“Total garbage,” he snorted. “Hey, what are you up to tonight?”
Jack perked up. Ari was pretty cute, and it had been a while since she’d hooked up with anybody.
“Nothing much. I was thinking of grabbing some dinner and watching a movie. Want to hang out?”
“I’m going to the Freeculture meeting. You should come.”
Jack didn’t know that much about Freeculture, except for the fact that her lab’s principal investigator, Louise Bendis, had some kind of beef with them over a patent she’d filed. From that, and stories about Freeculture in science journals, she’d gotten the vague impression that they were the sort of people who threw a lot of technical terms around to justify selling “liberated” drugs.
She must have looked dubious, because Ari laughed and said, “We’re not going to ply you with drugs or anything. But you should know more about the patent system if you’re going to be working on the Bendis Patent Farm.” He made a snarky face. Then he smiled again, and lightly touched Jack’s arm. “A bunch of us are going to get dinner after.”
“Sold,” she pronounced. What the hell. She was at university to expand her mind, right? And maybe she’d get laid.
The meeting was in an airy graduate student lounge down the hall from the Plant Biology Department. Years ago, some joker had tweaked a few genes in a plant designed to repair glass and set it free on the windows. Now the light was filtered by leaves whose molecular structure had bonded with the glass and remained stuck there in artful clumps long after the plant had died.
About twenty-five students were sitting in a circle of chairs introducing themselves when Ari and Jack arrived. Most of them studied genetic engineering, with a few cognitive and neuroscience weirdos. The students were all surprisingly smart, and Jack was immediately charmed by the evening’s invited speaker, a young professor from Saskatchewan who was mired in a protracted legal battle with his university over whether he would be allowed to file an open patent on some simple antivirals he’d discovered. He had thick, shoulder-length black hair, and green eyes that were striking against his brown face. His name was Krish Patel, and he made Jack forget about all the idle hookup plans she’d had for Ari.
Krish compared the patent system to the indenture system, which Jack thought was kind of a stretch. But she had to admit that the patent system did seem to be at the root of a lot of social problems. Only people with money could benefit from new medicine. Therefore, only the haves could remain physically healthy, while the have-nots couldn’t keep their minds sharp enough to work the good jobs, and didn’t generally live beyond a hundred. Plus, the cycle was passed down unfairly through families. The people who couldn’t afford patented meds were likely to have sickly, short-lived children who became indentured and never got out. Jack could see Krish’s point about how a lot of basic problems could be fixed if only patent licensing were reformed.
Afterward, at the restaurant, Jack got into a huge debate with Krish about whether open-patent antivirals could really lead to more innovation in viral shell engineering. She liked how he calmly reasoned with every criticism she had, incorporating her ideas into a solution right there on the spot.
He walked her home after dinner, and she came up with some incredibly lame excuse to invite him upstairs.
Curled up on a sofa near the window, they shared some 420 and listened to the ocean in the distance. “So the politics of virus shells,” Jack said, exhaling. “Pretty hot stuff. Pretty sexy.”
Krish stared at her, his hand frozen in midair, the pipe in his fingers slowly bleeding smoke. He looked half-terrified, half-perplexed. She realized suddenly that he might not have understood she was bringing him here to have sex. Maybe he thought she’d really just wanted to talk sequence all night.
“I am flirting with you,” she clarified.
“Oh, good—that’s what I thought.” He laughed. “One can never be sure, though.”
She liked the way he never made assumptions, even about basic things like fucking.
When they kissed, she could taste the political analysis he’d described during the Freeculture meeting. His flavor, a mixture of smoke and fennel, was redolent of the Good Science she’d dreamed about doing when she was an undergraduate: the science that helped people, and gave them a chance to lead lives they could be proud of. Nothing made her want to strip a man naked more than knowing he had good ideas… and so she did. She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body.
Over the next few months, Jack divided her time between less-than-challenging work at the Bendis Patent Farm and extremely challenging reading about patents. Some of it was stuff that Krish recommended, but once she’d read the basic essays and books, she followed footnotes and references and struck out on her own. She became a regular at the Freeculture meetings, and even gave a demo one evening about a little program she’d written that could help reverse engineer certain classes of patented drugs. Though it was gray-area legal, she emphasized that the program was just for research purposes—or maybe for some kind of pandemic-style emergency when lots of drugs had to be fabbed right away.
One of the CogSci guys asked why you couldn’t just visit the patent office and get the drug’s recipe directly from the publicly filed patents. She quoted from a recent article by a Freeculture legal scholar at Harvard, who had analyzed how much time and money it would take for an ordinary person to retain lawyers and experts who could actually navigate the expensive patent databases and figure out how a drug had been put together. Most drugs that made it out of trials were a confusing hodgepodge of licensed parts and processes, and it took corp money to figure out how it had been made. For an ordinary person who just wanted to copy a gene therapy, it was usually easier to amplify and sequence the drug fast, then analyze it with her little program.
Some of the other students added to Jack’s program, and pretty soon it became a small but thriving open source project called reng, for “reverse engineer.” Krish gave reng to his students back in Saskatoon, they passed it along to Iqaluit engineers, and pretty soon Jack was getting patches from people in weird places she’d never heard of in the Asian Union and Brazilian States.
When Jack wasn’t trying to figure out how to dismantle the patent system, she was busy being completely in love with Krish. Admittedly, she didn’t take love nearly as seriously as some of her classmates did, the ones who talked about “dating” and “getting married.” She viewed romance like any other biological process. It was the product of chemical and electrical signaling in her brain, inspired by input from the outside world. If she was deliriously happy around Krish and constantly yearning to have sex with him when he was away, that was just the ventral tegmental region of her brain and a bunch of neural pathways at work.
Krish felt the same way about Jack. Even when he went back to Saskatoon for the quarter to teach, they talked every day. Then, they took things to the next leveclass="underline" They founded an anonymized text repo together, about practical ways to deliver drugs to the public domain. It was the most intense relationship Jack had ever had.
JULY 5, 2144
An input mechanism in Yellowknife triggered a query to a molecule database in Bern, seeking several specific strings in one data field. One hundred sixty milliseconds later, the query returned a set of pointers.
The input mechanism in Yellowknife who had requested those pointers was a biobot named Med who had just watched a man die of organ failure. Three days before, the man had arrived at the emergency room nearly comatose. He’d been doing nothing but painting his flat for five straight days—not eating, barely drinking a few swallows of water, going out only to get more paint so he could keep adding more coats. The neurons in his midbrain were losing dopamine receptors in a familiar addiction pattern, the kind of thing you see after years of heroin use or gambling. No one had ever seen a person develop such a pattern in response to a week of painting.