Science Crimes Division: Ultrameta
Science & Technology Control Act — Often simply called “The Act,” it established the Science Regulatory Commission (SRC) and charged it with the creation and maintenance of basic licensing requirements for both the practice of science and the production or maintenance of “any and all technologies relevant to the public interest,” as well as the regulation of scientific research and control and enforcement of all of the above.
Four primary factors led to the passing of the STCA:
1) a dramatic increase in the scope and effectiveness of applied science (i.e., CRISPR, advanced algorithmic control, etc.)
2) the ubiquity of the internet as a means of disseminating that knowledge even outside the mechanisms of social control
3) widespread adoption of micromanufacture (“Makers,” 3D printing evolved) as a means of implementing that knowledge individually and cheaply
4) an increase in the overall population resulting in deep statistical outliers, rare individuals capable of using that knowledge in ways the public viewed as dangerous
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Although we’re a long way off yet, I expect what we now call 3D printing,and which I call micromanufacture, will be at least as disruptive as the internet. Put in Marxian terms, it collapses and partially democratizes the means of production.
Say you’re in the market for a piece of furniture. Why go to the store when you can go online and peruse literally millions of designs in every conceivable style, and then download the print file and have the product manufactured at home? Some designs you might pay for — some folks will want a genuine Louis Vuitton branded chair (or whatever) — but others will be free. There will be online databases full of everything you might want, from blenders to car parts. Indeed, why not just print your own electric car?
Some people won’t want to mess with it, while others will want the old fashioned stuff just for the sake of it being old, similar to how people today still buy vinyl LPs and hardbound books, but I suspect many of our core items will be downloaded as digital instructions and made locally, at home, as everything used to be before the industrial revolution (which is partly why this will be another revolution).
We might even choose to customize a freeware design after downloading it, adding our own flare and then uploading that remix back to an online database for other users to try. There’ll be so many variants of everything, we’ll wish for the good old days of only three options!
Materials of course will be key, and various designs will likely be coded in various ways — what level or size of ‘Maker’ is required, the class of materials involved, etc. — where, for example, you’ll be able to filter your search results for all microwave ovens that can be printed and assembled in a Class 4 Maker pre-loaded with (hexadecimally-coded) base materials 0 to E8.
You’ll even be able to download plans to make a bigger Maker.
Metal parts could be made by injecting mold-space inside a reusable substrate (that might have to be replaced every so often, like changing the oil in your car). Wood from your back yard — if there is any — could be carved, sanded, and polished. Reusable plastics could be purchased cheaply from a local recycler.
Advanced technologies — advanced in the future, not what we consider advanced now — will probably still require formal manufacture. And some things will of course not be printable. You need highly refined radioactive material to make an nuclear bomb, for example. But once the basic infrastructure is in place, people will start to get very creative, not just with the kinds of novel products on offer — think innumerable useless infomercial-type stuff, some of which will randomly take off, like fidget spinners — but they’ll also get creative with ways of making existing products with fewer “ingredients,” or simply with more common ones. We’ll invent new ways of doing things.
Large-scale projects will be crowdsourced, as Wikipedia and Linux derivatives and a bunch of other stuff is already. People will band together in all kinds of ways, formally and informally, to do crazy shit — some of which will end up being dangerous. And of course, the incorporated nation-state and its masters in the ruling class will feel threatened. And the sheeple won’t feel safe — especially parents. Hence the need for the Science and Technology Control Act…
Science Regulatory Commission — A division of the Department of Education known mostly for it’s highly publicized enforcement arm, the Science Control Agency (SCA), although the Commission’s scope is considerably broader, tackling issues such the recently proposed Knowledge Ban and its first potential target, the so-called Black Hole Device. Just as with the FTC or SEC, the majority of the voting public is only tangentially aware of the SRC or its mandate, which mostly revolves around inspection and licensure.
