"We were talking about Junior. And his interpretation of business. Long story shorter, I should have paid more attention, trusted my gut, said no. He turned it into a game. That crazy distribution, the caches, making people, sleepless or their family members or friends, stumble around town with RFID scanners looking for hidden bottles of Dreamer. Like it was a damn Easter egg hunt. And of course he lost interest, anyway. Just let someone else run the whole thing for him. Supposed to turn the money around, put it back in, buy more Dreamer, put it on the market, take his margin and do whatever he wanted with it. Put it in that sad club. I don't know. But he didn't. None of that money came back, not to pay the advance I gave him to acquire the first pallets, not to buy more. It was a small loss in terms of A-ND, but it needed to be covered. I did it out of my own personal accounts. On principle. It was my mistake. I paid for it. And I confronted the boy, told him to return what hadn't been sold. Make good his debts. He offered me a spreadsheet of GPS coordinates. Told me he wasn't even getting paid for most of the Dreamer. He was trading it outright for goods to equip his gaming teams. Bartering for 'character art.' Other things I didn't understand. To my shame, I slapped him. Never did that before. Don't believe anything good comes of striking your flesh and blood. And, well, that was that. It didn't matter much what he was doing with the Dreamer once I covered the loss. His distribution method is slow, inefficient, and cruel, but you are correct, it's nearly invisible. I asked some people in law enforcement to keep an eye on the streets, told them that some Dreamer might have leaked from the system. They understood. Set something up so they'd know if rumors started spreading, make sure the general public didn't find out. Word got out that my son was dealing Dreamer, half the country would likely get burned down by the other half. We're just that close to the edge of what people can understand and endure without running mad in the streets. And. And that's about it. Pathetic is how it sounds. When I say it all aloud."
Park stared at the man.
"The murders."
Senior nodded.
"The murders."
He shrugged.
"I never met the people Junior was in business with. But they were doing the nuts and bolts for him. Maybe they stepped on another dealer's turf without realizing it. Started selling to sleepless south of the Santa Monica. We supply some very aggressive Dreamer franchises down there. Very protective of their clientele. And very traditional in terms of how they deal with competitors. Gangland sound like their style. Maybe it wasn't even about Dreamer. That gold farming, if the numbers Junior showed me are real, that's serious money. Could have been a competitor in that space. But Junior? Pulling the trigger? Or having those two ex-SEAL supermodels of his do it for him? No. He's a, a difficult boy, frivolous, but there's no killing in him. I may not be best friends with my son, but I know him that well. That well, at least."
They sat in silence for a moment.
Senior looked at the empty snifter again.
"I keep telling myself I may as well have another, but I hear my wife saying that one is enough."
Park was slumping slightly, his elbow coming to rest on his thigh.
"Sir. SLP."
Senior kept staring at the glass.
"No, you're wrong about that. I wish I could tell you we poisoned the well. That there was a reason for it. Greed. It could be undone. But there is no peace of mind to be had there."
He looked at Park.
"We did it, all right, people, I mean. We did it, but it wasn't about greed. It was about hunger. Are you certain you want to hear this?"
Park didn't move.
Senior closed his eyes.
"Not enough food. The people who were paying attention, they knew it was coming. No shock to a lot of us when the price of corn and beans and rice started to jump. Too many people. Not enough food. Poor distribution for what there is. The hungry getting hungrier. At its root, yes, it was market exploitation, seeking to take advantage of a massive demand, but it was also plain necessary."
Park had straightened.
"What was necessary, sir?"
Senior opened his eyes.
"Know anything about transgenic plants, Officer?"
Park shook his head.
Senior nodded.
"GMOs?"
Park shook his head again.
Senior looked once more at his glass.
"Well, you've eaten a load of them. Genetically modified organisms. Unless you're hooked up with an organic shared farming operation, you've eaten plenty of transgenic maize. Genetically altered corn. High-yield corn. More specific to this discussion, pest-resistant corn. Heard of a thing called a European corn borer? No, no reason why you should unless you're a farmer. Far back as 1938, in France, they were spraying corn with something called Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt. A naturally occurring biotoxin that kills beetles, flies, moths, butterflies, and the European corn borer. Problem with a spray is, it wears off the surface. If you could get the stuff inside the corn, then you'd be set. Corn borer eats corn with Bt in it and it ends up with holes in its digestive tract. Dies. Bt, it contains two classes of toxins: cytolysins, or Cyt toxins, and crystal delta-endotoxins, or Cry toxins. Those are the ones that kill the corn borers. Smart people, they identified the genes encoding the Cry proteins."
Park licked dry lips.
Senior picked a new thread from his bathrobe.
"Yes, proteins; it's all about proteins. Cry9C is a pesticidal protein, a naturally occurring product of Bt. But it can be produced as a designed material. And introduced to the genetic code of regular old-fashioned corn. And it was. There were a few fusses about it, fears that people were reacting to the Cry9C, allergies, but nobody died, the fuss faded. And what people didn't realize was that it was far too late to go back anyhow. Hell, by 1999 thirty percent of all corn, globally I'm saying, was Bt-modified. Sure, there were concerns around the turn of the century; Cry9C corn was supposed to be limited to nonhuman consumption. But if you use it for feed, and humans eat the animals, well, proteins don't die. They don't wear out. They just are. By 2008 it was all moot. Between world hunger and ethanol, the market for corn was booming. In August '08 the FDA proposed eliminating all safety limits on Bt toxins in transgenic foods. And soon after it was so. Even if they hadn't, the horse was out of the barn. In 2001, down in Mexico, transgenic artificial DNA had been found in traditional cornfields. It was spreading, cross-pollinating. Anyhow, Cry9C wasn't the issue. It was Cry9E."
