There was a note at the end of the brochure, it was addressed to me from Jamie.

Jamie should have taken a chill pill, his Jamaican mysticism had obviously warped him more than I'd suspected. And how would a hospital orderly like Jamie know anything about Kirchov in the first place? I had thought Jamie was an island of sanity, but this just seemed bizarre.

Was Alexei Kirchov a parasite, a Horseman of the Apocalypse? I'd never liked Kirchov, but my disdain was more the inbred academic sort.

That wasn't to say Kirchov was innocent, there'd been accusations all along that his company, Ultima Pharmaceuticals, was leeching millions from AIDs infected victims who depended on Ultima's 'miracle' cures, but I figured those were just the complaints of the anarchist anti-business lefties who infest the universities. Still, Kirchov had created what even I thought was an unholy alliance between Ultima and the California University with intertwined patents.

Jamie's note, for all its bizarre ramblings, had rekindled my paranoia. I still couldn't resolve what I fervently believed was Jamie's murder and the connection to me. Maybe his crazy ideas entered into why he was killed? Believing Kirchov was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was certainly insane, but not the sort of thing that normally gets you killed, just Prozacked.

I was uneasy. I'm no Holy Roller, so what bothered me couldn't be Jamie's biblical prophesy. Morality is relative to your belief system, so if you don't believe in Armageddon then your fear of ultimate evil is also lessened. Heck, I don't believe in much of anything any more. Yet, while Kirchov obviously could not be as evil as Jamie believed, Alexei was sucking the academic lifeblood out of me by stealing control of my SuperGrid. That made this personal.

In the five months since my accident, Alexei Kirchov had made quite a name for himself acting as spokesman for the university's SuperGrid facility. I'd spent some time on the Internet researching Kirchov and his company, Ultima Pharmaceuticals, and I didn't like some of what I found, though it would be a stretch to call it apocalyptic.

The grey area in Alexei Kirchov's background was that he was a product of the Russian biogenetic engineering program called Biopreparat. I'd Googled Biopreparat soon after I first met Kirchov during his interviews for the California Institute. In the previous millenia, Biopreparat had been the entity in charge of the old Soviet biological weapons program and I thought Kirchov would be canned for association with something so evil. In 1973, a year after the Soviet Union signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Conventionunder, Biopreparat was established under the Main Microbiological Industry Agency as a way to evade the treaty. After the fall of the Soviet Union though, Biopreparat had evolved substantially and was now charged with the humanitarian inoculation of children against measles and tuberculosis. I guess there is redemption after all, by beating biological swords into plowshares, they were now into saving the world, not destroying it.

At its peak, the former Soviet Union had had the world's largest biological warfare program, with somewhere between 25,000 and 32,000 people employed in a network of 20 to 30 military and civilian laboratories and research institutions. Between 1,000 to 2,000 of those scientists were experts on deadly pathogens. Biopreparat suffered dramatic downsizing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, with more than half its scientific staff departing - many left Russia for more sophisticated laboratories of the West. While that affected Fyodor Kirchov (Alexei's father who also worked at Biopreparat), Alexei himself left much later and for wholly different reasons.

In contrast to the old Soviet regime which had shaped father Fyodor, Alexei Kirchov had been a rising star of the modern Biopreparat. A new myth was purposely created out of the ashes of the old Biopreparat and it centered around Alexei Kirchov the new hero of the state, a star of humanity! However, adulation changed after Fyodor's death. There followed a very public fallout with Biopreparat's new director, Igor Gurtin, who accused Alexei of "hooligan profiteering on the backs of sick children". Kirchov came to the California Institute soon after, part of the wave of Russian immigration after the Islamic jihad took control of Turkmenistan and the ensuing biological genocide in Chechnya. Kirchov's roots were Islamic as well, his mother was Chechnyan.

Kirchov explained to the selection committee that Gurtin's charges had been a vendetta by the Russian regime which was trying to outlaw Islamic culture. The committee eventually concluded Alexei had indeed been railroaded by Gurtin, who himself later went to jail for blackmail charges.

At the California Institute, Kirchov again became a star. He cleaned up his academic resume, though some felt his penchant for "hooligan profiteering" seemed to resurface when he started Ultima with his new colleagues at the University. That hadn't stopped the media from fawning over him, Alexei was seen giving vaccines to children in every Ultima public relations brochure. I had to admit he seemed to be doing more good for the world than I was with my cold fractal algorithms.

"Alexei Kirchov, his goal is to cure all the world's children of AIDs" was the PR angle in the glossy brochure found on the Ultima website. Of course you can't always believe what you find on the Internet.

I'd never had the time or political inclination to turn the academic position of Director of SuperGrid facilities into a bully pulpit, but Kirchov had shown himself to be a master of public relations. Most people hope science is apolitical, a search for absolute truth, but scientific debate often degenerates into vicious petty political quarrels. The open dirty secret is that grant money is allocated politically and not strictly by merit. A lot of Grant money had been funneled to Ultima Pharmaceuticals by President William's administration, stroke of the pen law of the land kinds of patronage.

Science has always been infected with politics. Until Galileo's reason prevailed over church politics, earth was the center of the universe and Christopher Columbus was forced to live on a flatworld. In Russia, Lychenko revoked genetics under Stalin for political reasons. Blind politics also blessed Hitler's eugenics program under Dr. Mengele, exacting on the Jews a twisted human genetic experimentation through false science. Even Einstein was overtly political, inaugurating the anti-nuclear peace movement under Roosevelt even while designing the means to end all creation with the atomic bomb.

Science has always been the poor slave to the political ambitions of those who manipulate it.

Politicization of science in the age of information accelerated as the stakes in trumpeting ideology through pseudo-technology have grown. One of the seminal examples was the Nuclear Winter Theory of the early nineties, derived from naive computer simulations based on Martian atmospheric data. Anti-war scientists were so eager to promote their anti-nuclear political position that they hired a publicist to push their hypothesis before the models were subject to peer review.

Nuclear winter was the theory that dust and debris from a nuclear war would be so dense as to blot out the sun and inflict a freezing winter that would end life on the planet. Based on these calculated effects of nuclear war on the climate, the noted astronomer Carl Sagan predicted during America's first war with Iraq that the firing of the Kuwaiti oil wells would result in smoke rising high into the stratosphere thereby blotting out the sun. If the nuclear winter theory were correct, the smoke would have covered vast regions of the earth with disastrous cooling effects.