Accelerating Returns

Chapter 4. KillJoy's Manifesto

   

  "Are you ready to go?" asked Rachel.

  Robert said, "When the news is over."

  "Which tie do you want to wear?"        

  As the news droned, Robert got up from the couch and tried to connect the top buttons on his shirt, but had difficulty bringing them together.  The fat of his neck bulged around the collar. He forced the buttons together and tied his tie.  The lab Christmas party required semi-formal attire, which Robert generally avoided in favor of loose-fitting clothes.  The notion of going on a diet came to him as his shirt collar chafed the skin beneath. 

  He said to his wife, "Christ, I'm fatter than ever."

  "Oh you look handsome, Bobby."  She put her arms around his waist.  "You should wear a tie more often."

  They drove to Marshall Ploof's lavish house in Highland Park, north of Chicago.  Because his conversation with Ploof was still fresh in his mind, Robert loathed the idea of listening to more praise for Ploof.  Every chance he had, Ploof regaled the staff with his affluence, another one of his attempts to impress the world and collect followers.  The house overlooked a large portion of Highland Park, which drew compliments from the staff - particularly from the new members of the lab who had not yet seen it.  Robert's wife shared the fascination, leaving Robert as the only malcontent among the party-goers. 

  When they arrived, Ploof's wife greeted Robert and Rachel at the door and took their coats.  The two women kissed each other on the cheek and expressed great pleasure in seeing one another.  She offered a drink to Robert and champagne to Rachel.  An attractive young housemaid prepared the first of several gin-and-tonics for Robert.  From the center of the spacious dining room, Ploof looked at the door, but when his eyes landed on the Lopez couple, he barely paused in his conversation and made no attempt to greet them at the door as he did with everyone else, and Robert appreciated his lack of hospitality after what had occurred in the lab that week. 

  A symphony of Christmas music played in the house, covering a few familiar carols and many alternative, non-religious, non-controversial ditties.  The immaculate house and lavish furnishings gleamed from a legion of maids that had whisked away every imperfection that afternoon.  Robert's eyes glanced throughout the visible living room and dining room, searching for something to secretly mock, but found nothing, and so he mocked perfection.

  Ornate hors d'oeurves, chandeliers and champagne, post-modern artwork and oversized picture windows made Robert think of Ploof as the poster-boy for conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display.  In the center of it all, near the banquet on the table, stood Ploof pointing at a helpless platter.  A young researcher and his date listened to Ploof's dissertation on the food.  They nodded along with his words with cow-eyed stares, wowed by the extravagance.  Another person on the other side of the table filled his plate and poured out compliments on Ploof and his home, which pained Robert's ears.  The same compliments spilled out at every Christmas party.  The young couple standing next to Ploof, however, did not pay the same compliments, but instead simply thanked him for the invitation. 

  Five years before, Robert and Rachel had hosted the Christmas party in their modest house, with less exotic foods.  The parties Robert and Rachel hosted, even with hired chefs, paled in comparison to Ploof's buffet of delicacies.  Ploof lobbied among members of the lab to have the party at his house, and turned the hosting of the Christmas party into a point of contention.  Oddly enough, Robert observed, the well-educated members of the lab became rather simple when faced with exotic food.  They congregated like suppliants at sophistication under any guise. 

  Dressed in a black vest with a blue pin-stripe shirt and complimentary tie, Ploof met with each guest, spewing anecdotes and wit wherever he went, never staying too long in a dialogue, but moving on quickly, charismatically, leaving smiles behind, like a good politician.  What Robert lacked, Ploof had, and with it he thrived.   

  Despite his curdling disgust, Robert moved toward the table, unable to resist the food.  As he approached, Ploof continued describing certain foods to the young couple, whose backs were turned to Robert.  Ploof seemed to notice Robert and wrapped up his description of cucumber root quickly so he could avoid an exchange with Robert. 

  "It's not a cucumber. It's actually an herb, a member of the lily family.  The Native Americans ate it.  But, I won't bore you any longer.  Enjoy.  Bon appetite." Ploof turned and walked in the opposite direction. 

  The couple remained in place with their backs turned, oblivious to Robert.  He picked up a plate and started picking at the food, but then he heard the young woman whisper to the young man in a low voice, clearly not meant for anyone but her date to hear. 

