Rule 34

rising bread dough, and the wee airlock thingy sticking up from the lid burps an alien curse as you stare at it.

It’s a fab of sorts, the Gnome told you. A new kind of fab, or a really old one, depending on your perspective. Transmutation, liquid bread, water of life, al-kuhl. Not like the desktop fabs Tariq and his mates are using to run off air-guns and sex toys these days.

This is about using yeast cells as a platform for synthetic biology. As the Gnome explained it to you at great length—there will be an exam later, Anwar—in normal cells there’s DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which in turn is used as a punched-card template by protein-manufacturing machines called ribosomes. Each three words of DNA data—codons—correspond to a single amino acid out of a palette of twenty- one; the ribosomes read the codons, grab amino acids bound to carrier molecules out of the soupy intracellular medium, and glue them together to form new proteins or enzymes.

But in these cells there’s a whole new biology. It uses four codons to represent a much wider range of amino acids, many of which are entirely artificial. Some of them code for the protein components of the molecular assembly line that replaces the boring Nature 1.0 ribosomes in the mechanosystem; others code for enzymes that synthesize the exotic new amino acids the synthetic biochemistry runs on. There’s bootstrap code written for old-style ribosomes to get the new system up and running: That’s what the health-food supplement switched on. Once it’s running, the yeast cells are redundant, just a convenient platform for servicing the nanosystem.

Not that this is about shiny Star Trek nanites. Oh no, we’re not that advanced. Nanotechnology is the shiny new magic dessert topping /floor wax/pixie dust of tomorrow, and always will be. This stuff is just synthetic biochemistry, with some funky new tools for handling buckytubes and exotic amino acids. Nothing strange about it at all, except that it’s bubbling away in the bucket in the corner of your den and it smells like money, which is always enough to secure your exclusive attention.

What’s in the bucket, Anwar?

Adam gave you some helpful pointers. If it’s full of yellow crystalline sediment, back away slowly—but no, that’s not so likely. You glance over your shoulder at the intruder’s suitcase, but it just sits there, eyeless and unspeaking. Too many ideas are jostling in your head, seeking attention. Bread Mix. Colonel Datka’s man. Tariq’s chat room. The stuff you didn’t tell Inspector Butthurt about: Tariq’s unhealthy interest in making sure his chat-room environment wasn’t as well guarded against malware as it looked, his secret VPN access to the webcrime bulletin boards, plausible deniability. And then there are the dark suspicions you don’t dare voice even to yourself as yet: How accidental is all this? Where did Adam hear about the Issyk-Kulistan gig?

Thoughts fermenting in your head, you lever up the rim of the bucket lid and look inside.

The bucket smells of old socks and the broken promises of a hostile future, musty and somehow warm. You peer in and see only dirty greybrown water, a scum adhering to its surface, bubbles forming at the edges: It’s slightly iridescent, as if you’d spilled a drop of diesel oil on top. Is that all? you think, disappointed, and dip the chopsticks in it.

The kitchen utensils don’t spontaneously catch fire, or dissolve, or morph into brightly coloured machine parts. You stir the scum on the surface around a bit, and it crinkles and crumples against them; then you pull them out again. A rope of congealed filmy scum sticks to the chopsticks, dribbling water back into the bucket.

“Yuck.” You raise the chopsticks, and the floating sheet dangles from them, mucilaginous, like an elephant- sized snotter. You cast them aside, and they curl together, landing on the carpet in a stringy mass under the window. You clamp the lid down on the bucket of spoiled whatever-it-is and shake your head. Probably you’ll have to take it downstairs, pour it down the toilet—hope the Environmental Health wardens don’t have surveillance robots lurking in the sewers. It’d be just your luck to be busted for possession of an illegal chemical factory. Assuming the thing hasn’t died or been infected by sixty kinds of bacteria.

You climb downstairs wearily and head for the bedroom. It’s been a long day, what with the visit from Colonel Datka’s man and the unspeakable event at Taleb’s. At least Bibi’s taking care of the kids, you think.

Interlude 2 TOYMAKER: Happy Families

When you were eight, your dad taught you the correct way to peel a live frog.

You seem to recall him teaching you lots of things, but mostly he succeeded in annoying the hell out of you. It wasn’t his fault: He was in therapy for most of your childhood, and it damaged him. Then you were in therapy, and it gets vague real fast.

One of the things he taught you early is that ants can recognize an intruder from another colony; they smell the strangeness and respond by chewing its legs off, immobilizing it until the soldiers come with jaws the size of legs and bite through its neck.

Humans are not dissimilar.

Dad was diagnosed, but never let it get in his way. He learned to cover up by copying, passing for another worker ant. But he wasn’t very good at it.

“Look,” said Dad, holding down the slimy, frantically gulping bull-frog, “it’s simple. Just one cut here and—” He demonstrated. A flip of the fingers and inside out it goes. You laughed excitedly as the skinless amphibian flailed away at the bleeding air. “Looks real funny, doesn’t he? Just like a little man. Now you try.” And he handed you a frog and a knife.

In retrospect, you know exactly what Dad was doing: He was testing you to see if you were like him. Mom or Alice would puke their guts up if he did something like this in front of them, but Dad was curious. Did you share his unusual quirk, or were you doomed to go through life as just another soft-headed mark? So you got to peel frogs one happy summer afternoon with Dad, and it was true: They looked just like little skinned-alive men.

Father-son bonding experiences among the neurotypically diverse: putting the “fun” into “dysfunctional.” You didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad was teaching you stuff you weren’t going to learn anywhere else: stuff like what you were, how to look “normal,” how to pass among the ants, how not to get found out. All Mom gave you was your looks and good manners. (She had a great ass, though: Dad had good taste.)

You cling to the memory of that afternoon: Unlike most of your history, it remains vivid and fresh, not fading into the cloud-banks of the imagination. You didn’t have many afternoons like that: Dad was always busy at work, buying and selling shit. He did it from an office suite just off Wall Street, and you and he and Mom and Sis lived in a fancy uptown condo overlooking Ninth Avenue when you were in Manhattan. Or maybe he had a room above a shop on Threadneedle Street and the maisonette was in Docklands? It’s hard to be sure. You do remember there being a nice beachfront when you were vacationing on the West Coast, and a house on Long Island for weekends, and lots of plane trips. Mom did the stay-at-home thing and looked after you and Alice; and there was an old woman who kept the condo clean when you weren’t there, and an ever-changing supply of kindergarten friends to torment experimentally. And Bozo the Cat (until he went away).

But that was before the car crash turned everything to shit.

You were nine. One day a year earlier, Dad came home early and pulled your mom into the kitchen and shut the door. There were words, loud words. Later, your mom came out to talk to you. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her make-up was smeary. “Your daddy and I have agreed,” she said, with a funny little twitch. “We’re moving to California, to Palo Alto. He needs to be nearer where the money comes from.”

This was cool with you, as long as there was beachfront and sun and other kids to score off. Mom didn’t seem too happy when you said so. She got a bit too excited and shouted at you and cried because she liked the big city, Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever it was. Well, silly her.

What you only figured out much later was that it was February, Y2K+1. Dad’s dotcom portfolio had vaped, and he had to steal some more money. And this being Y2K+1, there wasn’t a lot of money in circulation to steal—at least, not from Dad’s friendly circle of day traders and stock-jobbers. So he’d been forced to diversify and got fucked