Chapter 6: Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas

Lisa had gotten behind the wheel of her Audi A5 shakily, forgetting to tip, and had driven a block, then pulled into the first parking lot and double-parked. She cried for several long minutes, her shoulders shaking and breath ragged as she struggled for control. "How, how, how???" she kept asking herself, still not believing that she had taken up with a criminal organization. Now that she had the coveted VP title, she was now an officer in a company that was knowingly stealing information from customers and filing patents it didn't legitimately own through shell companies. Because it was happening in her division, she would now be complicit, could go to jail. The forged documents over her signature had made that clear, and the feeling of her once-promising career turned to ash in her mouth. She had no choice, she would have to play along or wind up dead or in prison. The theft was staggering, and now she truly understood how the financials added up, and how YoYoJolt had captured so much of the research market's raw computing cycles through their cloud-based services, crushing competitors like Google Research like gnats in just 2 short years. They could afford to offer world-class supercomputing services for ½ the cost of the competition if they were stealing the information and profiting elsewhere, really stealing from their customers twice. She now also understood why YoYoJolt paid into a bonus and generous pension program, never even hinting at the stock options or IPO that were the normal practice in IT startups. There could be no public scrutiny of financials in a company with their business model, so no IPO was possible. They simply paid for continued service and loyalty, the loyalty that made Lisa angry and scared at how she'd been used, at her plight.

Having finally stopped crying and shaking, Lisa cleaned off her ruined makeup with a determined sigh, and willed herself to drive back to her office at the Las Vegas Datacenter. She still felt nauseous at the thought of continuing her work for the slimeballs, but did she have a choice? She had never suspected the vast criminal underpinnings of YoYoJolt Synthetics and its parent company, or that the overtime and hard work she'd pumped into the research operations division had been serving to advance thousands of major crimes. Now that she knew, and had received as near-direct a death threat as possible, Lisa felt trapped, and the fight-or-flight response was kicking her adrenaline into high gear. It was all she could do to sit still in her seat as she drove, and she felt physically ill, cold sweats hitting her as she contemplated prison or worse.

Bradley Majors had calmly explained his treachery and villainy with even tones, as though discussing a painting or reading a sonnet, and the calm demeanor as the madman spoke had made an impression on her. Brad's organization had entered the supercomputer market as a means of developing the best pharmaceutical and biochemical components through the simple expedited means of having others do most of the work. As his supercomputers crunched the formulas, two teams got copies of the results, the real customer and his shadow researchers. However, merely gaining access to the research models and simulations would have only told his researchers which simulations were successful, but not provided access to the clinical data. Bradley's true stroke of genius was by giving his customers free tools for collaboration, grant writing, financial analysis, economic modeling, journal and paper review and publication services, all through a social network dedicated to the scientific community, as a the Sm@rtLabs Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. Sm@rtLabs PaaS was a rich platform for researchers that they embraced completely, and had supplanted minor competitors within months as the "next big thing" in research. Researchers found they were able to collaborate and advance their fields as never before. With that free tool, plus the dramatic price undercutting of competitors, YoYoJolt was the little darling of the research community. Recently, they'd published the Sm@rtLabs Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the community for free development, and third parties were already expanding on the base platform with applications as diverse as job boards, virtual particle accelerators and simulated super-colliders, learning environments, collaboration portals and so on. Sm@rtLabs had broken the resistance, and YoYoJolt had captured nearly all new research hosting through their powerful tool, causing a furor of scientific collaboration and coordinated research.

What customers neglected to consider was that YoYoJolt had administrative access to it all, the whole enchilada. They were able to see the entire spectrum of solutions that the researchers were working on, and even their own private lab notes regarding clinical trials and real-world biological testing that wasn't simulated on a supercomputer. Brad's team was able to act even more quickly than the scientists who were running the experiments, as they didn't have the overhead of all the animal research, clinical trials and cross-checking of results.

