“Makes sense,” Krish mused. “What kind of memory blocker would you use?”
“Check this out.” Med allowed herself a quick grin, and showed them a molecular structure erupting into the air as a series of abstracted bonds. It was a collection of already-existing biological parts, along with a protein that Med had folded herself.
“I call it Retcon,” she said. Krish walked around the table, looking at the projection from every angle. “Essentially, what we’ll be doing is establishing retroactive continuity in the brain. We tweak the neurons to avoid the memory of the Zacuity-fueled reward, and we link the pre-addiction past to the present. You could say we create an alternate present for the brain, based on changing what it thinks has just happened.”
“Sounds easy.” Krish’s tone hovered between distracted and sarcastic, making Jack remember why she’d once loved him so much.
“What will be the experiential result for the person undergoing this therapy?” The question came from an undergraduate with a mass of curly red hair and a very serious expression on his face. “I mean, will they literally forget that they’ve ever taken the addictive substance before? Or just all the cues that make them want to do it again?”
“I am not sure,” Med admitted, looking at Jack for help. “I think they will forget some things, but I am not sure how much, or what that will feel like.”
“But won’t you be destroying years’ worth of memories?”
Jack could tell this kid was going to keep asking questions, and Med didn’t have much experience dealing with curious undergrads.
“Here’s the deal,” Jack interjected. “Retcon isn’t a cure-all for every kind of addiction. Nobody can make that. But it will work as a therapy for people who’ve taken Zacuity.” She had his attention now, and Med nodded gratefully. “Potentially, we can save thousands of lives.”
Seemingly mollified, the undergrad crooked his right index finger at Med’s simulation, downloading it to his goggles. The bot addressed the group again. “Anybody want to help out? We could divide up some of these simulations today, to model how different molecules might affect the brain.”
Jack raised her hand. “Sign me up.”
“Sure, I’ll do some.” This next volunteer was a postdoc who typed on the lab bench as she talked, her fingers’ movements captured by wrist sensors that translated them into keystrokes. Her coveralls were plastered with patches that seemed to be responding to the sound of her voice: When she spoke, they all turned red, then slowly faded through green into black again. The grad student with vines growing out of her head, who went by the nym Catalyst, volunteered, too. The serious undergraduate, who had no special adornments other than his grave facial expression, glanced through whatever he saw on his goggles, then focused on Med and Jack. “I’m intrigued,” he said. “I’ll put in some hours right now. I don’t have class until tomorrow.”
For a moment, Jack allowed herself to be charmed. These students loved their work at Free Lab so much that they came here when they weren’t in class, first thing in the morning, just to find something “intriguing” to research. It had been a long time since she’d worked on a drug project with people doing it for the thrill of discovery. Usually her lab teams were motivated by death or money, half-crazed with a desire to cure the former and bathe in giant tanks of the latter. She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.
Med organized the simulations quickly, parceling them out equally to everyone on the ad hoc Retcon Team.
Absorbed in analysis, the group lapsed into silence. Several meters above them, the Free Lab’s rectangular windows illuminated walls covered in shelves, revealing in dusty splotches of light the half-finished projects of dozens of genetic engineers. PCR machines the size of Jack’s fist lay in boxes with cables and self-cooling sample holders. A robotic arm inside a transparent shoebox was harvesting amplified sequence from minute cultures on a tray.
A long planter filled with moist dirt was bolted beneath one window, and out of it poked green stalks of modded wheat, its tender seeds rich in tumor suppressants. Below that, somebody had taken up an entire three-meter shelf with an experiment on repairing broken metal struts using new virus epoxies. One strut had grown back together nicely, but another was developing a strange, shiny tumor that was eating into the shelf below. Posted next to the bulbous strut was a note that read, “Please clean up. If not removed by 8/1/44, this will be THROWN AWAY.”
Jack stared at the tumor, and imagined molecules.
The trick with a therapy would be to disrupt or maybe just erase those hyper-rewarding memories of work. Which wasn’t exactly a small task. It wasn’t as if there was one memory center in the brain, any more than there was a single reward center. It was all molecular pathways, connections between different regions, conversations between neurotransmitters and receptors.
Med’s neck jerked slightly back from what she was looking at on the bench, just enough to register in the corner of Jack’s eye.
She messaged to Med from her tablet. What is it?
“Jack, can you come with me to Krish’s office?” Med asked casually. “I think we should run this by him.”
“Got something?” asked the serious student.
“Not yet, David,” Med replied. “But I want to see what Krish thinks of this.”
They angled their way between benches, pausing briefly at Krish’s door before he waved them in.
“My patient—the Zacuity OD—died a few days ago,” Med said. “Now there are six more people with similar symptoms at the hospital, and my supervisor is asking if I can come home early.”
“Just don’t answer,” Krish said. “Tell him you were off the grid for a few days.”
“She can’t hide the fact that she read the message, Krish,” Jack said. A sophisticated understanding of molecular networks in the brain hadn’t given Krish much insight into computer networks. He looked confused for a minute, then shrugged.
Jack turned to Med. “What do you want to do? We can take over here if you want to go back and work on Retcon remotely. We’ll create an anonymous code repository on a public server—just use good crypto when you update the data.”
