Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

The hangar's eerie lighting flowed from liquid chandeliers.

They were glass-bottomed steel tubs, big as children's wading pools, full of cool and oozy radiance. Thick, white, lumines- cent goo. It threw weird shadows on the dents and ripples of the cardboard ceiling.

It was loud here: industrial chugging and gurgling, with the busy whir of loaded motors and the thrum and squeal of plumbing. The warm, moist air smelled bland and pleasant, like boiled rice. With strange reeks cutting through-the chemi- cal tang of acid, a chalk-dust whiff of lime. A plumber's dope dream: great towers of ribbed stainless steel, jutting three stories tall, their knobby bases snaked with tubing. Indicator lights in Christmas-tree red and green, glossy readout panels shining like cheap jewelry... . Scores of crew people in white paper overalls-checking readouts, leaning over long, glass-topped troughs full of steamy, roiling oatmeal .. .

They followed Andrei down the stairs, David carefully scanning everything and mumbling into his set. "Why aren't they wearing scrub gear?" Laura asked.

"We wear the scrub gear," Andrei said. "It's clean down here. But we have wild bugs on our skin." He laughed.

"Don't sneeze or touch things."

Three flights down, still above the hull, they detoured onto a catwalk. It led to glass-fronted offices, which overlooked the plant from a bamboo pier.

Andrei led them inside. It was quiet and cool in the offices, with filtered air and electric lights. There were desks, phones, office calendars, a fridge beside stacked cartons of canned

Pepsi-Cola. Like an office back in the States, Laura thought, looking around. Maybe twenty years behind the times .. .

A door marked "PRIVATE" opened suddenly, and an Anglo man backed through it. He was working. a pump-piston aero- sol spray. He turned and noticed them. "Oh! Hi, uh, Andrei

"Hello," Laura said. "I'm Laura Webster, this is David, my husband...."

"Oh, it's you folks! Where's your baby?" Unlike everyone they'd seen so far, the stranger wore a suit and tie. It was an old suit, in the flashy "Taipan" style that had been all the rage, ten years ago. "Didn't want to bring the little guy down here, huh? Well it's perfectly safe, you needn't have wor- ried." He peered at them; light gleamed from his glasses.

"You can take off those masks, it's okay inside here.... You don't have, like, flu or anything?"

Laura pulled her mask below her chin. "No."

"I'll have to ask you not to use the, um, toilets." He paused. "It's all linked together down here, see-all sealed tight and recycled. Water, oxygen, the works! Just like a space station." He smiled.

"This is Dr. Prentis," Andrei told them.

"Oh!" Prentis said. "Yeah. I'm kind of the head honcho down here, as you must've guessed... . You're Americans, right? Call me Brian."

"A pleasure, Brian." David offered his hand.

Prentis winced. "Sorry, now, that's not kosher, either....

You guys want a Pepsi?" He set his sprayer on a desk and opened the fridge. "Got some Doo-Dads, Twinkies, beef jerky... "

"Uh, we just ate...." David was listening to something online. "Thanks anyway."

"All plastic-sealed, all perfectly safe! Right out of the carton! You're sure? Laura?" Prentis popped a Pepsi. "Oh, well, all the more for me."

"My contact online," David said. "She wants to know if you're the Brian Prentis who did the paper on ... I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that-polysaccharide something."

Prentis nodded, shortly. "Yeah. I did that."

"Reception's a little scratchy down here," David apologized.

"At Ohio State. Long time ago," Prentis said. "Who is this person? Somebody from your Rizome, right?"

"Professor Millie Syers, a Rizome Fellow at North Carolina State ... "

"Never heard of her," Prentis said. "So! What's new

Stateside, huh? How about that `L. A. Live' comedy show? I never miss an episode."

"They say it's very funny," Laura said. She never watched it.

"Those guys who do the 'Breadhead Brothers,' they slay me." Prentis paused. "We can get everything down here, y'know. Anything that hits the Net-not just American! Those

Stateside cable companies, they edit out a lot. Brazilian exot- ics ..." He winked clumsily. "And that Japanese blue stuff-whew!"

"Porn doesn't sell like it used to," Laura said.

"Yeah, they're stuffy, they're uptight," Prentis nodded.

"I don't hold with that. I believe in Total openness ... honesty, y'know? People shouldn't go through life with blinders on."

"Can you tell us what you do here?" Laura said.

"Oh. Surely. We use auxotrophic E. coli, they're homoserine auxotrophs mostly, though we use double auxotrophy if we're trying anything ticklish.... And the fermenters, the tower rigs, those are saccharomyces.... It's a standard strain, Pruteen copyright, nothing very advanced, just tried-and-true scop technology. At eighty percent capacity, we pump about fif- teen metric tons per rig per day, dry weight... . Of course we don't leave it raw, though. We do a lot of what they call cosmetics-palate work."

Prentis walked toward the windows. "Those smaller troughs are bell-and-whistle rigs. Texture, flavoring, secondary fer- mentation ..." He smiled at Laura, glassily. "It's very much the normal things that any housewife might do in the comfort of her own kitchen! Blenders, microwaves, eggbeaters; just a little scaled up, that's all."

Prentis glanced at David and away; the dark glasses both- ered him. He looked to Laura, gazing raptly at her bustline.

"It's not so new, really. If you've ever eaten bread or cheese or beer, you're eating molds and yeasts. All that stuff: tofu, soy sauce; you'd be amazed what they have to go through to make soy sauce. And believe it or not, it's far safer than so-called natural foods. Fresh vegetables!" Prentis barked with laughter. "They're chock-full of natural poisons! There are cases on record where people have died outright from eating potatoes!"

"Hey," David said, "you're preaching to the converted, amigo

Laura turned away toward the windows. "This isn't ex- actly new to us, Dr. Prentis. Rizome has a synthetic foods division... . I did some P.R. for them once."

"But that's good, that's good!" Prentis said, nodding in surprise. "People have, you know, absurd prejudices.... About

`eating germs.' "

"Maybe they did years ago," Laura said. "But nowadays it's mostly a class thing-that it's poor people's food. Cattle feed. "

Andrei folded his arms. "A bourgeois Yankee notion.

"Well, it's a marketing problem," Laura said. "But I agree with you. Rizome sees nothing wrong with feeding hungry people. We have our own expertise in this--and it's the kind of technology transfer that might be very helpful to a developing industry...." She paused. "I heard your speech upstairs, Andrei, and there's more common ground between us than you may think."

David chimed in, nodding. "There's a game in the States now called Worldrun. I play it a lot, it's very popular.... Protein tech, like this, is one of your major tools for world stability.

Without it, there are food riots, cities crumble, governments go down... . And not just in Africa, either."

"This is work," Andrei said. "Not a game."

"We don't make that distinction," David told him seri- ously. "We don't have `work' in Rizome just things to do, and people to do them." He smiled winningly. "For us, play is learning ... you play Worldrun, and you learn that you can't sit on your ass and let things go to hell. You can't just take a salary, make a profit, be a dead weight in the system.

In Rizome, we know this-hell, that's why we came to Grenada. "

He turned to Prentis. "I got a copy on my rig-call me up,

I can download it, for you. You too, Andrei."

Prentis snickered. "Uh, I can access the Bank from here,