Bugs
David M. Palmer
A bar story. Between Calahan's and the Chatsubo, where nobody much
cares if you live OR die, between now and then, there are
BUGS
The guy on the stool next to me swore into his beer and looked up.
I didn't follow his eyes, I got caught that way once. No cause he
should hit me, but a guy wearing a suit like that and drinking in a
dive like Sally's, no telling what he might do. *I* was a bit classy
for this place. I watched him grab a rusty dart from the bar and throw
it at the ceiling. "Got her!" he said. He called towards the other
end of the bar--"Bartender!"
The barkeep wandered over. I guess she was Sally--the place looked
like her, and she didn't look like the type anyone would hire, so she
had to own the bar. "Yeah, what do you want?" she asked.
"A fresh beer, without egg in it."
"Nobody put egg in your beer," she said.
"She did," he said, and pointed straight up.
This time I looked. The dart had nailed a huge roach to the
plasterboard ceiling. Dead center.
Sally knocked down the dart with a broom, probably the first time it
had been used in weeks, dropping the roach into the beer with its
eggs. "Right, I guess that's a fresh beer for you, on the house," she
said. She picked up the glass and looked at the roach. "They seem to
be getting bolder every day. When I was a girl, they always ran away
from people. Nowadays they just try to sneak up on you."
Sally poured the beer down the sink, I watched to make sure. The guy
just looked at the ceiling. The bugs were coming back. "She's right,
you know," he said, "these roaches aren't like the old ones."
"A roach is a roach," I said, "they haven't changed in three million
years." I had heard that somewhere. "I saw on TV that they're coming
out more nowadays because of the greenhouse effect, something about too
much carbon monoxide and chlorowhatevers in the air."
"New one on me," he said. "The fact is that roaches have changed,
they've been changed. They sneak around in cracks, laying eggs
everywhere, following you around, listening to everything you do,
telling people all your secrets."
I looked at him. Crazy man. He didn't look dangerous, I just wished
those darts were farther away. Somebody had to tell him, or he'd never
get over it. "You're crazy, roaches don't tell secrets."
Sally gave him a fresh beer. No tip, he wasn't all crazy. Sally left
when she figured that out.
"They do now, ever since a few years ago, around the turn of the
century."
Roaches I don't like talking about, but it was probably better than
talking to Sally. "What happened then?"
"Project Blatta-Blather. The invention of the talking roach."
I've got a thing called a pocket transcriber that writes down
everything I hear, the judge makes me carry it so I can't say the other
guy started it. There's somebody that pays me to put in the 'he said's
and what the guy does when someone tells me a good story. It's not as
much money as hustling darts, but I wasn't going to do that with this
guy.
"I'm a biological engineer with...a company you have certainly heard
of. One day a Colonel from a government agency you have certainly
never heard of came into my office. He told me that he needed a
special type of creature--a creature that could carry a miniature audio
recorder into hostile territory, get close enough to record
conversations without being seen, or at least without causing
suspicion, and then return to friendly territory where the recording
could be read out.
"I put my best engineer on it. I'll call him Joe because that was not
his name. Joe's a genius, but English was his eighth language, he had
only been speaking it for a few months, and he once confided to me that
the maximum number of languages his brain could hold was seven and a
half.
"The result was pure genius. The sort of idea that never occurs when
engineers have well-developed communications skills.
"Joe made a bug that was a bug. A completely biological tape recorder that
could walk, fly, find its own energy sources, reproduce. He changed the
cockroach from a crawling, repulsive, filth-eating marvel of
evolution into a crawling, repulsive, filth-eating marvel of
espionage.
"The idea was simple, like all works of genius. The implementation was
incredibly difficult, as befits a cost-plus contract. Joe created
special cells that fit between the auditory neurons and the wing motor
neurons. The cell connected signals from these neurons to an organelle
unlike anything ever before created."
"Organelle?" I asked. I was totally lost. All I knew was the guy had
made a crawling tape recorder.
"An organelle is just an organ in a cell, like a pancreas or a spleen
would be for you or me. This particular organelle has the ability to
transcribe sounds onto strands of DNA and vice versa."
"DNA?" I asked. It was fun to hear the words roll by. He really
talked like that, and it sounded like he knew what he was saying. I
wanted to see how many of the words my transcriber knew.
"DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid," he said. (The thing knew how to spell
that word. I knew how to spell DNA.) "It's a long string of molecules,
and the order of molecules in the string contains information that
helps to run the cell. It's like a computer program on tape that
controls all of the cell's machinery."
"Oh yeah," I said, "I remember now." It had to do with computerized
tape recorders that crawled around, I guess.
"Anyway, Joe realized that he could use DNA to store sound, instead of
genetic information. The signals from the auditory neurons go to a DNA
encoder, which creates a string of DNA with the sounds imprinted on
it. When given the proper trigger, in this case a pheromone-induced
hormone, it stops recording and passes the DNA to a decoder, which
reads the DNA and signals the motor neurons to vibrate the wings and
reproduce the original sound."
"Very clever," I said. He sounded like he thought it was clever.
"The Colonel thought so too. It was the perfect way to avoid the
problem of a surveillance target finding a bug. If you stomp on a
cockroach you try to avoid looking at the remains, which was why the
Colonel had originally wanted to implant a conventional recorder into
one. With this, even if you got suspicious and examined the flattened
spyroach carefully, you'd need a powerful microscope and an intimate
familiarity with cockroach neurocytophysiology to figure out that the
bugs were engineered."
"Sounds pretty good," I said. I was catching on, it was a tape
recorder hidden in an cockroach that you wouldn't want to look for and
couldn't find if you did.
