Nature Futures 2 (13 page)

“But is it worth the pop-ups? I need my stimplant for my sales job, but otherwise…”

A tiger, the mascot of a breakfast cereal that I had bought a few times, stalked along the aisle, and paused in front of me.

“Have you had
your
Quinoa Puffs today?” it asked reproachfully, and walked on.

She gave me a sympathetic half-smile, and nodded. “I almost got mine taken out last month, though it would have broken my heart. But I got an ad-blocking patch instead.”

“I thought those didn't work?”

“My son works for Cybella. He gave me a copy of their newest product. That was thoughtful of him, wasn't it? It would have cost me 300 dollars otherwise, and I'm on a fixed income.”

Worth every dime, I thought. “Where can I buy it?”

“I think you can download it. I'm not absolutely sure, though, because mine was a present.”

I brought up my visual display and googled. Sure enough: Cybella, Shanghai. “Adprufe?”

She smiled. “That's it, dear.” She patted my arm, almost too gently to feel.

I authorized the payment so eagerly that I made a mistake on my password, and had to try again. After a few seconds, the world around me began to fizz and sparkle as the patch installed. I smelled mint green and tasted furry pentagons; a million ice-cold ball bearings slithered over my skin.

When my senses cleared, the seat beside me was empty.

I guess I'm slow on the uptake. I actually looked up and down the bus to see where she'd gone.

And then, from somewhere under my seat, I heard an all-too-familiar rattle.

Robert Dawson teaches mathematics at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia. His research interests include geometry and category theory; spare-time activities include writing, music, fencing and cycling.

The Omniplus Ultra

Paul Di Filippo

Everyone wants an Omniplus Ultra, and I am not immune to the urge. But of course they are almost impossible to purchase — for love or money.

Since their debut nine months ago at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, more than 40 million units have been sold worldwide, exhausting the initial stockpile but barely sating a fraction of consumer demand. The Chinese factories that produce the Omniplus Ultra are tooling up as fast as possible to make more, but retailers cannot guarantee delivery any sooner than six months. On eBay, each available Omniplus Ultra, with a MSRP of $749.99, sells for upwards of $5,000.

OmninfoPotent Corporation, the enigmatic firm behind the Omniplus Ultra, has leapt to the top of the NASDAQ exchange. Its reclusive founders, Pine Martin and Sheeda Waxwing, have vaulted into the lower ranks of the Forbes 400. Sales of the device are being credited with jump-starting the ailing economy almost single-handedly.

The ad campaign for the Omniplus Ultra has already won six Clios. The catchy theme music,
O U Kidz
by the Black Eyed Peas, and the images of average people of every race, age, gender, nationality and creed using their Omniplus Ultras to navigate a plethora of life situations ranging from sweetly comic to upliftingly tragic have generated their own fan clubs, YouTube mash-ups and punchlines for late-night comedians. Allusions to the Omniplus Ultra, as well as its invocation in metaphors, similes, rants, raves, jeremiads and paeans, fill watercooler conversations and the printed pages of the world's magazines, newspapers and blogs. The first instant book on the Omniplus Ultra —
Uberpower!
by Thomas Friedman and Charles Stross — is due out any day.

I myself do not know anyone who actually owns an Omniplus Ultra, but I'm dying to see and handle one. But even 40 million units, distributed across 7 billion people, means that there is only one Omniplus Ultra for every 175 citizens. Of course, the gadgets are not seeded evenly around the planet. They are concentrated in the hands of relatively wealthy and elite consumers and early adopters: circles I do not really travel in, given my job in a Staples warehouse and a set of friends whose familiarity with the latest products of Silicon Valley generally extends no further than their TV remotes.

So I must content myself with studying the advertisements and the gadget-porn reviews. These can't say enough about the life-changing capabilities of the Omniplus Ultra, its potential to shatter all old paradigms and to literally remake the world.

Publisher's Weekly:
After five centuries, the printed book has found its worthiest successor in the Omniplus Ultra. The future of reading is safely triumphant.

