That hope is a faint one, though. Patricia Rowan was right to argue that ßehemoth, by virtue of its ancient origins, should be an obligate anaerobe[8]. To even make it out onto the seabed would require either a very convenient mutation, or a deliberate tweak. Damn lucky the plot called for one anyway.

Waters et al. have recently reported the discovery of an ancient, hot-vent-dwelling nanobe called Nanoarchaeum equitans[9]; genome size, proportion of junk DNA, and diameter are all in the ßehemoth ballpark. Even better, it's a parasite/symbiont (it lives on a much larger Archeon called Ignicoccus). However, its minimalist genome (about 500 kilobases, half the size of ßehemoth's) lacks the recipes for certain vital enzymes, which it must therefore get from its host. It could never be a free-liver. ßehemoth, with its larger genome, is more self-sufficient—but how it crams all those extra genes into a capsule only 60 % the size remains a mystery.

The fishheads and the corpses got into a bit of a debate about the odds of ßehemoth hitching a ride in the flesh of dispersing larval fish. I was always worried about that myself, even back when I was writing Starfish—if true, there'd be no reason why ßehemoth would not have, in fact, taken over the world billions of years ago. Invertebrate larvae do seem to cross vast distances in the deep sea; fortunately they generally go into a sort of arrested development en route1, making them unlikely carriers of ßehemoth (which needs an actively-metabolizing host to withstand long-term thermo-osmotic stress). It also appears that even highly-dispersing larval fish species maintain fairly distinct geographic ranges, judging by the lack of genetic flow between populations around adjacent islands[10, 11]. Worst comes to worst, local topographic and chemical conditions can constrain the distribution of various deep-water species[12, 13].

So I dodged the bullet. This was not prescience on my part, and it may yet come back and bite me in the ass: at least one adult fish may have swum through deep water from Patagonia all the way up to Greenland[14].

Artificial microbes are almost mainstream these days: J. Craig Venter (the Human Genome guy) has completed an entirely artificial genome even as I type[15], hoping that such organisms will be able to cure the world's environmental ills. Peter Schulz and his team have already tweaked E. coli to synthesize a novel amino acid not found in nature[16], hoping it will be able to outcompete the baseline strain. Entirely synthetic organisms, built from interchangeable genetic modules, are just around the corner[17]. I wish all these guys better luck than Jakob Holtzbrink's gel-jocks had when they tweaked ßehemoth.

Seppuku's genetic template was first synthesized by Leslie Orgel[18] back in 2000; TNA actually does duplex with conventional nucleic acids. The idea of alien genes incorporating themselves into our own nuclear material is even more old-hat than artificial microbes—not only are our genes rife with parasitic DNA from a range of bugs, but functional genes originally brought into the cell by the ancestors of our own mitochondria appear to have migrated into the nucleus[19]. Massive horizontal gene transfer between species has occurred throughout much of Earth's history[20], and of course the symbiotic incorporation of small cells into larger ones has a long and honorable history reflected in every eukaryotic cell on the planet. (Back in Maelstrom I cited chloroplasts and mitochondria; apicoclasts are a related example, devolved endosymbionts found in Toxoplasma and Plasmodium[21].)

Taka Ouellette's awed appreciation of proline as a metabolic catalyst will probably be a little behind the times by mid-century, since Movassaghi and Jacobsen have already pointed out the potential of such simple molecules to act as enzymes[22].

Some readers may wonder if I have trouble distinguishing between personality and neurochemistry. It's a fair point, but don't blame me: blame the scientists who can't let a week go by without reporting yet more evidence that personality is just another word for biochemistry, albeit written in an exceedingly complex font (e.g. Hannuk Yaeger's propensity for violence, rooted in his monoamine oxidase levels[23]). Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature.

A central tenet of the whole rifters saga—introduced in Starfish, and expanded in Maelstrom and Behemoth—is that false memories of abuse can cause neurological changes in the individual every bit as real as genuine memories can. That was pretty speculative when Starfish first came out, but recent research has added empirical evidence of this effect[24, 25].

Details on the care and feeding of sociopaths were largely taken from the work of Robert Hare[26] and others[27]. ßehemoth's musings regarding the adaptive value of sociopathy in corporate settings may not be entirely off the mark, either [26, 28, 29]. (And as these references should make clear, neither Ken Lubin nor Achilles Desjardins are sociopaths in the classic sense. More goes into such creatures than a mere absence of conscience.)

Maelstrom established that Guilt Trip took its lead largely from the genes of certain parasites which could alter the behavior of their hosts. The actual mechanism by which this occurred was not known when that book came out, although some had speculated that it occured right down at the neurotransmitter level. I hung Guilt Trip's hat on that hypothesis, and am now relieved to report that the gamble paid off: at least one such parasitic puppet-master works by screwing with its host's serotonin-producing neurons[30].

Alice Jovellanos's denigration of the ethical impulse takes its lead from recent studies which establish that moral «reasoning» is not reasonable at all—it occurs primarily in the emotional centers of the brain, resulting in inconsistent and indefensible beliefs about whether a course of action is «right» or "wrong"[31]. An accompanying commentary article gives a very nice summary of the so-called "Trolley Paradox", not to mention an airtight rationale for pushing people in front of trains[32]. Jovellanos's arguments may be simplistic—the prefrontal cortex, after all, seems to play at least some role in moral decision-making[33, 34, 35]—but then again, Jovellanos was a bit of a zealot. For which she paid a price.