Category: News

Editor’s notes: Apologies for inconsistencies in this transcript, they were transcribed from a tape recording of a meeting provided to us by Rick. It was recorded on a hidden Olympus Note Corder DP-311 digital recorder and while the sound quality is usually clear for this device, it was hidden in a jacket pocket and it has picked up noises from movement around the table. It is therefore difficult to perform an accurate transcription during the noisy bits.

Everyone, this is Josh, and he promised me that I would be out of here in time for my four-o’clock detail. Everyone else in here, I am serving in an administrative capacity only in this meeting. If any question arises with regards to the principal research of this work, I will not comment. I will only ask questions of the marketing team in this meeting. Now, we have one official transcription of this meeting. Alex, you are taking the notes as the ex-officio, is that correct? Lessee … We have concurred by majority that for this meeting, an audio or video recording is not necessary and we can run on the notes of the ex-officio. In order to avoid pre-existing conflicts of interest, I’ll ask each one of you in the room if you are currently recording this meeting in any way, other than personal notes, hand written on a notepad, or typed notes into a computer. You will also either affirm or not-affirm to me that you have all audio and or video recording on your computer, pocket device or any other electronic means turned off. Eddie?

I affirm, I am not recording this meeting in any way, nor will I during this meeting.

Okay, Leandra?

I affirm, I am not recording this meeting and I will not record this meeting.

Cassandra?

I am not recording and I will not record for the length of this meeting.

Do you affirm?

I affirm.

Shin Liu?

I affirm, I am not recording this meeting and I will not record this meeting.

Rick?

I do not-affirm.

Okay. Alex, Dr. Yukon has entered a “not affirm” please note.

Rick, why do you claim a “no affirm?”

Conflict of interest.

Alex please note Dr. Yukon’s claimed COI.

Rick, under the guidelines of this funding opportunity, do you accept to leave the room now for the remainder of the meeting?

Yes.

[Editor’s note: at this point, the sound fell apart, Rick apparently took off his jacket and placed if over the the back of the chair. Other than a few random words, we had to move forward by 43 seconds in the recording to continue the transcript.]

Yes, but please pull the plug from the back of the laptop … Dr. Hui?

I affirm, I am not recording this meeting and I will not record this meeting.

Josh?

I affirm, I am not recording this meeting and I will not record this meeting.

Okay, we’re good now, we can get started.

On the side. It might still be on though. It has a battery. Why don’t you just open it up and check?

We’re not going to open it up. Alex, would you please hand the computer to the guard at the door, and tell him to bring it to Rick? Unplug the charger too, bring him him charger.

Alex, please note time, day and participants in attendance. Now, Josh, without discussing the specifics of why we hired you for this contract, do you have any questions for me as the administrator of this meeting?

(inaudible) on the third line of the second graf.

Yes, it should be number 3447. 8022 is the old funding object.

Josh, what is the current projection for Year 2 total fatalities?

We have two, which do you want first, the Bacardi Scenario or the Jameson Scenario?

Bacardi first.

Okay, Bacardi … current year two projections are three point five million. We can conceivably get that to zero average burden fatalities over five years. For the zero, we projected on decreased flu and pneumonia deaths, decreased air pollution deaths averaged at approximately seven hundred thousand per year. We didn’t include accidental hospital deaths because we can’t verify the model for those, but we expect the Bacardi option to increase accidental hospital deaths by no more than five percent over burden. The burden for flu, pneumonia and noncorrelated air pollution for lung and full cycle cardio is currently a shade south of seven million premature deaths per year, so we’ll only need to hit ten percent under burden to show zero average deaths. But this one is going to require some creative accounting.

Creative accounting …

Some remarkably creative accounting.

Jameson?

The Jameson is safer and it’s easier. For the Jameson we just market the whole thing as a conspiracy theory.

Josh … I’m quite sure that we don’t have that kind of budget.

It might not be as expensive as you think. We’ve used this strategy a bit lately, it works well so far. The first year isn’t even as expensive as the Bacardi, so you’ll have a year to get your ducks in a line. Year two is about the same as Bacardi, then then you have three and four, for which you’ll be ready. You can probably cover it in two years by just starting a new token swap.

We’re not in that business Josh. We do research.

We can license it. It’s not a big deal. The point is that the Jameson scenario lets you save all that money up front. We don’t need to hide anything, we just need to arrange a few extra coincidences so it looks conspiratorial. The mainstreams won’t touch it, the niche markets will eat it up and that will distance it even further from the mainstreams. If you can keep that up for four years, your provisional responsibility is eroded enough to sell the obligation outright.

Who would buy it?

I have a few labs that would buy it.

Josh, when you say buy it, you mean sell it, right?

Of course, only the big shops can actually pay cash for provisional responsibility. But we shouldn’t need it for this.

