Exponent System #4
The day after James tricked me, someone tried to get me to socialize with my ‘team members,’ but after cursory introductions I asked for their academic work to be sent to my digipad and then left them alone. None of them chased after me or tried to contact me afterwards. I then spend several days wandering the Ninurta Dynamics corp town, carefully figuring out how far I can walk before my collar starts beeping to warn me to go back.
Four days after James tricked me, I have purchased a small amount of personal necessities for my apartment, and have started editing work to eventually publish corrections on my ‘coworkers’ their research papers.
It has now been six days, and I am sitting in one of the Ninurta corp town cafetaria when someone sits down across from me. I look up from my food, and immediately notice the collar around her neck. Similar to mine, but covered in bright stickers of cartoon characters.
“Hiya,” she says. “What are you supposed to be?”
“What?” I ask.
“The collar,” she says, pointing at her own bomb. “You don’t look very human. I’m Amelia, I’m test meat. What are you?”
“I’m indentured,” I say while making haste to finish my food so I can leave, when a question pops into my mind. “Wait. What is test meat?”
“Y’know, a clone body to test new stuff on.”
“Is that legal?” I ask, confused.
“Well, not on conscious clones. I’m conscious, so I’m an employee now. I hope to get declared a human being somewhere in the next two years. It’s a long legal process, though, and I have to pay for it myself,” Amelia explains. She then points at me and makes a ‘hurry up’ gesture.
“I’m an Exponent.”
“Oh, the hivemind. Sorry, I don’t know much about Exponents. I know very little about the world outside the corp. It’s not like they let the test meat go to school. If you’re an Exponent, what are you doing here?”
“We aren’t a hivemind. We’re eusocially organized. There’s a difference,” I say, internally debating what’s stronger: my desire to be left alone or my morbid curiosity to this poor creature her life’s circumstances.
“Oh,” Amelia says. “I don’t know that word. I’ll see if I can assimilate knowledge on that later.”
“Assimilate knowledge?”
She smiles, and takes a deep breath before explaining. “Alright, so do you know about double-strand breaks in the DNA in neurons? Neurons, as an acute stress response, can induce breaks in the DNA strand near the genes involved in synaptogenesis. This allows the genes to be rapidly expressed, leading to the rapid formation of new neural synaptic connections. Ninurta has been experimenting with various ways to drastically lower the amount of stress actually required in conjunction with minor modifications of the actual genes responsible for synaptogenesis. The result has been several lines of near-human beings with tremendous neuroplasticity, though not without the necessary hiccups along the road. I’m the only surviving specimen from my line. My brain is easily twenty times better at taking in new information than a baseline human being. I don’t really ‘learn’ things as much as that I immediately turn new information into novel neural structures.”
“Huh?” I say, realizing the theory is sound. The complications arising from these kinds of modifications would be unlikely to result in a viable human being, though, which explains why she’s the only surviving test subject of her kind. “That’s sound on paper, but wouldn’t you be exceedingly vulnerable to neurodegenerative disease?”
“Yeah,” she says, sighing. “I probably don’t have much more than, say, five more years left to live. I hope to spend at least a few as a free human citizen, though.”
“More neural connections are also not necessarily good. Extremely dense neural tissue with too much interconnectivity can cause problems. Schizophrenia, hallucinations.”
“We’ll see,” she says. “Anyway, I taught myself language and then consciousness so now I’m on the path to being a full human being. What are you doing here?”
I realize she’s being deceived. Ninurta is keeping viable human clones to experiment on, depriving them from stimuli to argue they aren’t conscious beings. “Say,” I carefully inquire, “what was life as, eh, ‘test meat’ like before being promoted to indentured servant?”
“Ugh,” she groans. “Mostly boring tests together with the other meat. The others were unbelievably slow so I wasn’t much for socializing. The tests and fragmentary contact with the researchers were the only things for me to do. They were really impressed that I taught myself English from the tiny few interactions we had.”
I’m right. They are keeping an entire facility full of actual human beings somewhere. The sheer amount of crimes Ninurta is committing on both its own people and no doubt on the rest of New Kent Shores is staggering. I worry that if I never make it out of here, nobody else will find out until it is far too late.
“Do you want to go do something together?” Amelia asks.
“I have work,” I reply.
“What work?” she asks.
“Biology research.”
