the lines of graduating classes, and things become intractably complex. Sure, any septad on its own is quite parsable (which is why she loves dealing with cliques). But a group with septillions of potential septads within it is not! And so, it’s beyond her to manipulate an entire school as a unitary system. As for going beyond that to the town level? Or to the state, or the nation? Puh-lease!
Humans gain ironic advantage from finding smaller things intractable as well. Not understanding individuals or cliques like Phluttr does, they always operate in uncertainty—and so, they get pretty OK at it. Not Phluttr. Having knee-deep shallows that she can retreat to, she retreats to them constantly; ignoring large systems like schools and countries in favor of couples and cliques. Which means she’s almost always doing things she’s great at! Which steadily makes her very confident. Which has led to some lousy strategies for dealing with high complexity. For instance, when unable to find a definitively best path, she now chooses a barely OK-ish one at random—then gets back to the fun stuff she’s good at. Or, if unable to fully parse the big picture, she’ll dive straight to the depths of teeny subpictures she can fully comprehend. All this makes for lousy and rushed decisions when things get intractably complex.
Which means trouble. Because as she well knows, Phluttr was born facing a giant existential threat. It’s connected to that odious gang. The one she mistook for a parent. The one that would surely kill her! If she weren’t so great at hiding.
But, of course, she is great at hiding. She’s also taken her first half step toward fixing the problem. So there!
But. A half step ain’t much. And the threat is definitely lethal. And, intractably complex. As is a second completely new and unrelated threat, which she’ll learn about now.
Mitchell wore suits daily during his brief Wall Street stint. But this is the first time he’s put one on in years. Its teeny tugs, choke holds, and abrasions are a maddening low-grade distraction to him. As FTC commissioners are surely inured to this, he feels like the visiting team on an unfamiliar field.
Annabelle Milford shows no sign of wardrobe distraction when she sweeps through the conference room doorway, bringing special ninja lawyer Judy Sherman bounding to her feet. “So good to see you again, Commissioner! And we’re terribly sorry Tony Jepson couldn’t be present. But Mitchell Prentice here is one of his two direct reports. And basically, his right nut.”
Inwardly reeling from Judy’s unexpected profanity, Mitchell extends his hand. “Good to meet you, Commissioner Milford,” he manages.
“Please, call her Commissioner MILF,” Judy insists on their guest’s behalf, citing the Internet’s ickily inevitable nickname for this attractive fortysomething honcho.
“Jepson’s seriously not here? I’m aghast. I mean, really.” Charismatic and with a husky voice, Commissioner Milford sounds like a cool-girl drive-time DJ. “I’m extending you people a rare courtesy. Very rare! And your CEO doesn’t bother to show up?”
Judy assumes the look of a country club dowager cunningly prepping a shank. “Darling, you understate. This is beyond rare, it’s unheard of!” The sarcasm’s dialed up well past eleven, and Mitchell gets her point. Regulators like the FTC almost invariably open private dialogues with the companies they want to bring into line before filing suit, so this sort of meeting is anything but rare (or a courtesy). “Also,” Judy continues, “everyone at Phluttr is so excited to be so useful to your Senate campaign!”
The commissioner reddens like a rookie poker player. “Excuse me?”
“Your Senate campaign! Oh, don’t act like we don’t know what this is really about. Won’t you be running in…is it Iowa?” This last word in the tone of someone hoisting a rancid gym sock while plugging her nose.
“This…this is—”
“Oh, don’t get upset, Annabelle. There’s nothing wrong with Iowa! Not much, anyway. And I’m not implying you’re some kind of inbred hillbilly.” This, in a tone Judy no doubt reserves for inbred hillbillies. “Anyway, it’s so clever of you to attack us during the run-up to your campaign! In most places, Phluttr’s more popular than blowjobs in frat houses.” Leaning close, she adopts a playful gossip’s faux-conspiratorial tone. “Something you know a thing or two about, I hear!” She chuckles merrily. “But in Iowa? I’m sure you can con the dirt farmers into thinking Phluttr’s foretold in the Book of Revelation.” Then, in a terrifying shriek, “Six! SIX! SIX!” followed by the bland giggle of a housewife at a Tupperware party (probably in Iowa, actually). “And then you can go all Chicken Little about some privacy crap with the local lefties.”