  "Wow," the woman said, "Talk about needing the approval of everybody.  Can you imagine, Isaac, needing this much shit?"

  Robert smiled.  He looked at the young woman and noticed a tattoo painted symmetrically in the middle of her upper back.  He recognized the shape as a graphic of a mathematical set, more specifically, a spiral shape known as a Seahorse Valley.  Seeing this symbol emblazoned on the beautiful brown skin of the woman raised Robert's intrigue. 

  The woman started whispering again, and sneered at the food on the table.

  "It's pathetic..."

  She stopped talking when she noticed Robert, but he was smiling at her last comment, which somehow made him feel vindicated for Ploof's getting credit for the S24 research.

  Her face turned red, and she said bashfully, "Oh, I didn't know anyone was listening."

  Isaac apologized, "Sorry about that Dr.  Lopez."

  The woman looked surprised.  "Oh God - you're Dr. Lopez?  Now I'm doubly sorry.  I was looking forward to meeting you tonight, and now," she threw up her hands, "what can I say, I have my foot in my mouth already."

  Robert laughed out loud, and genuinely for once.  Isaac and the woman stood stone-still waiting to hear what Robert would say when he regained his composure.  He said, "Believe me, both of you, nothing you've said bothered me in the least.  In fact, to tell you a secret, I was afraid you were reading my mind!"

  The woman sighed.  "That's a relief.  I didn't want to meet Isaac's co-workers and make a terrible first impression."

  "Not at all," Robert laughed.  "I'm impressed.  It's refreshing.  Let me introduce myself. Robert Lopez.  And I insist, none of this 'Doctor Lopez' business tonight."

  Isaac said, "This is my fiancé, Julia." 

  Robert smiled upon hearing her name.  "Julia," he said, "as in 'Julia Sets.'  As in, non-computable.  I saw the tattoo and wondered, but now it all makes sense."

  "You see?" said Isaac.  "I wasn't kidding.  This man knows everything, I swear.  She had to explain to me what her tattoo meant, Dr. Lopez."

  "I'm not that smart, Isaac, but thank you for the compliment.  As you may or may not know, in this line of work, flattery gets you everywhere."  He took a drink.  "If you need proof, just take a look around this house.  Flattery is the cornerstone."

  Forgetting about food, Robert became engrossed in conversation with the couple, feeling the rare kind of connection that occurs between people with similar opinions, the connection that allows for almost immediate candor.  During Robert's career among the intellectual elite, the opportunities for long-term life-affirming friendships had been few.  His own introverted qualities limited his opportunities, but so did the diverse personalities and opinions of the intellectuals in the labs.  Due to years of conversational attrition, Robert stuck to safe topics of discussion rather than risk delving into anything interesting.  By clinging to safe topics, it usually meant asking questions about pets and children, and more often pets than children.  Pets offered an avenue out of uncomfortable silences so often that his private motto became: "When in doubt, pets."  Politics, social classes, religion, literature - even movies were controversial. Avoiding any potentially offensive discourse kept politics out of t
he lab.  But for once Robert felt comfortable among his company, particularly when talking to Isaac's dynamic fiancé.

  The three of them moved out of the dining room onto an outdoor patio.  The deck overlooked the shimmering lights of Highland Park.  Fresh snow and twinkling lights blanketed the rooftops, giving the city below a snow-globe look and feel.  The patio had heat vents that poured out warmth into the night air, so that Ploof's guests might have every chance to explore his spacious home.  The Christmas music from the inside of the house wafted gently onto the patio.  The setting put Robert at ease, at last, after the thoroughly unenjoyable workweek. 

  Rachel delivered a fresh gin-and-tonic to Robert.  He introduced Rachel to Isaac and Julia, but Rachel returned to mingling inside the house.  Though somewhat sad to see Rachel make such a quick turnaround, Robert felt pleased to have the full privacy of the patio for a real conversation with his new friends.

