Their construction techniques had originally been invented by a group of overeager would-be Mars colonizers.
These long-vanished space techies, an ingenious and fanatical group, had invented a wide variety of cheap and simple techniques by which small groups of astronauts might colonize the airless and frozen deserts of the Red Planet. Humanity had never yet reached Mars, but with the final collapse of NASA the Martian colonization plans had become public domain.
These plans fell into the eager hands of fanatical street protesters. They had dug down into the squelchy subsoil of the Potomac riverbed, squeezing water from the soil, compacting it to use as bricks, building an endless series of archways, tunnels, and kivas. The radicals found that even the sorriest patch of Earth was a cornucopia, com-pared to the airless deserts of Mars. Anything that might work on Mars would work a hundred times better in a deserted alley or parking lot.
Now NASA’s ingenuity had borne amazing fruit, and the streets of Washington were lavishly bumped and measled with martian settle-ments. Slums of compacted dirt, all glue and mazy airlocks, climbed straight up the walls of buildings, where they clung like the nests of mud-daubing wasps. There were excavation hills three stories high near Union Station, and even Georgetown was subject to repeated subterranean rumblings.
Most of these martians were Anglos. In fact, sixty percent of Washington’s populace were members of the troubled minority. Local DC government, a world-famous model of urban corruption, was dominated by militant Anglos. The ethnic bosses were busily exercis-ing their traditional genius for fraud, hacking, and white-collar crime scams.
Oscar, though a stranger to Washington, knew better than to enter the city unprepared. He abandoned his krewe inside the bus, which retreated at once to the relative safety of Alexandria. Oscar then walked two blocks on foot, through a protesters’ permanent street market of flowers, medals, bracelets, bumper stickers, flags, cassettes, and Christmas toys.
He arrived at his destination, unmolested and in good order. He then discovered, without much surprise, that the federal office build-ing had fallen into the hands of squatters.
Oscar wandered through the entry hall, passing metal detectors and a cyclops set of facial recognition units. The squat’s concierge was an elderly black man with close-cropped hair and a bow tie. He gave Oscar a clip-on ID bracelet.
The system was now logging Oscar’s presence and his move-ments, along with everything else of relevance inside the building: furniture, appliances, tools, kitchenware, clothes, shoes, pets, and of course all the squatters themselves. The locators were as small as or-ange pips and as rugged as tenpenny nails, so they could invisibly infest any device that anyone found of interest.
This universal tagging made the contents of the building basically theftproof It also made communal property a rather simple proposi-tion. It was never hard to find a tool when the locale, condition, and history of every tool was logged and displayed in real time. It was also very hard for freeloaders to anonymously steal or abuse the common goods. When it worked, this digital socialism was considerably cheaper and more convenient than private property.
However, in order to function, this technology had a major side effect: it turned people’s lives inside out. There were children playing in the building’s halls — in fact, to judge by the disorder, the squatters’ children were living in the halls. The kids were bugged and safety-tagged, surrounded by a smorgasbord of the community’s color-coded and positionally registered kiddie toys.
Oscar picked his way through a dense litter of tricycles and in-flatable animals, then took a crowded elevator up to the third floor. This section of the building reeked powerfully of East Indian cook-ing — curries, papadams, maybe some chicken masala. Probably, to judge by the smell, large flocks of computer-tagged chickens.
The double doors of Room 358 opened trustingly at his touch. Oscar found himself in a sculptor’s studio, a bleak, ill-smelling place reconstructed from a fire-blackened set of office cubicles. The torched federal offices had left eerie remains: a gridwork of blackened floor scars and the dripping stalagmite lumps of dead plastic workstations. The retrofitted office had been reoccupied, however. It now boasted a long makeshift workbench of bolted railway ties, amid piles of automotive scrap metal, flattened epoxy tubes, and stubby welding rods. The concrete floor echoed beneath Oscar’s shoes.
Clearly he was in the wrong room.
His phone rang. He answered it. “Hello?”
“Is this really you?” It was Greta.
“It’s me all right — live and in person.”
“It’s not a phone-sex line?”
“No. I use that phone-sex service to reroute my private calls. They have tremendous voice traffic on their lines, so it helps a lot against tracing attacks. And if anyone is running traffic analysis, they’ll just assume… Well, never mind the technical details. The point is that we can talk safely together on an unencrypted phone.”
“I guess it’s okay.”
“So, let’s talk, Greta. Tell me how you are. Tell me everything.”
“Are you safe there in Washington?”
Oscar clutched the fabric phone tenderly. It was as if he had her ear cradled in his hand. It now mattered much less to him that he was hopelessly lost and in the wrong building.
“I’m perfectly fine. This is where I make my career, after all.”
“I worry about you, Oscar.” Long pause. “I think … I think maybe I could go to Boston later. There’s a neuro seminar there. Maybe I could block some time in.”
“Excellent! You should come to Boston, by all means. I’ll show you my house.” A slow, sizzling pause.
“That sounds interesting…”
“Do it. It’s what we need. It’s good for us.”
“I have to tell you something important…”
He swiftly examined his battery level and replaced the phone at his ear. “Just go ahead and tell me, Greta.”
“It’s so hard to explain this… It’s just that different now and… I’m all inspired and it’s just…” A lingering silence.
“Go on,” he coaxed. “Get it off your chest.”
Her voice dropped to a confiding whisper. “It’s my amyloid fibrils…”
“It’s what?”
“My fibrils. There are a lot of diverse neural proteins that form amyloid fibrils in vivo. And even though they have unrelated sequences, they all polymerize into fibrils with similar ultrastructure. The conformational folding arrangements have been bothering me. A lot. ”
“Really? That’s a shame.”
“But then I was messing with my GDNF adeno carriers, yesterday, and I grafted a new amyloidogenic variant onto the carrier. I’ve just derived their mass with the electrospray spectrometer. And, Oscar, they’re expressing. And they’re all enzymatically active and they all have the correct, intact disulfide bonds.”
“It’s marvelous when you’re expressing.”
“They’re going to express in vivo! And that’s so much less inva-sive than dumb, old-fashioned gene therapy. That’s been the critical limiting factor, a permanent cheap method of delivery. And if we can do amyloids as well as dopamine and neurotrophic factors… I mean, transfer all those loads congruently into live neural tissue… Well, I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
“No, no,” Oscar said deftly, “depend on it, I’m solid on that issue.”
“It’s just that Bellotti and Hawkins are doing autosomal amy-loidosis, so they’re right on top of this problem. And they’re doing a poster session at the Boston AMAC.”
“Then you should definitely go to Boston,” Oscar said, “there’s no way that some drone like Bellotti should scoop you on this! I’ll put it all in order for you, right away. Never mind trying to swing the travel funding. My krewe can book you right through to Boston. You’ll have time on the plane to assemble your presentation. We’ll get you a suite at the convention hotel and we’ll have all your meals catered, to save you time. You should seize this opportunity, Greta. You never get proper time to think for yourself when you’re riding herd back at the lab.”