This is how it began:

In a moment of dumbness, Caitlin clicked on the link: believe it or not, given the specific context of the missive it was actually plausible that it came from the person whose name was attached. Ever since then, everyone on Caitlin’s contact list has been getting the same message (some of us twice), this time signed “Caitlin”. And this is a savvy hack indeed: those suspicious enough to actually write back, asking if this was legit (the e-mail certainly lacked anything even close to the BUG’s narrative voice) received another e-mail in response, assuring them in the same fractured English that yes indeed, Caitlin was the actual author. At the same time the little fucker deletes your Gmail contact list; unless you have a photographic memory or an offsite record of your contacts, you lose the ability to send a mass warning to those on the hit list. The most you can do is wait until various perplexed and angry people write back, one by one, and reply to them in turn.

Clever, then, but obvious phishery; I Googled a bit and learned that those who get suckered by this scam find themselves on a faux-Google page that tries to trick them into entering their Gmail login credentials. I also discovered that this agent doesn’t limit itself to e-mails; it’s starting to infiltrate blogs and impersonate actual posts (although even less convincingly in that context).

Here’s the thing, though.  While I’ve seen this fucker in action, and while I’ve found alerts at malware monitoring sites and on  Google forums, I haven’t found a single reference to its ability to wipe out the entire contents of one’s Gmail account. And that does seem to be the kind of thing that would warrant some sort of mention.

Caitlin lost tens of thousands of cloud-borne e-mails. She never bothered to make local backups, trusting Google’s servers for such security— and while Google does apparently offer archiving services for paying customers, the most they do for us freeloaders is recommend that we keep local backups. (We will save for another time my rant about why you should never trust your data to the fucking cloud, and why certain authors who smugly proclaim “We are not going to retreat from the cloud” either have their heads up their asses or are taking kickbacks from Google. Does anyone think the Cylons would have been able to pull it off if everyone on the Twelve Colonies had been running Xp?)

Things have improved between this paragraph and the last. One of the BUG’s IT-savvy friends has come down to our booth (we’re drowning our sorrows at the Duke of Somerset) and discovered that her MacBook Air has, in fact, retained a scrambled and intermittent local backup of sorts. All is not lost, only some; and while the date-stamps on the remainder are totally fucked, the text of the surviving emails seems to be intact.

Still. That was a fortuitous happenstance on a local flash drive. The definitive archive in the cloud is just gone — and from what we can tell, the surviving local subset will get nuked the moment we connect with that cloud. Something up there is still lurking in Caitlin’s account, hungry for kibbles and bits; it’s the Ebola of computer viruses, so virulent that it’s bound to implode from its own lethality before it has a chance to conquer the world.

It’s conquered the BUG’s account, though. And the weird thing is, nobody else who’s reported this phish seems to have experienced anything remotely close to that level of lethality.

I know you people, as a statistical population if not as individual faces. A lot of you eat bytes for breakfast.

Any suggestions?

(That said, I am typing this while sitting on our front porch, twilight deepening around me. I have fond hopes for a replay of last night’s three-way dust-up between rival gangs of cats, possums, and raccoons, all of whom converged pretty much simultaneously on the kibble we leave out here as an offering to the local wildlife. If that happens — and if I escape with all my toes and some decent pictures — I might post those too. Although I don’t know how long it might take to upload a toe using my Telus account.)

Anyway. While this project sprints for the finish line, others unwind around the world. One such is a little e-collection which is about to come out from Fata Libelli, in Spain— and over the past week or so I’ve been sneaking away from Echopraxia now and then to answer some questions they e-mailed me in hopes of spurring interest amongst their base.

Tonight’s impoverished offering, therefore, is an prexcerpt from that interview, with a bit of a semantic bent. Because we all know that if there’s anything more fascinating than watching a bunch of panelists sitting around arguing about the definition of “science fiction”, it’s gotta be watching a bunch of people sitting around arguing about the definition of “life”:

FL:

Your aliens have been widely praised for looking genuinely different, not just like green humanoids. Sometimes, those aliens are so weird (no genes, no cephalisation, hive minds instead of individual selves) that even the main characters have trouble identifying them as living beings. Is there a basic definition of ‘life’ suitable for humans, aliens and IAs?

