John Barnes by Rod Rapid;His Electric Chair

Author:Rod Rapid;His Electric Chair
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-12-11T23:53:07+00:00

“Just made it all up, that’s how they got those answers,” he told Wilson. “That is what futurists and ecological modelers do. They make up numbers where they don’t have them. Then they extrapolate them all over the place, line them up in big vectors, multiply the vectors by each other to get really big tables, and then look around the table for something that appears to make sense. By doing all that, they turn ordinary disorganized crap into organized crap with numbers. And with error bars big enough to park small countries in.”

Wilson nodded. “I understand that. Nonetheless the assessment office says that the rationale for why this stuff can’t grow wild looks bogus to them.”

“That’s because it is bogus,” Jellande explained. “Just like their assessment. Look here, the idea of making the stuff chemically dependent on some rare element so it can’t reproduce in the wild is totally nuts. It can’t be done in any timely way.”

“Tell me why not.”

Jellande knew that Wilson knew already, but couldn’t resist putting a patronizing tone on his answer. “Because no matter what the clowns in the media say, we don’t ‘program in the genetic code’ at all. We just crib big sections of it that we hope we understand, and then put in lines of code from something else we hope we understand, and see if what we put in does what we wanted. Like an eleven year old that thinks he’s a hacker because he can plagiarize a big block of code and tweak some variables. We could spend decades trying to learn to do the things they’re suggesting. Or we could start a new era of incredibly cheap and plentiful materials, hardly any logging, and carbon dioxide pouring out of the atmosphere. You can go their way and just be safe as safe can be in your little safe hole — safe, expensive, and not too sightly — or you can help me get this case together, and own a lot of great stuff, and New England can be all snow-covered pine trees in a couple decades.”

Wilson was staring into space, obviously trying to weigh out his desire for Jellande to be right, and his desire to do what his bosses were asking him to do. The phone rang, and he glanced at the ID on it before picking it up. “Well, this is the big boss,” he told Jellande, and answered it. After various noncommittal noises, he drew a deep breath, and Jellande saw his shoulders rise.

“Yeah,” Wilson said. “Yeah. He’ll be sending you over a full set of his reasons and arguments on the subject, and I’ll co-sign it, and the short summary of it is, we ought to go full steam ahead, get it up and running in pilot, fix it on the fly. He’s listened to the other side, but that’s where Jellande is right now.”

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