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July 14, 2004

The Biome Project

I'm a gnomey little dweeb driving my four door sedan 40 miles each way to my little cubicle. I turn on NPR and halfway through whatever paragraph, I turn it off and start daydreaming in the fast lane. Once upon a time, I wore a suit, overcoat and hat and peeked over my tome at the leggy women on the IRT. Commuting still provides ample time for reverie for the mentally overclocked and socially underutilized. This morning I landed in the 22nd century.

I had to explain to my new Third at the depot exactly why he had to eat his squid and why everybody scowled at him when he didn't clear his plate. After I put on his glasses and eartrans I explained once again patiently.

"It's you duty to the Biome", I said.

"The what?"

"The Biome, you idiot 3rd." I was more grumpy than I usually am when I pick up Thirds for integration, but his eartrans was set to 'Correct' so the slur didn't get through in whatever language he mumbled back.

Obviously he didn't understand that the success of the Global Biome Project had changed the way we humans ate in the First. Now that the project was successful, agribusiness had found that the lowest cost food to engineer and grow depended on which biome you were in. So there was plenty of squid for everyone but he didn't really have a choice of whether or not it was squid. I mean everything else would be too expensive. Back in the day, squid was expensive, now it was cheaper than chicken. That's because of the current balance of biomass in our biome. It made it easy to grow, in fact, it practically grew itself, and if he and enough people didn't eat it, we might be back to insects like in 2149.

How did I know the biomass composition? Well I didn't any more than he knew the stock price of IBM, but you could look it up because people were paid to know. And since much of the world, except for the third of course, had been mapped, the bioeconomists knew exactly which food chains would survive under which conditions. Since we humans are omniverous, it works out. The largest organisms to thrive, we simply picked off the top of those chains and sent them straight to your grocer's freezer. Sustainability was part of the economy, so long as people ate their spinach, as it were. But, Thirds had to have all these ethics explained. At least he was somewhat intelligent, I could tell he was getting it.

So then he asks me all these highschool science questions about how people figured out biomass composition and balance. Hell I don't know. Ask the gardener. I mean they all have the cheap portable biospectrometers that can tell you exactly what the air chemistry is, what microbes are in your dirt with all the DNA maps. From there it only takes a minute to model what survives best, not that the suburbs ever get out of balance. Sure they use it for dosing your lawn with the appropriate stabilizers to keep certain vectors out of your house, but the theory works for everything living. You figure out what's living, inject a positive vector and maintain balance. Geez. I was starting to sound like a cliche, but that's basically how it works. Anyway, I got sick of smelling his breath and suggested he get balanced himself. We could stop by the Wal on the way home.

Posted by mbowen at July 14, 2004 10:07 PM

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Posted by: Jillian Catoe at October 24, 2004 09:26 AM