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So I dodged the bullet. This was not prescience on my part, and it may yet come back and bite me in the ass: at least one adult fish may have swum through deep water from Patagonia all the way up to Greenland[14].

Seppuku

Artificial microbes are almost mainstream these days: J. Craig Venter (the Human Genome guy) has completed an entirely artificial genome even as I type[15], hoping that such organisms will be able to cure the world’s environmental ills. Peter Schulz and his team have already tweaked E. coli to synthesize a novel amino acid not found in nature[16], hoping it will be able to outcompete the baseline strain. Entirely synthetic organisms, built from interchangeable genetic modules, are just around the corner[17]. I wish all these guys better luck than Jakob Holtzbrink’s gel-jocks had when they tweaked ßehemoth.

Seppuku’s genetic template was first synthesized by Leslie Orgel[18] back in 2000; TNA actually does duplex with conventional nucleic acids. The idea of alien genes incorporating themselves into our own nuclear material is even more old-hat than artificial microbes—not only are our genes rife with parasitic DNA from a range of bugs, but functional genes originally brought into the cell by the ancestors of our own mitochondria appear to have migrated into the nucleus[19]. Massive horizontal gene transfer between species has occurred throughout much of Earth’s history[20], and of course the symbiotic incorporation of small cells into larger ones has a long and honorable history reflected in every eukaryotic cell on the planet. (Back in Maelstrom I cited chloroplasts and mitochondria; apicoclasts are a related example, devolved endosymbionts found in Toxoplasma and Plasmodium[21].)

Taka Ouellette’s awed appreciation of proline as a metabolic catalyst will probably be a little behind the times by mid-century, since Movassaghi and Jacobsen have already pointed out the potential of such simple molecules to act as enzymes[22].

The Chemistry of Character

Some readers may wonder if I have trouble distinguishing between personality and neurochemistry. It’s a fair point, but don’t blame me: blame the scientists who can’t let a week go by without reporting yet more evidence that personality is just another word for biochemistry, albeit written in an exceedingly complex font (e.g. Hannuk Yaeger’s propensity for violence, rooted in his monoamine oxidase levels[23]). Unless you’re one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there’s really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature.

A central tenet of the whole rifters saga—introduced in Starfish, and expanded in Maelstrom and Behemoth—is that false memories of abuse can cause neurological changes in the individual every bit as real as genuine memories can. That was pretty speculative when Starfish first came out, but recent research has added empirical evidence of this effect[24]^, [25].

Details on the care and feeding of sociopaths were largely taken from the work of Robert Hare[26] and others[27]. ßehemoth’s musings regarding the adaptive value of sociopathy in corporate settings may not be entirely off the mark, either[28]^,[29]^,[30]^, (And as these references should make clear, neither Ken Lubin nor Achilles Desjardins are sociopaths in the classic sense. More goes into such creatures than a mere absence of conscience.)

Maelstrom established that Guilt Trip took its lead largely from the genes of certain parasites which could alter the behavior of their hosts. The actual mechanism by which this occurred was not known when that book came out, although some had speculated that it occured right down at the neurotransmitter level. I hung Guilt Trip’s hat on that hypothesis, and am now relieved to report that the gamble paid off: at least one such parasitic puppet-master works by screwing with its host’s serotonin-producing neurons[31].

Alice Jovellanos’s denigration of the ethical impulse takes its lead from recent studies which establish that moral “reasoning” is not reasonable at all—it occurs primarily in the emotional centers of the brain, resulting in inconsistent and indefensible beliefs about whether a course of action is “right” or “wrong”[32]. An accompanying commentary article gives a very nice summary of the so-called “Trolley Paradox”, not to mention an airtight rationale for pushing people in front of trains[33]. Jovellanos’s arguments may be simplistic—the prefrontal cortex, after all, seems to play at least some role in moral decision-making[34]^,[35]^,[36]—but then again, Jovellanos was a bit of a zealot. For which she paid a price.

Speaking of moral decision-making, Lenie Clarke’s passion for revenge earlier in the rifters saga—not to mention Ken Lubin’s unacknowledged passion for same later on—are not merely overused dramatic tropes. We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if—and this is the counterintuitive bit—even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us[37]. I like to think the reason the world gets another chance at the end of this story is because, as Lubin speculates, Spartacus disabled the vengeance response in Achilles Desjardins at the same time it destroyed his conscience. He may have been a monster. He may have been sexual sadist. But in that one retrofitted corner of his soul, he may have been more civilized that you or I will ever be.

And finally, the most disturbing real-world echo of this imaginary hellhole comes from the Village Voice[38], reporting on ongoing research towards an “anti-remorse pill”—a drug developed to cure post-traumatic stress syndrome, which would soothe the torturer as well as the tortured. Such neurochemical tweaks would work by short-circuiting guilt itself, making it that much easier to get a good night’s sleep after mowing down crowds of unruly civilians protesting unpopular government policies. Yes, I called my version Absolution—but people, it was supposed to be ironic...

Here, the Maelstrom just moved outside...

Some background ambience from the world above the waterline:

The developing world has no shortage of reasons to be pissed at the other two. By mid-century, I’m postulating a sort of Africa-wide schadenfreude in response to the collapse of N’Am’s societal infrastructure. The icing on that bitter cake is the further prediction that the majority of the African population will consist of women; I base this on the fact that in Ethiopia at least, malnourished women are more likely to give birth to daughters than sons[39] (presumably for the same energetics-related reasons this happens in other species). I’m basically suggesting that generations of disease, starvation, and exploitation/indifference will result in one righteously-pissed, gender-skewed hotbed of discontent in which the myth of a victimized woman’s apocalyptic vendetta would catch on real fast. Think of Liberation Theology, that violent incarnation of Catholicism that arose from the political turnoil of Latin America in the last century; now move it to Africa, and emphasise the warrior Madonna at its heart.