"We implanted audiotaxis to make it get approach interesting
conversations, homing instincts to let it return to the spy base for
playback, the usual tricks. It all worked great, until we turned it
over to the Colonel."
"What happened then?"
"The Colonel decided that, rather than just planting the bugs where he
expected something significant to be said, it would be easier and more
productive to spread them everywhere, have them listen to everything,
and later just pick up the ones that happened to be around the former
site of an important conversation. It makes the logistics much
simpler.
"Anyway, he took one of our spyroaches, which had been sterilized to
avoid precisely this sort of thing, and to ensure repeat business, and
had it de-sterilized at a competitor's shop. Not only that, he had
adjustments made. The new modifications allowed it to fly faster,
cling to ceilings better, and produce more eggs. It became a sort of
super-roach, capable of competing in almost any ecological niche.
"When the Colonel released these things, they quickly reproduced and
became a major component of the roach population. Our company started
discovering our spyroaches everywhere, and we were horrified. We tried
to sue--we estimated that there were several billion of these things
running around at one time, and at a thousand dollars apiece that's a
lot of royalties--but it's impossible to sue a government agency that
officially doesn't exist. We didn't have any legal names to put on the
papers or an address for the process server to deliver them to."
I got enough of that to be mad. "You made a super-roach, and now there
are billions of them running around, recording everything we say?" It
was bad enough that I had to carry a transcriber until my probation
runs out, but if you have billions of cockroaches listening to
everything you say, you can't ever get away with anything. I had
roaches at my place, I was going to get some bug poison on the way
home.
"Don't blame us!" he said, "it was all that Colonel's fault. Nothing
that comes out of our lab lasts more than sixty days, nothing lasts
more than a generation. If the Colonel hadn't gone to that other
shop..."
"Yeah, it's always somebody else's fault. I bet you got a cushy raise
and the Colonel got a real talking to and a cushy raise."
"Well, it turned out that the playback trigger was insufficiently
selective to prevent accidental activation. The roach that first
demonstrated this design deficiency was in the same hotel room as a
General and his secretary. He decided that such a widespread invasion
of the American public's privacy was not to be tolerated, and gave us
the task of eliminating the spyroaches that the Colonel had produced.
The Colonel got a transverse promotion to head of security at a
single-person observation post in Antarctica.
"Joe figured out a solution to the roach problem, and I'm here to field
test it. Until we get everything worked out, all secure government
buildings are fumigated every night, and high- level officials use sign
language for all secret conversations. Of course, this whole matter is
classified at the very highest levels."
"That's ridiculous," I said, finally breaking. "If it's so secret, why
are you telling me all this? You're not using sign language."
"I'll tell you in a minute," he said, "but first, listen to this, and
don't say a word until it's over."
He pulled out a small tape recorder and pushed the play button, "Don't
make a sound."
It didn't sound very good, it was no worse than what people listen to
nowadays, but it wouldn't sell any records. It had no words, and the
transcriber didn't write anything down for it. While it was playing,
he went to the door and propped it open.
"Those were the sounds you get by playing back a very special piece of
DNA." He tucked his recorder back into his pocket. "Part of the DNA
makes the cell produce a toxin, a poison lethal only to roaches. A
roach with this DNA, any spyroach that hears the sounds I just played,
is dead." That stopped me, "you can't kill a person just by playing
that tape, can you?" I asked.
"Oh no, it has no effect at all on anything other than spyroaches.
It's perfectly safe."
I usually don't trust people like that who say something's perfectly
safe, not after what happened to Memphis, but I wasn't dead, and he
hadn't worn earplugs or anything like that, so I guessed it wasn't that
dangerous.
"Naturally, it is impractical to go into every roach habitat, like this
one, and play that sound. We plan a media blitz on radio and TV in the
next few days, but that will give us only around 30% coverage.
"The rest of the DNA is to get these sounds to the other 70%. In
mature male roaches, the DNA produces an exogamy instinct. The roaches
find other swarms and try to attract a mate. The sex hormones this
releases trigger the playback mechanism. For mature males, toxin
production is delayed until that happens. In a few weeks, we expect
that every spyroach in the country will have heard those sounds, either
directly, or from some other roach playing back. When that happens,
every spyroach in the country will be dead.
"You see, a spyroach is just this sound's way of making another sound.
It's not the first audio virus--songs and advertising jingles have been
doing it with people, birds and whales for centuries--it's just the
first one with such a high mortality rate among its hosts."
He got down from his stool, "By the way, the reason I'm telling you
this is because it's a secret," he pointed at the ceiling, "and they
love secrets."
I looked up. The ceiling above us was covered with roaches. A few
spread their wings and flitted out the open door.
"There go the first few, to spread their poisonous gospel among their
brethren. It looks like it's working. In a few months there will be
none left. So much for the nouveau roach."
He walked towards the door. "By the way, you may want to leave too,
the toxin is pretty fast acting, and fairly uniform in the time it
requires to take effect." That was the last I saw of him.
I looked back at the roaches. More and more were leaving the ceiling
and flying out the door. Sally was next to me, watching with her mouth
hanging open. I heard a small splosh, and looked down to see a roach
in my beer. "I'm not thirsty anyway," I said, and headed for the
door.
Behind me I heard a hundred small sounds, like popcorn, or like small
hard bodies falling onto the bar, and the floor, and a face.
I'm pretty sure she closed her mouth in time.
--
David M. Palmer pal...@alumni.caltech.edu
pal...@tgrs.gsfc.nasa.gov