We can’t afford it for that.

I’m happy to get you out of here on time for your four o’clock, but you’ll need to just let me get to the end. Some of these details aren’t critical to the process.

Go ahead. Alex, Josh tends to speak quickly, so if you don’t get all the details in your notes, don’t stress, we’ve all been there. Go ahead Josh.

I recommend the Jameson option. It’s cleaner. We are never going to be able to fully hide this release. My in-house geneticist has already figured it out, and she did it with a twenty-year-old sequence setup. If you accept that the accidental release observation is unavoidable, which it is … which it is. If you accept that the observation is unavoidable at this point, then we just accept the life loss above burden, and put our chips on hiding the release. We can add just enough extra material to keep enough meat on the bone that a conspiracy would work. It doesn’t need to be much, but it needs to be enough to pull in some good names. We can’t manage a zero with this one, we’ll have to swallow the whole three point five or so. But it will remain a natural event.

Why can’t we just use the conspiracy theory for the Bacardi event too?

The foundation is wrong. We’re using that one for the fifty story teepee over Times Square for Native American Week.

Josh, is that real?

It was never an actual teepee, but we have the promotion in place for the five year summit. We’ve already done the creatives. We can’t use the conspiracy for the Bacardi scenario, it just isn’t built for that, it won’t work. But I can’t recommend the Bacardi because the accidental release could come right back to this lab and the whole funding opportunity. We have over a dozen sign-offs on this work, my other clients can’t risk that kind of exposure. Most of those dozen are public servants and officers, we don’t pay them enough to take that kind of exposure.

Josh, say I agreed to the Bacardi, but we also buy the first two years of the Jameson, it sounds like that wouldn’t be much extra, right?

I would need six month advance notice on cancellation if you decide to stay with Bacardi and attach yourself more permanently to Jameson. And I would need six month following the end of Bacardi to put that one to bed. So you’re looking at a one-fifth increase minimum, one quarter including our own contingency, which we attach out of policy. So add a quarter to the total contact and we can do it that way.

To be clear Josh, the actual deaths are the same for both options, right?

Yeah, I’m not in the business of killing people with shitty research practices, that’s your job. I’m just on the marketing side.

I’m going to ignore your comment. Alex, please do not note Josh’s previous comment, the funding guidelines specifically instruct us to avoid inflammatory comments.

And what are our current options to exist this contract?

Given the potential exposure for my other clients, you aren’t authorized for a release, You can use Bacardi, Jameson or both. You can also chose neither, in which case we will assume the process and you own nothing.

And I end up in a Chinese prison next time I order a bowl of sesame noodles on Sixteenth Street.

Yeah.

Alex, please do not record Josh’s comment, it followed my own comment which should also not be recorded, I made an inappropriate joke that could be considered inflammatory.

Okay, we’ll do the full Bacardi, full five year contract, and the first two point five years of Jameson, contingent on renewal before the end of Year Two.

Any questions anyone?

(inaudible)

Yes, that one should be 3447 too.

Adjourned? Anyone? Adjourned.

Alex, please tell the guard at the door to ask Rick to come back in here, and note it on your record.

No, that one is 3447, that one stays 8022 it refers to the previous funding object. Please remind Dr. Liu that she left her computer on the table, catch her before she leaves, please.

Editor’s note, this was transcribed from the opposite side of the cassette tape from the previous interview, this one was apparently between Dr. Cassandra St. Clair and Consuela, as written on the cassette tape. Like the previous interview, the tape recorder could pick up only one voice, the other was muffled. Unfortunately, we are not familiar enough with the vocal patterns to know who is speaking here, either Cassandra or Consuela, they have a relatively similar voice, and we don’t know enough of their histories to know who is who here. We have denoted the nonaudible sections with ellipses. This interview was apparently taken about a year after the Stumpy Lefkowitz interview, or parhaps a bit longer, and apparently with the same cassette recorder, the Realistic MiniSette-20.