PW:

Up until recently, Dawkins’s definition would have done just fine: Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Of course, that means that computer viruses have the potential to qualify as life forms, not just metaphorically but literally. I can live with that. A-life can meet Darwin’s criteria as well as any other kind.

The problem now is that we’re actually in the process of creating synthetic life — squishy bugs with real genes and metabolic processes — pretty much from scratch. Those things are undeniably alive, yet were not shaped by natural selection. You could make an analogous case for any conscious AIs not derived via genetic algorithm.

Darwin coined the term “natural selection” to distinguish it from the “artificial selection” that characterizes things like the selective breeding of dogs and pigeons. So perhaps tweaking Dawkins definition to “Information, shaped by natural or artificial selection” might be enough to cover the synthetics coming up through the ranks.

Or maybe it’s time to give up on defining “life” in terms of the way it was derived, or what it’s made of, and to concentrate instead on what it does. So: How about defining life as any complex of structured energy pathways that restricts entropy increase below some threshold rate?

What do you guys think? Anybody have any thoughts on where that threshold might lie?  Hell, judging by your past comments it’s pretty obvious that  most of you know how to define “entropy”, and I bet a few of you even know what units it goes by. Which, offhand, is more than I can claim right now.

Shhh. Something rustling under the porch…

Hell, I’ll take it.

Of course, the problem now is that the Ballroom at the Gladstone Hotel only held about a hundred attendees; Canadian SF fandom must number almost twice that many.  So the question is how to let those other folks in on what they’d be voting for (or against).  It turns out that videos were made of all the talks that day, but as luck would have it all the slides I presented during “Hive Minds, Mind Hives” ended up out-of-frame and the audio track was unintelligible to boot. (We will pause a moment here for the inevitable wisecracks about whether that word is more properly applied to the recording or the speaker.)  Helen Marshall— a ChiZine stalwart, and nominated herself in no less than three categories— was willing to upload that file regardless, but all you’d have seen would have been some gangly middle-aged dude gesticulating wildly while speaking in tongues, being interrupted occasionally by (what I’m pretty sure was) appreciative laughter.

So what I’ve done is re-record the talk, based on my original notes and what I can remember of the off-script bits. I laid that down behind a PowerPoint of the slides themselves, converted the whole thing to a variety of formats, and uploaded it to YouTube.  You can watch it right here:

It lacks the ambiance and spontaneity of a live performance, but at least you can both see and hear what I’m talking about. Be warned: it’s 40 minutes long. The cautious and/or busy among you might want to first check out the brief excerpt I posted leading up to the event itself, just to see if it’s really up your alley. I’ll also be posting a link to an archived file over on the backlist page sometime over the next few days, and of course some version of this thing will show up in the official Aurora voting packet.

But you saw it here first. (In more ways than one; since I gave the talk last fall I’ve recycled some of its ideas on this very ‘crawl.)

I like the cover. I like the layout. I like the way the teaser text down there in the corner kinda leads one to think that Blindsight won the Hugo even though it didn’t. I’m a little surprised by the pull from the NY Times — it’s lifted out of context and not, I think, really descriptive of my work overall — but I get the sense I’m in a teensy minority when it comes to characterizing my own work anyway, so okay. “Seriously paranoid” is a punchy little eye-catcher at the very least.

I gotta say I’m a bit taken aback by the synopsis, though.

Not the story thumbnails, mind you: those rock. Whoever wrote that text did a bang-up job. No, what raises my eyebrows is the description of me: “a highly controversial author”.

Highly controversial? Seriously?

Grumpy, misanthropic, nihilistic, cuddly — I’ve been called all of these things before. I don’t necessarily agree with any of them (except maybe that last one), but at least I’m used to them. I don’t think anyone’s described me as controversial before, though (much less highly so). As far as I know, the closest I ever came to real controversy was getting charged with imaginary crimes in Port Huron, and even the jury that convicted me seemed to agree that it was the border guards who wore the asshole hats that time around.

Still. So long as it sells copies, I guess.

While we’re on the subject of collections with pretty covers, I was surfing around MAG‘s site the other day to see if my upcoming Polish collection had surfaced in their catalog (the title for that one translates as An Antidote for Optimism). It had not; but I see they’ve released a third edition of Blindsight. For some reason, each new edition gets spiffy new cover art— and man, I defy anyone to tell me that this new cover doesn’t kick all kinds of ass. I didn’t think it was possible to put a vampire front and center without descending into cliché almost by definition. But wow. (And just between you and me, if the vampire had been female this would have made an even better cover for Echopraxia.) I’ve liked every cover these guys have put out (and come to think of it, ArsMACHINA have also served up relentlessly awesome covers for the Rifters trilogy. Must be something in the water over there.)

