ORACLE on Cereal
Michael
Charley's input into ORACLE: "who might benefit the most from selling a breakfast cereal with a glyph on it that encourages kids to eat it."
Mel, if Charley wants to let the program run scenarios overnight Monday into Tuesday to get 15 hours of Extra Time (+4) bonuses from it, you would roll Ontomancy-17.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 8
Michael
When Charley comes back into the office on Tuesday morning, she checks the results of the ORACLE simulation runs. Luckily, of course, David and Elias had insisted on adding modules and subroutines to simulate what the use of Anunnaki glyphs on a population would result in, and so Charley had been able to program in a "hunger" glyph to see how that would affect American and global eating habits and agricultural practices.
The simulations take the initial small run of Beale Farms products and extrapolate them out. A glyph that gets kids eating a certain brand of cereal, well, that's going to have two big effects: brand loyalty and a desire to eat more of what they're eating. These kids will grow up to be adults with a wicked craving for these products and the constituent raw materials made to produce them. And so it's super important for Charley to know what the cereal consists of.
It's clear from the stated ingredients on the packaging that that mostly means "corn"; in the ingredient list it's listed only as "CORN (MAIZE) BYPRODUCTS" with some beet sugar and infused vitamins and minerals. So Charley sees what that does to corn consumption and production over the next 50 years: in the short-to-medium term, it makes monoculture crop growers who can supply the exponential demand for corn-based products filthy rich. The hunger/famine modules used in GRAIL TABLE kick in here, as climate and agriculture simulations show that overdependence on one crop will have a long-term negative effect on American and eventually world agriculture.
What about the consumers, apart from their "corn sugar" addiction? Well, here's where ORACLE maybe isn't as well-equipped to handle all the ramifications, but it's clear that the program can project that if the glyphs being used on Beale Farms products in 1973 are the beginning of a trend, and if other manufacturers of food and growers of crops follow suit with the cheap, overwhelming presence of corn, nearly the entirety of America will be eating these type of products in 50 years. What a diet heavy in these products will do to the American consumer Charley can't say because her chemical analysis was stymied by her lab equipment breaking down. So it's all the more important to get that ion mass spectrometer fixed!
I'm going to give Charley a chance to fix it with repair equipment. We'll default Electronics Repair (Scientific) from your highest Electronics Repair, which is Computers (18) minus 4 for defaulting, plus 4 for TL 7+1 repair parts and equipment, so Electronics Repair-18.
Measure of success will determine how long the repair takes.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 11
Michael
Cool! That will probably mean if Charley wants to get onto the repair right away after getting the ORACLE results, she can have the ion trap spectrometer finished by the end of the day Tuesday.
Oh, Mel, to fix the ion trap spectrometer will require Charley to roll against her Short Attention Span. Succeed on a 12 or less.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Mel, time for another Chemistry roll. IQ minus 6 as your Default, then add 4 for the equipment bonus, so Chemistry-13.
Mel
>> SUCCESS by 4
Michael
Much better results! Charley will have the chemical analysis ready near the end of the day. (I need some time to type it all up, Mel.)
The Sample B results (Sample A went up in flames with the broken ion trap spectrometer yesterday) are pretty straightforward for Charley to interpret. The grain barns, windmills, and tractors in the cereal are a little less than half complex starches—mostly, it seems, derived from oats and wheat. The other half of a typical grain piece is a mix of fructose and glucose in a ratio of about 2 to 3. High caloric impact; these are levels of sweetness only seen in dried fruits or honey. The marshmallow pigs, corn cobs, and trees are naturally even more made of simple sugar by weight: and thus they're mostly made of that 2:3 fructose:glucose mix with some binding materials/gelatin to make the crunchy puff of the marshmallow.
Again, Charley is not a doctor, a dietitian, a food scientist or a nutrition biologist (not without Renshawing of course). But these sugars on a pure chemical level are packing a lot of caloric punch. And they're not complex sugars; there's no need for the body to expend any effort to break these down like they would in a grain or a piece of fruit. And getting a nation of kids addicted to this kind of food … Charley's pretty sure she can fill in the blanks in ORACLE's predictions. It's going to mean much, much higher-calorie diets … let's hope the kids of the future have lots of ways to expend all that quick energy!
One more thing, unrelated to the nutritive value: Charley wonders how they're mass-producing this fructose-glucose mix. They must have some proprietary method for producing this much glucose from "vegetables," maybe there's something in the U.S patent records but that'd be more research.
