Bodyblow

I had asked Kiwi to plan an operation against the Port of Los Angeles, or rather at least one of the container ships inside the port, so that I would have an opportunity to tag along. When she saw the very limpet-mine-looking devices that I would be carrying with me in a backpack, though, she frowned and said, "I don't think I'm down for committing any terrorism-murder or sinking any ships."

I shook my head, "They only look like explosives. They're not. They contain sensors, in addition to a few other things. They won't damage the ships at all or hurt anybody. They're just no reason to reinvent the wheel when I need to affix something surreptitiously to the hull of a ship, but please don't mention or even think too often about them. The project is at the highest confidentiality level."

I was a little nervous because the first cloned body and cloned brain for Project Synchronicity were not ready yet, nor had I finalised the design of the cyberbrain housing, so this would be a real risk for me, but at the same time, I had taken much more significant risks than this in Night City. I had gotten the Haywire comms fairly small, about the size of what I would have recognised in Brockton Bay as a USB dongle, but they still needed fairly frequent maintenance, which wasn't going to work. I felt they needed to go at least six months without me having to tinker with them.

Although the main reason for this project was to protect against death, a secondary reason was to try to start making some waves. I wouldn't mind if one of my bodies was kidnapped and placed into a gilded cage, for example, so long as I had real-time comms with the net and my other bodies. That would be a good opportunity for me to start producing other things that could help the world or people as a whole.

I had good feelings about my algae, for example, but it was merely a first attempt. I was pretty sure it would do a lot more good than harm, but I wasn't entirely sure about how well it would help the environment, despite my projections. It would definitely take carbon out of the air and deposit it as edible sugars in the ocean and in the cellular structure of the algae, with the idea that the carbon in the air would be temporarily "sequestered" as a large increase in biomass that lived and stayed in the ocean, but I wasn't sure if it would work like I thought it would work over many, many fish-generations.

Biomass was biodegradable into carbon gasses after the organisms died, after all, but I still felt that increasing the total amount of biomass in the oceans would be somewhat effective, so long as the ecosystems weren't knocked totally off balance.

I wasn't an expert on anything but biology and technology that interfaced with it. I was smart, and I could make inferences, but they were fundamentally the guesses of a gifted hobbyist in every part of science that didn't touch on biology or genetics. If I could get one of my bodies in place as a prized researcher in a large Corporation, then I could have dozens of research assistants helping me with my "hobby projects", which the Corp would be more than happy to let me research to keep me happy, so long as I produced enough money elsewhere.

If they baulked at releasing my hobby projects or did so but charged too much for them, I could easily leak the research publically through my other bodies. As a prized researcher, I had no doubt that they would have me under constant monitoring by their counter-intelligence division, so they would never suspect me of the leaks. It would likely give them indigestion, trying to find spies or hacks in their systems that never existed.

However, there was a very good chance that once kidnapped... err, recruited, I wouldn't be able to tinker with my own implants for months. They wouldn't want to give me a chance to either create something to escape or kill myself with. In fact, I expected in that situation, my implants would be examined fairly closely and dangerous ones like my monowire or maybe even my cyberdeck removed.

So the Haywire comms had to both get smaller and more reliable. Smaller so that I could put them in a place that looked either harmless or critical, something that they wouldn't yank out of my body. I was close to this stage already in terms of the size of the current generation devices, but I still had more to go. I was six generations passed the first device I had implanted into my chest, which still worked but was now occasionally dropping packets during communications with its twin due to not being able to maintain in its current installation.

The next version, or perhaps the one just after that, would be small enough that I could incorporate it into a cyberbrain system which was going to be the basis for the synchronisation hardware.

However, they also had to get more reliable so that they could go months without maintenance, as otherwise, that body would be disconnected from the network and might diverge over time before it could reconnect.

I had already decided that if this happened, we would treat each other as sisters and allies, not enemies. I wasn't so prideful that I couldn't accept someone with the same skills as I had, especially when they would think almost exactly like I did. I would prefer that not to happen, but it wouldn't bother me that much if it did. If necessary, we could carve out territories, or something, so as to avoid stepping on each other's toes.

