Four out of five doctors recommend Deep Trouble...

[Scott of Hyperborea]

You sit down in the plush seats of the museum theater, and listen with boredom as an overly friendly female voice tells you to please turn off your cell phones for the dutation of the presentation. Another voice, a deep male bass, intones that the presentation you are about to view was sponsored by the Deep Trouble Historical Museum, a generous grant from Omega Industries, and Viewers Like You. The room goes dark.

"Welcome to Systematic Expansion, sometimes jokingly called "Deep Trouble", a center of scholarship and prosperity in the heart of Straylight! Our sanct's history is one of courage, deep wisdom, and an abiding quest for greatness."

A vision of an island, seen from above. The sound of waves, and bird-calls.

"Biotopia, one of the provinces of old Audentior. During the classical age, it was a utopian society arranged according to natural principles. When the classical age ended, its stratified social structure fell apart, leaving only a few scattered remnants. One such was the college of the brilliant Tobias Persson, a small medical and biotech school held together by the dedication of its seventy-odd students and Persson's personal magnetism."

A picture of Tobias Persson, bespectacled and reticent-looking. He is short and thin, with a faint crop of brown-red hair. Completely unremarkable.

"Persson's greatest educational innovation was the idea of translating complicated scientific ideas into a language more attractive and intuitive to the majority of humanity. He was famous - or infamous - during his time for his tendency to phrase concepts from biology as magical spells invoking angels and demons."

There is a clip of Persson teaching, pointing animatedly at a blackboard. His voice is quiet but captivating. "All creatures are known to their Maker not by the false names of the flesh, but by their True Name, written upon spiral scrolls a myriad of myriads of times in every corner of their being. The True Name is a billion or more letters long, written not in any mortal alphabet but in a tongue unspeakable to any but God and the Enacting Angel. Now, this tongue is written with four runes: the rune of fire, the rune of air, the rune of water, and the rune of earth. The rune of fire must always be written opposite the rune of water, and the rune of air opposite the rune of earth, or else the runes become chaotic and the Name collapses. To know the True Name of a creature is to gain control over it. The True Name may be read in the following way..."

"After Persson's death, his school became unpopular. Persson's style of confronting the natural order head-on, and performing gung-ho genetic experiments on animals and humans upset the ignorant and provincial local population. Eventually the Kildari government bowed to political pressure imposed strict rules on biological experimentation."

Sad music, and a scene of distraught students packing their bags.

"The school split in two halves. One group obtained the sponsorship of a pharmaceutical company, and purchased a large container ship, the Local Maximum, and set up a laboratory in international waters where they continued as they had before. Drugs discovered as a result of their researches went to their sponsors, who in return sent them a steady supply of money. As the original generation of scholars died or retired, the pharmaceutical company recruited others to take their place aboard the vessel, where they came to adapt Persson's terminology and unique ethos."

A panorama of Argaal, an Atteran city. Exotic-sounding music plays.

"Another group took the offer of Ras Tigineh of Attera, who wanted a modern medical school set up in his capital of Argaal. They established the Perssonite University of Attera, training a generation of Atteran researchers to become doctors, biochemists, and geneticists."

The Atteran city partly fades, and a picture of the Local Maximum fills half the screen. Both scenes look vague and sort of dreamy.

"Both seaborne laboratory and Atteran college continued, successful in their own way, for a century before the event that changed them forever."

A jarring note of music. Then something stirringly classical, maybe German. If Micras has an equivalent to Also Sprach Zarathustra, that is what is playing now.

"Berihun Garret, a half-Atteran trained at PUA, announced the discovery of a cure for death. He did it quietly, with an article in a technical journal that only three dozen people in the world read with complete understanding, under the unassuming title of 'Induced chemical reconstruction of telomere material in rats'. His method, he wrote, seemed generalizable to humans with further research."

The music has now reached an especially loud and dissonant motion, and the picture of Berihun is slowly overlaid with scenes of fire, war, and destruction.

