CHAPTER TEN
(for Don B.)
English stood by his carving station, in astute attention, over-compensating for the nervousness he feared his body would reveal. If he were ever caught…. He couldn’t even think about it. He turned his attention to the steaming roast beef, hot under the yellow food lamp. The smell made him nauseous.
The Romer Onyx banquets were always quite an extravaganza, whenever they were launching a new project or product. All the executive Board, stock holders, and stake holders would gather like well-heeled and well-mannered vultures, chattering around one another in self-indulgent adoration of their very existence.
The last time they had held a gathering this big, with long rows of buffet, more suited to a king’s coronation than a stock holders meeting was the day they launched the data pods. English remembered how the R.O executives cooed and crowed over their creation, and how it would “revolutionize the relationships” between capital (aka their money) and the producers of their capital (the communities) through seamless portals of data mining.
While large percentages of the globe continued to operate under the sway of this partnership-of-domination-through-surveillance, more and more decolonized cities were cropping up, following the example of Interregnum City. Romer Onyx’s control, and profits, weakened with every city that unplugged. If this spread of meats, salads, desserts, and ice sculptures that English had been charged with coordinating for today, was any indication, whatever it was they were launching next, which must have taken them decades to construct, was going to be even bigger.
English eyed Ryder protectively, who was at the far corner, dressed as a waiter. Nervousness leaked off of him. His movements were mechanical, forced, and stiff. He did not carry himself like someone who had been trained as R.O wait staff. English hoped the CEO’s would be too full of themselves today to notice the odd looking waiter who could barely pour glasses of water without shaking.
Mr. Parks, in his crisp dark blue suit made his way to the podium at the front of the ballroom. Mr. Parks had been CEO of Romer Onyx as long as English could recall, which was now over twenty years. He must have risen through the ranks as a very young executive groomed for world domination. How else does someone else to get to become as powerful as him?
English had started working with the company as a young widower, desperate to provide for his two children, after the loss of their mother. Back then, no one fully understood what R.O was doing to their communities in the name of “progress.” Once the community members realized how R.O was controlling them, English had wanted to quit, but it was Pops who convinced him to stay on, and be a source of necessary information. Given how the community had rejected their partnerships with R.O., English was surprised that Mr. Parks was willing to keep him on a Chief Chef in charge of all food distribution for the company and their neighborhood “partnerships.” Mr. Parks had simply said, “English. You’re a good employee. I don’t want to have to bother retraining someone else. You just keep doing a good job and we will be just fine.” It was a simple as that. English saw firsthand how R.O used access to food and water as instruments of control over desperate communities.
English chuckled to himself. Over the last ten years or so, Mr. Parks clearly had forgotten who English was, and where he’d come from or he would have never allowed him to be present for this current unveiling. Of course, part of his job was to be vetted for security clearance. English had dutifully moved out of Interregnum City and into the R.O established living quarters. It was comfortable enough…as long as you didn’t ask any questions. Which English never did, publicly at least. He had quietly worked his way into the wallpaper, so to speak. He excelled at going un-noticed. English knew he would have to remain so until he could reach Pops with news of what he was learning.
“Excuse me,” Mr. Parks called with authority through the podium microphone. “Please, have a seat. May I have your attention?”
The room of about forty people (mostly grey haired white males) obediently took their seats. Mr. Parks announced, “We’d like to begin our program for this evening. I think you’ll be quite pleased with what we have to present to you. It’s going to revolutionize the face of our community relations.” English had heard that before.
English and Ryder caught one others attention from across the room. Ryder had to lean against the wall to keep from falling. The fabric of waiter jacket was hot and itchy, and the sleeves agitated his wrists. He wanted to claw his way out of it. Oh god, what could be worse than the data pods? he asked himself. English tried to give him a weak smile of assurance as if to say, “Hang in there. It’ll be ok.”
“I’d like to introduce you all to our top scientist, Dr. Caldwell, who will be sharing with you his latest work. I think you’ll be quite pleased.”
Not likely, English thought as he stirred the large silver tray of mashed potatoes.