"So, what is your target, anyway?" I asked Kiwi. I hadn't sat in on her internal briefing to her team, as all I cared about was that she had to steal something that would be noticed and that it had to include something that I would hypothetically want. However, now I kind of thought that had been a mistake, especially since we were sort of operating as a team.

"The MR Kazuliski-maru is carrying a mixed cargo, but our target is a load of specialised industrial nanomachines," I frowned, as I wouldn't be interested in that, "plus several thousand kilograms of medical-grade nanites from Europe." Ah, I would want that.

She nodded, noticing my expression, "We have a buyer for the industrial nanomachines already, so it works out." He rubbed her hands together, "So, let me discuss the plan. It will start with infiltrating the port of Los Angeles, which, as you know, is a high-security area..."

---xxxxxx---

The Port of Los Angeles was a sprawling, huge area, and that was ultimately why it was so easy to sneak in. Unfortunately for them, it was way oversized for the amount of traffic the port received and was built and expanded in the middle of the last century. This was when the population of the world was in excess of three times its current level, as well as when there was not an Artificially Intelligent self-replicating minefield that roamed the Pacific Ocean. Whoever thought that was a good idea should have been shot. Hopefully, they had been.

As such, the level of traffic the port received was less than ten per cent of what it had received during its peak. The unused sections were lawless, one of Los Angeles' no-go zones, but they had easy access to the piers and the harbour, which we could use to infiltrate the MR Kazuliski-maru before it got underway.

Kiwi's plan was to infiltrate the ship as it was leaving, incapacitate the crew and meet up with some seafaring Nomads, who might be better described as pirates, to offload the cargo and escape. This has to be done after the ship leaves the harbour but before it meets up with the other vessels in its convoy for the return trip to Asia. The payment to the Nomads was that they would be looting other containers on the ship, so it was a win-win for everyone except the company that owned this ship and the people sending the cargo we were going to be pilfering.

And well, the consumers at large who would end up paying more, and the insurance companies... well, it was a win-win for us two groups anyway, and in the short term, that was the only thing that mattered.

"Alright, park the vehicles here," Kiwi said on the tacnet, taking command of the operation now that it was underway and we were in a dangerous area. I wasn't entirely a supernumerary, I would be assisting, but I didn't want there to be questions about who was in command in a mission with as many moving parts as this one, so I was keeping quiet and playing the good little soldier. We were all wearing identical sets of armour, including full helmets that were somewhat similar to what I was issued in Trauma Team if a decade out of date. Still, we resembled less a group of criminals and more a corporate Spec Ops team.

All Kiwi had told her team about me was that I was one of her former teammates before she constituted this new team, which was true. When I arrived this evening, they were a little surprised to discover that I was actually the doctor that had put in most of their implants and was essentially their team's sponsor. They weren't stupid and could tell that a fair bit of the jobs they did had only one purpose, which was to make my clinic safer.

In that sense, this job was quite a bit out of the ordinary for them.

As the two vans rolled to a stop, we hopped out of the vehicles and gathered together. The area we stopped at was at the east end, abutting the port of Long Beach, which was totally shuttered. There were abandoned warehouses and decades-old abandoned steel shipping containers everywhere.

Even as dark as it was, it would be a balmy, uncomfortable heat if our armour didn't include an integrated cooling system. When I looked up to glance at the full moon, the sensors in my helmet couldn't decide whether to shift to low-light or infrared vision modes.

"Step one, we need to proceed one hundred and fifty metres west our present location and pacify a group of wreckers that are inhabiting a former abandoned maritime services company. They serviced tugboats or something," she shook her head, realising it didn't really matter what they did, "In any case, they're too close to our exfil point here, so they gotta go."

All six of us gathered together and slowly approached the set of buildings that the wreckers were holed up in, but about twenty metres from the largest one, Kiwi held up a closed fist in the universal non-verbal command to halt. "They actually have someone on watch," Kiwi said, sounding surprised. Then she glanced back, turning her helmet to look at me and used my call sign for the mission, "Assassin, can you take him out?"

I nodded, activated my stealth system and eased out of concealment, moving at a slow jog towards the building. There was clearly electricity running to the building because the man standing on a galvanised steel stairway was backlit by artificial light coming from inside the building, which was probably ruining his ability to see in the night unless he had some sort of vision augmentations.

