Page 95 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Viral Assassin

“I know this isn’t original,” said Izzy Azimuth. “But it would be
a new use of an old trope. You provided it yourself, Leith. Suppose,
after all that tailoring, the precision is such that a certain degree of
relation to the target made one susceptible—collateral damage, you
called it. And further grant the obvious precaution of making sure
none of our own leadership were in that circle of susceptibility. But
that determination is only as good as the data upon which it
depends. Perhaps our supreme leader’s DNA had been taken in the
early days of genetic research, but mishandled and misidentified.
That would open the possibility that he, like all the crowned heads
of Europe on the eve of World War One, was unknowingly a
cousin of the enemy’s leader. So they both would fall victim to the
mystery disease, as Felicity suggested.”
“Thanks, folks,” Leith Mauker nodded. “I see that I almost
certainly need to have the originators of this diabolical scheme
punished for their meddling with Mother Nature. And another
outcome occurs to me, suggested by what has happened with the
engineered crop seeds turned loose on the world by large
corporations: genetic drift. From the origin of life, genes are a deck
of characteristics constantly shuffled to produce unpredictable
variation in DNA. The virus might start out harmless in the vectors,
but it won’t reach the target without going through several people,
each time reproducing with small mutations. How could anyone
guarantee this narrowly-targeted pathogen not turn into a weapon
of mass destruction?”

94