So far, Bradley's research teams had beaten opposing patent attorneys to the punch for 2900 solid patents on everything from improved fertilizer compounds and high-yield rice and soybean strains to genetic research, genome mapping and hundreds of pharmaceuticals. This was the true mother lode that he had sought and exploited through a series of dummy and shell corporations that appeared to be part of Sha Gang, a massive Chinese petro-chemical and pharmaceutical giant conglomerate with US, UK, Hong Kong and Australian offices. In actuality, Sha Gang was owned by Soe Industries through very carefully structured agreements that had thus-far proved impossible to penetrate. YoYoJolt stole the information, Sha Gang published the patents and produced the chemicals and drugs, and Soe Industries raked in the massive profits.

What the outside world never quite appreciated was that the 8400 researchers Sha Gang retained in three modern facilities in mainland China were gleaning most of their research progress through monitoring and stealing the ideas of the best and brightest researchers across the globe. Sha Gang was beating the legitimate inventors and researchers to patent filing by a typical 6-10 months, as they would file anything they felt relevant, and discard the ones that didn't pan out in the research collaboration site. For every ten patents they filed, nine were discarded, with only one worth defending to the patent offices, but it was enough. Through deceit and guile, Bradley Majors paid 8400 researchers but profited from the work of 3 million researchers, making Soe Industries beneficiary of most of the world's research while paying for none of it. Even now, they had had to slow down their operations, since customers would suspect when every major advance in bio-science was coming from Sha Gang and matched very closely their own research. No, by raping the research community for 18 months, Bradley had gotten the start he had needed; from here he could pick and choose the research he would steal.

Bradley had not described the depths of his treachery, but Lisa could glean enough. In quiet tones, he described a super-virus that would contain the genetic code to eradicate a host of maladies, currently 30 of the biggest cancer and congenital maladies that plagued the human condition. Once the super-virus was ingested or absorbed through the skin, it would rapidly start to remap the genetic structure of the sperm or eggs of the host, ensuring that every bit of genetic material to be passed to their offspring would generate children free of Childhood Diabetes, Spina Bifida, Cleft Lip or Palate, Down Syndrome, Microcephaly, Usher Syndrome, Sturge-Weber Syndrome, Neurofibromatosis, and several other congenital disorders. Even more encouraging, they believed they could reduce or eliminate the genetic predisposition to breast, testicular and cervical cancer. Bradley spoke of these as proud achievements that would change the face of the planet and the human condition. Lisa was nearly swayed at she thought of the staggering implications of finally beating breast and cervical cancer and ridding the world of Down Syndrome and Cleft Lip/Palate children, and all the rest. That was, until she heard the rest of his plan.

They were going to introduce the virus through a variety of foods, major cities' water supplies, and on money and illegal drugs that they had access to through their relations with some of those industries. Even now, the first drug was being test piloted in Mexico, having been sprayed on thousands of $100 bills that were circulating by the drug lords. The drug lords typically only deposited 30% of the funds that their received, and the rest was dispensed to bribed officials, pay their workers in cash, and some was inevitably tossed to their women and lieutenants to blow in Cancun and other luxury resort communities. The influx of cash into the local economy meant that the bankers and merchants would handle the bills, the bills would be exchanged for pesos, and then the bills would be circulated back into the US economy. Such infusion of cash directly into America by Soe Industries would have been difficult without trigger money laundering controls that would have also implicated them. Bradley had come up with the plan, and called it money laundering by proxy. They sprayed the bills with the virus, the drug lords distributed it and laundered the money, and then it was pumped into the US economy to change hands thousands of times.

Lisa listened dumbfounded. She wondered, but did not ask the question, "Why?" Why would he force this on people instead of offering this miracle drug? Why surreptitiously add it to food, money, drugs and water? And where was the profit motive there, particularly if it meant selling fewer drugs? Why not market this as the parent pill, the cure that would help ensure more perfect children if you just swallowed the pill, just pay $500, thank you very much. No, there was something sinister in his plot, even if she couldn't call it out. It just didn't ring true, and the seeding of the water supply and foods with the super-virus was bizarre and risky, and she did not believe that such an approach would be used for something described as so philanthropic. No, there were only three things that Lisa could be assured of at the moment: That Bradley was lying, that her life was likely in danger, and that she was in deep, dark trouble.

