Side effects of Deep Trouble include fever, nausea and death
Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:00 am
(a continuation of the story begun in Four out of five doctors recommend Deep Trouble)
You end up in a small, grimy apartment on a small, grimy street in a small, grimy part of the sanct. You see "FUCK THE SYSTEM" spray-painted prominently on walls, along with the circle-A anarchy sign and, inexplicably, "VOTE NO ON LISBON". Apartment 1-22-40 has little to recommend it beyond its neighbors, but at least the lights are on.
Inside, a man with spiky hair and piercings in uncomlooking places ushers you into a makeshift theater. You sit down around the back of a group of perhaps fifteen or twenty people, all tourists with that "How did I end up here?" sort of look on their faces.
The movie begins.
You are reminded of those "dead baby jokes" you used to hear on the more tasteless corners of the Internet. "What's the difference between a pile of a hundred dead babies, and a Ferrari? Answer: I don't have a Ferrari in my garage." The first scene of the movie looks like the setup for such a joke. An open stretch of ocean, broken only by the occasional dead baby being tossed back and forth by the waves.
"Abortion," says the narrator in a lower-class Yardistan accent. "Some people say it's a woman's right to choose. Other people say it's murder. But nowhere is it practiced on quite the same industrial scale as the sanct of Deep Trouble in Straylight."
A diagram of the famous Garret Process of inserting genes into germ cells.
"The Garret Process allows parents to build so-called 'designer babies' - when it works. What Amara Pharmaceuticals hides in the small print is that two-thirds of the time, the modifications fail, and the modified child develops abnormally. It's why most Garret Process therapies include the use of a fertility drug that promotes multiple-births. Of the two point eight children conceived during the average Garret Process fertilization, on average one point one are successfully born. Doctors advertise that the removal of the failed foeti is painless and convenient - and they're right. The whole process has become so automated that no one need even acknowledge its existence. This spot of ocean, where several currents meet and the debris dumped off Deep Trouble tends to end up, is the only evidence."
Return to the picture of dead babies floating on the sea.
"The Sisters of Viviantia, a nonprofit right-to-life group, estimates that the sanct of 13,000 performs 5,000 abortions per year, including those of off-sancters who visit for Deep Trouble's renowned reproductive therapies. To some, like the Brookshire Secular Alliance, these statistics are not troubling."
Picture of a group of Brookshirerithians, waving signs like "Get the Kaiser out of my uterus".
"But even secularists have voiced concerns at the sanct's legal definition of the practice, which allows the "abortion" of children as old as four years."
A video clip of a Deep Trouble researcher, speaking to a seminar of some sort. "Flaws in the Garret Process can reveal themselves at any stage of life. Developmental abnormalities that passed undetected in the womb might only come to light when the child is old enough to crawl, or walk, or form zir first words. If that happens, we need the option to show mercy on these children by terminating what promises to be in any case a painful and hopeless existence. The Sanct Board has determined that a child only achieves personhood when ze has a rudimentary command of language, and I think it's a wise decision. If the child can't even speak to us, how do we know it even wants to keep living?" The image of the researcher shifts to grainy black and white, and ominous music sounds.
"Data on infanticide in Deep Trouble is understandably hard to come by, but the practice is both common and accepted. Some sources suggest as many as hrgdlk wmbr vvvvzzzzzzzzz....."
The tape has jammed, or the projector has broken, or something. The man with the piercings shouts different variants of "FUCK!" for a while, and then, still muttering, puts in the second tape.
A man is interviewing a cyclops. The cyclops is dressed in denim slacks and an ordinary work shirt. He appears human save that he has only one eye, on the left of his face. Not only is the right eye missing, but there is no sign that it was ever supposed to be there. The skin covers the eye socket in an unbroken sweep.
MAN: Why did you sign up for the experiment with Amara?
CYCLOPS: I needed the money. Five thousand erb, a lot of cash at the time. My son had breakdown, and we needed some extra to pay for his healthcare.
MAN: Explain breakdown to our viewers.
CYCLOPS: It's one of those emergent chaotic processes. If the genes are engineered wrong, they might not fit with the rest of the genome, and there's a conflict. The body's self-repair functions keep it at bay most of the time, and then one day, the dam breaks and you've got five or ten different cancers.
MAN: So your son also had genetic engineering done to him?