  In the discussion, Robert learned that Julia also worked at Talbot Labs, but in a different field.  She said that she had recently finished the masters program in artificial intelligence at the University of Illinois.  Her grasp of emerging technologies was crisp.  She was as cutting edge as her tattoo.  Lean like a sprinter, she had jet-black hair with two white swatches folded in.  Her dark skin and unique hair contrasted with Isaac, who looked and talked like a Norwegian.  Together they were a handsome couple, who appeared superficially as yuppies, but as Robert learned, they were almost militant about consumerism as the true opiate of the people.  As for pets, none, and Robert could not remember a petless and childless couple in his many years of pet and child dialogues.  Isaac and Julia seemed unlike anyone Robert had met during his tenure at Talbot because they were immediately forthcoming, humble, and anything but careerists.  They told Robert about their Spartan household.  Both modest, Julia and Isaac seemed uncondescending, progressive, new-age - and more.  He gained respect for them as the stars clicked over Highland Park.

  Julia said, "If anything attracted me to apply to work at Talbot, it was the ethics they stand by.  Mr. Jovan made a believer out of me."

  "Ethics, really?"  The word piqued Robert. 

  "Well, I hope I don't offend you," she continued, "but I believe there is lack of a serious dialogue about ethics in science."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes, when now more than ever before, we need to be conscious of our work.  It's the way we think that needs changing, especially now that the Western ways are global. The whole world is Anglo-Saxon at this point, all going for the win, losers be damned." 

  "When I started on the path to becoming a scientist," she continued, "I was hoping to make a big splash, but one day I woke up and realized that my goal wasn't knowledge.  No, I just wanted fame.  In fact, from the beginning, that might have been my goal.  It makes me wonder. Are we working for knowledge or just the status of getting our name in a textbook?  I've developed a love-hate relationship with technology.  Maybe every scientist does at some point, I don't know.  Even so, I am still drawn toward progress like a lodestone rock. I can't avoid helping the cause. The jobs of the general population become increasingly routine and sequestered in cubicles and standing in assembly lines, only until software can replace them all.  We have the elite knowledge workforce and the trailing masses.  Frankly, I'm surprised the suicide rate isn't higher.  We produce cold numbers and statistics with our breakthroughs that sometimes we don't even understand.  We are a few short years from vacations in space, for goodness sakes.  I should be excited, but what does all of it mean?  What will hindsight look like?"

  "The machines are taking over," Isaac said.  "Drink up!"

  Julia ignored him.  "I feel like all the heroes are gone.  We need some science heroes.  How many frontiers we can cross before the losses outweigh the gains?  And there's no going back."

  "What Judith means," Isaac said, then stopped and corrected himself, "What Julia is getting at is better summed up by a quote from Emerson, who said 'We do not ride the railroad. The railroad rides upon us.'  We can never go back to the era before the railroads, just like we cannot return to the era before the factory, just as we cannot return to the era before we stole fire.  Whatever is lost in each advance is gone forever.  Of course, we sure as hell don't want to go back to the era before the railroad.  Once cancer is cured, once AIDS is cured, once we have lightweight carbon steel, hydrogen engines, clean nuclear plants...then what?  Machine integration. Look at Pelius Research, shouting from the rooftops that knowledge is at the knee of an accelerating curve.  They want to see an end to human life as we know it.  The new apocalypse literature is equal parts science and religion.  This compulsive move forward, even in the face of annihilation, would not hold back the seekers, yet who am I to complain when I am helping build this new railroad?"

  Robert listened intently, feeling a strange sensation in hearing his own quiet thoughts put into words.  He said, "I wonder about the same things."

  "I should mention," Julia said, "that working at Talbot attracted me, and equally repelled me.  Without question, having the ability to work on the latest breakthroughs appeals to me.  Immensely.  I have a strange relationship with my work.  The progress we are making is exciting, but at the same time...you know, if the endgame is the replacement of ourselves with modified bodies, then I'm swapping the essence of life for answers that will make me obsolete.  I already know the ending: I will miss the essence of today, and tomorrow's answer won't satisfy me. For comfort and ease of life, we will subtract all that's human from our descendents."

  After a silence, Robert said, "Maybe this is relevant. Maybe not.  It's one of Aesop's fables - the one about the wolf and the dog.  Do you know it?"

  Julia and Isaac shook their heads.