As he described the utopia his contributions would create for society, Bradley neglected to mention the real reason for his research. While it was true he was working on the ability for beating genetic disorders, and would indeed offer an injection like the "Parent Pill" that Lisa had thought of, that would definitely be for a hefty profit and sold to rich and middle-class prospective parents all across the world. No, Bradley's plan for the United States was far more sinister. His research into genetic materials and virus distribution systems had come up with a method of creating a very specific genetic market that would permit the anti-virus to "latch onto" a cell and propagate through the host ... a term one of his lieutenants had called the "bio-tag", and it had stuck. The method used one virus to drop the "bio-tag" and replicate it throughout the infected host, but that virus was only able to be passed by being ingested. The bio-tag virus was incapable of being distributed via airborne or skin vectors, and required the host to eat or drink the virus to become infected. Once the host had been infected with the bio-tag virus, and been "bio-tagged", they could then be infected with the super-virus that would provide for manipulation of the hosts' DNA.

One of the companies under the conglomerate that was Soe Industries manufactured food additives for the food and beverage industry, and had many thousands of additives as trade secrets. For the past six months, Soe Industries had been adding the "bio-tag" virus to two particular food additives in a package designed to be ingested. The "bio-tag" virus was protected via a microscopic shell designed to withstand stomach acid for several hours, ensuring the bio-tag virus would be absorbed in the intestines of the victim. This bio-tag virus package was added to two of the most popular additives used for US-based products, but these additives were ingredients in hundreds of processed food products including ice cream, cereal, hash browns, cheese, soda and licorice, and many products in-between. The additives were not approved for export, so Bradley could be assured that only US versions of the products contained his additive, so that only Americans and some visiting nationals from other nations would be infected with the bio-tag virus. By his researcher's calculations, some 92% of the US population should already be infected. The only substantive populations they forecasted would not be infected would be those who exclusively grew their own food, such as the Amish and Mennonite communities, and those on liquid diets in hospitals and nursing homes.

The second secret to Bradley's revenge was that the super-virus was a monstrously evil virus that did not merely change the genetics of the parents to remove dispositions to diseases. Rather, it degraded the DNA within the eggs of the hosts, destroying all of them by making them non-viable. This super-virus was not limited like the bio-tag virus, and was designed to spread through casual contact and through airborn vectors as well. Except for some rare exceptions, within in months every female in the United States would be rendered incapable of conception. An entire generation would die out, as nobody was born to replace them. His researchers were still working on achieving the same results with sperm to doubly-damn the Americans and keep them from simply "importing" wives, but they had not yet completed their work. At the brink of his success and grim revenge, Brad was impatient. It was no matter, the nation would crumble with no children, would have no military within 20 years, and no workers for industry within 40 years hence. Even if every bride and mother in the United States for the next 40 years was imported from other countries, the massive cultural shift would create a new America that would not be so arrogant as to drop nuclear weapons on innocents. No, he would have his revenge, and rip motherhood from the womb of 200 million women, just as the Americans had turned his mother to charred ash.

Unfortunately, Bradley's researchers had made two simple but devastating errors. First, at the macro level, they'd failed to understand that the bio-tag additives also had a black market. Several of their most popular additives were being diverted by their warehouse staff in exchange for hefty bribes. The packages were shipped to middle-men who repacked the additives in misleading boxes, and shipped them to some of the largest processed foods manufacturers in Brazil, China, Malaysia, India, Germany, Australia, Jordan, Netherlands, Canada and the UK. Further, the US companies who legitimately purchased the additives exported them as ingredients to their processing and bottling plants all around the globe, turning a blind eye to the export restrictions. As a result, fully 90% of the human population had been infected with the bio-tag virus.