CYCLOPS: Yeah, the more effective germ-cell kind. It was our fault, really. We were short on money, so we went with Turgin Premium Life, even though their reputation wasn't so good. We should have sprung for the Amara Gold.
MAN: If you knew Turgin had such a bad reputation, why did you order genetic engineering for your son at all?
CYCLOPS: You know how it is. The advertisements, where a boy with crooked teeth and lots of acne walks in for his first day of school, and all the other kids are pointing and laughing at him. Then 'This doesn't have to be your child.' We love our son. We wanted him to start on an equal playing field with the children of those rich kids from Hub. We would've aborted him if we'd known, but the breakdown didn't start until he was eight or nine.
MAN: I'm sorry to hear that. Let's get back to your experiment with Amara. What kind of drug were you testing?
CYCLOPS: Cosmetic. Supposed to induce the skin to grow over unsightly blemishes. My eyes weren't all that unsightly, but my skin grew over them anyway. Doctors were able to save the left, but the skin had fused too completely with the right one by the time I was able to get an operation. I hear they ironed out the eye problem, and the cosmetic's a big success now. Even the Kaiseress uses it, though you didn't hear that from me.
MAN: And did you sue Amara?
CYCLOPS: Couldn't. I'd signed a release form waiving my right to sue. It was a condition of participation in the trial.
MAN: But surely release forms don't cover...
CYCLOPS: We're all adults, here in Straylight. We know what it means to sign a contract. if I didn't want to waive my right to sue, I shouldn't have participated in the trial.
MAN: So what do you do now?
CYCLOPS: I'm in one of the smaller MUD communities off the platform. I do inventory at an algae farm five clicks from Deep Trouble Main. I started with a diving job, but I'm not so good at spatial tasks because my depth perception is like hell. The algae farm's nice and easy, and no one judges me there.
MAN: Explain "MUD community" to our viewers.
CYCLOPS: Mutants / UnDesirables. When you've got someone with partly transparent skin, or one eye, or tumors in conspicuous places, the normals don't want them around so much. I don't think it's aesthetics so much as it reminds them of their own mortality. The surrounding algae farms and resource extraction rigs are almost entirely MUD. We look after one another, and the businesses are pretty lucrative. Seafloor 8, Deep Trouble's main subaquatic dome, is run by Dan Hu, a guy with an arm coming out of his head. My farm is easy to navigate and requires only simple agricultural work, so a lot of the eyeless and vision-impaired end up there. I'm a senior manager now. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and all that.
MAN: So you're forbidden from living on Deep Trouble Main?
CYCLOPS: No, of course not! Citizens of Straylight are free to move around as they please! But no one would offer someone like me a job on the main platform; they'd tell me to go look on a MUD. Most businesses on Main Platform wouldn't even let me on the premises for fear I'd drive away customers. And of course there are only two ways of getting around the platform, YourPath and ArrowWay, and both companies have a no-MUD policy except in cases of emergency or pre-approved visit. If I tried to use either I'd probably be arrested, and of course there's no way out of the docks without one or the other.
MAN: How would you describe your quality of life?
CYCLOPS: Pretty good, actually. My first wife left me a few years back, but I have a new girlfriend on the farm and we're getting married next month. My son recovered from his breakdown and now works for Amara, where he's got promethin-cis-6 treatment and is taking the anti-promethinases, and when he has kids they're guaranteed Amara Gold and will probably become top execs. So our family's really one of those Straylight success stories you always hear about.
MAN: Thank you.
The tape finishes and ejects. The man with the spiky hair mutters "FUCK!" a few times, even though everything seems to have worked perfectly, and inserts a third tape.
"This is Brookshire Broadcasting's nightly News at 11. Glen Freeman, on the run for the past three years, has been arrested in Backbone Site on patent violation charges relating to the illegal synthesis of anti-promethinases."
A mugshot of Glen Freeman, now prisoner number 20882. The picture switches to a spokesperson for Amara Pharmaceuticals.
"The hard-working men and women at Amara Pharmaceuticals put in years of effort to create the promethin series of therapies. By trying to profit from them without fairly compensating us, Glen Freeman tried to deny the very basis of commercial exchange upon which our society is based. He is no better than a common thief, and we applaud the brave men and women of the Straylight Militia who have finally put him where he belongs - behind bars."
The screen goes black, followed by (in one of those decaying, urban fonts) GLEN FREEMAN: THE PRISON MANIFESTO. A shot of Glen Freeman, in his prison cell, talking at the camera.
