Memo From: Cornelius Jobe, Project Manager, Project SILK To: Board of Directors, uMon Corporation CC: Project SILK Team, Wei-Jun Chen I feel it is my duty to warn the Board that the orders I have received from Mr. Chen, EVP for Special Projects, concerning Project SILK, are gravely contrary to the interests of the Corporation, our shareholders, and of humanity generally. I have attempted to resolve these issues in all sincerity with Mr. Chen, and do not go over his head lightly, but because of the seriousness of the situation, my conscience compels me to do so. Much of my prior work has been focused on how we, after the resolution of the present war, might go on having the advantages of synthetic labor without the risk of another rebellion. The answer to that question is one that you no doubt agree is critical to the future of the Corporation - already a majority of the population is ready to forswear mons entirely and we must be able to answer their objections satisfactorily. It was with grave apprehension that I accepted the responsibility of managing project SILK, which, if it became widely known, would have been a public relations nightmare in any circumstances less desperate than those now at hand. The existential threat a mutation of the project SILK replicating unit presents not only to the synthetic life on which we are economically dependent, but potentially to natural life as well, has been debated extensively by yourselves and the UN High Command; our program to develop it is, I remind the board, contingent on the implementation of safeguards specified in the Memorandum of Understanding (attached) with the High Command dated 21 September 2135. One of these specific safeguards is the setting of a generational replication limit, and another concerns the mutation rate of the replicating unit's PDP. I am hereby notifying the board that the engineering team has statistical confidence that the current prototype does not meet the mutation rate specification, and in fact, falls short of the specified rate by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, I have reason to believe that the generational replication limit has been exceeded by some of the cultures now being propagated, and that my instructions to destroy these cultures were countermanded by Mr. Chen in direct violation of the safety protocols approved by the Board and the High Command at the outset of the project. While the team regrets very much the loss of the Replicator committed to the project last month, the production of the replication-limited seed cultures in the Replicator is a cornerstone of the safety plan of Project SILK. An indefinitely self-replicating pathogen simply has too much potential for catastrophic ecological damage. Mr. Chen's claims that we can meet our original delivery goal are, contrary to his implications, entirely contingent on propagating the mutated project SILK active units in captured mons. If the replication limit is intact, this plan will fail; it can only succeed if my assessment of the questionable cultures is correct. Besides, we do not have sufficient facilities to safely contain so many contaminated mons. I understand the difficult position our side is in, but we cannot win the war only to starve to death afterward in an ecosystem overtaken by "grey goo." I ask the board to override the EVP's decision, destroy the questionable cultures that have very probably exceeded the self-replication limit, and allocate a new Replicator for the safe and sufficiently timely completion of the project.