  "Bear with me."  He paused and set his drink on the railing. "The wolf met up with his second-cousin, the dog.  They swapped stories about life, what they had been up to, how are things?  Et cetera.  After all, they had been apart for a thousand generations.  The wolf said to the dog, 'Life is pretty much the same.  I'm often hungry, my bones hurt in the winter, and I'm always on the move.  Life's a bitch.'  The healthy dog laughed and said to the wolf, 'Oh, you're really missing out.  Life is great!  I get fed twice a day, I live in a warm little house, a doctor can fix whatever is wrong with me, and at night, I get to go outside for five minutes.  Wolf, you should come live with me.'  The wolf was stunned at the dog's good fortune and agreed to go live with the dog and the humans.  But when the two animals were walking toward the house, the wolf noticed a collar around the dog's neck and underneath the collar, the fur was worn away.  The wolf asked the dog about the collar, and the dog replied, 'This thing here? Oh, this is just my collar.  My master uses it to tie me up during the day while he's gone.'  Hearing this, the wolf stopped in his tracks and turned back into the woods.  He said to the dog, 'No thanks, not interested.'"  Robert paused and added, "That's the end of the fable.  And of course, the moral of the story is..."

  Julia interrupted, "Better to be starving and free than to be a comfortable slave."

  "Exactly," Robert said.  "Like your quote from Emerson, what is lost and what is gained?  Maybe it's simply a matter of perspective from the 'user.'"

  "Users," Julia said.  "We're all users."

  Robert paused and sipped on his drink before continuing.  "Progress is not really anything, though.  It's just the current condition.  Wherever we are right now - that's what we think of as progress.  From flour mills to steamboats to factories to the atomic bomb to nanotechnology. I doubt that it will slow down anytime soon."

  Julia said, "Unless a KillJoy can change the public's mind."

  "Oh, God, here we go."  Isaac laughed.

  Robert asked, "What's a KillJoy?"

  "A progress killer," Julia said.

  "Excuse me?"  The idea seized Robert's attention. 

  "An underground writer coined the term," Julia explained.  "Rather, he was a
writer.  No one seems to know what happened to him, but he wrote KillJoy's Manifesto.  It's about how to be a 'Blocker.'  You could say a KillJoy is the prototype for uncivil disobedience, a lifestyle dedicated to startling the general public out of their complacency."

  "He writes about the responsibilities of scientists," Isaac said, "and how they can expose the impact of technologies before they enter the world.  The great example from history is nuclear technology. Its introduction to the world rudely displayed the worst-case scenario." 

  "He wants scientists to expose the railroad before it gets built," Julia said, "and to do so, in the end, the scientists must destroy their own work, if necessary.  Kind of like Kafka asking for his writing to be destroyed."  She stopped and frowned.  "Of course, if he really wanted it destroyed, he would have burned it himself."

  "The writer's name is Ben Longstreet," Isaac said.  "He was a postmodern-Romanticist, whatever that is, and he was probably insane.  When he published the Manifesto on the internet, his state of mind had already come into question.  What he did do, however, was organize a disconnected movement.  You can still find copies of his manifesto online, but they are rare and only in the old command-line IRC chat rooms."

  Julia said, "The FBI supposedly tracks the IP addresses whenever the book gets downloaded."

  "Imagine the idea of destroying your own project," Isaac said and laughed at the idea.  "Who would work for twenty to thirty years only to become a terrorist at the end of the game?  Now that's insane."

  Robert pursed his lips and felt his back muscles tighten as the cold air permeated his shirt.

  "To be human is to be insane," Julia rebutted.

  Robert smiled at his subordinates, even though his mind raced with questions provoked by the ideas Julia had mentioned.  "Wow," he said, shaking his head.  "That sounds like something out of Asimov or Arthur Clarke.  But interesting.  Very interesting.  I've always enjoyed science-fiction, but that's chilling.  Speaking of which, it's getting cold out here.  Should we go back inside?"

  The expression on Julia's face indicated that she felt foolish for bringing up the topic to such a recognized researcher.  Quite the contrary, Robert walked away with great interest.  As the three of them went back into the living room to join the other guests, Robert excused himself from Julia and Isaac to use the restroom. 

  Once Julia and Isaac were out of sight, Robert descended a staircase to the basement of Ploof's house and turned on a hallway light.  He walked down the hallway and peeked into each open door.  Finding nothing but empty bedrooms and storage closets, he almost turned around before checking the final doorway at the end of the hall, which happened to be Ploof's home office, where a laptop and open browser session awaited.  Robert entered the room without turning on the light, and sat quietly on a leather chair.  He listened for noise in the basement to assure himself that he was alone.  Hearing nothing, he began searching for a copy of KillJoy's Manifesto. 