Can’t wait to see what cover Fata Libelli slaps on the Spanish e-minicollection.

This is actually turning out to be a pretty good year, collections-wise.

*

Finally: some of you may remember that writer’s workshop thingy I participated in last year, the one presented by Starship Sofa.  Well, Tony’s doing it again; a Video Writers Workshop, this time with Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo. June 16th, live online, the usual £20 but if you’re one of the five who springs for £99 you also get one of those guys to personally critique your work in realtime. (I’d assume this last perk would be a private affair following the main event — at least, if there were the option of bringing in onlookers to watch the blood spill, I can’t imagine that Tony wouldn’t be advertising the fact. And charging extra.) (Not that it wouldn’t be worth it, mind you.)

If you’re at all interested in doing what I do for a living (such as it is), you should probably look into this.

An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century

An Internal Report to the Holy See by The Pontifical Academy of Sciences in conjunction with the John Templeton Foundation, based upon investigations inaugurated July 23—Sep 16 2093

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Background

The past century has witnessed what Sujeit describes as “a joyful if weedy renaissance of Faith in the face of the secular … an inevitable reaction to science’s vendetta against the soul”. This has been a source of ongoing consternation to the secular community. Surely, they say, the more science explains, the less we need to invoke the supernatural. Surely the “God of the Gaps” diminishes with each new scientific breakthrough. How then to explain not just the persistence but an actual resurgence of faith in a world where every last vestige of humanity can be “explained” by the invocation of some brain structure or chemical process?

Ironically, it is thanks to the empiricists themselves that we can answer this question. It has been known for generations that Faith flourishes most strongly when people feel threatened and powerless. What could be more threatening — what could make a soul feel more powerless — than an endless litany of scientific “discoveries” hammering home our utter insignificance in a vast and indifferent cosmos, reducing every flicker of the Human soul to chemicals and electricity, telling us that the very notion of free will is logically absurd in a mechanistic universe?^[1] Science itself has provoked this return to God — and once again we see His Hand in that precisely-designed mechanism ensuring that our faith is strongest when it is most desperately needed.

While we may thank this divine feedback loop for reversing the last generation’s exodus from the Church of Rome^[2], it has also played a role in a recent proliferation of cults whose elements borrow from a variety of pagan and pantheistic sources, and whose tenets pose a fundamental obstacle to Salvation. Such cults have always been with us, springing to life on stony ground and withering just as quickly. The Abrahamic religions, rooted in richer soil, have outlasted them all and continue to thrive even under the tumultuous conditions of the late twenty-first century.

These are, however, times of uncertainty; and in the face of modern challenges we may find ourselves tempted to turn our backs on the wider world (as have certain Protestant denominations). Such retreat in the face of adversity would not only go against the Scriptural admonition to “go and make disciples of all nations”, but also risks dire consequence in its own right. The Redeemer Gyland offers a stark case in point. It has been almost a year since the alliance between the Southern and Central Baptists broke down, and three months since we have been able to establish contact with anyone from either side of that conflict. (It is no longer practical to board the gyland directly— any craft approaching within two kilometers is fired upon — but remote surveillance has yielded no evidence of human activity since March 28. The UN believes that the weapons fire is automated, and has declared Redeemer off-limits until those defenses exhaust their ammunition.)

In contrast to the failed retreat of the southern Baptists, other faiths have tried “broadening their appeal” to “keep up with changing times”.  While this has an undeniable short-term appeal, it too would be ultimately self-defeating. It is certainly easier to join a group which makes no real demands of its adherents — which tolerates sin in the name of “diversity” and “equal rights” — but it is also much easier to leave such a group. The existence of moral codes and constraints, arbitrary though they may appear to outsiders, serve to ensure that only the truly faithful enter the Church. It is no accident that strict religious communities have longer lifespans than secular (or even liberal theistic) ones.

Historically, therefore, the Holy See has never had cause to feel threatened by the transient appeal of the cults forever flowering around our ankles in the morning, only to blow away by nightfall. To date, we have also taken this attitude of benign tolerance regarding the so-called Bicameral Order.