"There are two types of gene therapy," Glen is saying. "First, you can use a retrovirus to inject a gene into every cell of an adult human. It works, to a degree, but it's crude and you can only make blunt high-level changes to the genome that way."
A caption: Glen Freeman has a Ph.D in molecular biology.
"The second kind is germ cell therapy. Edit the unfertilized egg, and you can do pretty much whatever you want. Biologically, it's a gold mine. The advantage of both of these methods is that the therapy only needs to be done once, and then you're changed forever. Of course, that's a disadvantage from the sellers' point of view. Let a parent buy the top germ therapy for zir kids, and the kids will never need to give you another dollar until they're old enough to have kids of their own. Where's the money in that?"
"Amara's most valuable product is the cis-6-promethin gene - that's a variant of a neuroprotein that increases IQ between 25 and 40 points. That's the difference between the class dunce and the class valedictorian. This is an especially problematic case for them: they're worried someone will get the gene and then use their enhanced intelligence to go work for a competitor. With a retroviral therapy, you could make the subject sign a non-competition agreements, but if you're giving it to unborn kids they can't make binding contracts."
"So Amara uses the promethinase enzyme. They inject an embryo with the gene for the enhanced protein. They also inject the embryo with a gene for promethinase, an enzyme that destroys the protein. Then they patent anti-promethinase, the chemical that inactivates the enzyme. So now kids get born with normal intelligence, and don't get the benefits from the gene until they take the anti-promethinase drugs. Which, of course, Amara only gives to those who comply with its terms."
"First, I had to pay them twenty percent of my income yearly. That was just the beginning. I also had to sign a contract agreeing not to criticize Amara Pharmaceuticals or their policies on promethinase in any public forum. Then I had to promise not to work for any of Amara's competitors, or any competitors of companies affiliated with Amara. Then I got the drugs."
"So, around the time I was twenty six, I said, you know fuck this. I stopped taking the drugs, and started speaking out against Amara's policies. Even got on TV a few times. But...you don't know how it feels, to be three or four sigmas above average g your whole life, and then go back to being a normal. There was one day, when I opened up my favorite webcomic and couldn't get any of the jokes. That was the day I started buying black-market anti-promethinases. Only for a few months, of course, to rachet my intellect up to a level where I could figure out how to synthesize it myself. Seven years, I was on the run from the law before they caught me. And now I'm here."
"They told me if I stopped sending out these videos, they'll give me my drugs back. Fuck that. There's nothing you can do with intelligence anyway in here. So listen to me. Screw this whole libertarian ethos thing. We need the government to step in and make the anti-promethinases public domain. I guarantee you that ninety percent of the Deep Trouble scientific community agrees with me, but they're legally prohibited from saying so because of the contracts. Meanwhile, if you're on anti-promethinases, find a black-market dealer. There are some good ones in Discontinuity. Go to the West Harbor, find the guy with the red ring on his shirt, and tell him "There is no friend, anywhere." He will know what to do."
The tape ended. At around the same time, someone started knocking at the door.
"WHO THE FUCK IS IT?" asked the boy with the spiky hair. A girl with a blue mohawk materialized next to him and shouted the same question, laced with a few more curse words.
An older man came in. A USB port marked his pineal eye, a connection to the basic computer implanted in his skull. "I hear you've been showing anti-Board videos to tourists in here."
"Fuck, it's the landlord," the girl told her male counterpart. Then, defiant, "There's no law against showing videos."
"Of course not," said the landlord. "But the Board just offered me two years' rent to kick you out of the building, and considering what a mess you make around here I'm inclined to accept. You've got three days to find a new place. Although," he added "if you've gotten yourself on a Board blacklist, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who will accept you."
Another man came through the open door. "Ah," he says, and turns to you. "I'm Mark Killarney, from the Tourism Authority. I'd like to apologize on behalf of the people of Deep Trouble for allowing these young hooligans into tricking you into seeing their propaganda, which is of course completely baseless. As compensation for your lost time, the Authority has decided to offer you all a free dinner at the StratoVeranda tomorrow night, a 120 erb value, and to give you each complimentary copies of this glossy coffee table book: Systemic Expansion: Better Living Through Biology. Come on now. We've already called a taxi to take you back to your hotels. The dinner passes are in the car with the driver."
The thought of a free dinner at a fancy restaurant blocking the past forty-five minutes from your mind, you and your fellow tourists happily descend the stairwell to the waiting taxi.