The Huffington Post:
Opens new channels for the spread of democracy.

Boing-Boing:
Coolest gadget since the iPhone! The cold-laser picoprojector alone is worth the cost.

Car and Driver:
Jack the Omniplus Ultra into your dash's USB port and driving will never be the same!

Entertainment Weekly:
If you can't download your favourite show onto your Omniplus Ultra, it's not worth watching.

Variety:
First flicks helmed with the Omniplus Ultra to hit big screens soon!

Aerospace & Defense Industry Review:
Guaranteed to be standard equipment for all future warriors.

Mother Jones:
The Omniplus Ultra is the greenest invention since the
Whole Earth Catalog
.

BusinessWeek:
Every chief executive will benefit from having an Omniplus Ultra to hand — and anyone without one will watch competitors eat their lunch.

Rolling Stone:
Elvis. The Beatles. The Sex Pistols. The Omniplus Ultra. The sequence is complete at last.

The more such talk I read, the longer I drool over pictures of the sleekly tactile Omniplus Ultra, with its customizable sexy skins and ergonomically perfect controls, and the more I lust to own one. Although nothing in my condition has really changed, and although I have enough money, love and security, my life feels incomplete and empty without an Omniplus Ultra.

But there was just no way for me to get my hands on one.

Until I saw my boss's boss's boss walk through the warehouse carrying one.

Then and there, I knew what I had to do.

As a low-level employee, I certainly could not jump several levels of management and directly approach my boss's boss's boss and ask to fondle his Omniplus Ultra. But I had a scheme.

It took me six frustrating weeks, but at last I managed it. In a series of furtive unauthorized forays into executive territory, I caught the lucky Omniplus Ultra owner in a lavatory break with his prized possession carelessly left behind on his desk.

That's when I pulled the fire alarm.

While everyone else rushed outside, I darted into the guy's office, snatched his Omniplus Ultra off the desk, and sank down behind the furniture in the knee well, out of sight.

With trembling hands I sought to shuffle aside the protective wings of the device, utilizing all the instructions I had lovingly memorized, and expose its intimate control and display surfaces to my wanton gaze and lewd touch.

But I was doing something wrong! The expected blossoming failed to happen.

Instead, after some fumbling, the unit split open like a simple styrofoam clamshell container full of leftovers.

The interior gaped utterly vacant, except for a simple piece of printed cardboard.

Dumbfounded, I removed the cardboard and read the message.

Dear Consumer: the Omniplus Ultra is not what you need. You are already everything you thought it could do. Pass this message on as widely as you see fit. Or not. Hopefully yours, Pine Martin and Sheeda Waxwing, for the OmninfoPotent Corporation.

I put the card back inside, resealed the Omniplus Ultra, dropped it with a dull thud on the desk, and joined all my peers outside, waiting to resume our lives.

Paul Di Filippo's 35th book, a story collection titled
The Great Jones Coop Ten Gigasoul Party
, was published recently by Wildside Press.

The Gower Street Cuckoos

Joe Dunckley

Charles Quackenbush is a prodigy. He doesn't look his 39 years, and already
The Daily Mail
has credited him with seven miracle cures for cancer, one for each of his years as professor at the Midwitch Institute. He looks up from his computer to sigh in unison with his 460 fellow travellers, as a crackly voice announces that all Crossrail services have been suspended, and that the train will terminate at Tottenham Court Road. Thank God the tunnel has Wi-Fi.

Charles adjusts the bag between his feet, and presses himself to the carriage wall, in an attempt to gain some working space among those standing. All he can do is return to the device before him, and the online lab notebook that he is searching for clues. He is
still
trying to solve the problems that his graduate student has been having, and is furious with his lack of success.

Let me explain. Charles's student is trying to treat some glioma cells with a drug that should inhibit the cell cycle. This treatment is just a preliminary step in a bigger experiment, and the activity of the drug on the cells has been known for decades. The pesky cells, however, are showing utter disregard for orthodox science, and stubbornly reproduce like rabbits.