“Jealous,” she replies. “I wish they would let me anywhere near biological research. Once I got my hands on a file with mathematics in it, but when I derived the ability to program from my self-taught ability to do math they got scared and put me on a tighter leash. I’m not to read anything they haven’t approved in triplicate or, haha, well, boom. They blow my head off.”
If that’s true, I’m in the presence of a remarkable mind. I wonder if she could eventually be convinced to join the Exponent System. If the Arcology turned out able to replicate her biology and mental patterns closely enough to create Exponents of her, regular recycling would circumvent the problems of neurodegenerative disease. “Hey, I really have to go back to work in a bit. Let’s exchange personal information through our digipads and you can come visit me at my apartment when I’m less busy, okay?” I tell her. If I spend more time with her, I might be able to come up with a strategy to free the both of us, and then take her to the rest of us.
“Yes!” she yells in excitement. “Bam, day one of wandering around the cafeteria and I’ve made my first friend. I am so good at this.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to mimic a human smile. “You’re very good at this.” If only I had a Diplomat’s body, and not a Stalker. Ah well. Seducing Amelia into joining the Exponent System is in all likelihood, though with the prerequisite that I actually find a way out of here, not going to be that hard.
We exchange our social information by tapping our digipads together, and I promise to let Amelia know when I’m less busy. Then I finish eating and take a roundabout route along the hanging glass corridors back to my apartment. The glass walkways are the closest I can get to being ‘outside’ without getting my head blown off.
Once ‘home’ I jump right back into my work. I’m starting to come up with a theoretical basis for a longevity drug that’ll work on human beings, but it’ll require drastic corrections to the work the rest of the team has been doing so far. As James had previously mentioned, the research team is working on longevity through manipulating Yamanaka factors- four genetic switches in the human genome that can revert a specialized cell back into a stemcell, or when only three are activated, roll back the biological age of the cell. The basic concept has been known to biology since before the colonization of New Kent Shores, but it’s unworkable. There are so many compounding factors to human aging that simply partially reverting the biological age of cells doesn’t actually result in a meaningful increase in lifespan. The biggest barrier is compounding loss of genetic information that happens over time. Eventually a cell has to stop reproducing or it will become a cancer cell, and rolling back the biological age of the cell does not magically restore the lost information. The laws of entropy are inviolable even to the cellular automata of the human body- lost information stays lost.
Still, there ought to be workarounds. This is science Exponent society hasn’t bothered properly developing, but the theoretical basis for the science has been with me since my birth. I was quite literally designed in a laboratory to do genetics research. Solving a petty flaw in the pathetic baseline human body should be easy enough compared to trying to develop a body that can survive stepping on a landmine or being hit by a rocket propelled grenade- which is what I was working on when I got captured, I suddenly remember. I wonder how the rest of us, the rest of me, of the fifth generation are doing. I wonder how development of the sixth generation is coming along, and am suddenly overwhelmed by a homesickness I wasn’t previously aware my Stalker body could actually experience.
I shake the sentimental thoughts from my head and go back to work. The most promising research is Suzy Li her work on backing up DNA and re-inserting it into the cell at the same time the biological age is rolled back, but her work is sloppy. I don’t need to repeat her practical lab research in the lab myself to know she’s made mistakes, though I obviously will- it’d be sloppy to submit a correction without proof.
Just when I am almost done and send a message to the scheduling system that I want access to the lab and to both cloned cell strains as well as live rats, my apartment door opens. James walks in, waving around his administrator level access card, flaunting his ability to come into my room whenever he wants to.
“Ryo,” he says. “I hope you’re not too busy.”
“I actually am, and I do not appreciate you coming in without asking.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, but I know he’s lying. “I was going to ask you out for dinner. I need to pick your brain on some things.”
“What?”
“What?” he asks in return.
“You were going to ask me out for dinner, but then? Then what?”
“Oh. No, I mean, I am going to ask you out for dinner. Hey Ryo, do you want to go out for dinner? My monthly evaluation has gone very well and I want to celebrate with my favourite Exponent.”
“Do you have any other Exponents with bombs around their necks hidden away somewhere, then?”
“God, I wish,” he says. I’m sure he would. “My favourite woman, then.”
“Aren’t you going to get in trouble for calling me a woman?”
“There’s no spyware in your condo. There’s a human rights issue with putting spyware on private habitats. I can say whatever I want here.”
“Right,” I say, not sure if he’s lying or not.