Med looked at the mobile in her hands, then out at the Free Lab. The Retcon team had forgotten to eat lunch, but they’d taken a break for early tea. Steaming mugs sat next to half-eaten sandwiches on the bench. Catalyst was playfully poking David in the side, finally forcing a giggle out of him. The postdoc with sound-activated patches projected some kind of animation into the air over the table. Behind them, Threezed was coming down the ladder from the loft, wearing nothing but a towel as he headed to the showers.
“I want to stay,” the bot said, her eyes on Threezed. Then, glancing at Krish, she added, “If that is alright with you.”
“That’s fine with me. You’re the lead on this.”
“There’s something else, too,” Med continued. “I sent out a query about Zacuity to an addiction therapy research group last week. A few hours ago, somebody claiming to work at Zaxy mailed me from a temporary public account and said there are other problems, too. Apparently the casualties aren’t just on the street.”
Jack leaned against the glass and considered. “This has got to be pretty serious if somebody’s willing to whistle-blow.”
“How do you know this mail isn’t a trap?” Med’s obvious question pulled Jack up short. The IPC could easily trace that mail to the network where it landed.
“Oh, shit—did you receive it here?”
“No, I logged into the mail server at work remotely. They’ll only be able to get as far as Yellowknife if they’re snooping.”
Krish looked nauseated. This was exactly the kind of spy shit that Jack knew he feared most. She could just imagine him calculating the risk their project posed to his latest grant. Hell, for all she knew, he was partly funded by Zaxy. She cringed as he opened his mouth to speak, expecting him to order them out of his
happy little bubble where radicalism grew only as far as corporate boundaries allowed.
“Do you think that your supervisor knows something?” Krish was unexpectedly calm. “That he’s asking you to come back because he got a nastygram from the Zone IPC office?”
“Could be.”
“Then you’re going to need a good reason to stay here. A reason nobody would question.” He gestured at his desk absentmindedly. It looked like he was flicking through the subject heads on his mail without reading them. “It would also have to be something that would justify why you’ve been a little secretive.”
A grin tugged at the side of his mouth. “Med, you’ve come to my lab highly recommended by one of the best genetic engineers I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.” He pointed at Jack. His voice was suddenly formal, as if he were addressing an audience at a conference. “I’m very pleased that you were willing to come out for a job interview at such short notice, since we unfortunately had our best pharma developer poached by University of British Columbia last week.”
He turned to Med, who was also starting to grin. “I think we can make you an offer that would be competitive with whatever they’re paying you over at Yellowknife, and as an associate researcher you’d get your own budget and research team. I realize you might want to think about this further, uh, Dr. Cohen, but we would love it if you could start work right away on a new project we’ve launched.”
“Why, thank you, Dr. Patel.” Med replied in a tone whose stagey formality matched Krish’s own. “But why don’t you call me Med, since we’ll be working together now. That’s what everybody calls me.”
This quiet exchange was a small thing, a trick to allay suspicion. But it was also huge, a real job doing the kind of work that Jack had once imagined for herself, in this very lab. Jack was gripped by vertigo as she considered how much time had passed since she’d wanted that job, and how many choices had torn her away from this place. Looking at Krish and Med, she was suddenly overwhelmed with an almost painful affection—not just for this smart young researcher, but also for the man who’d recognized Med as an excellent scientist. Coming to the Free Lab for help had turned out to be Jack’s first good decision after a string of incredibly bad ones.
She sidled up behind Krish, peeking over his shoulder at what was on his desk. He had Med’s staff page from Yellowknife beneath his fingertips. There was a black-and-white headshot of the bot floating above her name and title: Medea Cohen, PhD, Assistant Researcher. Areas of specialization: pharmaceutical testing and development, neurogenetics. Below that, a tidy list of publications, some with Med’s name listed first. A few professional affiliations, including membership in one progressive nonprofit that worked with Freeculture groups. It presented the perfect portrait of a young, ambitious, liberal-minded geneng researcher: no black marks, no holes in her employment record, no publications in anything but peer-reviewed journals.
Up until the past few days, Med had been a very good girl. And Krish had just rewarded her with the kind of job every assistant researcher dreams of. She would never need to go back to Yellowknife again.
12
THE HUMAN NETWORK
JULY 11, 2144
As the sun sank, every surface in the medina continued to radiate heat. But the teahouse remained cool beneath reflective paint, and water-cooled air kept patrons from sweating. Eliasz ordered some fragrant oolong at the end of a long bar made from polished wood edged with a Moorish pattern of elaborately interpenetrating polygons. Through the dusky gray windows, they could see a tiny alley, one of the many canopy-shaded streets that twisted through the oldest neighborhood in Casablanca. An archway across the street, edged with blue tile, led into a barely visible courtyard. Next door, a woman filled jugs with water from a public fountain whose gracefully arranged stones dated back to when this was a nation called Morocco. Now Casablanca was one of the African Federation’s key port cities, flush with international capital. In a seam where the crumbling foam walls of an apartment building met the street, a boy arranged some wares to sell: a small wagon piled with long, arrow-shaped fish, and a cage of buzzing, cheaply fabbed perimeter drones.