"By this time, the collapse of Attera was in full swing. Several members of the Perssonite University there had already been conscripted by one faction or another as bioweapon researchers or otherwise valuable military assets. Friends in the world scientific community told Garret that his discovery was too important to be lost in the political chaos, and warned him to flee before the Atterans realized the impact of his work. He tried to emigrate, but was blocked by the Argaal authorities. But Garret, along with his scientific brilliance, was a natural leader. Negotiating with Shirerithian authorities to whom his contacts on Local Maximum had introduced him, he and the entire staff and student body of the Perssonite University fled Attera in secret and rendevouzed with a heroic Shirerithian military forces that conveyed them to the research ship. The Kaiser himself welcomed Garret to the Imperial Republic in a historic telephone call."

"The Local Maximum was too small to comfortably host all the biologists on board, and the board of directors commissioned the leading sanct artist in McCallavre to construct a world-class marine platform. Operating off of the container ship and the still under construction sanct, Garret began human trials of his discovery."

Funeral dirges, silhouettes clutching their chests and dying.

"The trial was an unfortunate failure. Of the ninety one subjects injected with the retrovirus, sixty died within a month. Thirty others died between one month and ten years after the trial."

A picture of Maria Morimoto, smiling, apparently in her late twenties. She is standing in front of a birthday cake with two hundred eighty two candles.

"One did not die at all. For reasons still unclear to scientists, the treatment had its intended effect on Ms. Morimoto, and only Ms. Morimoto. Based on the astronomically high fatality rate, no further large-scale human trials of Dr. Garret's drug have been conducted."

"Berihun Garret continued his revolutionary work on the new platform he inspired. Among his famous innovations are the gene that holds the average IQ of Deep Trouble at thirteen points above Shireroth average and the anticancer drug norotecin. However, he always returned to his original goal of lifespan extension. He was eventually able to safely add ten to twenty years onto the children of those who implanted his treatments in their germ cells, but a safe form of his telomere reconstruction drug eluded him. He lost his lifelong battle with death at the age of eighty-two."

Image of a platform sitting serenely on the sea. It is green and spacious, and people can be seen engaging in happy activities across its length.

"The floating platform, first called Systematic Expansion, originally hosted a population of about three thousand, mostly scientists, their dependents, and employees of Amara Pharmaceuticals, the company that had originally sponsored Local Maximum. Around the time the platform was completed, local citizen Kajsa DeMarcus bought a controlling share in the company with the money she made from her patent on a popular cosmetic. Amara became the platform's chief employer, and took advantage of the enhanced-IQ population to become a world leader in the drug industry."

"Today, Systematic Expansion, colloquially called "Deep Trouble" as an in-joke among its citizens, boasts nine thousand people on the main spar, and six thousand in associated vessels and communities. Amara Pharmaceuticals offers free genetic enhancements to all citizens, and an level of medical care unparalleled in the world. A board of top citizens, including the chairman of Amara and the immortal Ms. Morimoto assure basic services while leaving residents complete control over their daily lives. With lifespans of many citizens passing the one hundred fifty mark, stratospheric IQ, and efforts underway to eliminate the scourges of obesity and ugliness, the citizens of Systematic Expansion can truly say they have achieved the old Biotopian dream of a peaceful civilization prospering from the gifts of biotechnology."

The lights come on. You rub your eyes, stretch, and head for the exits, bumping into a few of your fellow viewers along the way.

Wait. What's this? One of the people you bumped into seems to have placed something in your hand. A note. "Pure, disgusting propaganda. Don't believe a word of it. If you want to know the real reason this place is called Deep Trouble, come to 1-22-40 tonight at 8 PM. Don't bring any friends who aren't expendable." The note is signed "The Troublemakers"

[hypatias mom]

A cliffhanger!! Give us more!!

[Ari Rahikkala]

* surreptitiously edits out typos *

I like it. I like it quite a bit .

[Andreas the Wise]

Beautifully written Scott. And lovely to see Biotopia used too ... Atterock owes you a lot, it seems. The start of more to come, I hope ...

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Actually, are you familiar with the history of those areas? How Biotopia was an Audente "harmony with nature" themed province founded by me, and Libertopia was an Audente "Milton Friedman super-libertarian" themed province founded by Imran? Maybe with your recent interest in Friedman you might want to expand on some of that.

[Andreas the Wise]

Scott, when I started Atterock, I searched for any explanation for the original histories, and very little was forthcoming, so I gave up and went with what I did (and the plague to explain discrepancies).

Free market magic though ... hmm ...