It is the considered opinion of this committee, however, that continuing complacency would be a terrible mistake in this case. We believe the Order represents a threat not only to the Holy Church of Rome, but to all Abrahamic religions.

The Limits of Science

The purview of science is a narrow one: it deals with questions of how the multiverse works. The deeper issues of why the multiverse exists— and of our rightful place therein— are beyond its reach. The Church is not threatened by the procession of discoveries and insights hailing from the scientific method, because worldly matters are not within its domain. As St. Gould famously opined, Science and Faith occupy “non-overlapping magisteria”. It is no more the place of the Church to make testable hypotheses than it is the place of Science to pass judgment on matters of the spirit.

It is perhaps too-infrequently noted, however, that science can claim no better understanding than the Church even in the matter of how the universe works.

This is a surprisingly uncontroversial view even among scientists, most of whom admit not only that science cannot claim to accurately describe reality, but that it cannot even claim to approach greater accuracy as it progresses. Yes, Einstein’s physics produce more accurate predictions than Newton’s— but a model in which celestial bodies are affixed to a series of concentric crystal spheres produces more accurate predictions of planetary motion than one which posits only a single sphere. Is it more “realistic”?

So while Science may produce ever-more-accurate predictions about how reality behaves under known conditions, it can never claim to understand what lies within that black box (a century after its introduction, Smolin’s “Breeder Multiverse” remains untested and untestable even in principle— a mathematical construct to be taken on faith no less than the existence of God Himself).  Ultimately, all science is mere correlation. For that matter, there was a time before science even existed when people turned to religion to understand the physical universe; and while the thought of deities hurling lightning bolts may seem fanciful to modern minds, it was then (as science claims to be now) the best explanation available to limited human understanding.

The fundamental difference between Science and Scripture is not, therefore, that scientific insights are necessarily more realistic than those based upon Faith. The difference is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.

The Bicameral Threat

The Bicamerals represent a stark anomaly in this otherwise consistent landscape. We have exhaustively reviewed their publications and the predictions contained therein. Their methodologies appear to be explicitly faith-based, and they venture unapologetically into metaphysical realms which defy empirical analysis— yet they yield results with consistently more predictive power than conventional science. (How they do this is not known; our best evidence suggests some kind of rewiring of the temporal lobe in a way that amplifies their connection to the Divine.)

It would be dangerously naïve to regard this as a victory for traditional religion. It is not. It is a victory for a radical sect barely half a century old, and the cost of that victory has been to demolish the wall between science and faith. The Church’s concession of the physical realm informed the historic armistice which has allowed faith and reason to coexist in separate and inviolable domains to this day. One may find it heartening to see faith ascendant once again across the Human spectrum; but it is not our faith. Its hand still guides lost sheep away from the soulless empiricism of secular science, but the days in which it guided them into the loving arms of Our Savior are waning.

The Bicameral Order does not proselytize, preferring to stay out of the public eye (a suspicious sign in and of itself). Nonetheless, its ability to work miracles on demand cannot help but draw notice. While the ultimate consequences of their arrogance will be evident to anyone familiar with Genesis’s metaphor of the forbidden fruit, the inevitable near-term impact is to put more venerable institutions at a significant disadvantage.

Under current circumstances, therefore, we foresee the collapse of the Abrahamic religions — possibly even of the Dharmic and Taoist faiths to which the Bicamerals claim at least tenuous kinship — within as little as a single generation.

Recommendations

Having exhaustively considered and prayed upon the alternatives, we implore His Holiness to pursue a clandestine alliance of the Abrahamic religions, pursuant to meeting this common threat to our existence. The conflicts and internecine squabbles that have historically occurred between our respective faiths pale into insignificance next to the crisis currently brewing. The task before us will be daunting enough even in the company of powerful allies; standing alone, it would likely prove impossible.

God help us, we see no recourse but drastic action.

From Pais-Vieira et al

You’ve probably heard about the rat-brain network by now — it showed up in the popsci threads back at the end of February, provoking breathless comparisons with Vulcan mind melds and The Matrix. And I gotta say, the coverage certainly sucked me in: an actual (albeit rudimentary) network of brains, linked together to solve problems? Hive-Mind stuff; Mind-Hive stuff. Something very much like it shows up in Echopraxia. It makes a cameo in “Giants”. The talk I gave at last year’s SpecFic Colloquium got into it big-time. Right up my alley.