They make them sound like those drinks fell from heaven. I can tell you see, nobody on a frigate actually asks for an non-alcoholic drink. They drink them because they actually believe that the nutritional supplements are going to give them a more efficient torch hand. I was the only female welder in that whole crew. And I was there because Dogtown was banging the owner, he gave her the world that I was as good a welder as any of the men. I was, but the reality is that I was a female working conditions that were optimized for me. I have different respiration, different balance and body mass distribution, I have different perceptions because I’m a female … Yes, these young kids come in, they’ve been diving maybe five years, and their joints are fresh, they’re usually in good shape. It took me eight years of diving as a scientist before I could get a welding gig. … It was never science …. no, it was never science, I know that I’m supposed to be interested in science, and females in STEM and all that, they must have interviewed me twenty times for these teen magazines to show that girls can become marine biologists. … Yeah, but it wasn’t a cliche back then, it was this unstoppable reality, all these teenage girls went from wanting to be professional pony trainers to wanting to be marine biologists, and it happened overnight. I must have been at least partly responsible for that. … I didn’t lie to the interviews about my orientation. And my thing wasn’t some kind of secret. I was clear to every academic team I worked that I was just doing this until I could get my commercial diving career together … It was the machines and the welding for me. Sitting on some coral with a rebreather making notes about fish, I get it, I know it’s important, but it never meant anything to me, except that I wanted to hit 200 total dive hours on the rebreather. We used the rebreathers because we supposedly pulled more accurate data when we didn’t have the stream of bubbles rising from regular SCUBA gear. And when I got into United Crushing, I was the only commercial diver they had with more than five hours on the rebreathers. I had two hundred hours on them … But that was why I did academia for eight years, I needed lots of shallow water dive time. I don’t mind deeper water and rougher conditions, but it’s hard on your body to do those deeper dives. Some of these kids come in with a couple years experience, they use up their joint and their bodies doing a few seasons of deep water dives, and then they’re mostly done. They’re out the business, but my expertise was always the underwater heavy equipment. I rebuilt pumps underwater, I was their only diver could do that. Some of these boys looked at me with an air chisel, breaking off corroded nuts and bolts, they think I’m some kind of superhero. But that’s just what I did back then, I worked on machines. I had been doing that since I as maybe six years old, I went with Daddy, he bought me cream sodas and Whatchamacallits, and I got to stay with him while he worked. As long as I didn’t get any of my dresses greasy, he didn’t care, because momma never found out.

That was my life for those years though, just sitting on my ass underwater taking notes about fish and shit. I got it, it helped the environment and the bioversity and all that, but that wasn’t where my head was. I even pitched my own research to get data from fish interaction with artificial reefs made from sunken heavy equipment. I didn’t really care about the fish, I wanted to get down there and get an idea of how quickly equipment corrodes when it no longer gets anti-corrosion work. They actually liked the idea, but then some asshole puts some other female marine biologist diver on that one. He knew I was into the machinery, but he just wanted to drive me out of the university, because he knew the sunken heavy equipment thing was all me … he was just a skinny little guy, he never worked around heavy equipment, he barely knew how to dive. He drove an electric car, and they weren’t that common back then. So you can see why he probably thought of me as a thread. I’m a girl, I know more about that research than he does … Oh, sorry, are we starting this thing. Has it been recording all this time? … I can do it now.

Okay, the Rebender, that wasn’t the big deal they claim it was, it was jut a variation on their before-dive drinks and after-dive drinks … a third one? … There were probably ten of them. And the divers knew how to drink before a dive. Not all of them did it, maybe only two of them … The Rebender was non-alcoholic, it was a sanctioned drink, but it was created by necessity. Stumpy and Rick had this whole complex bullsh … Dogtown? … Dogtown was banging the owner’s ex-wife, I’m not even sure if he was the frigate. I can’t remember, but he definitely wasn’t part of that drink nonsense. It was Stumpy and Rick, those two assholes think their farts smell like apple blossoms … the Rebender was mine, did either of those dipshits claim that they invented it? … Ok good, no, it was mine … the second one, the economic necessity thing you said … But Rick and Stumpy were both drunk most of the time, I once saw Rick pushing Stumpy across the deck in some pretty high seas, they’re doing some kind of bobsled thing with a deck cart. They were both maniacs when sober, and they were a danger to themselves when they were drunk, which was most of the time … well I could handle Stumpy, at least he could be reasoned with. But Rick was just a mess. He was a happy drunk at least. What a miserable cuss when he was sober though, he sooked around, that long face like some homeless horse, he was a romantic, he was a mess. But Stumpy, he and I used to get high on the stern when the weather was good … it was mostly the smell, it used to mix enough with the smell of the bunker that they didn’t know we smoked weed back there … maybe they knew, but they didn’t say anything to us.