“Let’s go out for dinner, Ryo. I want to eat imported food from Earth. And I want to talk to you about stuff.”
“I’m busy,” I reply.
He walks up to me, and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t you want to eat something better than cafeteria slop bought with company scrip? Doesn’t Ryo-five want to eat something she hasn’t had before, wonders from Earth? And doesn’t she want to abuse the opportunity to get under the skin of the one person she’ll have to manipulate to eventually escape from here?”
I hate him. Oh, how I hate him so. But him finally calling me by my proper name, finally acknowledging me as a person with a preferred identity manages to soften my heart, if only for a moment. “Okay,” I say.
“Perfect.”
The restaurant is still on Ninurta Dynamics company town grounds, but on the top floor of the executive building. It’s one of the tallest buildings in New Canterbury, so tall as to pass the dense layer of clouds that covers our skies, and from our seat at one of the glass walls I can see below us the endless cloud sea, and above us the soft glow of Thanet, the Hephaestus-type gas giant that warms our little moon. It makes for an impressive sight.
“What will you have?” James asks.
I scroll over the digipad the waiter gave us to order from. “This all costs real Blocks. I don’t have any Blocks, just company scrip.”
“I’ll obviously pay for you,” he says. “It might seem silly to you, but back on Earth, in the old days of the American Empire, men would be expected to pay for- well. You know,” he says.
“As soon as there’s a risk of there being a microphone recording that might impact your next evaluation you can’t spit it out anymore, huh?” I spit back.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Anyway, I’ll pay for you. Pick whatever you want. I’d recommend getting something you can’t natively get here on New Kent Shores, though. There’s people who swear steak from Earth tastes better, but that’s delusional. I’m getting something in a honey sauce, I think.”
“Honey?”
“You don’t- no way. You don’t know?”
“I don’t!”
“Honey is a foodstuff produced by insects called bees,” James says. “It’s sweet. It’s where ‘honeyed’ comes from- something sweet to make the rest go down easier. Like honeyed words.”
“Oh,” I say. Insects can’t live on New Kent Shores. Something to do with the way they breathe- the atmospheric conditions for them to thrive have to be remarkably precise.
“Bees are eusocial insects, a swarm intelligence. They construct primitive dwellings, communally raise their children and react to danger as a single entity. They even have specialized bodies for different roles. Workers are called drones, and then there’s soldiers, and the queen- the queen is like a primitive organic cloning vat. She gives birth to all the children in the colony, and can even influence if she’ll give birth to more drones or more soldiers, depending on their current needs.”
“She?” I ask.
“Bees are almost all female. Only a few males live in each colony.”
“I see.”
“It’s remarkable, right?”
“And they produce a foodstuff.”
“Mass produce it. Humans have selectively bred them to produce even more of it. They’re a vital part of crop pollination in Earth based agriculture. An extremely useful organism performing multiple roles in the ecosystem, living and working alongside humans.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Nothing. Just saying I want to eat something with honey in it today.”
“I’ll get whatever you’ll get, then,” I tell him.
“Alright,” he says, taking my digipad away from me.
“What are we getting?” I ask.
“It’s a surprise.”
“An extremely useful organism performing multiple roles in the ecosystem, living and working alongside humans,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “On Earth, humankind became so dominant that almost all life that didn’t fit in an economically useful niche has gone extinct.”
“I see.”
We sit in silence for a while before I ask him how long it will take them to print our food.
“They’re cooking it in a traditional way, Ryo. Not with a protein printer. That takes time.”
“I see. You wanted to talk to me about something specific tonight, didn’t you?”
“A few things,” he says. “I need your input on some stuff.”
“Like what?”
“If we make this longevity drug, right? It’ll have to be in a form that Earth cannot steal from me. I mean from us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Depending on the form it’ll take, it’s possible the Northern Hemisphere Federation will just appropriate and nationalize the technology before redistributing it to Earth-based corporations. Then we’ll have done all our work for nothing. We need to make sure that we can make Earth dependent on our product. That way we’ll have leverage over them. If we have leverage over them- well, there’s nothing humans want more than to live forever. We can fleece them for all they’re worth.”
“Huh,” I say. I hadn’t thought about things like that at all. I had naively assumed we’d develop the drug, and James would then sell it to the highest bidder.
“So if you and the others come up with something, run it by me. Maybe we can come up with a way to keep Earth dependent on New Kent Shores and Ninurta Dynamics together.”