You end up in a small, grimy apartment on a small, grimy street in a small, grimy part of the sanct. You see "FUCK THE SYSTEM" spray-painted prominently on walls, along with the circle-A anarchy sign and, inexplicably, "VOTE NO ON LISBON". Apartment 1-22-40 has little to recommend it beyond its neighbors, but at least the lights are on.
Inside, a man with spiky hair and piercings in uncomlooking places ushers you into a makeshift theater. You sit down around the back of a group of perhaps fifteen or twenty people, all tourists with that "How did I end up here?" sort of look on their faces.
The movie begins.
You are reminded of those "dead baby jokes" you used to hear on the more tasteless corners of the Internet. "What's the difference between a pile of a hundred dead babies, and a Ferrari? Answer: I don't have a Ferrari in my garage." The first scene of the movie looks like the setup for such a joke. An open stretch of ocean, broken only by the occasional dead baby being tossed back and forth by the waves.
"Abortion," says the narrator in a lower-class Yardistan accent. "Some people say it's a woman's right to choose. Other people say it's murder. But nowhere is it practiced on quite the same industrial scale as the sanct of Deep Trouble in Straylight."
A diagram of the famous Garret Process of inserting genes into germ cells.
"The Garret Process allows parents to build so-called 'designer babies' - when it works. What Amara Pharmaceuticals hides in the small print is that two-thirds of the time, the modifications fail, and the modified child develops abnormally. It's why most Garret Process therapies include the use of a fertility drug that promotes multiple-births. Of the two point eight children conceived during the average Garret Process fertilization, on average one point one are successfully born. Doctors advertise that the removal of the failed foeti is painless and convenient - and they're right. The whole process has become so automated that no one need even acknowledge its existence. This spot of ocean, where several currents meet and the debris dumped off Deep Trouble tends to end up, is the only evidence."
Return to the picture of dead babies floating on the sea.
"The Sisters of Viviantia, a nonprofit right-to-life group, estimates that the sanct of 13,000 performs 5,000 abortions per year, including those of off-sancters who visit for Deep Trouble's renowned reproductive therapies. To some, like the Brookshire Secular Alliance, these statistics are not troubling."
Picture of a group of Brookshirerithians, waving signs like "Get the Kaiser out of my uterus".
"But even secularists have voiced concerns at the sanct's legal definition of the practice, which allows the "abortion" of children as old as four years."
A video clip of a Deep Trouble researcher, speaking to a seminar of some sort. "Flaws in the Garret Process can reveal themselves at any stage of life. Developmental abnormalities that passed undetected in the womb might only come to light when the child is old enough to crawl, or walk, or form zir first words. If that happens, we need the option to show mercy on these children by terminating what promises to be in any case a painful and hopeless existence. The Sanct Board has determined that a child only achieves personhood when ze has a rudimentary command of language, and I think it's a wise decision. If the child can't even speak to us, how do we know it even wants to keep living?" The image of the researcher shifts to grainy black and white, and ominous music sounds.
"Data on infanticide in Deep Trouble is understandably hard to come by, but the practice is both common and accepted. Some sources suggest as many as hrgdlk wmbr vvvvzzzzzzzzz....."
The tape has jammed, or the projector has broken, or something. The man with the piercings shouts different variants of "FUCK!" for a while, and then, still muttering, puts in the second tape.
A man is interviewing a cyclops. The cyclops is dressed in denim slacks and an ordinary work shirt. He appears human save that he has only one eye, on the left of his face. Not only is the right eye missing, but there is no sign that it was ever supposed to be there. The skin covers the eye socket in an unbroken sweep.
MAN: Why did you sign up for the experiment with Amara?
CYCLOPS: I needed the money. Five thousand erb, a lot of cash at the time. My son had breakdown, and we needed some extra to pay for his healthcare.
MAN: Explain breakdown to our viewers.
CYCLOPS: It's one of those emergent chaotic processes. If the genes are engineered wrong, they might not fit with the rest of the genome, and there's a conflict. The body's self-repair functions keep it at bay most of the time, and then one day, the dam breaks and you've got five or ten different cancers.
MAN: So your son also had genetic engineering done to him?
CYCLOPS: Yeah, the more effective germ-cell kind. It was our fault, really. We were short on money, so we went with Turgin Premium Life, even though their reputation wasn't so good. We should have sprung for the Amara Gold.
