The Psychoactive Café (6 page)

The first model would be for PTSD.
It would provide the pre-sets that Xiang’s team had found most effective for
controlling panic and anxiety attacks, and would come with detailed
instructions and options for professional caregivers. It would essentially be
scooping Mercat by replicating the design they were preparing for the FDA.

The second model would be for
addictions and obsessive-compulsive disorders. The intensities would be much
lower than for PTSD, and would include a hit of A as well as B. There would be
several pre-set stations, like the thirty-second chocolate croissant buzz and
the two-minute cigarette break, and professional caregivers could set a variety
of options for specific addictive patterns. We were less certain about those
settings because we hadn’t tested them with enough subjects, but they would be
fairly easy to reprogram.

The third model was to be
marketed as pain control for people with recurring moderate-to-severe pain that
wasn’t being adequately controlled by other meds because of nausea or other
side effects. The settings would be limited to no more than ten hours a day of
mid-level B, equivalent to, say, prescription levels of OxyContin. Xiang didn’t
want this option because there were better solutions near to market that
targeted pain pathways directly. He said it was unethical to risk addiction by
offering the wrong solution to a common problem. Chenko’s position was that we
needed a way to eliminate the drug trade, and this would be the default model
that would actually get distributed to drug users. To save face for buyers and
medical clinics, we’d say it was for pain control. The pre-sets were strong
enough to replace a lot of illegal drug use while limiting medical risks. Chenko
agreed that we could write up the announcement to make it sound forbidding and
unappealing, like Viagra ads, bristling with side-effect warnings featuring men
in white coats.

The fourth model wasn’t really a
model; it was a blank slate. There were no programs and no pre-sets. It scared
the bejesus out of me, and Xiang was completely against it.

That was the first big argument.
Chenko’s rationale was that we had to bracket the widest possible spectrum of
acceptable uses, or else other products would take over. If we didn’t provide a
‘Turn the knob up to eleven’ model, someone else would reverse-engineer it, and
we’d lose market dominance within a year. Our blank-slate version was intended
for hackers who could flash their own programming into it. Hackers were going
to do it anyway, and that way we could set safety limits on intensity, setting
standards for the industry, so to speak. It would be released without a way to
manually control the settings. Someone would have to program it before it would
work with a control patch.

Despite these so-called
safeguards, all of the models could be unlocked and reprogrammed by any script-kiddie
in minutes. How did we know? Because we would provide the scripts in the
instructions.

That was the second big
argument. Chenko insisted that every user had to be able to control his own
implants. If a user didn’t want to be under medical control, he could go get
another control patch, or get his own patch rooted and unlocked, and if he
didn’t have the technical expertise, he could get it online. Xiang said that
was unsafe, and Chenko asked him how he proposed to prevent a totalitarian
government from controlling everyone in their country. Cripes, that was a
terrifying thought. External control of those things could turn you into a
zombie. Xiang backed down, Naseer built in additional options for rooting the
control patch, and Chenko documented them.

 By then, Miguel was working almost
full-time on his own video-presence projects again. The communications campaign
was essentially automated and ready to go at any time.

You might ask why Miguel, Chenko,
and I didn’t spend all of our time stoned. For one thing, it was summer. You
might think that’s trivial, but a summer in northern Canada is a miracle, a
precious thing that you don’t take for granted, and lying in a darkened room in
a state of false ecstasy didn’t compare. Being slightly stoned
and
outside
in the summer was another matter. Miguel would spend two or three hours a day
in a pleasant high, and then he’d crank it up after dinner in place of rum, while
sitting beside an open window in his parka. However, even he said it was like
stale cake if he kept it on too long. We enjoyed our lives, for the most part.

The subjects in the PTSD and
chronic pain studies varied in their usage. Some of them spent months in a
drugged out haze. I didn’t understand it. For me, after three days of pigging
out while Xiang was at a conference in Vancouver, I was nauseated with myself. I
told Naseer, and he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It is a sin of ingratitude against
God.” I kind of agreed with him.

By September we were close to
launch.

The final step had been to test
the manufacturing process and ensure that the built-in quality-control
processes worked. Chenko had located a few shady manufacturers with reputations
for making high-quality rip-offs, and commissioned limited runs. They were
located in India, South Korea, Eastern Europe and South America, to spread out
the initial distribution network. One of our main requirements was to minimize
the need for cross-border smuggling.

I don’t exactly know how he got
the test runs funded. Looking back on it now, I suspect that he'd set up a
quiet auction, invitation only, and offered a chance to get in on the ground
floor of a major business opportunity. The only investment required was to
create high-quality prototypes that met our specifications, and as soon as we
launched, they would be able to sell them directly. Now that I know more about
marketing, that’s how I’d do it.

No, I don’t resent that he took
a commission, if he actually did. I wouldn’t have accepted a penny for it, and
he needed an income for the work he’s taken on. It pisses me off that he hid it
from us. I mean, it would piss me off if he did hide it. You know what I mean.

As we expected, there were
several glitches in the first few prototypes. Naseer fixed them and revised the
file until Xiang was satisfied. Then Chenko went on a whirlwind global inspection
tour, funded by the manufacturers. He came back looking very pleased with
himself and with ten distributors ready to go as soon as we sent them the final
fabrication file. I suspect that there was a commission structure but, if so,
none of us ever saw it. We were pathetically grateful that he'd arranged the
testing for free.