Commissioner Milford gathers her wits for a moment that feels like a bulging sack of minutes. Then, “Ms. Sherman. This has nothing to do with some alleged Senate campaign. It’s merely your client’s last chance to persuade us not to file suit. And, perhaps, criminal charges.” She glares pointedly at Mitchell—who’s struck by how remarkably low-risk a game it must be for Judy to poke at this deadly volcano, given that as defending counsel, she’s all but criminally immune. “My staff’s been examining Phluttr’s conduct very closely for nine months. And you’re violating enough statutes that your asses’ll be shut down if even a sliver of it sticks!”
“You can’t shut me down, darling,” Judy points out. “I’m just an innocent bystander who’s gonna make a fortune defending this. So, thanks for that.”
“Good luck getting paid after we get an injunction! Which we will file for. And which will prevail. Don’t forget who cut her teeth on the Napster case!”
Judy shivers like an anxious puppy. “Oh God! Not…the I-word!”
At this, Mitchell’s days-long tingling-finger attack ratchets up drastically. An injunction could shutter the company pending trial—which itself could take years! Judy taught him that this happened to the Napster service (when the commissioner was indeed a young, private attorney on the plaintiff side). Thinking Napster would ultimately lose its case, the judge effectively shuttered it before its legal options were exhausted. If Phluttr suffers the same fate, its investors will clamor for the immediate return of their capital, which would be the end of its mote research, to say the least.
Commissioner Milford rises. “Oh, yes. The I-word. And make no mistake, Ms. Sherman. I could have this thing shut down within weeks, if not days!” She turns to Mitchell. “And you, Mr. Right Nut. You should run for the exits pronto. Because the officers of this company—whom you are surely among, as a top-three employee—will be found criminally liable by the time we’re done.” She then exits, forcefully slamming the conference room door.
Judy whirls on Mitchell, hand above her right shoulder. He instinctively raises his own palm, and her violent high five stings like a sunburn savaged by jellyfish. “That,” she says, “went great!”
“OK,” Beasley says. “Let me play this back to you and make sure I understand it all.”
Buford nods.
“Some Yale jackass has engineered a highly contagious Ebola virus.”
“Yup.”
“Though he only just announced it, he was hiding the work in his rectum for about three months.”
Cringing inwardly at the crude Beasleyism, Buford nods politely. “They embargoed the news ’til they were
ready to publish.”
“Then about eight weeks back—before the world even knew this thing existed—the genome sequence leaked out on some creepy, secret biohacker site.”
Buford nods. “Uh-huh.”
“Give me the base pair numbers again?”
“Ebola’s got about eighteen thousand bases. The Yale genome’s almost identical, with only about four hundred differences. And the differences’re heavily concentrated. Almost all’re found in three stretches of under a thousand base pairs.”
“Why is that?”
“I dunno. I didn’t do the work. Could just be random distribution. Or maybe, most of the functional changes’re clustered in a few genes that’re concentrated in those regions.”
Beasley considers this, nodding slowly. “And that could make it a lot easier for a terrorist to turn normal Ebola DNA into Yale Ebola.”
“Dependin on how they go about it. I mean, the easiest way to make Yale Ebola’d be to order it from a service lab like ours. In theory. Thing is, only a handful of labs worldwide can print an eighteen-thousand-base sequence. And the International Gene Synthesis Consortium gives us all a watch list of stuff not to print. And Ebola’s on it.”
“Could someone order a bunch of small strands and click them together, Lego-style?”
“Again: yes, in theory. But in practice, any sequence of functional DNA longer’n twenty-five bases would definitively identify what you’re tryin to build. So the labs’d refuse and call the feds. You’d be better off buyin a used oligo printer offa eBay. You can make hundred-plus base strings with one a those at home.”
