Kathryn Dresser, who worked on constitutional law at the college. But home invasion wasn’t Dresser’s field, and Els didn’t know her all that well. He’d never engaged a lawyer for anything, not even his divorce. Calling one now felt criminal.
He felt like suing. But righteousness would only incriminate him. Coldberg and Mendoza’s cards bore the address of a government building in Philadelphia, a generic email contact, and a phone. He’d failed to get any other information. He’d let two strangers come into his house and walk off with his lab equipment, no questions asked.
It wasn’t clear how much trouble he might be in. Perhaps the impounding was a routine precaution. The best thing was to keep still and see how things played out. Let the Joint Security people run their checks on him and on Serratia , his bacterium of choice. Let them comb through every datum collected on him in the course of seventy years and discover that he’d never even gotten a speeding ticket. Nine or ten days from now, long enough to punish him for making them waste valuable public resources on a false alarm, they’d ship the incubator back, dinged up and emptied out.
The day was shot for any real effort. His last week of work was ruined. Els drained off his nervous energy in the yard, deadheading daffodils and splitting the early hostas. He moved half the huge Blue Angel that filled the bed under the front bay window to the center of Fidelio’s grave. It would be beautiful there, by this time next spring.
When he could move no more plants around without doing damage, Els went inside and got on the computer. There, he made the rounds of his bookmarked DIY bio sites, to see whether the community of amateur researchers had any advice for a situation like this. One site mentioned a recent rise in legal confrontations. It linked to a grassroots group for citizens’ rights to do science.
A few clicks, and Els found himself scanning a recipe for getting ricin from castor beans. Botulism from stockpiles of cosmetics. Ebola from any of half a dozen obliging cults. Fifty minutes on the Net and he wanted to arrest himself.
But all the garage genetics sites agreed: a person could assemble a respectable plague for far less than five thousand dollars, without needing any fancy gene splicing. Spreading the plague, however, would be a problem. One link led to another, and before long, Els was lost in the whole Amerithrax saga, its byzantine plots—all the mysteries surrounding those seven spore-filled letters. He’d forgotten about that nightmare—one of the largest investigations in history. The topic might have made a first-rate CNN opera.
Amerithrax led him to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. From Tokyo, two clicks landed him on a rooftop in Miyako City, watching cars and trucks and warehouses and apartment buildings turning into driftwood on a hump of gray water that would not stop surging inland. A whole neighborhood tore loose and shot down the rapids. As the cell phone film panned, a stack of frothing water overtook the camera and the shot went black.
Els scanned down the long columns of related videos: Latest eyewitness. Tape captures eerie sounds. Most dramatic compilation. Survivors recount terror . Some clips had been clicked on a million times, some once or twice. Overnight, this carousel of catastrophe.
Among the hundreds of two-minute clips, right between Moment tsunami hits and Japan bids to save power plant, a prodigious automated sorting algorithm had inserted the bleakest of errors. Or maybe a human curator planted the link, a sadistic joke on the theme of disaster: a video that had gone viral on the day of the quake, racking up 62,700,312 views in the few days since. Els clicked and became number 62,700,313.
At his click, the room filled with a vivacious, pitch-corrected, and jaw-droppingly sunny little song. On Els’s screen, a thirteen-year-old singer woke up, went to the bus stop, joined her friends in
He felt like suing. But righteousness would only incriminate him. Coldberg and Mendoza’s cards bore the address of a government building in Philadelphia, a generic email contact, and a phone. He’d failed to get any other information. He’d let two strangers come into his house and walk off with his lab equipment, no questions asked.
It wasn’t clear how much trouble he might be in. Perhaps the impounding was a routine precaution. The best thing was to keep still and see how things played out. Let the Joint Security people run their checks on him and on Serratia , his bacterium of choice. Let them comb through every datum collected on him in the course of seventy years and discover that he’d never even gotten a speeding ticket. Nine or ten days from now, long enough to punish him for making them waste valuable public resources on a false alarm, they’d ship the incubator back, dinged up and emptied out.
The day was shot for any real effort. His last week of work was ruined. Els drained off his nervous energy in the yard, deadheading daffodils and splitting the early hostas. He moved half the huge Blue Angel that filled the bed under the front bay window to the center of Fidelio’s grave. It would be beautiful there, by this time next spring.
When he could move no more plants around without doing damage, Els went inside and got on the computer. There, he made the rounds of his bookmarked DIY bio sites, to see whether the community of amateur researchers had any advice for a situation like this. One site mentioned a recent rise in legal confrontations. It linked to a grassroots group for citizens’ rights to do science.
A few clicks, and Els found himself scanning a recipe for getting ricin from castor beans. Botulism from stockpiles of cosmetics. Ebola from any of half a dozen obliging cults. Fifty minutes on the Net and he wanted to arrest himself.
But all the garage genetics sites agreed: a person could assemble a respectable plague for far less than five thousand dollars, without needing any fancy gene splicing. Spreading the plague, however, would be a problem. One link led to another, and before long, Els was lost in the whole Amerithrax saga, its byzantine plots—all the mysteries surrounding those seven spore-filled letters. He’d forgotten about that nightmare—one of the largest investigations in history. The topic might have made a first-rate CNN opera.
Amerithrax led him to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. From Tokyo, two clicks landed him on a rooftop in Miyako City, watching cars and trucks and warehouses and apartment buildings turning into driftwood on a hump of gray water that would not stop surging inland. A whole neighborhood tore loose and shot down the rapids. As the cell phone film panned, a stack of frothing water overtook the camera and the shot went black.
Els scanned down the long columns of related videos: Latest eyewitness. Tape captures eerie sounds. Most dramatic compilation. Survivors recount terror . Some clips had been clicked on a million times, some once or twice. Overnight, this carousel of catastrophe.
Among the hundreds of two-minute clips, right between Moment tsunami hits and Japan bids to save power plant, a prodigious automated sorting algorithm had inserted the bleakest of errors. Or maybe a human curator planted the link, a sadistic joke on the theme of disaster: a video that had gone viral on the day of the quake, racking up 62,700,312 views in the few days since. Els clicked and became number 62,700,313.
At his click, the room filled with a vivacious, pitch-corrected, and jaw-droppingly sunny little song. On Els’s screen, a thirteen-year-old singer woke up, went to the bus stop, joined her friends in
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