While Chenko was travelling, Xiang
and I went to Toronto for a week to present him to my family. He transformed
into a shy, awkward Chinese guy, and I transformed into an extroverted Western
girl with real live friends. It was fun introducing him around, especially to
my oldest friend Patty. As usual, I met her in the hair salon. It used to be
that whenever I came back to Toronto she would see me, yip with horror and drag
me to her favourite salon for an emergency haircut. Eventually, to head off the
predictable argument and repeated humiliation of begging the receptionist for
an urgent appointment every bloody time I went home, I suggested we set up a
standing date. Patty would make an appointment at the salon for the morning
after my arrival and we’d meet there. She would tell the stylist what to do
within the constraints of strict functional requirements  - no hair products,
no maintenance – and we’d go out for lunch afterwards. This time, I brought Xiang
with me to show Patty and we had a shrieking, giggling hug-fest at the salon
which Xiang found mildly shocking, being entirely outside his experience of me.
The whole trip was socially over-exciting, and we were relieved to get back to
the lab.

I guess I should explain how Chenko
and Miguel had designed the launch process. It was quite complex.

They had bundled all of the
fabrication software files, instructions, and technical documents into one
massive zip file. They created dozens of variants of the file with slightly
different file sizes and different names to make them harder to identify and
delete. The idea was to make it impossible for law enforcement agencies to find
and destroy all the copies before they had been widely distributed. Originally,
Miguel had wanted to disguise some of them as high-definition movies, but we vetoed
that. We didn’t want to look any sleazier than we had to, although I have to
say we enjoyed making up names for the imaginary pornographic films.

Next, they created another
smaller zip file that contained an overview of the device, instructions for its
use, draft results of the PTSD clinical studies, a long technical article with
full scientific references, and a detailed rationale for why we were doing this
- everything but the fabrication software. We all contributed to writing the
documents, except for Naseer. Miguel translated all of them into Spanish and Xiang
into Chinese.

And then Chenko had written,
with my help, press releases and announcements that would go out to hundreds of
newspapers, forums, tech, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, the works. Between
the five of us, we translated them into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Farsi,
Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian and lousy French - that last was me.

Finally, they uploaded all of
the files into many different encrypted storage locations in the cloud.
Whenever we made a change in any of the files, Chenko would zip a new version
and replace them in all of the locations, so at any point we could launch even
if our computers were confiscated. As a quality control – and as a check on
Chenko – I would download and read the updates and compare the fabrication
files with Naseer’s originals.

A few weeks before launch,
Chenko added a dead-man’s switch. Every Monday, each one of us had to
separately log onto an online control panel using our own self-generated pass-phrases
and press the Delay button. If any one of us didn’t do it, the launch would be
activated automatically the following day. Or if any one of us pressed the Launch
button, it would happen immediately. Talk about pressure. Of course, we
arranged multiple redundant connections to the internet in case TU’s connection
went down.

A week before launch, Miguel
gave away his solar heater, packed up his video-presence gadgetry, said goodbye
to Alison, and flew back to Columbia. He told his advisor that he’d work on his
thesis project from there. Did I mention that he had set up a design company by
then?

At the end of September, Naseer arranged
for an indefinite academic leave for family reasons and returned to Kabul. He had a resigned look about him. Leave-taking was awkward. We had spent so much
intense time together as a team, and that kind of experience usually bonds
people, but he’d never become friends with any of us. He was a lonely guy. As I
say, I still feel really bad about my failure to connect to him.

Launch was planned for the last
week of October, Monday at noon, Central Time. Xiang and I were the only ones left
at the university. Chenko had flitted the day before leaving only an auto-reply
that said he would no longer be picking up email at this address. We didn’t
know where he’d gone, but I was sure he would have pressed the launch button
that day if we hadn’t. Miguel had checked in from his parents’ house in Bogota, and Naseer from an internet café in Kabul, to see if we needed anything.

Xiang signed onto the control
panel and pressed the Launch button. We sat at his monitors, dozens of windows
open, as the files appeared on torrent sites in their various incarnations, and
the downloading began. An hour later, the press releases were cast out in their
thousands and, within minutes, the news was picked up at Slashdot.

It was only then that I called
Mom and told her what I’d done. When she realized there was no turning back,
she rose magnificently to the occasion. There were no recriminations after an
initial bout of strangled shrieking. She ordered me to send her the full
package, which I did while we were talking. Then she hung up and called her
lawyer.

That was three years ago.

Did you want me to continue? As
of the launch, my role was essentially over, so I don't know that you need my
oral history after that. Other people are a lot more informed than I am about
the global economic impacts and such.

You want me to go on?

Okay, well, we got massive media
coverage almost immediately. The panicky reaction of the U.S. government helped spread the news and, by the time they began takedowns on torrent
sites, the files had been downloaded millions of times. Naseer had provided the
model numbers of current fabricators that could print out the device, and their
sales surged. Chenko’s manufacturers were churning out hundreds of devices
within days of launch, and others came online within weeks.

In the beginning, devices sold
for thousands of dollars. I wouldn’t say there were line-ups like there were
for iGlasses, but certainly there was an instant market comprising pharma
companies, governments, crime syndicates and the drug elite. Rave reviews were circulating
within a month using the name that the technology press had made up for it – de
Vice or ‘the Vice.’ Dumb media pun, but it stuck. I hate it.

Over the first year, the street price
fell to about a thousand dollars per device, including injection. There were a
few horror stories, but all of the medical complications, at that stage, were
tracked back to badly-done injections or defective manufacturing, not design
problems. A few genuine side effects cropped up near the end of year one but,
by that time, the overall safety of the device had been demonstrated. Regardless,
it was outlawed in most of the developed world.

During the second year, the
legal version of the device went on sale, rushed through the approval process
in several countries, including the US, which increased the legitimacy of the
pirate version. The legal devices were based on exactly the same operating
system and hardware base, and incorporated most of our innovations. We had
released all of our adaptations into the public domain under a Science Commons waiver
and let the lawyers figure out what was covered under which license.