Whoops

by submission | Jan 2, 2008 | Story

Author : Robert Niescier

The bacterium was our lab’s greatest achievement. An organism engineered to metabolize cellulose into ethanol quickly and efficiently would eliminate humanity’s dependence on fossil fuel and make energy shortages a thing of the past. It was our gift to an energy-starved world.

Sure, there were numerous obstacles to overcome. Sequencing and sorting through the thousands of cellulase and fermentation pathways to find the perfect combination of efficiency and output took time, and we were forced to manually engineer multi-branched carbohydrate metabolic pathways to maximize usage of all the monomeric sugars. The ethanol toxicity posed another problem, but through the optimization of an existing efflux pump the microbe was able to protect itself.

This led to what I considered the coup de grace: the septic cellulose liquefaction efflux pump. The biggest problem, the one we spent years of headaches trying to fix, was getting around cellulose crystalline structure. Sure, the bacterium was able to metabolize the carbohydrates once they got into the cell, but the fermentation was limited by the surface area of the substrate used. Even sawdust took too long to be considered effective. But in mere hours the SCLE-pump turned any cellulose sample, even blocks of wood, into soupy globs of cellobiose disaccharides ripe for absorption and fermentation.

The day after publication we received phone calls from nations all over the world. The Nobel Prize came a year later.

It was a few weeks after Sweden that I noticed something strange happening in the wooded areas around my lab. It was the deer. Their behavior was quite unusual, coming out during the daytime, stumbling into roads, even passing out in odd positions in the open. A graduate student joked that they looked drunk, and a certain suspicion made my stomach rise to my throat. I immediately called an ecologist friend of mine and asked him to look into the blood alcohol count of the local fauna; a few weeks later he called back and said, with astonishment, that it was off the charts.

That day I assembled my team and asked them if any of them had ever poured samples down the drain without properly bleaching them first. A few people looking at their feet were all I needed to see.

Sure, it was a big joke at first, drunk animals, hobos sucking bark for free booze. It became significantly less funny when houses began to slop down onto their foundations, then burst into giant fireballs and fried everyone unlucky enough to still be inside.

It wasn’t the bacterium we engineered that was making the forests melt into goo; it was the DNA. To avoid complications with the microbe’s main genome we had placed all the pathways onto two plasmids; pRN45 and pRN86. We didn’t stop to think that, in a world where 50% of the carbon is locked up in cellulose, that plasmids optimized for its digestion would be so highly selected. Hindsight, I suppose.

It was happening all over and got worse every day. Once it got into the groundwater there was no way to stop it. A plague on everything green and photosynthetic in the world was upon us. Pictures from NASA showed black spots lined with red all over the planet, growing bigger day by day.

We had to retreat to the deserts and tundra and live in caves; there was no other choice. I don’t expect to survive much longer as there is little left to eat, but I don’t want to say that to the others in my cave because they already don’t like me. I can’t imagine why.

Resolve

by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 1, 2008 | Story

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

The rain had stopped some time ago, but the roofs still unloaded their catchings through countless broken eves-troughs and missing downspouts. A man pulled his coat tighter around his sunken chest, and squeezed himself deeper into the shadows of the doorway, making at least a minimal effort to keep from getting any more wet.

He heard the police siren growing in volume for a time before the cruiser screamed by overhead, illuminating the broken windows and rusted fire escapes of the low rises in brilliant blue and red, before leaving him blinking in darkness as the sound faded into the city night.

He’d lost track of how many nights he’d spent like this.

Further up the street, the dim holiday glow of the red light district offered a little cheer for those who could afford such extravagances. He knew that the shop keepers would be lining up the men and women in their parlours, freshly bathed, charged and lubricated for an evenings work. The shops had grown in numbers over the years, spilling out of the original seedy alley into the adjoining streets, and he’d had to pack his few belongings several times to move farther into the abandoned sprawl at the forceful insistence of the flesh trade’s private security.

A low rumble approached, a taxi cruising slowly at street level. As it passed, a face flashed from an open window and the cab stopped, a mumble of words filtered to him before the door opened and a man stepped out onto the street, addressing the driver clearly through the still open window.

“Five minutes, alright?” holding his hand up, fingers extended, “just five and you can take me back downtown.”

The man turned, stepped a few paces towards the doorway and stopped, shoving his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.

“Hello Terry,” the name was familiar, though one he hadn’t heard in a long time, “still sleeping rough I see. You keeping well?”

Terry recognized the face gradually, remembered sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, talking over soup, and coffee. He remembered a weeks worth of chocolate bars and a pair of warm gloves.

“Do you remember our talk Terry? Do you remember the book I was working on?” The questions Terry remembered were all about his service, his coming undone, his winding up here. He did remember talk of a story, a book.

“I’ve been given an advance on the story we talked about, and I’m here to make good on my promise.” He reached into his back pocket, producing a slim square, fist sized and bisquit thin. “I made a resolution that year, to write a story and make it true, that’s what drove me to you. It’s almost midnight, and a New Year, and I resolved to find you again.”  He moved within arms reach, holding the flat device in between them at eye level. Terry was only briefly aware of a flicker of light, and then the device was gone, slipped back into a pocket. The man produced a plastic card, and passed it to him. Terry hesitated before accepting it, a blue fingerprint floating seemingly in space between the boundaries of the plastic, the image fascinating.

“It’s a tourism FreePass, Terry,” the man retreated to the sidewalk again, speaking slowly, “you’re in the system now, through your eyeprint. Anywhere you see this sign on a shop window they’ll give you food, or drink, a bed or a warm shower. Only if you want, but it’s there anytime you like.”

Terry looked from the shadows, and for a moment in the taillights of the taxi could have sworn there was a halo around this strange young novelist.

“Thank you,” he mumbled into the street, “thank you.”

“Happy New Year, Terry.” The man smiled, waved awkwardly and climbed back into the cab.  Terry listened as the low rumble grew to a whine, and watched the cab climb out of sight. Looking at the card in his hand, he let an awareness of his hunger reach him, and set out to sate it. ‘Happy New Year’, for the first time in a while he supposed it could be.