He was standing there, looking stupid and smoking. Still, when he glanced in my direction, I stopped moving just in case he managed to see the distortion my stealth field produced when I was in motion. When he looked away, I continued jogging in his direction until I arrived at the foot of the stairs. There was no way I was going to walk up those without making a noise, so I just casually raised my silenced submachine gun and carefully aimed at the glowing embers of the mostly smoked cigarette. Firing twice, I heard the man's body slump against the guardrail of the stairs, sliding down several steps with a thud.

That was, of course, the main reason I thought he looked stupid. Perhaps he wasn't a guard but merely out here for a smoke. In either case, though, it gave someone a perfect aiming point. "Target neutralised," I said over the tacnet, channelling all of my hours of experiencing trashy action BDs.

I deactivated my stealth system as the rest approached me, and I glanced at Kiwi, who said, "Infiltrating the local subnet, running ping now... filtering... targets identified. Eight people inside." With that, a three-dimensional map of the structure, along with lightly pulsating grey dots for the unidentified people inside it was transmitted to all of our systems.

All of Kiwi's team, except for her and I, had SmartLink implants, and they also all had one of the brand-new Kang Tao smart submachineguns. I heard that Trauma Team was adopting this weapon as their standard for Security Specialists in the next year if online rumours could be believed. We all walked up the stairs to the second floor, with me nudging the dead wrecker off the ledge, falling the four metres or so to the ground below.

Most of the enemy was on the ground floor, and there wasn't really enough of them for me and Kiwi to have to do anything. Her guys just designated targets, and at some hidden signal that was common with trigger-pullers, all opened up together from the elevated position. After they had put three rounds or so into each enemy, we broke into two teams to search the building for any survivors.

We met back up outside, on the ground floor, with Kiwi looking out into the ocean. She asked over the tacnet, "You're sure these things are waterproof and designed for use underwater?"

I nodded, "Yes... I mean, that's what the seller said." I affirmed, paused and then quickly qualified, "Supposedly, these used to be the standard in the NUSA Navy SEAL twenty years ago, back in the early forties." I hadn't actually tested them underwater, but I did ensure that the included small LOX system worked, was charged and that the auxiliary rebreather was functioning.

They weren't diving suits, and even using LOX instead of gaseous oxygen, we'd only get ten or fifteen minutes, but that was more than enough for even my plans. Its main purpose was NBC protection, after all, and not diving necessarily.

One of the men pulled out six small devices, handing one to each of us. At first, they kind of looked like weird, bulky, dousing rods, but you yanked on each handle, and then they transformed into something that more resembled a bicycle's handlebars. They were motors, using batteries and simple waterjets, that would let us move at significant speed until the batteries died. Faster than flapping our armoured feet, anyway.

We weren't too far from our target containership, and we all hopped into the harbour without any further preamble. It took me a moment before the active buoyancy system in the armour stopped me from sinking like a stone and another moment for me to figure out the bicycle handlebars, but after that, we were moving at a good clip.

"I have some secondary objectives. Please leave a rope or ladder at the target," I radioed. Underwater like this, even at high transmitter powers, the range of our radios was abysmal, but I got a thumbs up from someone.

I pulled to the left and accelerated around the stern of the large ship and into the next slip over, where a similarly large container ship was parked. I didn't waste any time and quickly pulled out one of my limpets and affixed it to the hull near the stern, under about a metre of water. The devices had a built-in GPS system, but I had to yank a small plastic antenna out of the top about ten centimetres for it to have a workable signal.

I repeated this process two more times, with one more container ship and one ship that I would have called a tramp freighter, according to my net searches about its name. Its planned departure was going through the Panama Canal and onto Europe. That would have been an odd voyage back in my old world, but the middle part of the North American continent was still something of a no man's land in many areas, and it was safer to sail around it than use faster over-ground convoys.

I got back to the target ship with about three minutes of air left, and climbed up a stout nylon rope that was dangling in the water. I'm not entirely sure how the first guy got up the hull, but it had to be some sort of gadget like suction cups or magnetic grippers. At one time, I would have found it rather difficult to climb up this rope, but these days I could bench two hundred and fifty kilos, so pulling my own weight up a rope was nothing.

