I had been waiting for him to clear the door more than he already had, just in case the dart gun was loud enough to alert anyone on the bridge, but that had been the wrong decision. The guy would have yelled before that happened.
"Robots disabled, moving to the bridge," Kiwi said, which made me sigh in relief after I disabled my suit's vox so nobody could hear it. "In position, confirm status."
I said, "Ready."
"Breach in 5... 4... 3," she counted down and I finished the last two seconds of the count mentally. We all rushed through the door at more or less the same time. There were only four people on the bridge, and they each got a dart instantly. I moved over to the comms console and shoved the datashard in without needing to be reminded.
"System intrusion in progress..." Kiwi said with the spacey tone she used when I knew she was hacking something. After a few moments, she said, "Complete. Assassin and I will stay here; Jones, take the rest of the team into the berthing area-one dart for each off-duty crew member. I don't want them asking questions when our ride gets here. Then we need to hit the purser's high-value storage. That's where our cargo is at."
Although there were a couple of close calls where the ship was expected to answer incoming radio calls, Kiwi had been analysing the comms record and even built an AI-generated fake voice that supposedly sounded and acted like the comms officer and replied each time.
Our nomad pirates arrived about thirty minutes after Kiwi called them, and we loaded our cargo on by hand, but the pirates used the cargo ship's own cranes to load five standard steel containers, picking them from here and there onto their much smaller ship. It was clear that they knew exactly which containers to steal, too, so I imagined they had some sort of contact with the longshoremen, but it wasn't my business.
We all stayed silent until the pirates dropped us off exactly where we left our vans. According to my chrono, the crewmembers should be waking up by now. This would go down in the logs of this ship and the authorities as a routine case of piracy and certainly nothing else. The limpet mines connected to the other ships would release a small amount of algae every time that ship got near shore. That would be enough. There would be no stopping it in a month.
Now what could I do with all of these nanomachines? I really didn't need them at all, and in fact, I was still buying more than I needed from my principal supplier and selling the excess off. Well, I guess more was always better.
Forty-six days later
Nicolo Loggagia was a busy man, and honestly, he hardly even ran his Corporation anymore, leaving the day-to-day operations to his Chief Operations Officer-his grandson Mario. He was much more interested in saving the world-or at least very small parts of it, one bit at a time. If he could live long enough, he'd accomplish the rest.
He wouldn't abandon the planetary surface like most people who made a quick buck. It was rank idiocy to do so, anyway. The effort required to planoform any celestial bodies was orders and orders of magnitude more costly and time-consuming than just fixing their own planet. It was better to work down here unless you wanted to live in a space habitat forever.
He never really understood the elite who had generational wealth in the first place. He started his first company in his garage with two thousand Eurodollars in his pocket, a dream and a lot of patent infringement.
It was only by chance that he heard enough to be aware of the important meeting that he was now crashing in person after arranging for an OrbitalAir suborbital flight just for himself back to Italy. He had been in Hawaii, releasing his latest project, which was the resurrection and improvement of the Hawksbill Sea Turtle, which had been extinct since the last Corporate War, when he saw an interesting item on local news. Apparently, people were starting to complain about a serious algae bloom in local waters, with an annoying-looking surfer complaining about it to the sympathetic newscaster.
Surfers, indeed. He scoffed. There were hardly any natural areas where that activity could be done these days, so any surfing that was done was on strictly curated artificial beaches, so he wasn't really that sympathetic to the man. However, he was curious about the algae, even if it only received a cursory two-minute segment on a slow news night.
He learned that his company had already discovered the same algae in Europe after he sent a sample to be sequenced at the local Biotechnica office, and from that, he learned of the planned emergency meeting. The files he had on the algae were quite interesting because they told him nothing. The algae in question had zero per cent similarity with any known phyla of cyanobacteria, or hell, any similarity with any bacteria at all.