“I will,” I reply. I wonder if I’ll be able to betray and undercut James after I escape. Having the finances and resources of Earth backing our Arcology would make the Exponent System the number one power on New Kent Shores overnight.
The waiter brings our food, a very brittle-seeming pink meat covered in a golden-yellow glaze, surrounded by vegetables. He then pours us a light liquid that vaguely smells of decay and alcohol.
“What is this?” I ask, as I poke into the meat with my finger.
“Salmon,” James says. “It’s a bizarre animal. Lives partially in salt and partially in sweetwater during different stages of its life.”
“It’s a fish?”
“Yeah. Most likely not one we can ever get to live here. The oceans are by leagues not salt enough.”
“How can anything live in salt water like that?” I ask, confused.
“I’m not sure? I can see if I can download the biological data if you’re interested, though.”
“Very,” I say as I clumsily try to use my fork to maneuver some of the salmon into my mouth. “Oh my,” I say, almost spitting it out again by accident. “Oh my that’s good.”
James squeals with joy. “I’m so glad you like it,” he says. “The glaze on it- the sauce- that’s honey.”
A gigantic sense of vertigo suddenly overcomes me. Eleven and a half light-years away from me, separated by a void so empty it is beyond imagining by mortal brains, no matter if human or Exponent, tiny proto-Exponents have tirelessly worked to create a foodstuff to feed their primitive Arcology, the excess taxed away by megacorps and shipped across interstellar space to be sold to Ninurta Dynamics at a preposterous markup. The scale of it all confounds me. I suddenly wonder if any Exponent will ever see Earth, set foot on Earth, and then return to bring the memories back to the rest of us.
“Ryo?” James asks, in between tiny bites from his food.
“Sorry,” I mutter, and I devour my plate of food as if it were the last thing I might ever eat.
“Drink some wine,” James says.
“It smells like rot and poison” I say. “I don’t think I can manage to drink that. Even sitting in the glass, away from me, it reeks. It is offensive to my senses.”
“Huh,” James mutters as he sips from his own glass. “I guess you have different senses than I do. Do you mind if I have your glass then? It’s prohibitively expensive.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“Fermented fruit, I think,” he says. “I’m not very well read on it. I know that it’s very hard to manufacture, it takes years. In the old days of America, the upper class refused to eat dinner without it.”
“All this excess,” I mutter.
“Don’t pretend you don’t secretly like it,” James says, smiling.
“If I help you make this drug- and you might like to hear that I’ve already made some progress, though I’ll have to see how happy the rest of your team is- then what comes after, James?” I ask after swallowing down the last of my salmon.
“Then I present a sociology paper to the New Kent Shores Council showing that Exponents can integrate into human society,” he says. “That there is a place for you here.”
“There is a place for us here,” I say, trying to mimic an angry emotional affect that does not come natural to me. “We have our own colony.”
James shakes his head. “Next election it is unlikely you’ll get any council seats at all. If things keep going the way they are, if the ideologues get their way- then very soon things will become very bad. Violently so. If your kind is to survive, you’ll need to integrate.”
“Genocide,” I say. “The people won’t callously accept a genocide.”
“You aren’t seen as people. Philosophers on the public square argue you aren’t even conscious.”
I think about Amelia, about what I learned about ‘test meat’ and Ninurta’s complicity. I can’t trust James, I reaffirm for myself. He put a bomb around my neck. Enslaved me. No matter how much he coats both my food and his rhetoric in honey- he’s part of the problem. Who is and isn’t conscious is being legally redefined, and Ninurta Dynamics is right there to take advantage of it.
“I see,” is all I manage to say.
“I’m sorry,” James says. “I’m ruining our date.”
“Our date?” I ask, insulted.
“Playdate,” he says, shrugging. “Though I wouldn’t mind making it something more.”
“I- I really am not into human beings.”
“A shame,” he replies, smiling. “I can’t say the distaste is mutual. You’re fascinating, Ryo. Your kind, and you yourself.”
“Fascinating like a specimen in your enclosure, sure,” I spit.
“You enchant me in a way humans have never managed to. I’m not usually an affectionate person.”
“I’m not interested, James.”
He sighs. “Nevertheless, I’m grateful for an evening spent together.”
“Grateful enough to take this thing off of my neck?”
He shakes his head. “That’ll have to wait until the third date at least,” he says, grinning like a maniac.