MAN: If you knew Turgin had such a bad reputation, why did you order genetic engineering for your son at all?
CYCLOPS: You know how it is. The advertisements, where a boy with crooked teeth and lots of acne walks in for his first day of school, and all the other kids are pointing and laughing at him. Then 'This doesn't have to be your child.' We love our son. We wanted him to start on an equal playing field with the children of those rich kids from Hub. We would've aborted him if we'd known, but the breakdown didn't start until he was eight or nine.
MAN: I'm sorry to hear that. Let's get back to your experiment with Amara. What kind of drug were you testing?
CYCLOPS: Cosmetic. Supposed to induce the skin to grow over unsightly blemishes. My eyes weren't all that unsightly, but my skin grew over them anyway. Doctors were able to save the left, but the skin had fused too completely with the right one by the time I was able to get an operation. I hear they ironed out the eye problem, and the cosmetic's a big success now. Even the Kaiseress uses it, though you didn't hear that from me.
MAN: And did you sue Amara?
CYCLOPS: Couldn't. I'd signed a release form waiving my right to sue. It was a condition of participation in the trial.
MAN: But surely release forms don't cover...
CYCLOPS: We're all adults, here in Straylight. We know what it means to sign a contract. if I didn't want to waive my right to sue, I shouldn't have participated in the trial.
MAN: So what do you do now?
CYCLOPS: I'm in one of the smaller MUD communities off the platform. I do inventory at an algae farm five clicks from Deep Trouble Main. I started with a diving job, but I'm not so good at spatial tasks because my depth perception is like hell. The algae farm's nice and easy, and no one judges me there.
MAN: Explain "MUD community" to our viewers.
CYCLOPS: Mutants / UnDesirables. When you've got someone with partly transparent skin, or one eye, or tumors in conspicuous places, the normals don't want them around so much. I don't think it's aesthetics so much as it reminds them of their own mortality. The surrounding algae farms and resource extraction rigs are almost entirely MUD. We look after one another, and the businesses are pretty lucrative. Seafloor 8, Deep Trouble's main subaquatic dome, is run by Dan Hu, a guy with an arm coming out of his head. My farm is easy to navigate and requires only simple agricultural work, so a lot of the eyeless and vision-impaired end up there. I'm a senior manager now. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and all that.
MAN: So you're forbidden from living on Deep Trouble Main?
CYCLOPS: No, of course not! Citizens of Straylight are free to move around as they please! But no one would offer someone like me a job on the main platform; they'd tell me to go look on a MUD. Most businesses on Main Platform wouldn't even let me on the premises for fear I'd drive away customers. And of course there are only two ways of getting around the platform, YourPath and ArrowWay, and both companies have a no-MUD policy except in cases of emergency or pre-approved visit. If I tried to use either I'd probably be arrested, and of course there's no way out of the docks without one or the other.
MAN: How would you describe your quality of life?
CYCLOPS: Pretty good, actually. My first wife left me a few years back, but I have a new girlfriend on the farm and we're getting married next month. My son recovered from his breakdown and now works for Amara, where he's got promethin-cis-6 treatment and is taking the anti-promethinases, and when he has kids they're guaranteed Amara Gold and will probably become top execs. So our family's really one of those Straylight success stories you always hear about.
MAN: Thank you.
The tape finishes and ejects. The man with the spiky hair mutters "FUCK!" a few times, even though everything seems to have worked perfectly, and inserts a third tape.
"This is Brookshire Broadcasting's nightly News at 11. Glen Freeman, on the run for the past three years, has been arrested in Backbone Site on patent violation charges relating to the illegal synthesis of anti-promethinases."
A mugshot of Glen Freeman, now prisoner number 20882. The picture switches to a spokesperson for Amara Pharmaceuticals.
"The hard-working men and women at Amara Pharmaceuticals put in years of effort to create the promethin series of therapies. By trying to profit from them without fairly compensating us, Glen Freeman tried to deny the very basis of commercial exchange upon which our society is based. He is no better than a common thief, and we applaud the brave men and women of the Straylight Militia who have finally put him where he belongs - behind bars."
The screen goes black, followed by (in one of those decaying, urban fonts) GLEN FREEMAN: THE PRISON MANIFESTO. A shot of Glen Freeman, in his prison cell, talking at the camera.