Then you read the actual research paper and, well… not so much.

This is how they sell it; this, technically, is how it was. The brains of two rats, each connected to the other by an array of microelectrodes implanted in the motor cortex. One of them is presented with a stimulus; the other, with the means to act on that stimulus¹. If the second rat reacts correctly to the stimulus the first one perceives, both get a reward. Rat #2 — gifted with no clues or insights save those piped directly from the brain of Rat #1 — reacts correctly 70% of the time, far more often than the 50% hit rate that random chance would serve up.

Ergo, the rats’ brains are in direct communication via an electronic network. Technologicaly-mediated telepathy. Technepathy.

There are the rudiments of a B2B interface here, certainly. Motor cortices and embedded electrode microarrays. A computer that mediates signal transmission from one to the other. Options presented, choices made, a reward for pressing the right lever. The way the Results are worded you really get a sense of linked minds, that the signals received by decoder-rat were pretty much the signals generated by the motor cortex of the encoder (“The primary factor that influenced the decoder rat’s performance was the quality of spatial information extracted from the encoder rat’s M1,” Pais-Vieira et al tell us. “The performance was high if the chosen neuronal ensemble accurately encoded left versus right presses”.) You imagine the array reading the motor commands off the very cortex, sending them through the internet, inserting them into the recipient’s motor control system where — possessed by an alien command planted in her brain — the little rodent feels an irresistible urge to move her paw just so.

Only when you move on to the Methods (Yes, “Methods” come after the “Results” in this paper for some reason), do you discover: oh, wait. The recipient was trained beforehand to push one lever or the other, depending on the incoming stimulus. And the stimulus wasn’t a motor command copied-and-pasted from one brain to the other, it was an arbitrary signal sent by the computer after the computer had decoded the sender-rat’s neural activity. It’s the difference between experiencing an orgasm and watching a tiny figure on a faraway hill spell out oh-god-oh-god-oh-god-yes using signal flags.

In other words, this is a brain dyad only in the most trivial sense. There’s no real meeting of the minds here, no sensory input or motor commands flitting between cortices in native neuro-ratspeak. Sure, the recipient must be feeling something; but whatever that is, it’s not the vicarious feel of walls against whiskers or the urge to move a muscle. It’s more itch than insight; the little guy was just trained beforehand to push one lever in response to Itch X, and another in response to Itch Y. For all the telepathy involved, he might as well have reacted to a blinking LED.

I admit I’m curious as to what that itch actually felt like, mind you. After all, the electrodes were embedded in motor wiring, not sensory; I’m a bit surprised that Pais-Vieira’s decoders felt anything at all (I’d have expected some kind of uncontrollable muscle tremor). And this is the standard approach used by all those wired-up primates who’ve been making news by controlling robot and/or virtual limbs with their minds. You don’t move that thing on the screen by actually sending a motor command down your arm; you just kinda concentrate, and the computer takes those arbitrary brainwaves and interprets them as left or right. Somewhere out there, someone might have trained an on-screen avatar to jump whenever she thinks the first six notes of “Aqualung”. It’s all pretty cool.

But a mind-meld? A “brain-net“? Not even close, not unless I become part of the Borg Collective every time I have a two-sentence conversation with someone.

Which is not to say that I find the idea of brain-to-brain networks ludicrous in principle. I’m actually a bit scared by them. Everybody knows what happens when you split a brain down the middle, force the hemispheres to resort to the dial-up speeds of the hypothalamus instead of the broadband pipe of the corpus callosum: two distinct personalities emerge in the space where one had been before. Fewer people, I suspect, know that it works the other way around; when isolated hemispheres are reconnected (when an anesthetized hemisphere wakes back up, for example), the persona manifested by the lone hemisphere gets swallowed into the greater whole. I see no reason why that wouldn’t scale up. If you could build a fat enough pipe between two intact brains — an electronic corpus callosum, as it were — and if you could keep latency down to below the few-hundred milliseconds that seems necessary for coherent self-identity — would the result be two linked minds, or a single distributed one? Would the parts retain their identity, or would consciousness expand to fill the space available? If you joined such a network, would you retain any more autonomy, any more sense of self, than your parietal lobe enjoys now?