I found the rest of the team huddling out of sight in the void of a couple of containers. "I'm back. What now?" I asked.

"Now we wait," said Kiwi, "But let's go over the plans. This is a big ship, but if there are twenty crew aboard, I will be surprised. And half of those are going to be in the engineering spaces."

We all nodded, she had told us all this before, but it was good to review. She continued, "Once we're clear of the harbour, we will need to hit two places on the ship simultaneously. The bridge, and the security office. Although they only have twenty crewmembers, they do have some antipersonnel autonomous robots for anti-piracy duty, so we will need to disable them first. I will lead this team."

She glanced around, "Assassin will lead the team hitting the bridge. It is equally important to secure the comms station. Otherwise, they could call in help from either the Coast Guard or the convoy security service. I will give you a datashard which you will need to insert into either the comms station or the main computer terminal." I didn't know where the main computer terminal was, so it was going to get plugged into the comms station on the bridge. She had given us photos of the bridge of this class of ship, so I knew which station it was.

"Remember, the client wants no fatalities unless it is absolutely necessary to ensure your survival, so we will be switching to dart pistols. The agent in the darts should render a normal person unconscious in less than ten seconds and a highly augmented person in less than thirty," she reminded us. Since I was the client that wanted no fatalities, I nodded twice. These sailors were just doing their jobs, after all. They wouldn't work on borgs, but I doubted there were any in the ship's company, and if there were, they would definitely be amongst the engineering crew, which we were completely bypassing.

It took another hour for the ship to be pulled out of its slip by tugboats and then another hour before it ponderously meandered on its way. Still, we remained hidden. While we waited, I worked on some of the CAD files on my new cyberbrain system. I was modifying a general-purpose cyberbrain manufactured by MoorE Technologies for my purposes. A cyberbrain was basically a heavily armoured and reinforced skull, with included emergency life-support systems. It was, basically, a biopod designed to interface into organic bodies and not full-body replacements.

Only a few companies produced them, Raven and MoorE being the two best. The target demographic for their customers were well-to-do people who worried about what might happen. Preppers, paranoid executives, and rich housewives were the biggest customers. The latter was because you could either put your brain into a donor or cloned body easily and therefore look and be younger. You couldn't live forever just hopping from body to body like some demented bodysnatcher, though. Absent rejuvenation treatments, your brain did age, albeit slower than most people's bodies did.

The idea was that even in most incidents that would result in your permanent death, a cyberbrain could be recovered, and you could at least be put into a full-body replacement afterwards or possibly have your body cloned.

I needed something that had enough space to add both user-serviceable entangled comms units, as well as the brain scanner device I was building. I had been thinking about what NC-Taylor told me about Cranial, the memory tinker. I just couldn't wrap my head around something that could download memories like your brain was a computer. Not yet, anyway. But I could do something that was, for my purposes, superior.

While I couldn't download someone's memories discreetly, I could scan the whole brain. I had been thinking about the rumours of the supposed Soulkiller software for months now, maybe more than a year. When I first heard about it, there was no way I could build something similar, but now I could. And I could do it better, too.

Allegedly, Soulkiller killed the person that it took a brain scan of. There were many reasons this could happen, but I suspected it was because it used equipment that was never intended to scan someone's brain and shoehorned it into that purpose. Namely, a cyberdeck interface and this abuse of cybernetics in ways they were never designed to be used caused severe damage to parts of the user's brain, which proved fatal. That actually gave me a couple of ideas for really fatal Black ICE, actually. Maybe that was what the mythical "brain broiler" did.

In any event, my brain scanner would be running continuously, with every "node" in my network. In theory, combining this with the FTL comms system would mean that each important brain area would be completely synchronised at all times. One mind, not just many that were connected.

"Okay, it's time," Kiwi interrupted both my work and my daydreams. We all nodded, shouldered our lethal weapons and brought out the dart pistols. They weren't very fancy and, in fact, were what vets used to dart unruly animals but filled with my special anaesthetic instead, so they were single shot, but we could probably reload them fast enough.

My team followed our internal map and Kiwi's urgings to the bridge. She would hack a series of cameras, tell us to move, and then we'd wait while she hacked the next set. Our job was to wait until Kiwi disabled the security robots, and if the bridge was alerted to attack them before they could raise the alarm, otherwise we would wait and attack the bridge together in a classic pincer attack from two directions.