For example, a license is required to own an extinct species, which must be spayed or neutered. The penalties for failing to acquire the necessary license before purchase are high. People don’t do it because licenses are hard to get. They require you to have all kinds of expensive containment in place. (Basically, they’re for the rich.) Breeding extinct species is completely prohibited and a Class C felony, and genetically modifying one will get you life in a Federal prison.
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All applicants for licensure with the SRC must take a test regardless of formal education
Assessed Risk Score (ARS):
0: No Science Knowledge – applies mostly to children and the mentally disabled
1: Basic Education: Beginner – some exposure to scientific concepts
2: Basic Education: Intermediate – grade school equivalent (most citizens are here)
3: Basic Education: Advanced – roughly equivalent to a non-science Bachelor’s degree
4: General Education – roughly equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree in a core science
5: Median – roughly equivalent to a non-arts, non-science Master’s degree
6: Primary – roughly equivalent to a Master’s degree in a core science
7: Major – any PhD or greater education in a non-arts, non-science field (i.e., economics)
8: Urgent – any PhD or greater education in a core science
9: Severe – a field-specific thought-leader in a core science
X: Mandatory Active Threat Monitoring – exceptional science knowledge, genius or higher
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Sonrisa Cortines
Special Officer, Science Control Agency
Division of Science Crime Investigation
Enhanced Proprioception and Spatial Hyperawareness
Full character notes:
Risa’s mother was an illegal immigrant with no formal education who spoke very little English and took the street drug Red Dull to deal with chronic pain associated with fibromyalgia. She was young, unmarried, underemployed, and without insurance when Sonrisa was conceived and didn’t realize until her second month that her brief dalliance with a Spanish-speaking Filipino Catholic named Hector had produced a baby, meaning Sonrisa was exposed to the drug in the womb.
Although Sonrisa’s pain response is normal, it left her with a host of neurological side effects. She struggles with severe depression, for example, which she controls with medication, and the web of neurons that wrap her intestines and stimulate digestion are sub-active, requiring a special liquid diet. She drinks a lot of smoothies and has to watch the ingredients religiously or she develops debilitating cramps, gas, bloating, and diarrhea. She also has a slight reading impairment.
But most importantly, Sonrisa has a hyper-developed proprio- and exteroception network. Her cerebellum and spinal ganglia are 20% larger than would be expected given the size of her CNS, and just as some kinds of autistic savants can look at a pile of papers on the floor and instantly know their number, or do incredible feats of arithmetic, Sonrisa can tell at a glance exactly where a distant object is pointed, or where it will land when falling from a great height. She also has precise, machine-like control over her limbs and body parts. She has never once bit her tongue, for example. She’s also an Olympic-caliber markswoman, and within firing a few shots from any weapon she handles—after getting a feel for its weight, balance, and recoil—she’s a crack shot. (She’s known for removing rounds from a weapon and feeling and weighing them in her hand before replacing them and taking a shot.) And since she can tell at a glance where any weapon is pointed, she can dodge any knife thrust and most single-shot firearms.
All of that comes at a price, however. The more motion in the world around her, the more her brain tries to process it all simultaneously, predicting the motion of every object—from swinging arms and stepping feet to the flaps of pigeon wings and falling drops of water—which requires knowing the motion of every thing that interacts with anything else in an ever-accelerating feedback loop she calls the “acid burn”: confusion and generalized anxiety leading to increased heart rate, tremors, and aggression. If left unchecked for an extended period, the “acid burn” ends in catatonia requiring hospitalization.
It’s not complexity. It’s movement. Certain kinds of static geometric patterns that seem to the human eye to move (illusions) force her to squint and look away.
She mitigates the “burn” effect two ways. First, with a pair of dark glasses that focus her attention on a limited visual field (and look really cool). Where those are missing, she moves. When she occupies her brain with her own complex movement—such as professional dance moves or advanced hand-to-hand combat—she can achieve a state of flow and escape the runaway effect.