  First he tried the popular search engines, but his searches came back with no hits, almost as if the topic did not exist anywhere on the internet.  Robert decided to take Isaac's advice - to try the chat rooms.  Robert hadn't been in a chat room since his college days, but he still recalled the archaic Internet Relay Chat commands.  Expecting to find ghost towns in the IRC rooms, he found the old chatting grounds filled with users, but now they typed faster than ever.  Robert could hardly read the streaming lines, let alone respond. 

  Feeling unsure of how to ask someone about acquiring a copy of a banned book, he decided to try something slightly cryptic, in hopes that it would invoke the right user to respond. 

  At the cursor, Robert removed the vowels and typed, "lngstrt mnfsto."

  Before hitting Enter, Robert deleted what he had written and then decided to just type the keywords.

  "KillJoy." 

  When he hit enter, his contribution to the chat room flashed on the screen and scrolled out of view almost immediately.  He tried to read the streaming chat, but the buffer scrolled away. Much of the content came from bots, small scripted parsing-programs, and not actual people.  The presence of these bots also meant that the bots parsed for patterns in every string entered into the domain.  

  As the text continued to stream by, Robert scrolled back and forth through the lines of output, searching in vain for a valid response, but only waded through the techno-babble of old programmers and IRC chat junkies.  After a few minutes of scanning the text, Robert realized that several users had started playing an old command line game and their bots had virtually overthrown the chat room.  The text began coming faster and faster, to a point where Robert decided that his feeble attempt at finding a copy of the manifesto had not worked, and he decided to go back upstairs and rejoin the party.  He typed 'quit' and his pinky finger hovered over the enter key, but a private message addressed to Robert popped up from a user named "k8r_w8r_4_life."

  The message asked, "u want klljy?"

  Robert pulled his finger away from the enter key.  Feeling somewhat thrilled, he nervously typed a response to indicate he was interested. 

  "Yes."

  "r u sure?"

  "y"

 

  As soon as Robert sent the message, a pop-up interface appeared on the monitor asking him to accept a secure socket connection along with the text: "Prepare to download certificate and file."  Robert accepted the download and the transfer completed instantaneously.  The file itself was only a one hundred kilobyte XML file, meaning that the Manifesto couldn't be more than fifty pages. 

  Robert started to type a message of thanks to the sender, but before doing so another private message came up carrying a set of zany instructions that read, "now, b a gud boi!  offline 4 u.  & b advised: un-suggest yor mind.  eyes lurk inside 128-bit strings.  Trust me, trust nada.  CIAO."

  Suddenly the user disappeared from the chat room and in doing so also sliced Robert's connection.  The user on the other end had somehow kept the secure socket open and twined their sessions so that he had control over Robert, leaving him staring at the text "Broken Pipe Error."  Somewhat disabused by the chat room drama, Robert disabled the wireless adapter to be certain that the user could not remain connected to Ploof's computer. 

  A new file icon flashed on the desktop and Robert opened KillJoy's Manifesto, thinking that he might print the file and then delete it.  With the strange warning from the sender of the file already fading in Robert's mind, his excitement grew when he saw plain, dry text, with no viruses or nude photos or any other blight of the immature technorati.  Fe felt the creeping invisible hand of government security reaching out toward him as he read the first lines of the Manifesto. 

   

  "Today, it is no longer the revolutionary who succeeds in forcing change; it is the radical conformist.  Revolutionaries and protesters, with their flare-ups and cardboard placards, only manage to stoke the power they want to bring down.  They slap at the windows of a moving bus, thinking that it will stop, when they should be on board, driving, increasing its speed, running signs over, and sending the bus over the tallest cliff possible.  Only a fool throws stones at the bus.  A sensible activist gets on it before it starts moving.  Traditional violence and nonviolent protest lead to temporary, unsustainable change and is attempted by reactive, pusillanimous outcasts who read too much and partake too little.  These masses of malcontents are necessary and can be motivated, but only by the work of an effective, proactive KillJoy, called a Blocker.  Effective violence in the new economy involves the promotion of fear, accomplished by two distinguished methods: divide-and-conquer, distract-and-destroy.  To kill the beast from inside, you must be the cancer.  The hero will be a silent betrayer, and the most effective way to betray is as it was in Caesar's day: to stab..."