We sat there, next to the bridge door, for five minutes. Before Kiwi signalled us, the door opened, and a man walked out directly into the path of me and the two other men. He widened his eyes but got a dart to the chest before he could say anything or scream out. I reached out and stopped him from falling onto the floor and stashed him in the corner, giving the shooter a thumbs up.

I had been waiting for him to clear the door more than he already had, just in case the dart gun was loud enough to alert anyone on the bridge, but that had been the wrong decision. The guy would have yelled before that happened.

"Robots disabled, moving to the bridge," Kiwi said, which made me sigh in relief after I disabled my suit's vox so nobody could hear it. "In position, confirm status."

I said, "Ready."

"Breach in 5... 4... 3," she counted down and I finished the last two seconds of the count mentally. We all rushed through the door at more or less the same time. There were only four people on the bridge, and they each got a dart instantly. I moved over to the comms console and shoved the datashard in without needing to be reminded.

"System intrusion in progress..." Kiwi said with the spacey tone she used when I knew she was hacking something. After a few moments, she said, "Complete. Assassin and I will stay here; Jones, take the rest of the team into the berthing area—one dart for each off-duty crew member. I don't want them asking questions when our ride gets here. Then we need to hit the purser's high-value storage. That's where our cargo is at."

---xxxxxx---

Although there were a couple of close calls where the ship was expected to answer incoming radio calls, Kiwi had been analysing the comms record and even built an AI-generated fake voice that supposedly sounded and acted like the comms officer and replied each time.

Our nomad pirates arrived about thirty minutes after Kiwi called them, and we loaded our cargo on by hand, but the pirates used the cargo ship's own cranes to load five standard steel containers, picking them from here and there onto their much smaller ship. It was clear that they knew exactly which containers to steal, too, so I imagined they had some sort of contact with the longshoremen, but it wasn't my business.

We all stayed silent until the pirates dropped us off exactly where we left our vans. According to my chrono, the crewmembers should be waking up by now. This would go down in the logs of this ship and the authorities as a routine case of piracy and certainly nothing else. The limpet mines connected to the other ships would release a small amount of algae every time that ship got near shore. That would be enough. There would be no stopping it in a month.

Now what could I do with all of these nanomachines? I really didn't need them at all, and in fact, I was still buying more than I needed from my principal supplier and selling the excess off. Well, I guess more was always better.

---xxxxxx---

Forty-six days later

Nicolo Loggagia was a busy man, and honestly, he hardly even ran his Corporation anymore, leaving the day-to-day operations to his Chief Operations Officer—his grandson Mario. He was much more interested in saving the world—or at least very small parts of it, one bit at a time. If he could live long enough, he'd accomplish the rest.

He wouldn't abandon the planetary surface like most people who made a quick buck. It was rank idiocy to do so, anyway. The effort required to planoform any celestial bodies was orders and orders of magnitude more costly and time-consuming than just fixing their own planet. It was better to work down here unless you wanted to live in a space habitat forever.

He never really understood the elite who had generational wealth in the first place. He started his first company in his garage with two thousand Eurodollars in his pocket, a dream and a lot of patent infringement.

It was only by chance that he heard enough to be aware of the important meeting that he was now crashing in person after arranging for an OrbitalAir suborbital flight just for himself back to Italy. He had been in Hawaii, releasing his latest project, which was the resurrection and improvement of the Hawksbill Sea Turtle, which had been extinct since the last Corporate War, when he saw an interesting item on local news. Apparently, people were starting to complain about a serious algae bloom in local waters, with an annoying-looking surfer complaining about it to the sympathetic newscaster.

Surfers, indeed. He scoffed. There were hardly any natural areas where that activity could be done these days, so any surfing that was done was on strictly curated artificial beaches, so he wasn't really that sympathetic to the man. However, he was curious about the algae, even if it only received a cursory two-minute segment on a slow news night.

He learned that his company had already discovered the same algae in Europe after he sent a sample to be sequenced at the local Biotechnica office, and from that, he learned of the planned emergency meeting. The files he had on the algae were quite interesting because they told him nothing. The algae in question had zero per cent similarity with any known phyla of cyanobacteria, or hell, any similarity with any bacteria at all.