What did they say about the Rebender? … Okay … Okay … Right, they probably didn’t even know it existed … probably, maybe, two to one … I think the taste just worked better with rum and whisky and that was most the divers liked … wait, no that was before a dive. After the dive you mean? … Every diver except for maybe two, one was a recovering alcoholic, he did his AA meetings over the shortwave, poor guy. And Danny, I’m not sure, he was a good diver, never drank. We used to say he was an Kuwaiti spy, I think that’s why he didn’t drink, it was the Muslim thing … I don’t know when you saw him, but he didn’t drink on the frigate, I would have remembered that. You remember the guys you decompress with … So yeah, after the dive then … he got that part right, they had a big box of those Raspberry Lemonade Natural Calm envelopes, they couldn’t use them for the Dirty Dishwaters, because the taste screwed up the coconut water they used … yeah, Coco Frio, I forgot about that … right, they couldn’t use them for the Unbenders, because that drink was the Emergen-C packets. I had this box full of the Raspberry Lemonade Natural Calms, I just started fucking around to see what I could do with them. I wasn’t really a believeer in the supplements. But they did help stabilize my moods, it was a tough time for me, my period always seemed to come right when I was scheduled for a dive, and then I was depressed about breaking up with my partner, she moved on when I was deployed, but there was nothing I could do, we couldn’t do that work in hurricane season … she wanted me to give up ocean work and just do inland work … that’s things like fixing broken docks, flood control valves, things like that. It’s not really the cakewalk people think it is. I had one of the closest calls with death that I’ve ever had as a professional diver and it was two thousand miles away from the Atlantic. We got a call for some valve work on a flood control reservoir, and of course, I’m right on top of that, that’s my bread and butter. But inland diving, it’s murky and it’s dark. I had to step through these access gates, about thirty feet down or so, but it’s dark, the spec made it sound like I could just step through, but I get down there, it’s actually really tight. And I figured “okay, they sent me down here because I’m the thinnest, even with my gear, I just need to get this thing done.” So I worm my way through, I took care of the gate, and then I go to squeeze back through the corrosion had kind of made a barb, going in the direction of the water flow. It’s cold, it’s dark, I’m running out of air, and I can’t get through this grate. I started swinging my light, my spotter was supposed to have eyes on me, I get nothing back. Just dark. It turns out he was thirty yards East and he didn’t even see me. I look at this mess, and I could feel death, it was right there, slow motion, running out of air, stuck behind a grate, But it was only about thirty feet. I burned through maybe ten minutes just trying to figure out why it was so easy to get in and so hard to get out. I took off my gear, down to the wetsuit, and even that is catching on the corrosion spikes. I pull a couple big breaths, and I just dived through that gate, I heard the wetsuit pulling on the growths, but at that point I realized that I’m not getting out unless I really push and I couldn’t do that tethered to whatever was left in my tank. So I drop that, and just muscle the fuck out of there, it was like having sex with a cactus. then I’m out, and I have to surface the thirty … no Pony bottle … I didn’t even bother to take it with me on that dive, it was supposed to be an in-and-out … I surface the thirty, my spotters still down there, I saw Jesse in a Bayliner maybe only twenty feet from where I surfaced, he’s freaking out because I didn’t have the marker rope, he figured I died down there. So then I yelled over to pull up the spotter, he was probably rummaging around down there looking for me. The spotter comes up, I barely inhale two words about getting stuck behind this grate, and Jesse starts screaming at me about the company SCUBA rig. I didn’t say another word, I had more than enough of his bullshit, I grabbed a tank and a regulator from the rack, I jumped down there, grabbed the gear from the other side of the grate, pulled it through, brought it up … it had to come up because we can’t leave gear inside of an active race. But then I pull the gear up, toss it on the deck and Jesse finally shuts the fuck up.

Where were we? … okay, yeah, I didn’t like inland diving. It’s working blind, it’s not for me. I still don’t like it. But I had this woman who wanted me to be with her for all her garden parties and her friends all adopting kids, it just wasn’t my scene. I ended up getting knocked up a few years ago, nice guy, I was ready to do the mommy thing, but it didn’t happen … about four months … it wasn’t easy, lots of hormonal issues with a miscarriage, but that’s life. I’m old for a commercial diver, but I’m not even thirty yet, I can still have kids … sorry, the Raspberry Lemonde ones, right? … I had this box of nothing but the Cherry ones and the Raspberry Lemonade ones. I’m not a professional bartender like Stumpy and Rick, but I can mix a drink, it’s not underwater walking hard, it’s just mix it, fix it. So I do their martini shaker method with crushed ice, and club soda, and one packet, then pour about two-thirds of the way and add Pepsi to the top … Yeah! I used Pepsi because that’s what they had on Crushing … bullshit, that was Stumpy who told you that right? … because he told that same load of bullshit to me. He didn’t try a hundred different mixers. He used Pepsi because that’s what we had in the bar, lots of Pepsi, we had to use what we had … it’s not an Unbender because it doesn’t have an Emergen-C, it has a Natural Calm instead.

That’s why it was the Rebender, these divers come back, they all had the shits from the magnesium, and they needed to get shiftfucked. Crushing didn’t care, as long as it was after the diver and not before. So I did a nonalcoholic with the Raspberry-Lemonade packets, and those worked with rum and whiskey. The guys all liked it. I drank a lot of them. I could get enough for about five drinks out of one packet. And we had hundreds of those packets. Maybe thousands of them … the Cherry ones were fine, we used those a lot, they went with the Pepsi. So that’s it, the tape is still turning, so it recorded all this … what’s tha … she supposedly left it for me in one of your interoffice envelope mailers … did you check Tucker’s desk?