Solomon Rhodes looked around his plain but comfortable prison room. He had about 8 months left on his sentence, but he had never been happier.
The Warden had let him subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. Solomon made the request with perfect timing when Warden Davis was in a really good mood. Davis’s daughter had been accepted to a top tier school on the West coast. She had thought it a very long shot at best. A million-dollar donation to the school renovation fund was enough for her application to get the most favorable consideration. Solomon smirked - it was doubtless a waste of money, but Warden Davis was a nice guy and bribing him directly was impossible.
There was an article on page 5 about an FBI securities investigation starting on a fund called Blue Mountain. It looked like Solomon’s activities were starting to cause some problems. He had been getting the jump on some extremely corrupt hedge funds. In just a few weeks he had made over a billion dollars using insider trading opportunities. It was so simple. If a company was about to get a contract awarded, he would buy some short-term options to leverage the upside. When a government agency was about to make a large purchase, he bought up the futures contracts or real estate in that area. He then sold it back to them for a quick turnover with a huge mark-up. He was getting the information a few hours earlier than the hedge funds leaving barely any profit in these schemes.
Some large funds were about to have a lot of trouble as the easy money dried up. The investors would get angry their absurd returns were gone and pull out their money. These funds usually didn’t have a lot of liquid reserves. A few big withdrawals would force them to scramble for cash. They would have to dip into their more stable investments even if they had to sell at a loss.
Solomon placed a range of large short positions on big stable companies that were widely owned by these funds. When the funds dumped their stable investments, the stock market would crash. This would probably cause a recession, but he was going to make a killing. He had donated about 10 million anonymously to hundreds of small charities and would continue to do so. It just felt so good to steal from the rich and then give a small fraction of it away to poor people.
Solomon idly checked the big numbers pouring into his account. He laughed when he saw his minimum wage salary getting paid by a company called Genysis Mining. That Scott kid had really done him a favor moving the timeline up. His prison stay was so much more enjoyable as a result. He had gotten revenge on the people who put him here, screwed with the Russians, and made a fortune. Life was good!
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Ed Gill was the manager of the Spring Vale homeless shelter. He almost never showed up there because homeless people were smelly, and they often tried to talk to him. Besides, he had delegated feeding the bums to one of their own, a gluttonous woman called Tara. And if she ate so much that some didn’t get any, why should he care? They should get a job or something.
Anyway, he had gotten an email that the shelter had received an anonymous donation of 50,000 dollars. He should be happy, but now he had to come up with a plan to spend it. That was a lot of work he didn’t want to deal with. He idly tried to come up with some way to embezzle it, but wasn’t smart enough to come up with something foolproof. He figured he could just pay for the place to be cleaned and get some new furniture. The last time he went, the place was filthy. Tara had told him it was because Melinda White moved out and she used to organize the residents to do basic chores.
He sort of remembered that gibbering hag. He shivered a bit. Kind of a relief she was gone, although he’d have to visit here even less if it was going to be this dirty.
Tara also mentioned a guy named Carl who lived in the parking lot had disappeared and not come back. Now there was a guy who was never going to get a job! Poor guy had a room set up for him but still decided to sleep outside in a box. Ed felt vaguely sorry for the guy - he had serious mental problems and something bad had probably happened to him.
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Elsa Pittman had been very busy. It had all started going to some party with her friend and meeting a strange group of boys. They had casually talked about unbelievable technology they were working on. Her friend had even confirmed they were telling the truth! She had taken a look at the program they all seemed so excited about and read some interesting articles about developmental biology.
She had already learned the basics in high school about how DNA encoded mRNA which was expressed as proteins. These proteins determined how everything in a cell operated. She understood the basic idea that an organism started as stem cells which differentiated into all the different types of tissue and organs in the body.
In college her education tended to focus on more detail of how different systems worked and how defective genes, external toxins, or pathogens could cause things to go wrong. There was a lot of talk about how they designed drugs to target various proteins to help or hurt certain functions. It was just a lot of information - so many genes named after so many scientists who studied some rare disease or came up with some experiment. She had always felt the system was overly complicated by learning all the process and history of thousands of scientists who had contributed. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate their hard work, but it just felt like there was too much historical baggage and not enough explaining exactly how things worked.
The Glitch_HR training seemed to agree with her. Instead of exhaustive histories of past experiments and distinguished scientists, she found articles written by data scientists or speculation from undergraduate lab assistants.
One person had used a computer to categorize all known genes into broad categories related to where the proteins they produced would operate. The main categories were proteins that stayed in the nucleus, proteins that were never expressed, proteins that stayed in the cell, proteins that moved outside of the cells. This was not particularly exciting, but they went further from here.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The author colored the DNA according to these categories and projected it onto images of chromosomes. It wasn’t really groundbreaking, but the non-expressed sections were typically bound tightly in proteins and formed the structure. Bound sections did not get expressed, while free loops were constantly producing mRNA and protein. A closer look at the sequence found that the bound sections had a few hundred repeating sequences that showed up at a high frequency.