That was impossible, as he had looked at it under magnification, and while it was radically different, there were still structures that were recognisable. It wasn't possible for it to be completely dissimilar when you considered humans were at least thirty per cent similar to this bacteria. So obviously, the genome was encoded somehow, and not in a way that he recognised. When he found out that the heads of the Bacterial Research Division were going to be conducting a briefing on it, he decided to crash the party. Perhaps it was time to act like a CEO again, especially when he read the mass spectrometry readings.

To say that his arrival at the headquarters in Rome was surprising was an understatement. He had been something like the Phantom of the Palais Garnier for some time now, hiding from public sight and scrutiny and doing his own thing. He was sure Mario and his wife were going to be furious, and while he trusted them both to make good day-to-day business decisions, he was concerned that they might make a misstep here.

"Nonno, what are you doing here?" Mario asked him when he arrived.

He hugged the boy, well man, now, and said, "I heard about what was going on and felt it was important I be at this meeting, son." That answer clearly did not satisfy Mario, but what could he do? In many ways, he was Biotechnica. Even if he rarely flexed such muscles.

The first part of the briefing concerned economic matters. It hadn't taken them long to realise the purpose of the algae; the damn thing produced ethanol directly through a completely novel organelle. He listened for a while and then cut the Research Director off, "Signor, yes, yes, it's obviously encrypted. Who cares right now, today? We have gotten used to the easy way of just reading the genome like a book. Pretend this is one hundred years ago; tell me about this bacteria through observation of its processes, please."

The Research Director coughed and looked rather nervous at speaking to the great man himself, but he wasn't a dullard nor would he have gotten to his position without being able to take the pressure, so he nodded, "We have observed the full life cycle in over one thousand discrete environments. It outcompetes everything similar, but it is, in many ways, much more fragile than we were expecting in certain specific situations. It only replicates in a solution with a salinity of over 30 grams to the kilo and over a specific temperature range--"

Nicolo cut him off and said, "Clearly, it is designed to only work in seawater; that is obvious. Anything else?"

"If placed in a simulated environment with low CO2 levels in the air, then it will not replicate either. It needs at least two-hundred-and-seventy-five ppm," the man said.

Niccolo hummed and motioned for the man to continue his briefing while internally, he did some calculations. Unless that two-hundred-and-seventy-five switch was necessary for the unique biological process that created the ethanol, which he doubted, it was, to him, a sign that the group responsible for this stuff were both idealists as well as amateurs. But how could that be possible?

"Does your group have ten-year projections on the continental shelf biome?" he asked, finally, which got another surprised look from everybody before the data was delivered. Everybody was now talking about eurodollars, the monopoly that now, and he just ignored them for the moment.

Nodding after reviewing the file. The projections were kind of hazy, but they all agreed on an absolutely huge increase in the total biomass in littoral areas, slowly spreading outwards, but nobody, not even the AIs, could agree whether or not this would be a good or a bad thing for the underwater ecology as a whole. This might drive a few species extinct, or maybe it wouldn't.

The genetic switch that stopped mitosis if there was insufficient CO2 sounded, to him, like a safeguard. That was the approximate level of CO2 half a millennia ago, before industrialisation. But there was no way just this algae would ever cause that much drop in CO2 levels.

Even with a huge increase in ocean biomass as a carbon reservoir, it would eventually plateau far above that. It wasn't that CO2 wouldn't go down, but if you were concerned over a year-over-year decrease forever, as this switch implied, then you had to take carbon entirely out of the picture in a way so that it wouldn't biodegrade back into carbon-filled gasses and bubble back into the atmosphere.

He rolled his fingers along the conference table. It was like he was dealing with someone that was as gifted a geneticist as he was but who only had an undergraduate's understanding of climate science. How queer.

Perhaps there would be secondary algae that did something besides convert the alcohol into sugars? Maybe into some kind of polymer, and they were just using the exact same genetic scaffolding for each organism? He made a note to keep on the lookout for such things.

"--so how are we going to destroy it?!" asked his grandson, somewhat heatedly.

