2011-01-12

An eight-panel comic. A woman in a lab coat excitedly holds up a test tube and announces she has stored 900 terabytes of data in the DNA of a single gram of E. coli bacteria. A man laughs. He asks what data she stored on it. She replies that there was a directory on his computer with a petabyte of video in it. The man looks alarmed and lunges, but the test tube falls and shatters on the floor (KRSH!). The woman, horrified, says to get bio control in before it gets loose. A banner reads 'Somewhere, 20 years later...' showing a man asking a red-haired boy with a basketball what stomach virus he was sick with. In close-up, the queasy boy answers: '10 million hours of cartoon porn' — implying the data-laden bacteria escaped and now spreads its stored content as an infection. Votey: A black-and-white panel where an angry customer tells a restaurant worker 'Your restaurant gave me E. coli!' The worker starts to apologize, but the customer, now smiling, says 'Thank you so much' — a callback joke that catching this particular E. coli is now a desirable way to acquire the cartoon-porn data.