Friday, 10 August 2012

3PM, July the 20th, The Future


A.

You either had good connections and got a high-end job or you started tinkering with things on your own to try and make a name for yourself on the open source front. At least it was like that before the bioterrorist attack of 2020 killed around a million. It’s funny (in a sick way) how the death of one person is tragedy, but the death of one thousands is a statistic. Regulations were rapidly put in place to limit access to databases and materials, so self-styled, honest biopunks had to either go underground, take a sharp left turn in their career prospects and start doing something else or fill the jobs vacated by those who died. Where one door closes, another opens...
This is when the government decided that it needed more people to work on controlling the directions garage biology could take, to prevent such events ever happening again. The Biosafety and Biosecurity Division was set up and was tasked with developing ways to predict, model, prevent and remedy any bioterrorist attacks that could occur, as well as carry out periodic scans of most synthetic products that get released. We have shown some success, in that nothing so big has occurred again (yet?) and things have been quiet, save for a few isolated cases that we managed to contain quickly enough. Honest biopunks probably hate us for severing their access to the large databases, but even they must understand that we are fighting the good fight.

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