That was impossible, as he had looked at it under magnification, and while it was radically different, there were still structures that were recognisable. It wasn't possible for it to be completely dissimilar when you considered humans were at least thirty per cent similar to this bacteria. So obviously, the genome was encoded somehow, and not in a way that he recognised. When he found out that the heads of the Bacterial Research Division were going to be conducting a briefing on it, he decided to crash the party. Perhaps it was time to act like a CEO again, especially when he read the mass spectrometry readings.
To say that his arrival at the headquarters in Rome was surprising was an understatement. He had been something like the Phantom of the Palais Garnier for some time now, hiding from public sight and scrutiny and doing his own thing. He was sure Mario and his wife were going to be furious, and while he trusted them both to make good day-to-day business decisions, he was concerned that they might make a misstep here.
" Nonno, what are you doing here?" Mario asked him when he arrived.
He hugged the boy, well man, now, and said, " I heard about what was going on and felt it was important I be at this meeting, son." That answer clearly did not satisfy Mario, but what could he do? In many ways, he was Biotechnica . Even if he rarely flexed such muscles.
The first part of the briefing concerned economic matters. It hadn't taken them long to realise the purpose of the algae; the damn thing produced ethanol directly through a completely novel organelle. He listened for a while and then cut the Research Director off, " Signor, yes, yes, it's obviously encrypted. Who cares right now, today? We have gotten used to the easy way of just reading the genome like a book. Pretend this is one hundred years ago; tell me about this bacteria through observation of its processes, please."
The Research Director coughed and looked rather nervous at speaking to the great man himself, but he wasn't a dullard nor would he have gotten to his position without being able to take the pressure, so he nodded, " We have observed the full life cycle in over one thousand discrete environments. It outcompetes everything similar, but it is, in many ways, much more fragile than we were expecting in certain specific situations. It only replicates in a solution with a salinity of over 30 grams to the kilo and over a specific temperature range-"
Nicolo cut him off and said, " Clearly, it is designed to only work in seawater; that is obvious. Anything else?"
"If placed in a simulated environment with low CO2 levels in the air, then it will not replicate either. It needs at least two-hundred-and-seventy-five ppm," the man said.
Niccolo hummed and motioned for the man to continue his briefing while internally, he did some calculations. Unless that two-hundred-and-seventy-five switch was necessary for the unique biological process that created the ethanol, which he doubted, it was, to him, a sign that the group responsible for this stuff were both idealists as well as amateurs. But how could that be possible?
"Does your group have ten-year projections on the continental shelf biome?" he asked, finally, which got another surprised look from everybody before the data was delivered. Everybody was now talking about eurodollars, the monopoly that now, and he just ignored them for the moment.
Nodding after reviewing the file. The projections were kind of hazy, but they all agreed on an absolutely huge increase in the total biomass in littoral areas, slowly spreading outwards, but nobody, not even the AIs, could agree whether or not this would be a good or a bad thing for the underwater ecology as a whole. This might drive a few species extinct, or maybe it wouldn't.
The genetic switch that stopped mitosis if there was insufficient CO2 sounded, to him, like a safeguard. That was the approximate level of CO2 half a millennia ago, before industrialisation. But there was no way just this algae would ever cause that much drop in CO2 levels.
Even with a huge increase in ocean biomass as a carbon reservoir, it would eventually plateau far above that. It wasn't that CO2 wouldn't go down, but if you were concerned over a year-over-year decrease forever, as this switch implied, then you had to take carbon entirely out of the picture in a way so that it wouldn't biodegrade back into carbon-filled gasses and bubble back into the atmosphere.
He rolled his fingers along the conference table. It was like he was dealing with someone that was as gifted a geneticist as he was but who only had an undergraduate's understanding of climate science. How queer.
Perhaps there would be secondary algae that did something besides convert the alcohol into sugars? Maybe into some kind of polymer, and they were just using the exact same genetic scaffolding for each organism? He made a note to keep on the lookout for such things.
"-so how are we going to destroy it?!" asked his grandson, somewhat heatedly.