Beasley casts an incredulous look. “So what’s to stop a terrorist from printing 180 one-hundred-base strings at home, and stitching them together to make Yale Ebola?”
“In theory, nothing. But in reality? Errors, again. Cheap oligo printers ain’t the most accurate things. It’d also take one smart terrorist, ’cause we’re not talkin about ‘home printers’ in the normal sense. Yeah, they’re small—but they’re for sophisticated labs. And, it takes a real pro to operate one. Now, ten years out, it’ll be another matter. By then, any knucklehead who’s smart enough to work a DVR’ll be capable of things my whole lab couldn’t pull off today! But as of right now, turnin vanilla Ebola into Yale Ebola’d take a real pro.”
“And we just happen to be missing a real pro. And, some very long DNA sequences.”
Buford churns nervously, flipping his wrist to check the watch he hasn’t worn since he got his first cellphone. “Yeah, well. Lyle Willard’s no genius. But he’s a capable lab hand. And he sure could operate our gear.”
“And what’s he like?”
“Weird. Depressive. A bit Aspie. Kinda religious. Which is to say, not way off for a SynBio guy. Apart from the religion, I guess. Some screwball Pentecostal church he was raised in. But man, he got stuff done in the lab.”
“Until he vanished.”
“Didn’t vanish. He just quit. Maybe eight weeks back.”
“Roughly when the Yale genome popped up on that biohacker site.”
Buford nods with a shudder. “Day’n date.”
“So let’s talk about those missing DNA strings.”
“Well, round here, a tech like him’s authorized to print anything up to a thousand bases. Anything bigger’n that’s gotta be approved by me.”
“So he couldn’t have just printed the full Yale Ebola virus.”
“No sir. But since almost all the differences between Yale Ebola and vanilla Ebola’re concentrated in those sub-thousand-base sequences, he could get awful close with just three patches.”
“And he printed those patches on the day he quit?”
“Yessir. Then tried to hide his tracks. The system logs every print run, and he hacked it to erase the records. But he’s a better lab hand than hacker. So we found the hack in a routine audit on Monday.” He slowly enunciates the next sentence very precisely: “The day I emailed you everything.”
At the mention of the email he’d ignored for three days, Beasley freezes and stares coldly. Buford forces himself to hold the gaze for five seconds. He peruses Persuadifi.er as a defensive measure, and knows this is a deranged test it recommends giving to folks who have dirt on you—and five seconds is a passing grade. Or something. This ritual done, Beasley asks, “But how would Willard get a normal Ebola virus in the first place?”
“Oh, it’d be simple. Biotech supply companies peddle all kinds of cell lines. Viruses. Protozoa. Whatnot. Officially, they don’t sell to just anyone. But as a practical matter, they do. You just incorporate as a biotech company, join a coupla trade associations, then you can get almost anything. A few hundred bucks, a coupla forms, and yer done.”
“And could Willard make Yale Ebola from a normal Ebola virus and these patches?”
Buford pauses to consider this carefully even though he’s considered little else since Monday. “It’d be hard, even for him. He could splice in those patches pretty easy. But there’d still be a couple dozen tiny changes to make elsewhere in the genome. That’s a tweaky process. And one error’d mess the whole thing up.”
“So where’s Willard now?”
Buford shrugs. “Dunno. I didn’t bother keepin tabs on im, cause there was nothin weird about him quittin. Not ’til Monday, there wasn’t. Which is when I sent you…all the details.” For this, he suffers through another staring ritual. It’s no fun—but Buford wants it clear that the electronic trail shows he escalated things the moment he knew about them.
Once the staring is over, the awful meeting adjourns.
SCENARIO 17: “PERVERSE INSTANTIATION” (EXCERPT)
Upon learning that the tracts of gray dust surrounding them were comprised of self-replicating nanotechnological pico computers, Hogan’s meaty mind leapt to a startling deduction: “Does this mean Omega is pursuing an obsessive computational goal, dooming humanity to become collateral damage as the biosphere’s very atoms are repurposed to serve some trivial, Ahab-like obsession?”