"There are two types of gene therapy," Glen is saying. "First, you can use a retrovirus to inject a gene into every cell of an adult human. It works, to a degree, but it's crude and you can only make blunt high-level changes to the genome that way."
A caption: Glen Freeman has a Ph.D in molecular biology.
"The second kind is germ cell therapy. Edit the unfertilized egg, and you can do pretty much whatever you want. Biologically, it's a gold mine. The advantage of both of these methods is that the therapy only needs to be done once, and then you're changed forever. Of course, that's a disadvantage from the sellers' point of view. Let a parent buy the top germ therapy for zir kids, and the kids will never need to give you another dollar until they're old enough to have kids of their own. Where's the money in that?"
"Amara's most valuable product is the cis-6-promethin gene - that's a variant of a neuroprotein that increases IQ between 25 and 40 points. That's the difference between the class dunce and the class valedictorian. This is an especially problematic case for them: they're worried someone will get the gene and then use their enhanced intelligence to go work for a competitor. With a retroviral therapy, you could make the subject sign a non-competition agreements, but if you're giving it to unborn kids they can't make binding contracts."
"So Amara uses the promethinase enzyme. They inject an embryo with the gene for the enhanced protein. They also inject the embryo with a gene for promethinase, an enzyme that destroys the protein. Then they patent anti-promethinase, the chemical that inactivates the enzyme. So now kids get born with normal intelligence, and don't get the benefits from the gene until they take the anti-promethinase drugs. Which, of course, Amara only gives to those who comply with its terms."
"First, I had to pay them twenty percent of my income yearly. That was just the beginning. I also had to sign a contract agreeing not to criticize Amara Pharmaceuticals or their policies on promethinase in any public forum. Then I had to promise not to work for any of Amara's competitors, or any competitors of companies affiliated with Amara. Then I got the drugs."
"So, around the time I was twenty six, I said, you know fuck this. I stopped taking the drugs, and started speaking out against Amara's policies. Even got on TV a few times. But...you don't know how it feels, to be three or four sigmas above average g your whole life, and then go back to being a normal. There was one day, when I opened up my favorite webcomic and couldn't get any of the jokes. That was the day I started buying black-market anti-promethinases. Only for a few months, of course, to rachet my intellect up to a level where I could figure out how to synthesize it myself. Seven years, I was on the run from the law before they caught me. And now I'm here."
"They told me if I stopped sending out these videos, they'll give me my drugs back. Fuck that. There's nothing you can do with intelligence anyway in here. So listen to me. Screw this whole libertarian ethos thing. We need the government to step in and make the anti-promethinases public domain. I guarantee you that ninety percent of the Deep Trouble scientific community agrees with me, but they're legally prohibited from saying so because of the contracts. Meanwhile, if you're on anti-promethinases, find a black-market dealer. There are some good ones in Discontinuity. Go to the West Harbor, find the guy with the red ring on his shirt, and tell him "There is no friend, anywhere." He will know what to do."
The tape ended. At around the same time, someone started knocking at the door.
"WHO THE FUCK IS IT?" asked the boy with the spiky hair. A girl with a blue mohawk materialized next to him and shouted the same question, laced with a few more curse words.
An older man came in. A USB port marked his pineal eye, a connection to the basic computer implanted in his skull. "I hear you've been showing anti-Board videos to tourists in here."
"Fuck, it's the landlord," the girl told her male counterpart. Then, defiant, "There's no law against showing videos."
"Of course not," said the landlord. "But the Board just offered me two years' rent to kick you out of the building, and considering what a mess you make around here I'm inclined to accept. You've got three days to find a new place. Although," he added "if you've gotten yourself on a Board blacklist, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who will accept you."
Another man came through the open door. "Ah," he says, and turns to you. "I'm Mark Killarney, from the Tourism Authority. I'd like to apologize on behalf of the people of Deep Trouble for allowing these young hooligans into tricking you into seeing their propaganda, which is of course completely baseless. As compensation for your lost time, the Authority has decided to offer you all a free dinner at the StratoVeranda tomorrow night, a 120 erb value, and to give you each complimentary copies of this glossy coffee table book: Systemic Expansion: Better Living Through Biology. Come on now. We've already called a taxi to take you back to your hotels. The dinner passes are in the car with the driver."
The thought of a free dinner at a fancy restaurant blocking the past forty-five minutes from your mind, you and your fellow tourists happily descend the stairwell to the waiting taxi.