He was wrapping his finger with thread again.
"They tried to make a super bug killer. A protein that would kill off all corn pests. Superresilient corn. That was in 2000. It worked. Too well. Killed off just about any bug that crawled on the corn, pest or not. Well, even the lab boys knew that wouldn't fly in the ecosystem. But it was already out. Cry9E corn got mixed in with Cry9C, no one really knows how. And it got distributed. And it cross-pollinated. And there was what a white paper I read once called Lateral Transfer of Antibiotic Resistance Marker Genes."
Park had leaned forward, focusing on the other man's mouth. An insistent thrum, as if his hands were cupped over his ears, grew within his head.
Senior was pulling the thread tight, the tip of his finger becoming intensely purple.
"And that's it. Cry9E, a designed materials pesticidal protein. We ate it. Or we ate something that ate it. Or we breathed it when it was burned as ethanol. And what it was meant to do to the digestive system of an insect, it did to our brains. It spread through conformational influence and ate holes in our brains. Innocent as all hell, trying to feed and fuel the masses, some asshole in a lab somewhere created a species-killing prion. Without even knowing it."
He pulled the thread tighter.
"Took eight years from 2000 for it to spread, become recognizable as something clearly other than fatal familial insomnia or mad cow or CJD. And another two years for us to get here. One out of ten symptomatic."
Park stood.
"What's?"
He looked around the room.
"How do we? We have to."
He looked at Senior.
"We have to. Symptomatic?"
Senior rose.
"Ten percent symptomatic. Infection rates are way beyond that level. And it's still spreading."
Park took one step and froze.
"People are, no one has said anything. Who knows? People are eating corn. People are."
Senior took his empty glass to the bar.
"No one figured this out quickly. By the time anyone knew where SLP came from. It was. Hell. And what do you do? Tell people to stop eating corn? Tell them, 'We know it's all you have, all you can afford, and we know we can't afford to distribute alternatives to you, so just be quiet and starve, will you?' I saw a projection, one of these think tank types, a projection based on what would happen if someone could just kill off all the corn, spray it, something; this man's projection combined an assumed zero yield in corn with the impact of drought on rice and ended up with mass cannibalism in less than a decade. Socially accepted cannibalism."
He set his snifter on the bar.
"There's no one to tell. There's no one to save. There's no going back. A lot of people, most of us, are going to die. It's going to take some years, but that's the endgame. Society, what's out that front door, it's going to keep breaking down smaller and smaller. People are going to get more and more afraid. They're going to rely on what they know, what they can count on. It's too big already, too big to stop. People, people who know, people like me, we're just trying to tap the brakes, slow everything down, keep it as normal as possible, keep people as comfortable as possible. As long as possible."
He took the stopper from the bottle of cognac, then put it back.
"The slower it happens, the better the chance it won't all just crash and burn. The less people know, the lower the chance they'll go crazy all at once and just tear everything down. And the projections on that scenario, you don't want to know about those. If the statistics I've seen are half-right, there's still a better than even chance that someone somewhere will set off a nuke before this all shakes out. And then all the models break down. No one can say who might start pushing buttons."
He faced Park, the forgotten thread still around his finger.
"People in despair, Haas, they don't curl up and die. They are foolish and dangerous. We've lost the fight against SLP It had won before we knew what it was. Now we're fighting despair. Trying to convince people there's a reason to watch TV, go to work, clean up after the dog, pay the bills, obey traffic laws, not go next door and kill your neighbor's kid for playing his guitar too loud in the garage."
He noticed the thread and began to unwind it.
"Just let them believe for a little longer that there is hope and a reason to live."
He dangled the thread from between his fingers.
"Because some people will live. There's an immunity. Something to do with alterations in the prion gene. Whether you're heterozygotic plays into it. Some people are going to live."
He pinched the ends of the thread and stretched it between his hands.
"And we have to make sure there's something left for them."
The thread broke.
Park finished taking the step he had started moments before.
"I'm going to arrest your son."
Senior dropped the pieces of string.
"Haas. No. What is going to happen is my people, those former Mossad and Shabak agents that work for me, they are going to escort you from the property. At the Bel Air gates you will be photographed by the Thousand Storks contractors that handle security up here. Then you will be driven to your car. And you will go home. And you will never come back here again, or come near my son, or you will be killed. Now, I don't expect you'll accept anything from me. Not as a bribe, I mean, but in the way of help. Nonetheless, I would like to help you and your family. All you have to do is ask, but you must ask now."
He stopped speaking, and nothing was said in the room for a moment, and he nodded and continued.
"As I expected. However, you had among your possessions when you were picked up, a bottle of Dreamer. It will still be with your possessions when they are returned to you at your car."
He tightened the belt of his bathrobe.
"In this house, the main house, I mean, are many members of my extended family. They are here because I can care for them. Most of them are sleepless. Some are in the suffering. They have almost unlimited access to Dreamer. They can take a cap or two whenever they feel disoriented or in pain, and sleep and dream. And wake feeling almost like themselves. Unlike most anyone else in the world, they can do that for as long as several months, until they die. Not just the last few weeks like they do in the hospitals. Or, if they choose, if they are tired and spent and sad with the world, they can swallow twelve to eighteen caps of Dreamer at once and go deeply to sleep. The sleep lasts for several minutes to several hours, it is characterized by a general relaxation of all muscles, brain waves fall into continuous deltas, profound REM dreaming, no indications of unsettled or unpleasant dreams, and as the muscles relax further, the lungs slowly stop expanding, and the heart stops beating. From everything I have seen, it is a peaceful and merciful death."