The large movie screen behind Mr. Parks lit up, as Mr. Caldwell rose to the sound of polite applause, and he walked up toward the podium. An image appeared on the screen which read, “The future of bio-data.” Next to it was a picture of a field of corn, and next to that another picture of a smiling family of four, all seated around a computer screen as if looking at something happy.
What the…? English wondered.
“Thank you,” Dr. Caldwell began nervously. He was a short portly man with unkempt hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in days. He was a cliché of his scientific field. Probably hadn’t been out of the lab in years. English doubted that this man had any personal relationships or family whatsoever.
“As you can probably guess, I am not very good at public speaking.” A light wave of laughter floated over the room. He smiled. “So, I will get right to the point. I don’t want to be the only thing that stands between you and that amazing buffet of food R.O has provided for us today.” English felt self –conscious, as all eyes turned to him for a brief moment. He looked down and quickly stirred the tureen of soup, avoiding eye contact with the audience.
Dr. Caldwell clicked the remote, and another screen appeared– large over his head. It said: The future of biometric data. You are what you eat.
Click. New slide.
“We all know what happened twenty years ago after the development of data pods was so painfully rejected by some of our sister-cities.”
Ryder was stacking cups and napkins at the coffee station. He kept his back to the audience. An image of the destroyed data pod of Interregnum City came on the screen. There were murmurs in the crowd.
How did that get that image? English wondered. It seemed like R.O could do anything. Maybe they were gods, after all.
“So,” Dr. Caldwell interjected, trying to regain the attention of the crowd, “One of the problems we encountered was that the data pods, though efficient for their time, proved to be too external. Too out of our immediate control.”
Next slide: A magnified picture of a very tiny microchip…or something like that. Whatever it was, English had never seen anything like it. The Black Hatters had never talked about anything like this. You could see that, as the thing was placed next to someone’s thumb, as if to give the viewer a sense of scale, it was smaller than the size of a tip of a splinter underneath the skin.
“This… is ‘cyber-sky-supplement’ or CSS for short,” Dr. Caldwell pronounced this as if he were announcing the naming of a newborn child. His child. “CSS is the new face of biotechnology that will allow us to create immediate and direct relationships between our products and the data we need to continue our work. In this age where knowledge, or data, is capital, failing partnerships like the one’s started with Interregnum City, and more happening each week, we need a new way to interface with our sources of data that require no middle-man. Data pods were a middle man. But without them, how do we continue the necessary flow of knowledge in order to continue our work? We provide everything from quality of living improvements, financial services, food distribution, medical care… we provide everything to our partner communities. But, as you already know, we need their data to provide these services. We need their body metrics to create new medicines and manage healthy providers. We need their educational data to distribute individualized school services. We need their social, behavioral, and emotional data to ensure our investments in their businesses are not so risky that we face another financial collapse. While it hurts us that certain communities” he toned with disgust, “would refuse our services, maybe we need to rethink how we create these partnerships. As we are now learning, not everything can be serviced through cyber space alone. Outsourcing to the data pods exposed us to risk. Relying on good faith agreements with communities to participate prove insufficient. What can replace the middle man? Answer? We go back to the source. After all, without humans, without our very bodily existence, none of this matters, anyway.”
Slide: An image of a human body resembling the famous work by Leonardo Da Vinci entitled Vitruvian Man. Ryder recognized it from one of Keesha’s art books. He wondered about her and where she was right now. With her mom painting some happy mural he assumed. He wished she were here because as Dr. Caldwell was unveiling his monstrous masterpiece, all Ryder wanted to do was to cry in her arms.
“The CSS is so microscopic it is odorless and tasteless. It is virtually, no pun intended,” he stops to laugh at his own cleverness, “undetectable.” Once inside the human organism, it begins to move from a fabricated piece of artificial intelligence into something that learns from the human body, and transforms into an organic entity that evolves into a functioning part of the living organism itself. The Nano sensors are constructed of copper and magnesium. It is not necessary for the survival of the human organism such as heart, but functions on a more superfluous basis like the tonsils or the gallbladder.”