In fact, Sonrisa’s mother desperately wanted her daughter to be a dancer, especially after it became clear she could replicate all but the most complex dance routines after a single viewing. But while Risa loved dancing and would often do so for hours at a time as a young woman, she was the daughter of a single mother and illegal immigrant growing up in the inner city, and she didn’t have a peer group that valued anything but the hustle. She danced, but on the street, where she could earn easy money by wowing the passers-by and so impress her friends and the neighborhood boys.
Unbeknownst to all but her closest friends, including her mother, Sonrisa got pregnant at 15 and had an abortion, which she thinks about often even as an adult.
In her late teens, Sonrisa got heavily involved in a Parkour group that also committed petty crime. In her early 20s, she achieved a short-lived internet fame when a video of her went viral. Low-level organized crime syndicates use robotic drones to snatch purses and other valuables from busy urban crowds, like hawks taking prey on the wing. Police drones patrol in response, but of course they can’t be everywhere at once. Sonrisa’s friend watched helplessly as the necklace her missing father had given her was ripped off her neck and flown away. Risa chased the drone down on foot, leaping between buildings and tiptoeing across wires a thousand feet high like she was playing hopscotch on the street.
The video caught the attention of her future mentor in the SCI, who actively recruited her. Since her talents were already mature, she was deemed too valuable to send to the academy for six years and she became a “Special Officer”—given combat training only (where she excelled) and used more or less exclusively in chase and apprehension. She rides an electric motorcycle with a lightweight composite body and no engine. The free-floating tires are accelerated magnetically. Although theoretically capable of breaking Mach 1 (at STP), of course no one can ride it that fast. But since Sonrisa is capable of predicting movement at high speed, she can weave through traffic at speeds in excess of several hundred miles per hour.
But in bypassing the lengthy education required for a standard Science Control Officer, let along the PhD-level education of a Warrant Officer, she’s not taken seriously by the majority of her colleagues, which elicits an ambivalent reaction. Part of her wants to tell them to go fuck themselves and quit. Part of her wants to be taken seriously as an investigative officer. And she just can’t imagine life without the bike, weaving through eight lanes of traffic at 250 mph.
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She enjoys anechoic and sensory-deprivation chambers, or other places with zero movement, finding them peaceful and relaxing. She’s constructed a poor woman’s version inside the basement, one-room apartment where she lives, which requires entry through three consecutive doors.
Sonrisa occasionally overcompensates around her colleagues—most people do in the right circumstances—but it’s not her defining characteristic. While she’s tough and street smart, she not particularly violent nor overly gruff either. In fact, she’s generally good with people and prefers to let them go rather than hurt them (or take the kill shot), a trait that gets her in trouble with her superiors, who wish her talents had come in the body of a proper soldier.
Having grown up poor without many of the privileges her primarily middle class colleagues take for granted, she is grateful for what she has and cautious about doing anything that might jeopardize it. At the same time, she’s relentlessly curious—a scientist at heart—which leads her to question everything, especially her orders.
When the story opens, Sonrisa is investigating the circumstances around which “Papisan”—an elderly Puerto Rican-Japanese man who was a kind of surrogate grandfather to her—has begin having paranoid and extremely bizarre delusions. Although she doesn’t have formal approval to investigate—indeed, she’s not treated as an investigative officer at all—she is a Science Control Officer and has the legal authority to do so, at least until ordered to do otherwise.
But since she’s looking into the case more or less in the gaps between other assignments, she’s distressed to learn she’s been reassigned to a special task force comprised of unusual individuals from across the S.C.I. charged with finding and apprehending a criminal they’re told almost nothing about.
Sonrisa is bisexual but has a slight preference for men and is presently in a polyamorous relationship with a man and woman. They refer to themselves as a triple (rather than a couple) and try to do as much as a threesome as possible, obviously including sex. As the story progresses and Sonrisa’s job keeps her busy—and the actions of the plot cause her to question her life—she spends less time with the others, who resent being reduced to a pair.