The student did not need Charles's prompting to try the experiment with a new stock of drug from the concentrate, with fresh culture media, and finally with new cells from the frozen stock. None had made the slightest difference. It was at this point that Charles came in. He had bought a new set of media ingredients, had his pipettes calibrated and the tissue culture incubators serviced, and treated the cells to glass Petri dishes begged and borrowed from a colleague. Finally, two weeks ago, he had actually attempted to perform the experiment himself. After his inevitable failure he was at least consoled by issuing the order that the pests be disposed of. Stumped, he had sent a vial of frozen cells to colleagues in Sweden, and another to the department's sequencing guys, in the hope that somebody else might solve the problem for him.

Charles
had
hoped that the matter would all go away after Sarah had left. It had been a blow having to dismiss his technician: she was skilled, hardworking and thorough. But towards the end, he had received ever more frequent reports of infractions — flooding the laboratory by leaving the water purifier on over night; allowing a fungal contamination to wipe out all the flasks of neuroblastoma cells; and finally, Charles had found her at the tissue culture hood, glassy eyed and filling an incubator with nearly 60 flasks of glioma cells.

Charles moves on, and the uneasy feeling that has been competing with anger for space in his head grabs a lead. Either one of his students has totally destroyed his records, or something is very wrong with his inventory of liquid-nitrogen frozen cells. The page should list first- and second-generation stocks of a dozen different cell types going back to the start of Charles's 10 years as a lab leader, but instead lists four dozen vials of glioma cells. Like the ‘regular save' function on his notebook, five vials had been frozen consistently at three-day intervals for a month. Charles clicks through to a batch that had been frozen on a Sunday two weeks ago. A student who had only been in the laboratory to prepare an overnight antibody incubation, and who did not even use glioma cells in his work, had archived five vials of the cells. Charles checks the rest of the entries. At one time or another, each of his two postdocs and four students had frozen five vials of glioma cells, at or after 3 p.m. on the allotted day.

Charles is even more disturbed to note that nine of the vials have already been plucked from their sleep and moved on. One, Charles supposes, is now in Sweden, and another — one that Charles had believed to be seven years old, but that he now finds to be just seven days old — had gone for genome sequencing. This left seven that Charles couldn't account for. And somebody better be able to account for them by the time health and safety made their next audit.

The train jerks back into life and grinds into the station. An incomplete but disturbing hypothesis forming in his mind, Charlie pockets the computer and alights, just in time to miss a message from a postdoc.

hi chuck, we've got a *big* problem here. someone has filled the incubators with glioma, and the whole lot are duds anyway. no one even admits to doing it. i think i know what the problem is. it looks like you're gonna have to start from scratch. i'll keep some for troubleshooting, but i'm gonna have to start clearing out these incubators.

Now blinking in the sunlight, Charles ignores the cyclist gesturing at him as, still distracted, he shuffles across Oxford Street. On Tottenham Court Road he pushes a straight trajectory through the tourists. He trips in Bedford Square, taking the skin off one hand on the gravel, but does not stop to feel embarrassed.

At the Midwitch Institute on Gower Street, Charles is soon through the reception and up the concrete stairwell. He fumbles with his security card and crashes through the heavy doors to the lab, down a corridor cluttered with trolleys, tanks and barrels. He is too late. Charles has to push hard against the tissue culture room door to shift it, and the body behind. Esther, in a spreading pool of blood, two flasks in her left hand, a blade in the right.

Charles kneels in the vain hope of finding something he can do. Rising to leave and raise the alarm, he does not even notice himself step over the body, pry the flasks of glioma cells from the dead woman's hand, and place them neatly back in the crowded incubator, beside the dishes that he had ordered be destroyed two weeks earlier, closing the air-tight door behind them. So he was unable to explain to the court the presence of his footprint in the pool. Charles was loud and disruptive in court, but he settled into the routine at Broadmoor. After all, eight vials had got out. Soon the world would
have
to believe him.

Joe Dunckley once worked in cancer-cell biology, where he was never affected by cell-culture contamination. He blogs at
Cotch.net
and is excited about being paid to make stuff up.