Proteins that just sat in the nucleus could bind with the DNA or other proteins and the author speculated that many would either lock or unlock portions of the chromosomes. Cells that had specialized into different tissue types had significant differences in the structure of which DNA was bound or free to express. The author lamented that they could not find the details of exactly which changes to the structure of the chromosome corresponded to different cell specializations.
Another author built a database mapping the most common proteins expressed in various cells by tissue types - they used a notation for identifying proteins based on size and amino acid fraction with no attempt to trace them back to the proper name of some 20th century scientist who had mapped a gene to some rare disease.
Someone else had gone the opposite way and shared a database with all the genes identified with linked scientific papers that had identified a function or disease related to mutations in that gene.
The amount of data was overwhelming, but Elsa felt she was on the verge of putting some pieces together. She got a bit obsessed reading through all this science and speculation. She started skipping classes and ignoring her friends - even Barry. She had really enjoyed their date, but the poor guy could not compete with unraveling the secrets of the universe!
A couple weeks into her deep dive, Elsa took a break and decided to talk to Melinda White who had been persistent in requesting they have a chat. She knew Adrianna and Barry both were in awe of the woman, so she figured a few minutes talking wouldn’t hurt.
“Hello dear, “ the kindly sounding woman began. “I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but I get some reports summarizing the articles people are looking at in our training software.”
“Oh. Is there something wrong?”
“Not at all. I’m excited at the direction I think you are going. I just wanted you to be aware of some plans I have and where I think you will fit in.”
“Oh, OK.” Elsa replied skeptically.
“So, I have set up an organization called Genysis Biotechnology. You are currently a member of this company in Glitch_HR. You probably haven’t looked much at the org chart screen or you would have seen there are four other employees in this group.” Melinda explained.
Elsa wasn’t sure where this was going.
“Anyway, I’m planning to turn this into a real company soon and I’d like you to be one of the main owners. Similar to how Barry, Matt and Scott have their own companies that I am helping to manage.”
Elsa really had been out of touch. Adrianna had mentioned something about companies and how Scott was a millionaire, but she honestly hadn’t paid attention to the details. She made an effort to focus. Melinda wanted her to be part of a company along with a few other people she didn’t know. This was probably important, so she consciously tried to stop thinking about DNA and proteins.
“Briefly, I’m working with a girl named Lata Dhar to build a microchip that can encode proteins. I have a boy named Sebahat Babacan who can help us with databases and other computer graphics. There are another couple employees you don’t need to worry about right now.”
“A microchip to encode proteins sounds very interesting. So much of what I’m learning in school involves inserting DNA and expressing it in yeast or bacteria. If you get that working you could skip a lot of steps. It would really disrupt the whole biotech industry!”
“That’s correct. This is part of the reason I wanted to talk. You need to be aware of some of what we will be doing that wasn’t available to others when they wrote the articles you have read.”
“So, with a database guy I could combine some of the databases that others produced and map out a good portion of the developmental pathways from stem cells to fully differentiated… if we could print out proteins we could fill in all the gaps or even force new paths…”
Melinda waited patiently while Elsa babbled on.
“Oh! This was your plan all along and I was too dumb to pick up the phone!” Elsa exclaimed with embarrassment.
“Don’t worry, I figured you would talk to me when you were ready.’ Melinda replied.
“So, there is some equipment I read about. They use it for testing pharmaceuticals. It can automatically inject different solutions into hundreds of cells. If we had that, plus what we just talked about we could probably come up with new medicines.”
“Of course. I’ll look into that. Medicines are just a part of what we will look at, but it’s enough for initial funding.” Melinda replied. “If you are willing to work with Lata and Sebahat, I’m going to finish up a business plan. Angela is a bit overwhelmed so I’ll look for a different source of funding. If you are onboard I was going to set initial equity as 30% for you, 25% for Scott, 15% each for Lata, Sebahat and myself. Our shares will be diluted further when I find an investor, but I’ll let you know when I have details. I will not be giving up control of this company, so I hope to get up and running selling no more than a 20% stake.”
“That sounds exciting. Sorry, did you say Scott is getting 25%?”
“Yes, we will continue to use Glitch_HR and I am eternally grateful to him for building the tools I need to communicate. I will insist that he gets at least a 25% initial stake in any company I’m involved in.”
“Oh,” Elsa said sheepishly. “Yeah, I guess he deserves it! That all sounds great. I hope it works out because I am pretty sure I’m going to fail all my finals.”
“Don’t worry too much about that. I’ll make sure we have a salary allowance for you in the proposal. Besides, you might do well on your finals, if you give it a try. Why don’t you take a step back and use your new skills to learn the basics they are teaching in class? Maybe have a little fun and give Barry a call. The poor boy is worried he scared you off. I’ve heard he’s a millionaire now - quite a catch!” Melinda cackled.
“Yeah, I think I got a bit too intense the past few weeks. I’ll try to act like a normal college kid for a bit.” Elsa agreed.
After hanging up, Elsa decided to look at the org chart in Glitch_HR. She was sitting at the bottom as a Junior Medical Tech. She saw Lata and Sebahat - both were listed in Senior technical positions, and there was another electrical engineer. Melinda was CEO but listed as a Senior Research Surgeon. Finally, there was a guy named “Carl” with the job title “Cybernetics Guinea Pig”. What the heck?!