   

  A noise came from the hallway.  After holding his breath to listen, Robert turned back to the computer screen and scrolled down to the middle of th
e manifesto, hoping to get a feel for the overall tone of the document, one that he expected to read from beginning to end at a later date.  He scrolled through the text until he came to a bulleted list.  He read a random item:

 

  "Rule 7: A Blocker does not operate underground; he participates in a group; he is mainstream.  His piety and stability must be integral, including a family, kids, proven membership in uncontroversial volunteer organizations, church groups, and other habits consistent with highly regarded leaders and individuals.  A Blocker cannot demonstrate against society in any way, ever.  He must assist in turning the status quo into a tyrant.  Conformity to public norms should be engaged in with enthusiasm.  All things anathema to him, he must embrace and make central to his life.  The only way to give fuel to your side is to join the other side.  Imagine, there is no better war protestor than the officer who orders the massacre of a peaceful village, and thus repulses his own war machine so much that the soldiers and general population quit their support.  The Blocker is the officer, the social martyr, and in the end, he is happily reviled because by becoming a scapegoat he has motivated action to bring social change.  Reputation is the ultimate sacrifice in the modern world."

   

  A light came on in the hallway outside of the room.  Robert's heart raced.  He fumbled for his cell phone to download a copy of the Manifesto before being discovered.  He plugged his cell into a port on the hard drive and copied the file.  After the file was safely stored on his phone, he disconnected the cord. 

  The sound of soft footsteps neared the room.  Robert quickly put his cell phone up to his ear and feigned a conversation, realizing that getting caught talking on his cell phone promised a better outcome than being caught sitting quietly in the dark while alone in the basement.  Such a situation could be a waterfall upon the rumor mill.

  He spoke into the dead phone, "Ok, that's fine.  I can deal with that in the morning.  But I would like to go over that estimate with you one more time...ok, sounds good.  See you tomorrow."  Robert flipped his phone shut just as Marshall Ploof flipped on the office light.

  "Robert?" Ploof said.  "What are you doing down here?"

  "Oh, Rachel and I are just having some work done on the house.  I had to call the carpenter about tomorrow.  How is the party going?"

  Ploof maintained a stiff tone. "It's going fine.  Various people are looking for you.  I know we had our bad moments this week, but there are many people here who I'm sure would like to say hello to you."

  "Well, you know me - the social butterfly." 

  Ploof laughed as he sat down in another chair.  "I think this might be the best place to be."

  They laughed together for once.

  "Want a beer or some scotch?" Ploof asked.  "Let me show you this little hideaway.  I usually have one drink every night before I go to bed."  Ploof pushed a button on an old CPU tower to reveal that inside was a fully stocked mini-refrigerator.  Robert laughed as Ploof handed him a bottle. 

  "Now that's putting a computer to a good use," Robert said. 

  The two men raised their arms and clinked the bottles together.  Ploof said, "Truce?" 

  "For ten minutes."

  Another set of footsteps came down the stairs.  Ploof looked down the hallway and saw Mr. Jovan coming through the darkness. 

  Ploof whispered to Robert, "It's Marcus."

  "Jovan?  He actually showed up?"

  They both straightened in their chairs to meet with the CEO and founder of Talbot Labs.

  Ploof said, "Mr. Jovan, so glad you could make it."

  "What is this down here," Mr. Jovan asked, "members only?"

  Jovan sat on a file cabinet and surveyed Ploof's office.  His eyes seemed encapsulated in parentheses, wrinkled from forty years of incessant reading.  The heart and soul of Talbot, Jovan founded the most powerful research company in North America, and willed it into existence.  Once the greatest risk-taker in science, he softened with maturity and wealth, and as leader of a pharmaceutical giant, insisted on serious, ethical, and productive science.  As a younger man, he was the company tyrant, a womanizer, bold, brash, and full of sap - until he turned fifty-five.  He still looked and acted young, but something had softened him or had knocked the wind out of him.  Employees suspected a family issue, but no one asked.  His fiery past followed him and employees revered him as their alpha, no matter how gentle he seemed now. 

  "Well, Marshall, I'll ask you first."  He leaned forward and smiled.  "How's your family?" 

  Ploof stammered, surprised at such a mundane question.  Hardly the family type, Ploof gave a short answer.  

