2: A Sharper Tip
Though I didn’t really like to admit it, I was in fact studying pretty hard at college. I sometimes dreamed of finding a new way to think about bioengineering. I imagined discovering some easy way to visualize how the low-level DNA base-pairs lead to the high-level morphogenesis that shapes animal embryos and plant sprouts. And then we’d no longer be groping in the dark, twiddling switches with no sense of what controlled what.
I didn’t have much of a social life, or many relationships with women. I wasn’t attracted to the grade-grubbing engineer women I worked with. And the alluring liberal-arts types always wanted to have that discussion about whether biotech was evil. When I wanted a break, I’d ride my skateboard downtown and thrash at the punk clubs.
Both my parents died the winter before I graduated. That was a really rough time. Dad had a stroke, and Mom, usually so quick and warm, sank into a depression that segued into brain cancer. It was hard to believe. I hadn’t been all that close to my parents, but all those years I’d known they were there, in some sense standing between me and the Reaper. And now they were gone.
Only a few people showed up at my parents’ funerals. Fellow workers: engineers and sales reps. No relatives. It sucked. My parents had never really connected with the larger world; they’d been eaten by their jobs. I promised myself I’d find a warm, loving woman and that we’d build a jolly close-knit family.
As it turned out, my parents didn’t leave me any kind of inheritance at all. They’d fallen for some Houston company’s wealth-management scam that involved getting a second mortgage and putting all of their cash into leveraged insurance-market securities which had totally tanked. I’d always thought Mom and Dad were smarter than that. The bank foreclosed on our house, and even the cars got sold.
Fortunately I had a student loan to cover my costs. I plugged along at school. In a way, that was easier than having a breakdown and dropping out. And, as a practical matter, I needed to finish up my senior project and get a job.
In the spring I got my Bachelor’s degree in bioengineering and I started hitting the interviews. I didn’t really want to stay in academia, even if I could have afforded it. My impression was that the real biotech scene wasn’t at the universities—the big scores were at the industrial labs. Why be sitting out the action and getting a Master’s degree or a doctorate?
I landed what seemed like a good job at a biotech startup called Wiggler Labs, right there in Santa Cruz.
Wiggler was about bioenergy. Some other companies had been designing new versions of our shit-eating friend, the Escherichia coli bacterium that populates our guts. The new, tweaked E. coli strains were brewing long-chain forms of alcohol that were just about as good as gasoline. But our bioenergy rivals still had to distill the alcohol from the germ slime, and burn the alcohol to get the energy—creating fresh pollution along the way.
My new employer’s plan was to go straight from shit to electricity. That is, Wiggler Labs was designing germs that would eat whatever gross, random crud you fed them and they’d pump out power in return. The trick was to enhance our bacteria with some genes from a particular kind of electric eel, the Electrophorus electricus—a forty-pound, gray, slimy dude native to the stagnant backwaters of the Amazon River Basin. These eels can put out seven hundred volts a pop.
Wiggler had a giant tank with about a half dozen of the big electric eels in the lab’s reception area, along with the shrimps and frogs that the eels liked to shock and eat. Not that we really needed to keep that many electric eels around, but the display impressed the investors who were coming by all the time. It was a professional-quality tank, with a muddy river bank along one side, and a mangrove tree with orchids and ferns.
We had pans full of eel-flesh tissue-cultures on the lab’s work benches. Things were moving right along. We learned how to tweak the eel DNA, and how to splice eel genes into E. coli to make electric germs. And before long we had a couple of electric germ culture vats running—smelly tubs with tiny blue sparks crackling along their swampy surfaces. Brass collector knobs along the vats’ edges drained off the energy and stored it in batteries.
But Wiggler wasn’t anywhere near a commercial level of throughput. In those early months, if you’d you wanted to power your TV with a Wiggler vat, your bill might have run to fifty thousand dollars a month—what with all the tech support.
Week after week we tinkered with getting the genes right. We had to baby the eel-tissue cultures, and the electric germs were especially fragile. Our creations kept falling prey to wild molds and viruses that drifted in, looking for unsophisticated victims to trash. I was beginning to understand why the profs had been so skeptical about a biotech plague. Nature is a bitch—heartless, wily, and street wise.
But never mind the difficulties—Wiggler Labs had achieved a proof of concept. The venture capital came pouring in, and management was talking about having an IPO stock offering in about a year.
I was working insane hours and learning all kinds of stuff. But after nine months at the job, I started getting bored. As a low-level employee, I spent most of my time tending the eel-tissue cultures, or mapping genes with our scanning-tunneling microscope, or just mopping slop off the floors. Sometimes I felt like I worked at a slaughterhouse or at a sewage plant.
