Page 29 - Unlikely Stories 1

DeathCon

“Hello, Buell. I love your show!”
“Thank you, ma’am. I see from your badge that you are Jessie Bell,
head of applied sciences at Genomonix. We just learned that your
company is going head-to-head with Nemesys, and that you are fine
with that.”
“Well, of course, Buell. It’s no secret that the same people are on
the boards of directors of both companies. It’s a matter of public
record! But let me tell you about the superior qualities of our
product, Atropos 500. One of the prime qualities of a successful
weapon is its ability to exploit a weakness of its target. That, of
course, leads to the dialectic of sword and shield, of which everyone
is aware—and, certainly, of the high value placed on scrap iron.
Mechanical ordnance aside, attacks on the human ability to fight,
psychological or physiological, historically have been neutralized once
the vector of debilitation is identified. Gas leads to gas masks;
anthrax to inoculations; LSD in the water supply to—well, I’d rather
not say; there may be children in the audience. Thus the need for a
reliable but stealthy depopulator: a nuclear exchange wipes out
producer and customer alike. Genomonix, after sponsoring my
research at Moloch University in telomere bonding, brought me over
to head its own Department of Defense contract to exploit my
findings. So, you see your tax dollars at work, supporting pure science
in academia and its application in vital national defense projects, all
under the guiding hand of corporate America.”
“Right, Jessie: that’s why we’re number one, and everyone else
hates us or envies us. Really comes down to the same thing, doesn’t
it, folks? But tell us more about your product—if it isn’t classified
information. I don’t see any scale models or displays here.”
“Secrecy is a thing of the past, Buell! But don’t worry: as long as
DoD keeps those fat contracts coming, they can buy all our stock.
Now, what we’ve done here is analyze the nucleotide bonding
between layers of telomere, the protective caps on your DNA that
enable it to copy itself accurately when the cell it occupies divides. In
normal circumstances, those caps disintegrate slowly over time—
that’s one reason we age: after a certain number of copies, the

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