Els waved him away. He stood until the car disappeared down the tree-lined road. Then he went back inside the cabin to the piece he’d been working on for months — the stacks of staff paper on his drawing table with their hundreds of sketches for the first act of that same opera the two men had just mapped out together.
Life fills the world with copies of itself. Music and viruses both trick their hosts into copying them.
The radio names him twice in the first two hours out of Champaign. A government spokesperson says that scientists are trying to determine if the bacteria taken from the home of Peter Els, the so-called Biohacker Bach, have in fact been genetically altered. Els waits for the speaker to admit that the strain that killed the patients in Alabama wasn’t his. Instead, the announcer returns to say that, in yet more bacterial news, the deadly outbreak of E. coli in Germany may have come from tainted Spanish vegetables.
Through the Fiat’s windows, miles of stark black tillage begin to green. Nothing about the spare beauty looks like a country under any kind of threat. But at ten a.m., on a syndicated public radio interview program, Els learns just what he has unleashed.
The show is on the dangers of garage biology. A rash of hospital deaths, the host begins. Supermarket contaminations in several countries. A do-it-yourself genetic engineer working with toxic microbes, now on the run from the authorities. The sounds reach Els from a great distance, as if the whole segment is one of those sampled, chopped-up, looped, and reassembled song quilts that are again all the rage, half a century after their invention. How scared by all of these stories should you be?
For insight, the host welcomes a Bay Area writer whose book on the growing amateur microbiology movement Els has read. The man talks of garage scientists numbering in the thousands.
Who are these people? the host asks.
The writer gives a frustrated chuckle. Lots of folks. Libertarians, hobbyists, students, entrepreneurs, activists. They’re old-style citizen scientists in the spirit of Jenner and Mendel. This is cheap, democratic, participatory biotech. Closing it down would be a mistake.
The show turns to the director of a safety watchdog group, who maps out the worst-case scenario. The problem is, she says, between mail-order synthetic DNA and a kitchen stocked with a thousand dollars of gear, an amateur could create a new lethal pathogen. Given how many people want to harm this country, biopunk is one of the greatest threats facing us.
The writer laughs her off. Skiing is hundreds of times more dangerous.
A bipartisan Washington commission on WMDs and terrorism predicts a major bioterror attack in the next couple of years, the watchdog says.
The host asks, What can we do to prevent that?
We need to build on the success of the TSA, the watchdog answers.
The writer howls. The TSA hasn’t detected a single terrorist action since its inception!
That proves their effectiveness.
The host throws open the call-in lines. The first caller asks if this killer E. coli in Europe is a terrorist act. Both experts say no. The caller hangs up unconvinced.
Els hears the next caller’s fury before she speaks three words. This man, she says, creating germs in his own laboratory — people have died, and this man needs to be found and stopped before he harms anyone else.
The host asks his guests to comment. The watchdog says, At very best, this is a case of an amateur modifying a toxic microorganism without really knowing—
The writer cuts in: Amgen does that all the time. Monsanto. Half our corn and ninety percent of our soybeans are biohacked, and we put them in our mouths on blind faith.
Amgen is run by trained scientists, not a retired musician working at the kitchen sink with no idea what he’s doing.
Trained scientists have produced more disasters than all the amateurs combined.
The blast of an air horn like something out of Götterdämmerung drives Els across the lane. In his rearview mirror, an eighteen-wheeler rides up his tailpipe. He jerks right. The semi blasts past him, wailing. When the truck pulls back in front of Els, the driver hits the brakes. The front of the Fiat kisses the truck’s bumper.
The watchdog is talking. He has panicked the whole nation.
The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist.
The host patches in another caller. A trembling woman says that scientists were behind the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Els pulls one stuck hand off the wheel and kills the radio. An exit floats into view, and he takes it. He hits the rumble strip twice on his way up the ramp. He follows a local road for a long time, trying to regain control of his body. He pulls into a gas station in Vandalia that clings to the intersection of two empty state highways. He fills the tank and hands the cash to a bearded anarchist who looks like he wouldn’t turn in Hitler.
Els sits at a picnic table behind the station, under a blue spruce, nursing a turkey wrap and flipping through a copy of the Times that the convenience center stocked by accident. He finds himself on page A10: “Homebrew Genetic Modifier Heard Beat of Different Drummer.” The article psychoanalyzes Peter Els’s biohacking by considering his decades of audience-hostile avant-garde creations. A little vomit spasms into Els’s mouth. He folds up the paper and leaves it on the picnic table, under a stone.
He opens the door to the Fiat, and a voice shouts, Hey! Els turns, hands rising. The wild-bearded anarchist stands in the doorway of the gas station, rigid. It’s a relief, almost, caught at last. The fugitive motif has gone on too long. He’s tired. He smiles at his accoster, surrendering.
I forgot, the man says. You get a free drink with that turkey thingie.
Els sits in the parked car, his hands revolting. The free drink, his alibi, splatters when he brings it to his lips. Through the windshield, he watches a family of four parade into the convenience mart. The little girl, her sweatshirt advertising a megachurch, fixes him in a telephoto gaze. Arrest is just a matter of time. What he has done and what he has failed to do must both be paid for. The good of the many demands it.
Kohlmann’s phone has ridden beside him on the death seat since Champaign. He takes it and turns it on. Too late for the traceable device to hurt him. He has only eighty miles to St. Louis, and his destination. The Joint Task Force can have him, once he finishes there.
His fingers flail at the on-screen keys. He punches in an address memorized years ago. It has always been a little fictional, no place he would live to see. But the Voice figures out the route in seconds, door to door. All he needs to do is accept the GPS’s higher power.
The route unfolds in front of him — an hour and a half. His limbs are clammy and his skin metallic. He pries open the glove compartment. A stack of loose CDs spill out onto the passenger side floor, none of them what he needs. He leans over into the chaos-strewn backseat and rakes through dozens more cracked and unhinging jewel boxes, finding nothing that can help him.
Then he remembers: all the tunes in the world are his. He plugs the smartphone into the car stereo and pecks in his search. The piece bubbles up with a few pokes of his index finger. It’s music that will get him as far as he needs to go. Shostakovich’s Fifth — a condemned man writing the accompaniment to his own execution.