The after-work crowd began to flow into the pathways of the medina, disgorged from air-conditioned jitneys that ran every five minutes from Biotech Park. It was easy to spot their business-ready fashions among the locals. Some wore spotless white thawbs or embroidered caftans flowing over their khakis; some had colorful hijabs over their hair or the tails of saris over their shoulders; some sported Zone jeans and button shirts; some went retro in western suits of linen and seersucker; some bared their upper thighs and chests with transparent fabrics that suggested their skills were too important for employers to worry about modesty. All chattered with each other or the network via ear clips, goggles, perimeters, implants, and specialized, invisible devices.
Many of them would be stopping at one of the dozens of Prague-style secret teahouses that had sprung up here over the sixty years since the late twenty-first century Collapse, which left populations and farms ravaged by plagues. Afterwards, the newly formed African Federation hatched a ten-year plan from their headquarters in Johannesburg. They promised the Federation’s three hundred million surviving citizens that they would build the most high-tech agricultural economy in the world.
A sweeping reform bill allowed the Federation government to transform virtually the entire continent into a special economic zone with no regulations on research into anything that could make farming lucrative again. Eurozone and Asian Union companies flocked to the cosmopolitan Federation cities to research transgenic animals that secreted drugs; synthetic fast-growing organisms; metagenetic topsoil engineering; and exo-agriculture that could thrive offworld for export to the Moon and Mars colonies. Recent advances in molecular engineering had been ruled unsafe and ethically questionable in other economic coalitions. But not in the African Federation.
Among the most successful businesses to come out of that regulatory free-for-all were outfits founded by engineers from Prague, Budapest, and Tallinn. Those companies attracted more people from the central Eurozone, and with them came a secret teahouse culture: cool, dark little rooms with unmarked doors where the customers had to know the bouncer, or to whisper a password. Usually the “secret” was just a meaningless formality. You could get loosely guarded passwords on the net, or come to know the bouncer by beaming him a little crypto cash. These Eurozone quirks were easily merged into the casual teahouse culture that had existed for centuries in the medina.
Still, a few teahouses took their secrets seriously. Like the nameless one where Paladin stood, analyzing highly diffuse airborne chemicals produced by dozens of varieties of tea leaf, dried and steeped in precisely heated water. One of the Federation’s covert operatives from the IPC had given them the secret password. The place was known to attract hackers and pirates. To Paladin, however, the customers were indistinguishable from the business class deluge outside. That’s probably why Eliasz had given him a HUMINT exercise to work on for the next few hours. The bot needed to hone his social skills, and there was no better place to do it than in a teahouse where they were trying to meet as many people as possible.
Eliasz poked Paladin, gesturing almost imperceptibly at the man next to him. After ordering tea, the man slouched so far over the bar that Paladin could see a pale stripe of skin showing above the waistband of his pants. It was time to try his opening gambit. Offer a piece of personal information, and humans will be sure to offer some of their own.
“I have never been here before, and it is not what I expected,” Paladin vocalized, turning his torso and face toward the man, who looked up with an expression of vague surprise. He hadn’t expected anyone to talk to him, least of all a giant robot.
“Yeah? Did you expect there would be hydrocarbons to drink?”
Through his back sensors, Paladin could see Eliasz rolling his eyes. The joke about bots looking for hydrocarbons to drink in bars was stale forty years ago, and came acr
oss as extremely condescending now. But the man was just old enough to have grown a tiny mustache that looked like two dark hyphens in the middle of his face.
Paladin powered on, vowing to succeed somehow with this interaction. “I’m Pack, and this is Aleksy.” He gestured to Eliasz. Pack was a very common name for lab assistant bots.
“I’m Slavoj.” The man extended his hand, grasping the light alloy of Paladin’s in his fingers. Blood samples revealed high levels of caffeine. That was a good sign. It could lead to an infodump with minimal prompting.
Paladin chose a conversational gambit that always seemed to yield results.
“Where are you from?”
Slavoj spilled his whole story out to them, virtually unbidden, in a stimulant-enabled rush. He’d come from somewhere in the central Eurozone to work with his friends at a tissue engineering startup, but they ran out of money. Now he was doing QA on muscle trellises for meat factories. Slavoj shook his head mournfully at Paladin and Eliasz. “I guess what I’m saying is that this place is no happy hunting ground for jobs right now. They tell you it’s easy to get rich here, but what that really means is that it’s not as hard to be poor.”
Paladin tilted his head to indicate sympathy and extemporized. “We keep hearing the same thing from other people.”
This was enough to elicit another diatribe from Slavoj about various jobs he’d tried to get but hadn’t, through no fault of his own.
Eliasz pressed a warm hand against Paladin’s lower back. The bot had actually succeeded in making a connection with Slavoj. For an instant, Paladin felt a flash of something that went beyond the usual programmed pleasure at completing a task and pleasing Eliasz. He was having fun. Impulsively, he sent a smiley emoji to Eliasz’ perimeter. When the man received it, he tapped his thumb lightly on the bot’s back with a kind of aimless, amiable rhythm.
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