The second mistake that the Sha Gang researchers had made was in misunderstanding some of the research notes and animal testing data, and in taking numerous shortcuts in their own animal research. The super-virus did far more than they understood. Bradley Majors had put enormous pressure on the researchers, and they had provided the virus within 9 months of intense work, but their incomplete work came with a horrible price.

Bradley Majors didn't understand these significant gaps in his distribution or action of the viral agents, his mind was clouded with revenge. Brad only focused on the good news and positive reports, and ignored the disclaimers and half-truths in the status reports as irrelevant. No, the only important thing was that they were still marching forward. He could taste the revenge they would visit on America to render the Whore of Babylon impotent and barren, which was the only thing he cared about. The nation would be emptied, and the great polluting Satan would be scrubbed from the earth, so the land and skies could be returned to the natural state it should have been before the Americans raped the land. North America would become a garden again, and the utopia complete. But first, they would pay and suffer, and the once-great Superpower would cease to exist as a nation.

After his violent outburst, none of this cold-hearted malice showed in Bradley's features or tone as he laid out the kind benevolence his super-virus would create for the world. His drug would end disease, suffering and pain for countless children and adults within a generation, and that was the kind-hearted pitch he made to Lisa, who listened in shock. Bradley failed to mention that he only he would select which nation would have their seed so strengthened and perfected by his drugs, and that there was no point in providing them to the United States. His madness kept Bradley Majors from understanding just how insane his plan sounded, and how it failed to hang together. With the vehemence of his outburst, Lisa had no misconceptions that he was targeting the United States with love and benevolence with this super-virus. His plan could not be that beneficial if he hated them with that much intensity. She mulled this over in her mind, and was thinking about the kinds of research projects she'd seen, and how some of those biological and genetic discoveries could be turned to harm. No, there were simply too many research projects, over 60,000 active projects currently being modeled, some with multiple compounds and formularies. Perhaps there was another way to deduce what the madman was actually planning.

Her mind on her troubles instead of her driving, Lisa drove through a red light several blocks from her office. She had narrowly avoided a traffic accident, and the squealing of tires had set her nerves even more on edge. She cursed to herself, shifting in her seat and gripping the wheel more tightly. "Get it together, girl!" she said aloud. A block later, the blue lights from a LVPD cruiser flashed into her vision, and she saw the officer close behind, clearly after her. She panicked, wondering if the police were onto her already, wondered if they knew all about YoYoJolt's hacking and theft, and she nearly jammed down on the throttle as her stomach flip-flopped. The police car's siren whooped a short warble of warning, and Lisa pulled to the shoulder onto the gravel, and turned off her engine.

The officer sat in his cruiser for several seconds, probably running her license plate, Lisa thought. Lisa fumbled in her purse for her wallet, her panic causing her to shake, and finally the bile threatened to come up. She knew she was over-reacting, and this was surely just a traffic stop. It didn't help. She threw open her door, lurched out of the car, took two steps towards the back of her car, and violently vomited up her lunch behind her Audi. Scared energy coursed through her, one hand on her car still clutched her wallet, and the other on her knee as she shuddered and coughed, too overwhelmed and frightened to do anything but shake and puke. Through the tears from her eyes as the wave of nausea passed, she saw the officer's spit-shined shoes like black mirrors, approaching and standing outside the pool she'd made on the ground. "Are you OK, ma'am?" he asked, and she nodded automatically, and spit, thinking how unlady-like it was to puke and spit by the side of the road. How crazy the thoughts that sometimes come to you when you're stressed out and sick. Lisa wiped the stinging tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, and raised her head. As she looked past the officer, she saw a black sedan drive slowly by. She realized the face in the window as it passed was one of Brad's security goons, looking intently at her with dead eyes, and shaking his head slowly. The message was clear – talk to the cop, and she'd be dead. Lisa nearly threw up again, had a dry heave, then staggered to sit heavily on the driver's seat of her car, legs still in the road. She rested her head on her hands, and could only think of prison and the ugly black pistol with the silencer that Brad had held. She remembered the empty, black yawning hole at the end of the muzzle as he'd pointed the pistol at her as he'd said, "unfortunate accident."