in the mid-'90s when the big agriculture and chemical companies started to diversify their holdings in an effort to lessen their visibility. Mitratech, Subloftco, AFH Venture Group, Petriluminent, Hyacinth Holdings, Ionophaze: there's a long list. Most of them don't even know where their money is coming from. They, in turn, fund little biotech and biochem startups that focus on one product. The product does well, though its main buyers are part of the vast web of subsidiaries who rely on that product for their own efforts, and so on and so on. It keeps on going, and I keep thinking there's one master product that all of these little pieces are contributing to, but I can't figure out what it is.
“Anyway, this company out of Denver—Mnemosysia—is doing something with memory retention, and they've done some early Phase II tests in animals that have gotten some people at Stanford excited. There was a paper in one of the journals last year about some enzyme found in whale brains—blue whale brains—and this company thinks they've managed to replicate it in the laboratory. Groups like Prime Earth were all up in arms, of course, because the foundation of the research stems from having to, you know, dissect a blue whale brain.”
“They're not very good at volunteering,” I point out.
“No, they're not. So, I hear—via a circuitous chain of sources—that Mnemosysia's research is bogus. The enzyme is real enough, but their synthetic version has nasty side-effects and about a third of the efficacy of the naturally occurring enzyme. Mnemosysia is feeling pressure from someone else, someone who needs their product to work.”
She leans toward me, her hand tightening on my arm. “This is the problem of sourcing your own product chain, right? It's like a pyramid. You need everything in each of the layers so that you can build up and reach that top point. But what happens when some part of the base doesn't work? Does the whole pyramid collapse?”
“So Mnemosysia started looking for a shortcut.”
“Yes. The complicating part is that Kyodo Kujira wasn't talking about who was funding them. Mnemosysia would have benefited from the research, and there's a paper trail linking both Kyodo Kujira and Mnemosysia—they'd had a few exploratory conversations—but Mnemosysia is on life support. They don't have the ready cash to fund the whaling expedition.”
“So the money is coming from somewhere else,” I say. “And you think that company is the one who set up the tests.”
She nods. “They used Mnemosysia as a lure, to get you to commit a team to the Cetacean Liberty.”
“Do you think Mnemosysia knows they were set up?”
She laughs. “When I'm really paranoid, I think Mnemosysia never had a product. I think they're a complete shell, and their only purpose was to look real enough to get your attention. But that means whoever is running things has been working on this for a long time.”
“A long memory,” I muse.
“There are only a couple of multi-national corporations that have that sort of corporate intelligence. Most of them go back nearly a hundred years. They got started in completely different markets—industrial chemicals, rubber, plastics. They've only drifted toward Big Ag and GMOs and biotech because their older markets have become completely poisoned with lawsuits and the market margins have all shrunk to nothing.”
“You knew,” I realize, “you said something else on the boat. Something about a cost associated with what we were doing out there. A danger we didn't know about.”
It is her turn to hesitate, and I find myself unconsciously leaning toward her, my curiosity aroused.
“Upper Management at Prime Earth knew,” she admits. “They knew Kyodo Kujira's fleet wasn't whaling, but they didn't tell Captain Morse. I didn't know why, and at first, I thought my source had been wrong, but then the four of you showed up in Adelaide and I knew. Mnemosysia was a lure. The whole setup was about Arcadia.”
I swallow heavily and look away. Confirmation of what I told Callis. Arcadia is at risk. He's right. There is some poison in our roots.
“Something happened to one of your team—Nigel—when you went out to the whaler. Was it the weed killer?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Different dispersal method, but it was the same agent.”
“And it's fatal to you, to your kind?”
“Eventually,” I force the word out of my tight throat.
“Why do they want to kill you?”
“For the same reason any homeowner wants to get rid of any pernicious weed that is marring their otherwise pristine lawn.”
She nods. “You said ‘steward' earlier. You