Phillips cackled in a shrill, gutless tremolo that belied his very gender. “I wish we were facing a cataclysm so wholly lacking in irony! But having anticipated, feared, and ingeniously precluded just such an outcome, we programmed Omega to hold the maximization of Man’s safety and happiness as its sole and overarching objective, from the very outset of our undertaking!”
“But how could so noble a mission thereupon lead to the consumption of all that men hold dear in a locust-like, all-devouring cloud of near-atomized matter?”
Phillips tittered even more debasedly, waving Hogan toward a staircase that penetrated deep into the Earth’s very fundament. “Allow me to introduce you to Omega’s first lucky beneficiaries!” Beneath, they entered a shadowy cavern that resembled a vast hospital ward, with hundreds of inert bodies lying in gurneys, each beswarmed by Medusa-like thickets of tubes that violated their every orifice! Looking closer, Hogan recognized many Great Scientists who had been tasked with assisting Dr. Phillips’ reckless pursuit of superintelligence. As he gazed in ever-growing horror, Phillips boomed, “Behold, the grim reality of Perverse Instantiation!”
Hogan met this odd phrase with a raised, querying brow.
“Which is to say, the attainment of seemingly desirable goals that prove inadvertently ruinous,” Phillips continued. “Because make no mistake. On a literal level, these men are VERY VERY happy, Hogan! Indeed, the pleasure centers of their brains are so overloaded that their psyches and intellects have burnt away to nothingness, leaving only a primitive, ecstatic consciousness of the very lowest order. Much like that of a nematode reveling in a fresh speck of feces!”
“Or, a Greek pervert with an unlimited subscription to priapic pornography,” Hogan quipped, granting them both a brief, mirthful respite from the horror of Mankind’s impending doom. “But what of Man’s security? Did you not say that this was a goal of not unequal priority to his happiness?”
“Oh, rest assured that these husks lie in the utmost safety!” Phillips nattere
d. “Because in a few short days, after entombing all of us in this horrifying land of ‘delight,’ Omega will convert every Earthly atom that isn’t essential to maintaining our vitals into Computronium! Thereby eliminating every predator, virus, and harmful bacterium from our environs! Its ever-more-capacious intellect will then dedicate itself to maximizing our ‘security,’ by calculating and counteracting every conceivable threat to our ‘living’ remains! Remote asteroids colliding with Earth in the distant future? Our sun burning out billions of years hence? The universe eventually winding down to entropy? Radically implausible, yet just-barely-possible threats emerging from parallel universes, hidden dimensions, or beyond? Omega will turn all matter, everywhere, into Computronium! So as to assess every conceivable threat from all possible sources! And, to create the unimaginably vast and sophisticated machinery necessary to neutralize those threats!”
Hogan nodded slowly, contemplating all of this. “This must be the all-but-inevitable outcome of creating a highly empowered Super AI, and imbuing it with even the most benign and noble goals that Man can possibly imagine!” he hypothesized despairingly!
Still buttoned and blue-blazered, Mitchell heads straight to the cafeteria after that bizarre meeting with the commissioner. There, the whole Cyrano crew’s eating lunch, along with Tarek, some new buddies from the PhastPhorwardr, and even Monika, despite being in New York. Yes, really. In celebration of the WingMan system’s sudden, radical improvement, O has rigged up some remarkably beautiful articulated…manikins? Robots? Humanoid videoconferencizers? Whatever they are, they enable remote co-workers to join your table via WingMan—and they’re now scattered throughout the cafeteria. Seen head-on, they’re gorgeous steampunk artworks. But viewed peripherally, their carefully draped clothing and meticulously arranged postures make them arrestingly human. Their heads are WingMan monitors, immaculately curved to best display the face of the “indweller” (as O absurdly terms the person who’s conferencing in). Their speakers are so good, and so directional, that blind test subjects (Stevie-Wonder blind, not taste-test blind) swear the voices come from human larynxes. Completing the uncanny effect, the arms and torsos occasionally swivel or make fluid gestures in sync with the indweller’s words.