“Why nitric acid?”
“Just an example,” Browder said. “Because you could theoretically synthesize it from air and wouldn’t have to have any other material available. But depending on what they intend to attack, and what they can expect to find near it, there’s at least a hundred other possibilities: fluorine gas, or hydroxide or peroxide ions, or a bimetallic strip that works like a battery. For sabotage, you only need nanoreplicators to reproduce in clusters around something valuable, and excrete a substance that attacks it. Achieving that is down at the college sophomore lab level these days.”
Hannah Bledsoe, from DHS, tall, handsome, dignified, with a deep red dress and pearls that seemed as much a part of her as her soft curly gray hair, looked up from her laptop. “And what are the biotes? Disease organisms?”
Browder grunted. “Sort of, but not against people as much as against artificial materials. The Daybreakers’ genetic-modification stuff that we’ve decrypted so far is all devoted to modifying ordinary decay bacteria, molds, funguses, any bug that eats dead stuff, to make engineered enzymes to break down long chains of carbon.”
Edwards said, “Pretend that some of us skipped chemistry class.”
“A lot of artificial materials—most plastics, for example—and the common fuels like gasoline and kerosene—have molecules that are built around a long, branching string of carbon atoms, with various other atoms attached on the side. The reason they usually don’t decay is because the carbon-carbon bond is fairly strong, and where there’s a long string of them, there’s not much—at least not much that a living thing naturally makes—that will attack the chain and break it into pieces small enough to digest. Basically the biotes are molds or yeasts, bacteria or maybe viruses, that turn synthetic materials and liquid fuels into sugars, fats, proteins—food that rots and spoils.”
“My god,” Bledsoe said, “and that’s what’s loose out there? But how did they get the technical expertise?”
“They don’t have to be tech wizards,” Arnie Yang put in. “Nowadays a process is no sooner understood than it’s automated. The guys who wrote the first computer viruses back in the eighties were pretty smart, but they created scripts for them, and now any eleven-year-old script-kiddie with a bootleg kit can write a virus that will steal your password, e-mail him your credit-card numbers, and fill your hard drive with porn.
“Once they had computers big enough to do molecular simulations and cheap enough for the public—like about the time the ApplePi came out a few years ago—it was really more just a matter of who wanted to do genetic engineering. Sure, it seems like it’s big news, and true, even ten years ago, biohacking was still all guesswork. But that’s just because people don’t keep track. Last year a kid biohacked a completely synthetic RNA prion for his Science Talent Search project—and only got second place because there was something more innovative going on.”
“I know Agent Edwards said no recriminations,” Susan Adler said, stroking her forehead as if it hurt, “but how the hell did we let something like that get loose to the general public?”
Browder shrugged and looked at Heather; he was right, it was her department more than his. “By the time anyone paid attention, it was making too much money to get rid of. It’s the basic technology of biohacking,” she said. “All those booming industrial plants around Baton Rouge and Portland, where they create cows with human blood, and that erosion-control ivy they use in burned-over areas, and those gasoline-from-saltwater-algae farms that they’re just starting around San Diego. Biohacking was making too many people rich. No one wanted to squash it.”
Hannah Bledsoe sighed. “So you’re saying your umpty thousand saboteurs—or more—might be spraying this stuff around the country—”
“Definitely spraying it around the world,” Arnie said.
Edwards cocked his head to the side and squinted hard, as if trying to see. “Uh, right. So bottom line, what’s it going to do?”
Everyone looked at Heather, and she said, “Well, it looks like what they were trying to do with the biotes was make plastic rot like soft cheese on a hot day and gasoline spoil like milk.”
“Any reason to think it won’t work?” Edwards asked, softly, breaking the grim silence.
“I don’t think Daybreak would have initiated itself until they had it working,” Arnie said.
Edwards nodded. “I get it. So the nanoswarm must be working too. I understood what you said it did inside the machines, but what does it do to things as a whole?”
“As a whole, you mean—?”
“Well, Dr. Browder told me the biotes cut up molecules into little pieces, and I understood that, but it took me a moment to understand that that makes plastic rot. What does something that drips corrosive acid inside microchips do?”
“Hell if I know. Something big,” Arnie said.
Browder added, “Probably many things. None of them good.”
“Well,” Edwards said, “I’ve heard enough. Dr. Yang, do you have any kind of list of the leadership of Daybreak?”
Arnie sighed. “That’s why I said Daybreak initiated itself. It’s a concept and a process that some people devote themselves to; there’s no leadership except within tiny little affinity groups. Daybreak has no leaders, no theoreticians, nobody who runs it or made it up. In fact it probably had no creator, or no one creator. It’s more… improvisational, like that improv comedy stuff that was popular when I was a kid? But more so. Nobody said, Okay, we’re ready for Daybreak, roll it. Nobody gave an order, prepared a report, made a decision, voted, or took an assignment in committee. What happened was… more, um… more like a flock of geese taking off to fly south in the fall.”
“I thought the goose out front was the leader.”
Browder and Arnie were both looking nervously at Heather because she’d been pretty harsh with them in the meeting over coffee before this meeting. But she nodded at Arnie; it wouldn’t look good to evade the question.
He said, “No, there’s not really a leader as such. It’s what’s called flocking behavior. Some of them honk I’m leaving and take off, then more of them honk I’m coming too, and they circle and maneuver to line up in each other’s slipstreams, and that forms them up into Vs, and the goose that finds itself at the head of the V heads south. That goose out front is not the leader; it’s just the goose that happens to have a clear idea of south at the moment. Shoot or confuse the goose at the tip of the V, and a couple will peel off to take care of the damaged goose, and the rest will just form up behind some other goose. You can’t decapitate it because it doesn’t have a head.”
“But…” Edwards didn’t look at all happy. “But then how do they stay on the program?”
“The program is whatever they happen to stay on,” Crittenden said, from the back of the room. “Which is taking down the Big System.”
Heather wanted to hug him; she’d been afraid that Arnie would say the words that made everyone resist what he was saying—pure system artifact—and she wanted people committed by action before they heard that, because it was more frightening than what they’d already heard—and worse yet, probably true. “If there are no questions,” she said, “let’s take five minutes for bathroom and coffee, and start self-organizing, ourselves.” Much as she liked Lenny Plekhanov, she was glad he hadn’t been able to come on such short notice; he’d have suggested that they get all flocked up.