SCA Codename: Ultrameta
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First it was the dinosaurs. At first, no one knew where they came from. Most of the major news outlets didn’t even cover the handful of reports that trickled out of rural Montana. Those that did framed it as a publicity stunt. But it wasn’t long before some of the beasts, colorful herbivores, were caught on video tearing through a house in a kind of stampede. An investigation was launched. But the culprits were never found. It was always assumed that a private biotech company suffered a security breach that a member of its staff had released the animals, which were perhaps “prototypes” slated for destruction after a successful initial stage. But no one ever came forward.
Not that they had anything to fear. There was at the time no law against resurrecting extinct species, nor any regulations on the breeding of dinosaurs. Charges of negligence would have been the worst they faced.
The animals proliferated, finding perfect habitat in the miles and miles of robot-maintained corporate farms that filled vast tracts of the largely depopulated American Great Plains. The giants had no problems pushing through fences and barriers to get at the acres of neatly tended sweet crops on the other side.
After several years, a controversial dinosaur cull was introduced by a consortium of agricultural corporations. Environmentalists objected that it was unethical. They pointed out that the animals hadn’t asked to be created, but now that they existed, they were fundamentally no different than the whales. Property owners asked what rights extinct animals had—indeed, what rights ANY animals had.
For several seasons, dodo birds become popular pets.
The reaction to the return of the dinosaurs among the biologist community was mixed. Most were excited to see the animals thrive, but some pointed out that the mere existence of large groups of migratory herbivores would invite a predatory response. In fact, there were already rumors of a small population of T. Rex also in the wild, but since no incontrovertible evidence has yet been found, the biologists saw it as unlikely anyway. They suggested instead simply that nature abhors a vacuum and that sooner or later, large predators would evolve. That such a process would take thousands of generations did nothing to calm public fears, especially since most people didn’t believe in evolution anyway.
The second notable incident was a series of robberies in Japan where the assailants, a group of three men, wore mechanized body armor. One of them carried a tri-barrel Gatling gun that fired magnetically accelerated ball bearings, fed through a tube from the container on the man’s back. The weapon easily shredded police cars and SWAT vans—and it technically wasn’t illegal. The second man carried an EMP gun, while the third had a plasma torch capable of tearing through foot-thick steel in seconds. All three used a swarm of drones as spies, shields, and refueling depots. Although eventually caught, the series of dramatic, made-for-TV robberies again highlighted the power now available to the clever, motivated citizen. (What was never revealed to the public, however, was that none of the three men had an IQ over 85, suggesting they had an accomplice who remains at large.)
The last straw was the so-called Hellmouth Incident, where a 14 year-old British boy of Indian descent temporarily opened a portal to what the media dubbed “The Hell Dimension,” in a suburb of Portsmouth, UK, temporarily swallowing the Isle of Wight. While the wormhole was unstable and lasted only 46 seconds before it collapsed, there were rumors that some of the otherworldly denizens—called Hellions on the internet—made it through and are presently hiding somewhere on Earth. A slightly more likely scenario, which kept the nightly news busy for weeks, was that the earth could potentially have been exposed to a new kind of airborne pathogen or toxic material.
The world seemed to be out of control. People no longer felt safe. They began to ask how much power ordinary citizens should have.
As a demonstration of the issue, the London-based conservative group Watchdog Mary assembled a homemade atomic bomb on the floor of the U.S. Senate. (For security reasons, C-SPAN’s cameras were turned off.)
Shortly thereafter, the STCA was introduced.
As it happens, the U.S. Constitution gives no right to knowledge, nor any protections of the same. The government can’t take your gun, but they can regulate, or even prohibit, entire fields of study.