  Robert had watched Jovan change over the years.  Something happened that made him more interested in personal connections.  He had a son that used to visit the lab, a bright, likable boy who dressed like a hippie and, unsurprisingly, showed signs of rebellion against the paternal icon.  When the boy was fifteen, he disappeared.  Ideas about the son circulated Talbot, with speculations on the Peace Corps, a sex change, suicide, and other wild hypotheses.  All of this seemed to focus Jovan on people more than business. The inquiries he made into his employees' personal lives became downright annoying to the Ploofs of Talbot.

  "And you Robert?  How's my Rachel?"

  "Your Rachel?" Robert laughed.  "Let's keep this civil, Marcus."

  "What grade is Hannah in now?  Seventh?"

  "Close.  Eighth grade.  She hates it."

  "Smart girl."

  During five minutes of small talk, Robert noticed how uncomfortable Ploof appeared.  This was not his element.  But eventually, the conversation returned to science.

  "So," Jovan said, shifting his tone, "what's all this I hear about S24?  That came out quick.  I heard from some of my Japanese friends.  They were not too happy with our success."

  Robert looked at Ploof and smiled sarcastically.  For once he controlled Ploof, and the chance for tattling presented itself. 

  Ploof deferred to Robert, offering him a free shot.  "Robert, do you want to tell him?"

  They locked eyes for a moment, and from twenty years of stepping on each other's toes for sixty hours a week on the same projects, they read each other, loved and hated each other like an old married couple.  Robert caved and presented a united front.  "Well, we have a couple outstanding grad students who really pushed, and they produced the data.  We're really proud of them."

  "Great.  What are their names?"

  "Saul March, Cheryl O'Leary...and Isaac Blackwell - did you see Isaac upstairs?  "

  "I didn't," Jovan said, "but that's terrific news.  I know that your lab always exhausts the data before trying to publish.  I have some labs that tend to push things out the door too fast.  I commend you guys for your efforts.  I'm calmer now than I used to be, but let me tell you, we uncovered a data incident this week in another lab. Falsified data, published under the mantle of Talbot..."

  "That's terrible," Ploof said.

  Jovan took a drink and said with intensity, "I'll let you guys be the first to know that come Monday, if our internal investigation team finds out that the accusation is true, that lab will be closed.  Funding and all."  He chomped on ice, as if it soothed him.  "It's not going to be a happy new year for that lab, if what I suspect is true turns out to be fact."

  "Mr. Jovan, you're kind of making me nervous," Robert said.  "Are you talking about our lab?"

  "No."  He spit a piece of ice into the cup.  "What gave you that idea?  I'm talking about Spiro Ling's lab."  He looked up, squinted, and scanned their faces for lies.

   "Why, should I be concerned about you guys?" 

  "Not at all."

  "Nothing to worry about with us, Marcus."

  "Good."  He resumed rolling ice in his mouth.  "Just thinking about it pisses me off.  Forty years building this company.  The early years were different, we could get away with some things then, but now everybody is watchin
g.  I recruited Dr. Ling, paid a bundle to get him.  The guy is so sharp, probably the best we have at Talbot.  But I'm locked into the commitment that we do clean work here, and if need be, I'll sacrifice him to purify and scare the hell out of anyone else considering false results.  It's not like he won't get hired somewhere else, either back in China or somewhere else - what's the name of that San Francisco sweatshop - Puliax? They would hire him, I have no doubt about that.."

  Ploof said, "Pelius."

  "Yeah, Pelius."  He tipped his glass back for more ice but none was left.  "They are something out there.  Talk about unscrupulous bastards.  I met that little CEO at this year's PharmaCon.  You'll never believe what she asked me.  I nearly fell out of my shoes."

  Robert leaned forward.  "What did she ask?"

  "She asked if I was ready to sell Talbot to her."

  Ploof said, "You've got to be joking."

  "No.  Little Arrica Puli..."

  "Pelius," Robert said.

  "I won't forget the name again.  We have some small contracts with them, but she's got my attention.  She can't be much older than twenty-five.  What the hell does she think she'd do with Talbot anyway?"

  "Pardon my saying so," Robert said, "but from the stories I've heard, when you were twenty-five, you were the same way."

  Jovan raised his eyebrows and sat up straight in his chair.  "That's absolutely true."  Jovan stood up to leave.  "That's exactly how I was," and leaving the room, he said, "I guess we had better bulldoze that little shack before she starts taking herself seriously."