Negative Energy

Rapid Feces Sterilization

Naturally, Matt tried to quest Miriam.

Information inaccessible.

At first, Matt would have accepted that answer as final, but he was becoming more savvy about his newfound mental abilities. There were different kinds of denials. If you quested whether there was a teapot orbiting the sun, you might get a response of, No data. On the other hand, if you quested technology for creating self-replicating nanobots capable of turning the planet into gray goo, you would get the rather ominous sounding, This quest is subject to official sanction. Between these extremes lay many shades of ambiguity.

Approaching a question from a different angle could sometimes define the shape of the missing information or occasionally expose a loose thread to pull on. In this way, Matt was able to unearth a record of Miriam's public life up to the start of the Big Fix. Having reverted to her maiden name of Engles, there was little mention of her fifteen years of marriage, which were portrayed as a fallow period on her journey to becoming a business titan: the CEO of a powerful multi-national AI company.

Following her cancer recovery and ensuing divorce, Miriam had abandoned industrial chemistry, where she worked mostly with paints and adhesives, to venture into pharmaceuticals. By the time Matt died, she had already scaled a few rungs of the corporate ladder and was poised to take over her own research lab, which she did a short while later. On the face of it, it made for a great story: cancer survivor quits dead-end job to head research lab in her quest for new treatments. But her career was about to take an even bolder turn. Alongside chemists, she brought in cutting edge AI experts to sift through vast molecular libraries in search of promising compounds. In this way, her lab produced a bevy of would-be miracle cures. But there was a problem: human clinical trials were too slow and expensive to bring more than a handful of drugs to market, if any succeeded at all.

Fed up with the bureaucracy and delays, she jumped ship and launched her own startup, taking her best people with her. The new company struggled at first. Her former employer sued her for breaching its non-compete clause. Unable to afford a legal defense, she lost the case and was shut out of the healthcare industry. A reasonable person would have thrown in the towel at that point, but Miriam was determined. She had faced down death. The threat of bankruptcy wasn't going to stop her. She took to social media and cold-called the CEOs of hundreds of companies. She had no product and no funding, just a small group of chemical engineers and AI specialists.

Then one day she got a call from the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the second largest country in Africa. Could her team design an affordable sewage system for an overcrowded third world city like Kinshasa? Despite having no experience with sanitation, Miriam said of course she could. According to some accounts, the Kinshasa project was based on a fluke of misinterpretation. Miriam's company was called Onco AI. When the president heard about the company on the radio, he misheard the name as Congo AI. By the time an aide informed him that "onco" stood for oncology, the deal was already inked. Besides, no other company was loony or suicidal enough to touch the project.

Miriam pulled not only a rabbit out of the hat but the whole rabbit colony. Onco AI, which shortly after rebranded itself as On-cO, provided the first low-cost, infrastructure-free sanitation solution in the form of a swift-acting feces sterilization drug. The drug was completely inert when dissolved in water. Upon drinking, stomach acid would strip away the binding molecule, and the active agent would suffuse the bolus on its journey through the intestines to becoming feces. The compound remained harmless within the digestive tract but turned corrosive when it hit the oxygen-rich air, killing the bacteria in the stool.

The drug was cheap to produce and could be infused into the water supply just as fluoride had been done in the west. Where people lacked running water, a couple squirts into a pitcher would do the job. No new infrastructure was needed—no sewers, toilets, treatment centers, or incinerators. All that was required was to break apart the turds to thoroughly expose them to oxygen. Crank-driven toilets made the process squeamish-less for those that could afford them, but a simple stick was just as effective. Within minutes, crap would be turned into compost with the consistency of a grainy ash. It retained its organic properties, making it viable as fertilizer, yet it was completely sterile. It could be disposed of like common trash.

After the Kinshasa miracle, On-cO licensed the technology to dozens of other nations, and its operations soon spanned the globe. The company diversified into different sectors, expanding into energy, communications, and healthcare too. A pesky court injunction wasn't going to stop them now. When the Fever Decade hit, On-cO had become the sixth largest company in the world and was in a dead heat to develop the first super AI that would set in motion the Big Fix. And that was where Miriam's trail went cold.