"At the present time, we have no quick options that would impact the growth rates appreciably. We've tried a number of bacteriophages, but they are completely ineffective -- it is clear that the genome is encrypted at the transcription/replication process, so anything inserting random data into its chromosomes gets 'decrypted' into garbage," the man said, "Toxins work, of course, but uhh... that's not tenable."

"Why?" asked Mario, angry.

Niccolo shook his head, "Because it's a big ocean, son." What went without saying was they didn't have any biowarfare algae, either. I mean, why would anyone create overly aggressive plankton?

Glancing at his grandson, he nodded. Exactly what he was worried about was what was happening. Mario was trying to close the barn after the horse had gotten out. Worse, unless stopped, he would waste a huge amount of resources, political capital and goodwill on it and probably fail anyway.

Niccolo didn't become the CEO of Biotechnica so long ago because of his smarts, although they certainly didn't hurt. He took over the company because he had both a knack for realising when a change was nigh and the courage to take decisive action, even if it was scary.

"Mario, my son... we don't have time to stop it. I'm sure we will figure out its genome, including its encryption method, eventually, but it will only take a few more weeks before everyone realises what this means," he said, pointing to the quarter-on-quarter estimates. "Once that happens, countries won't let us do anything to stop it."

The fact that this stuff only grew around the shore was almost tailor-made to empower actual nation-states. The laws surrounding territorial waters were still enforced, theoretically, so whoever did this was just giving an epic fuckton of resources to any nations that had access to the ocean. Sure, only Hawaii, Europe and possibly Kyushu island were impacted now, but that wouldn't last. It would be smuggled everywhere else as soon as the value was understood.

It wouldn't cause revolutionary change as everyone was well-versed in extracting resources out of nation-states and giving them the minimal possible compensation in return, but it was still to throw a monkey wrench in a lot of people's mechanisms.

He made a decision and nodded, "How much easy capital do we have now?" Someone gave an answer, and he hummed, "Okay. In the short term, we're going to short our own stock, as well as Petrochem and our partners." That was wildly illegal, especially considering their insider knowledge, but nobody cared about that.

All of their stock prices would be taking a hit as soon as this became public, but the market was ultimately irrational and emotion-based and could be exploited. This was a body blow, for sure, but it wouldn't kill Biotechnica, so Biotechnica may as well make as much money off its wounding as possible.

"Today, immediately, we will shift our liquid investments into shipbuilding, refurbishing and the like. It will take months, maybe as much as a year, for the music to stop completely in the T. vulgaris sector. Have you heard of a ship designed to skim algae off the ocean? Economically? I am absolutely sure it is possible, as sure I am that it doesn't exist! I want to own at least a third of the shipbuilders that might tend to get these contracts," he said.

Niccolo nodded, "As far as our farming partners... well, I will take a personal hand in this. We have dozens of genetically modified plants and cultivars that we have held back because T. vulgaris was so profitable. Mostly food-based, but some produce harvestable polymer feedstocks and the like. We will have crops that are almost as profitable as T. vulgaris available for review in two weeks. Long before they can consider maybe just planting potatoes or something... unless they're Biotechnica potatoes, anyway."

Niccolo had the command voice of someone who once served in the Italian Army, even if it had been only a staff position, and people started to hop to. He was going to be busy now, but it felt kind of good. Like he used to feel in the old days before he had "won." Internally, he shifted more people to studying precisely how this chromosome replication process encrypted the genome. Biotechnica had similar technology, but there were many ways it could be done.

Who had made this, and why weren't they working for him directly was the main question he wanted answered.

His boy was still stewing in rage. Mario was talking to their Intel spooks about tracking down whoever did this. Maybe he'd succeed, too, but that was less important than ensuring they landed on their feet. Plus, he wasn't sure it was such a bad thing that something was shaking them up. Perhaps their planet could support more life if they could grow more food crops. There was so much non-arable land... could they dig small salt-water pools and grow these algae there, too? That would be cheap.

Perhaps he would have gone along with the plans to stop if it they were feasible, but since that didn't seem possible in the timeline they had, he wondered if he could take credit for it. It was a pretty good idea, but he was going to be absolutely furious if it caused his newly introduced Hawaiian Sea Turtle to go extinct. He had made this version venomous!