Outpost #3

The DNA Exchanges
    
     They have tortured the future to its own eventual oblivion, stopping at nothing that doesn't resemble superficial thinking. It's the normal chatter around the DNA Exchanges, boosting DNA capacity and government accountability, collections of old defense department reports, irregularities, allocations, arrays of spectrum assignments in various languages (both human and computer), their codes double-embedded within encrypted external main frames. DNA water, mankind's last hope; valuable commodity, made rare like so much gold of the later 20thCentury, who's shiny metal never touched the fingers of these humans. They stand on the brink, outlining a more aggressive approach to curbing levels of chemicals in the DNA water. They view themselves and the government algorithms, rumored to exist at the exchanges, in the various survival sectors (out there in the sun-baked regions of villages, the government is forced on foot), and believe the health agencies want something for them--push new measures to lift DNA production, shore up the public sector gene therapies, do something. They are about at wit's end when they hear rumors of government action beyond initial sampling of more perchlorate found in a DNA watershed in SectorIII (the government's first announcement of rocket fuel in DNA water). It's presence, when consumed, is long implicated in thyroid inability to absorb iodine, a condition spreading hormonal deficiencies. The perchlorate issue signals a separate effort by the government to attempt to barter new limits on their own culpability in the substances harming individual terminals(S.H.I.T.) zone. Other regulatory organizations, so public relations minded, advance their own separate efforts to set limits, deciding from board rooms in skyscrapers, seemingly, to show a more caring attitude toward theHumans. The various sector governments are quick to have difficulties--almost instantaneous--in their concerted effort at digesting fallout from the collapse of a century-long Golden Age of Genetics, that era that usually finds the answers but now knows the mistakes of its ways in the harried race of DNA sequencing of the human genome without giving due diligence to protein chemistry and signaling mechanisms. Health ministers predict the future of the DNA water with its 15 parts per million perchlorate embedded in the double helix; sensing their own confidence, they announce their game changing information, yet, slow to elicit a change of standards. How long, now,  has it been since the DNA Exchange has moved from its guidelines to a mandate?