Looking at Peter Watts' great blog, I found this little post http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1719 where he talks about putting messages into genomes. Something we are already doing, of course. Not just for research, information storage or to add copyrights (Craig Venter's team apparently put their email addresses in a genome), but for art too. His quote from his book State of Grace is worth reproducing:

Quote:

“…pure tissue was so hard to come by these days. There was always something that didn’t belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to make animals glow in the dark when exposed to some toxin the EPA had lost interest in twenty years before. Even DNA computers, custom-built for a specific task and then tramped carelessly into wild genotypes like muddy footprints on a pristine floor. Not to mention the fact that half the technical data on the planet was being stored genetically these days, and that stuff was always getting loose. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base-pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.”

In EP things are likely just as bad. Morph genomes are of course screened, but who can keep track of all those little genetic subroutines - they are as messy as any operating system. So you may find a port of POSIX running on a small DNA-kernel in ever cell, quietly updating a system clock starting at January 1 1970 for no purpose... and accidentally with a write access to the nuclear genome if you can phrase your biohack as a UNIX system call. All those anti-virus viruses desperate biohackers spread around habitats during the Fall still remain around, slightly mutated but trying to spread immune patches against bioweapons that are entirely forgotten. Sometimes they annoy immune systems to become diseases in their own right. And those loveable space roaches? Their symbiotic blattabacteria have been tweaked far too many times to do useful things like break down diamondoids (oops, now the roaches have begun gnawing at our nanoswarms!), signal the presence of neurotoxins (why are all the roaches *blinking* yellow and black?) or spread plasmids containing corporate adverts (Let's see what this gene does... threonine-histamine-glutamic acid-proline... "THE POWER OF DREAMS HONDA GENETICS" Damn.) Let's not even get started on viral advertising.