" At the present time, we have no quick options that would impact the growth rates appreciably. We've tried a number of bacteriophages, but they are completely ineffective — it is clear that the genome is encrypted at the transcription/replication process, so anything inserting random data into its chromosomes gets 'decrypted' into garbage," the man said, " Toxins work, of course, but uhh... that's not tenable. "
"Why?" asked Mario, angry.
Niccolo shook his head, " Because it's a big ocean, son." What went without saying was they didn't have any biowarfare algae, either. I mean, why would anyone create overly aggressive plankton?
Glancing at his grandson, he nodded. Exactly what he was worried about was what was happening. Mario was trying to close the barn after the horse had gotten out. Worse, unless stopped, he would waste a huge amount of resources, political capital and goodwill on it and probably fail anyway.
Niccolo didn't become the CEO of Biotechnica so long ago because of his smarts, although they certainly didn't hurt. He took over the company because he had both a knack for realising when a change was nigh and the courage to take decisive action, even if it was scary.
" Mario, my son... we don't have time to stop it. I'm sure we will figure out its genome, including its encryption method, eventually , but it will only take a few more weeks before everyone realises what this means," he said, pointing to the quarter-on-quarter estimates. " Once that happens, countries won't let us do anything to stop it."
The fact that this stuff only grew around the shore was almost tailor-made to empower actual nation-states. The laws surrounding territorial waters were still enforced, theoretically, so whoever did this was just giving an epic fuckton of resources to any nations that had access to the ocean. Sure, only Hawaii, Europe and possibly Kyushu island were impacted now, but that wouldn't last. It would be smuggled everywhere else as soon as the value was understood.
It wouldn't cause revolutionary change as everyone was well-versed in extracting resources out of nation-states and giving them the minimal possible compensation in return, but it was still to throw a monkey wrench in a lot of people's mechanisms.
He made a decision and nodded, " How much easy capital do we have now?" Someone gave an answer, and he hummed, " Okay. In the short term, we're going to short our own stock, as well as Petrochem and our partners." That was wildly illegal, especially considering their insider knowledge, but nobody cared about that.
All of their stock prices would be taking a hit as soon as this became public, but the market was ultimately irrational and emotion-based and could be exploited. This was a body blow, for sure, but it wouldn't kill Biotechnica, so Biotechnica may as well make as much money off its wounding as possible.
" Today, immediately, we will shift our liquid investments into shipbuilding, refurbishing and the like. It will take months, maybe as much as a year, for the music to stop completely in the T. vulgaris sector. Have you heard of a ship designed to skim algae off the ocean? Economically? I am absolutely sure it is possible, as sure I am that it doesn't exist! I want to own at least a third of the shipbuilders that might tend to get these contracts," he said.
Niccolo nodded, " As far as our farming partners... well, I will take a personal hand in this. We have dozens of genetically modified plants and cultivars that we have held back because T. vulgaris was so profitable. Mostly food-based, but some produce harvestable polymer feedstocks and the like. We will have crops that are almost as profitable as T. vulgaris available for review in two weeks. Long before they can consider maybe just planting potatoes or something... unless they're Biotechnica potatoes, anyway."
Niccolo had the command voice of someone who once served in the Italian Army, even if it had been only a staff position, and people started to hop to. He was going to be busy now, but it felt kind of good. Like he used to feel in the old days before he had "won." Internally, he shifted more people to studying precisely how this chromosome replication process encrypted the genome. Biotechnica had similar technology, but there were many ways it could be done.
Who had made this, and why weren't they working for him directly was the main question he wanted answered.
His boy was still stewing in rage. Mario was talking to their Intel spooks about tracking down whoever did this. Maybe he'd succeed, too, but that was less important than ensuring they landed on their feet. Plus, he wasn't sure it was such a bad thing that something was shaking them up. Perhaps their planet could support more life if they could grow more food crops. There was so much non-arable land... could they dig small salt-water pools and grow these algae there, too? That would be cheap.