After the tenth or fifteenth time that our electric germs all died off, I began seriously doubting if our power vats would ever reach the market. I was getting a sense that the managers’ plan was to pump up the stock price, and to dump their shares after the IPO. Sometimes I’d speculate about this with the other engineers, which created bad blood when the managers overheard me.
By way of running my mouth, I also enjoyed getting my co-workers to discuss the ethics of bioscience. To get a good argument going, I liked to play Devil’s advocate, and to advocate various extreme scenarios. One day, in an antic mood, I started telling the guys in the lunch room that we should let the state of Texas secede. My concept was that, with Texas a foreign country, we’d be free to bomb the whole state with electric germs. And then we’d set up power collection plants around the state’s barbed-wire borders and have endless free power flowing out!
I hadn’t registered the fact that Wiggler’s chief financial officer happened to be sitting at the table right behind me. He was—a Texan.
He led me into his office, showed me a photo of his family, and talked about collegiality, team spirit and public image. And the next day Human Resources gave me my thirty days’ notice.
This left me just enough time to attend the company picnic.
Like a complete pinhead, I stole a couple of pans of mutant eel-flesh from the lab, doused them in tamari sauce, scattered on sesame seeds, and roasted them in the kitchen of the little cottage I’d rented in Santa Cruz. I sliced up the roasted electric eel meat, and laid it out on a big black lacquer tray like a fancy appetizer—to bring to the picnic. Chang happened to be at my house, delivering some pot, so I brought him to the company picnic too.
People were actually eating the gene-tweaked eel flesh, going, like, “Hmm, this is tasty.” By the time the meat was about half gone I was drunk and stoned enough to announce what it was.
“We eat what we grow!” I whooped, and let out what I considered to be a Texas-style yodel.
Some of the engineers thought I was funny—but the execs and the staff were majorly pissed. Not that eating the tweaked eel would actually be bad for you. Your stomach acids break down all the DNA you eat—it doesn’t go and crawl into your cell nuclei. But, still...
Nobody went public with the story of my misdeed, but word got around. From then on, I was pretty much blackballed from the biotech biz. I’d phone up for an interview, and I’d hear the receptionist fighting back a laugh.
I got a pretty good severance package from Wiggler. For awhile I had some hopes of striking out on my own—I still had my vague notion of finding a better mental model language for the process of genetic engineering. And if my theorizing didn’t lead anywhere, maybe I could get into designing lab equipment. One of the few things I’d inherited from my Dad was a workshop’s worth of tools.
The house I’d rented in Cruz was a granny cottage in the back yard of a biggish stucco home on Madrone Street. My house faced the alley. My landlords were a Dick and Diane Simly. Dick owned a high-end car dealership called Simly The Best. The lot was switching over to hybrids and electrics, so Dick and Diane drove a pair of gas-guzzler Jaguars that Dick hadn’t been able to sell. Somehow Dick had made a profit by keeping these two cars—the guy always came out ahead.
Generally speaking, Dick and Diane left me alone. And when I adopted a puppy from the pound to keep me company, they didn’t squawk. My dog’s name was Droog—he was a collie-beagle mix. He liked to follow me around the house, watching everything I did. It was almost like I had an assistant.
Working on the screened-in side porch of my cottage, I built a scanning-tunneling microscope of my own—you call it an STM for short. I found the design on the web, and the parts only cost me about a thousand dollars. Why did I build an STM? Well, I still had some dreams of making a genomics breakthrough on my own—or of managing to patent a new wrinkle on the lab hardware.
Basically an STM works by bringing a tiny sharp tip close to a sample that’s resting on a little sample sled. You run voltage into the tip and the sample, and you track the virtual current that seems to flow across the gap. A computer munges the data and turns it into a display that resembles a bumpy surface—with the bumps being individual atoms. Even better, you can use your scanning tip to manipulate the individual atoms.
Obviously it’s important to have a very narrow scanning tip in your STM. For my home-built machine, I was using slivers of tungsten needles whose tips were only one or two atoms thick, just like we’d been doing at Wiggler Labs. I began wondering if there might be a way to find some better kind of scanning tip. If I could come up with that, maybe I’d have a way of getting better STM images, and that could lead to something marketable.
One afternoon, gnarly, funky Skeeves happened to come walking down the alley by my house. He didn’t seem to be looking for me; I think he was just wandering around. I was feeling bored and lonely, so I called out to him, gave him a beer, and showed him some of the pictures I’d been making with the STM.