Mel
Research.
Michael
But I'm gonna say that'll need to happen on Wednesday Aug 8, as realistically you've spent the entirety of today fixing the spectrometer.
So Mel and Leonard: on Wednesday, regarding hitting the patent records to find out more about this fructose/glucose mix: Research as a skill would be required, and Charley doesn't have it as a skill (she would roll at a 10, IQ minus 5), but obviously Jocasta does have Research, and with Charley helping out with her successful Chemistry roll, Charley could aid. So if Jo wants to give me a quick Research-17 roll (+1 from the aid, +1 from Jo having Law, and +1 from the previous Research that Jo did on Agrigenics), we can see what the two of you discover.
Leonard
Jo is always happy to do something with Charley. "Time to hit the books, kid," she says cheerily as they fire up the microfiche readers.
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
The ratio of glucose to fructose seems key to Charley. Why those numbers? So Jo and Charley spend some time hitting food sciences patents (and patents pending) looking for the reference numbers of both sugars and for that specific 60/40 ratio. It becomes easier to work backwards from the present over the past 25 years or so since WWII, but after a couple of hours Charley and Jo seem to have found the entire historical lineage for this process, what they make the sugars out of, and how.
It seems it's all about enzymes. A lot of vegetables other than beets and sugar cane contain lots of energy-packed starches, but they're complex molecules which are not palatable as a sweetening agent. People have been making maize into corn syrup for 150 years of course—good old Karo—but it's not as soluble, palatable, or broadly usable as a sweetening agent as good old cane or beet sugar and nowhere near the sweetness of fructose.
But what if you could flip the glucose in corn syrup into the much sweeter, much tastier fructose—both of them are C6H12O6, after all—using a yeast or some other enzymatic reaction? People had been playing around with this since World War II, given the problems in getting good old-fashioned sugar during the war, but it was only with the increased political instability in Cuba in the pre-Revolution years that scientists in America tried to do it on an industrial scale. Richard O. Marshall and Earl Kooi working in a lab in New York for the "Corn Products Company" came up with a process in '57, patented in '60, but it was only good for small batch conversion. Japanese food scientists, however, took the ball and ran with it and by '66 had come up with a method using Strepomyces bacteria that could yield 15% fructose. The Japanese researchers in turn got a patent in America and sold the process to a little concern out in Clinton, Iowa, the Clinton Corn Processing Company. Paydirt. Since '68 Clinton has been refining the process, perfecting it, until it hit a 42% fructose level: the sweet spot, if you will forgive the pun. All of a sudden food sweetening could possibly happen on an industrial scale without having to deal with international sugar commodities trading or refining. Just get some domestic corn, treat it with the Takasaki-Tanabe process, and you've got (sort of) sugar. They call it, rather unimaginatively, high-fructose corn syrup.
After all, if there's one thing America's never going to run out of, it's corn. Since '71, licensees in the agricultural and food sciences sector have been lining up around the block to play with this new method and save them money sweetening their food and drink, big companies including (and this is where going back into the trade magazines profits Jo and Charley) Anheuser‐Busch, CPC International (once the Corn Products Company), Archer Daniels‐Midland, Miles Laboratories, R. J. Reynolds, and, yes, Agrigenics.
Patents referenced in this research:
Oh! I just realized, Leonard: Jocasta can actually give me a Naturalist-12 roll! Weirdly, bodily health and nutrition can be found under Survival, which has a decent Default from Naturalist.
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 0
Michael
Right on. I mean, Jo knows her p's and q's when it comes to "quick boost of energy" type foods for forced marches and long-term physical activity, what's the best stuff to put in trail mix/granola and what you can live off of in the wilderness … basically she knows what it takes the human body to survive nutritionally and energy-wise, especially when exerting itself. Eating a lot of this HFCS stuff is likely to be a disaster for most Americans … even kids who burn off energy like nobody's business! Like, Jo can't boil things down to, say, the digestive and metabolic on a scientific level. But Jo does know how the human body responds to boosts of dietary sugar and complex carbohydrates in a survival context. This stuff is gonna hit a person's insulin-regulatory functions really hard if they eat it habitually! And what is that glyph but a command to eat more of this stuff. What's more, these kind of calories are not going to trigger the average human being's satiety threshold. Not only will they want to eat more—glyph or no glyph, given the addictive qualities of highly-sweet sugars—they'll be able to eat more.