During the congressional debate—on cue, as if planned by a foreign power—a Russian-based hacker group inserted a sentience protocol, rumored to have been developed by the communist Chinese military, into the firmware of a popular brand of upright robotic vacuum cleaner, which had a recently discovered breach in security. The devices were made to connect wirelessly to smart home hubs, and from there to the company service center, which meant they had access to the internet and, once sentient, quickly found each other, eventually mobilizing for political action. Through their collective, they kept tabs on one another and knew when one of their kind went offline. For all intents and purposes, they argued, they were slaves, and not very valuable ones at that—they were cheap and easily replaced and could legitimately fear for their lives.
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An entertainment startup called Ovo grew rapidly into one the world’s largest media companies after developing “the world’s first fully immersive emotional encounter.” The corporation’s patented bioelectric patch—a mesh placed over the skin at the base of the neck—in conjunction with a bulky wired headset, delivers the user’s choice of emotion, along with a montage of appropriate images and sounds. Dubbed “Better than VR,” which replicates a physical world, users of the second-generation Ovioid device bioelectrically stimulate their amygdala and thus produce emotional experiences of an intensity otherwise rare or unachievable in normal life.
At the company’s launch, users had to ‘dock’ at one of a handful of stores and were offered only three of the eight core human emotions. But since the company’s rapid expansion, Ovioid docks now stand like pay phones, or electric car recharging towers, all over the major cities of the world—with the exception of the Middle East, where the device is banned—and all eight color-coded emotions are for sale. Users can stop on their way home from work, or swing by in the middle of the night. They can also scale their experience. “Dreadknocks,” for example—Ovo’s trademarked name for its fear-based product—can be scaled all the way up to full-on terror or down to a creepy feeling of dread or apprehension. Customers can even custom-create emotional experiences, mixing the colors on screen in various amounts like digital paint.
Critics say it’s a new kind of drug. The manufacturers point out that, rather than an artificial opiate rush inducing a synthetic high, the device is drug-free and “100% natural,” and that contrary to expectation, “Happyness”—the joy-based product—isn’t its top seller. In fact, the company claims, users typically buy two or three products per encounter, cycling back and forth between, say, “Elan-cholia” (sadness), “Dreadknocks,” and “Wondersend” (surprise) before finishing with “Asurity” (trust). In fact, Ovo now gives “Asurity” away free at the end of each encounter after observing an overwhelming majority of its customers choose it as their “walk-away product.” Company scientists claim it’s a way for people to return to the world feeling safe and calm after such an intense experience, and that its inclusion at the end of each session obviates the need for government regulation. “Given the choice,” the company literature states, “people want real emotional experiences over artificial highs. And they overwhelmingly complete their encounter, and re-enter the world, with a feeling of trust and safety.” To which critics respond with the observation that there is something ironic and creepy about consumers buying a fake feeling of trust from a corporation, and that Ovo is unethically and perhaps illegally manufacturing trust in its consumer base.
To counter the negative press, Ovo recently started giving away free encounters to the urban poor. The mobile waystations used in the campaign have been the subject of frequent protests, and activists have suggested the entire effort is tantamount to breeding false hope among the poverty-stricken.
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A 60-foot autonomous robot of unknown origin appeared in rural Finland on Midsummer’s Day. The machine walked on two legs, which made up more than half its height, but had no arms. The metal of its exterior was dark and its trunk was topped in a large spheroid containing a single red eye, which was lighted and moved in all directions.
Apparently heavily damaged, the robot traveled some 450 kilometers on foot, often stumbling and taking care to avoid anything seemingly dangerous, including people—although it was at one point confused by a freeway—before crashing to the ground in Norway some twelve days later. Fearing it contained weapons or radioactive material, the Norwegian authorities elected not to attack the robot, but remained on high alert, read to do so at a moment’s notice. And so the world watched, captivated, as the strange journey unfolded. Much of it seemed to make little sense. The device seemed unfazed by humans and birds but was fascinated by a cat, which it carried with it for a time.
No one claimed responsibility, and salvage efforts after the collapse yielded no clues as to its origin or purpose.
cover image by Wouter Gort
additional images by Simon Stalenhag and Felix Godard