English felt the gravity beneath his feet fading away. Everything around him whirled in a free fall. He braced himself against the table. Ryder has seated himself in the darker corner at an empty round table. No one was paying attention to him. All eyes were glued to the screen. Jovial murmurs were replaced with total silence. The room felt like a cemetery at midnight.
“Our technology has allowed us to develop the CSS so that all internal sources of data, sources which once relied on external vehicles of transmission by way of computers and cell phone and surveillance networks attached to the data pods, can now be brought to us directly and immediately. Big data is “NOW” data. Data that cannot be interrupted through external chains of command.” A dark shadow washed over his face. He paused and cleared his throat. “We did had a disruption to our data after the advent of our experiment with the fertility project. While the growth and development of then human subject was a success …we…we lost our data. Security continues to locate the source.”
The crowd murmured.
One man seated at a table in the middle of the room raised his hand. “But…” he fumbled for the right words. “Is it safe?”
It was clear from his facial expression that Dr. Caldwell was expecting this question.
“Yes” he said emphatically. “Yes. It is. It was born out of earlier work with GMO’s. We thought, we can genetically modify the food, but can we create food materials that can genetically modify the human? And what can we do with those genetic modifications? So, we all know the science on GMO’s. I won’t go into those critiques against it. Nothing bad can be proven.”
Nods of approval erupted in the room.
“So, the CSS pairs GMO science with cyber Intel. The CSS is a consumable piece of artificial intelligence that learns from its host until it becomes a seamless part of the organism itself, which also transmits data through the cloud back to the original source, which is Romer Onyx. To your question– is it safe? In addition to relying on our work with GMOs we have engaged in trial runs of this process.”
What? English couldn’t believe this. They’ve experimented on humans already? How did they get participants willing to do that?
As if on cue, Dr. Caldwell explained, “We created contractual arrangements with our pre-natal medical unit and women who were searching for ways to bear a child. Through the fertility and in vitro fertilization center, we identified women who agreed to allow R.O to provide them with the means to conceive and carry to a child to full term so long as that child was inserted with CSS material within the DNA materials used to produce a viable fetus.”
Dr. Caldwell paused. He knows this is a lot to process, even for the executive board of the most powerful technologically advanced corporation on the globe.
“We’ve been tracking their progress now for about fifteen years.”
“You’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and never told any of the Board?” one bearded man demanded incredulously. He was either angry or confused, but from where English stood behind his carving station, it was difficult to tell.
“We had to keep this completely top secret until we had worked out all the bugs.”
What a funny term for life altering, perhaps life-ending mistakes, thought English. Bugs.
“While there were some miscalculations about how to manage the CSS once inside the fetus, especially as the human host moves through levels of maturation, we seem to have isolated the problems with our technology. Now we can go to scale.”
“Scale? But … how?” the same bearded man, asked more incredulous than before. “We can’t just go around inseminating women with CSS- infused DNA to produce children who are carriers of this data system!”
Click. New Screen. Dr. Caldwell pointed at the large image.
“Through the primary sources of human survival. Food and water. This can work easily with our existing sister-cities who already buy food and water resources through our distribution centers. Their contractual agreements state that we are permitted to alter the genetic composition of our foods, without disclosing this information to them, because biosecurity demands that we keep such information secret. Similarly, we have agreements that in exchange for ease and comfort of all the resources we provide, sister communities willingly give over their personal biodata anyway. Since the addition of CSS to all our food and drinking water resources complies with both contractual agreements, no further disclosure is necessary. We are doing this to better care for and control surveillance of our sources of capital. Who can fault us for that?”
The man seated next to the incredulous man scratched his chin. “Yes, but,” he blurts out, “What about the off script communities? The ones who destroyed the data pods and exist free of any outsourcing except with other off-script communities? They grow and make their own food. They drink their own water. What about them?”
By this time, Mr. Parks has returned to the podium, standing next to Dr. Caldwell. He leans in to the podium microphone. With deliberate slowness he says, “Well. We will just have to do to their food and water sources what they did to our data pods.”
English felt his body fall to the floor and everything went black.
educationalchemy 