I feel a story coming on: a few decades from now, a glitch in the iMind servers inadvertently surpasses that magic bandency threshold and a few million streaming subscribers meld for a few minutes. But the subsequent class-action lawsuit fails when Apple argues that none of the affected individuals have standing to bring the case, since none of them actually existed as individuals during the alleged events. Maybe it even countersues on behalf of that vast and ephemeral mind who took their place, only to be torn apart and murdered after a measly ten minutes of life.

I bet I could keep it short enough to fit onto the back page of Nature. Still need a punchline, though.

The guy with the cross is Blagoy Ivanov, editor of Iztok-Zapad : the guy with the handcuffs is Hristo Blazhev -  fellow-editor and premiere Bulgarian book blogger.  I have no idea what they planned on doing with those things afterwards, but I hope they at least stuck the book in a zip-lock baggie first. (Not shown is the actual translator, Elena Pavlova, who appears to have been named after my favorite dessert.)

Here's a close-up of the cover art, by Georgi Panayotov. Not quite sure what actual scene from the book it's supposed to represent, if any, but I think it's a really nice piece of art in its own right.

Outta here. If any of you happen to be at the 360° Restaurant this afternoon, please accept my preemptive apologies for the germs I'll be explosively dispersing across your entrees.

“I don’t think Rorschach’s magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they’re part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism… If I’m right, I’m not even dealing with complete organisms here.”

I kept it all fuzzy and hand-wavey — microscopic shards of magnetite in scrambler cells, dancing to the precise twitch of Rorschach’s filigreed magnetic fields — because I didn’t in truth have any idea how an inside/outside metabolism would really work. I thought it was a really cool idea, though.

Count on Nature to think of it a few billion years before I did. Are you ready for metal-breathing microbes?

Not scramblers, exactly. But definitely nonsentient. Photo credit Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

I wasn’t, not until last Thursday. That’s when I received an e-mail from one Jake Cohen, a dude who gets more out of my writing than some might consider normal. It happens, occasionally: someone drops a line mentioning that Blindsight inspired her degree in cognitive linguistics, or that an idea gleaned from Starfish allowed him to commit the perfect murder, or that Maelstrom‘s take on digital wildlife informed some project over at Lawrence Livermore that no one’s allowed to talk about¹. Jake, a microbiologist by trade, admitted to being especially fond of my rifters books. He pointed me to the Harvard lab where he’s about to start a PhD on hydrothermal vent ecology, and I dutifully clicked the link to check it out.

Which is where I encountered the photo caption “Extracellular electron transfer experiments at 1 kilometer below sea level in the Monterey Canyon”, slipping past almost too quickly to notice on Prof. Girguis’s splash page.

Extracellular electron transfer? Does that mean what I think it does?

I wrote Jake back, and yes: yes it does.  But don’t take my word for it, or even his: say hello to Shewanella oneidensis  — a bacterium that, while facultatively aerobic, can get by in anoxic environments by breathing metals². Here’s the money shot:

“…can also thrive without the gas if it must, thanks to energy-generating chemical reactions that transfer electrons from inside its cells to outside minerals that contain metals such as iron.”

—or, to quote my newfound go-to guy at Harvard, “[it] works mostly like a regular electron transport chain, except instead of the terminal electron acceptor being inside the cell, those bacteria use a carrier molecule to pick up those electrons and shuttle them outside of the cell to an acceptor they’re growing on.” Apparently this also raises certain commercial possibilities in the biobattery department.

Inside/outside metabolism. Holy shit.

I wish I’d known about this while I was writing Blindsight. You can be damn sure it’s going to make a walk-on in Echopraxia, though.

They're not saying it looks like this, though.

So Lever et al have found something in the rocks, deep below the Pacific seabed (Source paper; supplementary materials; Wired popsci commentary). It eats inorganics, notably sulfur—

(βehemoth assimilates several inorganic nutrients 26-84% more efficiently than its closest terrestrial competitors. This is especially problematic when dealing with sulfur.)

—it’s an anaerobe—

(“βehemoth doesn’t just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It predates oxygen. It’s over four billion years old. And all the other really ancient bugs we’ve found, the Archaebacteria and the Nanoliths and so forth, they’re still anaerobes to this day. You only find them in reducing environments. And yet here’s βehemoth, even older, and oxygen doesn’t bother it at all…

…Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like βehemoth, and tweak it?”)