“This is a hair,” I told Skeeves, flipping through the images on my computer. “This is a grain of pollen. And here’s an ant’s mandibles.”
“Ant,” said Skeeves, studying my computer screen. He reminded me of a dog trying to read. “Ants have hair? Can you see an atom?”
“Yeah, yeah. When I worked at the biotech lab, we were getting pictures of DNA. But those are pretty fuzzy.”
“Which part makes it sharp?” asked Skeeves, running his long, shaky fingers over my scanning-tunneling microscope’s boxes and wires.
“The scanning tip,” I said, pointing out how it slid back and forth above the samples. I went on to tell Skeeves about my quest for the sharpest needle ever. Not that he seemed to be listening to me. As if paralyzed by boredom, he lolled back in his chair, staring up at the corner of the ceiling like someone else’s voice was coming from up there. Soon thereafter, he’d finished his beer and left.
A week later, Chang showed up at my house.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said, taking out a little matchbox.
“Dope?”
“Sure,” said Chang. “But what’s in this box is a weird little prong of exotic matter that Ira stole from the lab. A tip for your whatchamacallit. Your microscope thing.”
“Ira?”
“You know him,” said Chang. “Little guy? Gnarly surf punk? Gay? Has a crush on Skeeves? He works nights as a janitor in the UC Santa Cruz labs.”
Chang handed me the box and I looked inside. The new tip was the shape of a toothpick, and at the sharp end, it cusped out into a point that was impossible to see.
“Ira gave you this for my STM?”
“Sold it to me,” said Chang. “For a bag of pot. Which you’ll have to pay for. Skeeves told Ira you needed a sharper tip. I guess he heard that from you?”
“Uh, yeah, I saw Skeeves not too long ago. But it didn’t seem like he even understood what I was saying.”
Chang laughed. “The way Skeeves works is that he remembers what he sees and hears and then he talks it over with the woman’s voice he hears in his head. He’s still living in his van with that casket with the mummies, you understand. And he talks to the spirit of the woman mummy that he fucks. He’s let me see the sarcophagus up close—though he won’t let me look inside. The box is all gold and covered with those wiggly Egyptian diagrams. Thousands of years old, according to our man.”
“Why isn’t Skeeves in jail? Or in the nut house?”
“He has this knack for falling between the cracks,” said Chang, shaking his head. “Beneath notice. Beyond belief.”
“And you’re saying that Skeeves told Ira to find me a better tip for my STM?”
“What it is, brah. Skeeves’s mummy woman’s soul hipped him to your trip.”
Again I had that feeling of reality being a laminate of layers—and that some of the layers were flaking off.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll pay for Ira’s pot.”
I asked around a little, and found out that Ira’s tip was a stiff whisker of metallic hydrogen. One of the UC physics profs had had found a way to keep the stuff stable at room temperature. And Ira had stolen a random scrap that just happened to have the shape I needed.
The tip’s narrow end was, I initially thought, a single row of protons. But now, thinking back on where that tip led me, I’d say that it must have incorporated a unique quantum anomaly. I think it must have contained an infinitely thin cusp of warped space. Going a little further out on the edge, I’d go so far as to speculate that the soul of Skeeves’s mummy woman had done some special tweaks on that tip.
But, to start with, all I knew was that Ira’s scrap of metallic hydrogen was very sharp. And, so far as I could find out, the physics prof wasn’t thinking at all about scanning-tunneling microscope tips. So for a couple of weeks I was hoping I might have lucked into a new and patentable technological process.
But, to my disappointment, my metallic hydrogen tip didn’t work any better than the carbon nanotubes that the big labs were using. Although my new scans were cleaner than they’d been with the tungsten tip, they weren’t any sharper than the carbon nanotube pictures that I could find online. And in any case, it didn’t seem like a realistic business model to base a product on metallic hydrogen tips that a janitor friend of a friend was stealing from a lab.
So, okay, my STM was really just a hobby, a science toy. I wasn’t going to find any patentable new process here. And I wasn’t really going to be using my STM for any independent biotech research. Truth be told, I’d come to think of bioengineering as slow, boring and, yes, potentially evil.
By now my severance pay had run out and I needed a job. Lacking any better ideas, I got a job as mailman working out of the Santa Cruz post office. In a way, I’d always wanted to be a mailman. It’s a clear-cut social good. Nobody ever comes up and tells you that delivering mail is evil. And I liked going out to walk the streets every day. By now, my dog Droog was well-behaved enough that I could leave him home alone.