Email the Game Master with a subject line that reflects your character:
kent@epicquest.bio
Old-school email-based gaming. Like MUDs, but with molecules.
Your subject line is your first character choice.
Picture this dystopian hellscape: It's 2025. Humanity has smartphones that can identify any song in 3 seconds, cars that drive themselves, and AI that writes better poetry than most humans.
But if you want to know if you have cancer?
MEDIEVAL TORTURE CHAMBER MODE ACTIVATED.
You'll navigate a Kafkaesque maze of:
And the grand finale? If you're lucky, they'll find it when it's only mostly trying to kill you.
Meanwhile, every morning, you stand over a porcelain portal and literally flush away the molecular autobiography of your body. That yellow stream contains:
It's like burning the Library of Alexandria every time you pee.
The COVID test? A cotton swab lobotomy that tells you ONE thing about ONE virus AFTER you're already sick. Revolutionary technology circa 1890.
Aging? Look in the mirror. Does your face look like a wrinkled ballsack? Congratulations, you're dying! No further tests needed. That'll be $5,000.
This is what passes for "advanced diagnostics" in the year of our lord two-thousand-and-twenty-five. We put a man on the moon with a computer less powerful than a Furby, but we can't tell you what's in your pee without a mass spectrometer the size of a refrigerator.
Once upon a time in 1948, humanity was collectively shitting its pants about nuclear war. Wallace Coulter, a electrical engineer with a peculiar hobby of "staring at blood cells," realized that if the bombs dropped, doctors would need to count radiation-damaged blood cells FAST.
The existing method? Squinting through microscopes like Victorian perverts, clicking mechanical counters until their fingers cramped. One blood sample. One hour. One exhausted technician ready to burn it all down.
So Coulter did what any reasonable person would do: He bummed a cigarette off someone and STABBED IT WITH A HOT NEEDLE.
Not the cigarette. The cellophane wrapper.
Then—and here's where it gets sexy—he ran electricity through salt water, put the holey cellophane in the middle, and watched what happened when blood cells got sucked through.
BOOM.
Each cell blocks the current. Each blockage makes a blip. Count the blips, count the cells. What took an hour now took seconds.
This magnificent bastard had just invented the most-used medical test in human history using a battery, an oscilloscope, and cigarette packaging. If that's not punk rock, I don't know what is.
Fast forward through decades of incremental progress (boring) to the REAL shit:
WE CAN NOW MAKE HOLES THE SIZE OF A SINGLE MOLECULE.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Holes so small that DNA has to squeeze through sideways, like a fat person in an airplane bathroom.
The alpha geeks at Oxford Nanopore figured out how to use ACTUAL BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS (proteins that bacteria use to murder your cells) as molecular reading devices. They stick these protein pores in fake membranes, shove DNA through them, and read the genetic code like a ticker tape. They turned this party trick into a company worth more billions than there are people who understand what they actually do.
But here's the thing about protein nanopores: They're prima donnas. They need:
Protein nanopores are the Tesla Roadster of molecular sensing: impressive, expensive, and breaks if you look at it wrong.
Enter: SOLID-STATE NANOPORES.
These bad boys are carved out of materials tougher than your ex's heart:
They're virtually indestructible. They work in conditions that would make protein pores curl up and die. They can be mechanically adjusted in real-time (we pioneered that shit—more on that later).
Scientists have gotten so good at this that they can:
Let me paint you a picture of what it's like to work in a nanopore lab:
Monday: Your carefully crafted nanopore that took 6 months to perfect? Dead. Cause of death: Someone breathed near it.
Tuesday: New pore works great! Signal looks beautiful! Wait, that's not your molecule. That's dust. Everything is dust. You are dust. The universe is dust.
Wednesday: Perfect signals! Nature paper incoming! Oh wait, that's 60Hz electrical noise from the building's wiring. Your data is literally the building humming to itself.
Thursday: Everything works! Champagne! Oh fuck, it's not reproducible. Nothing is reproducible. Reality is a lie.
Friday: Existential crisis. Consider becoming a bartender. At least alcohol molecules are big enough to see their effects.
This is why there are only a few thousand people on Earth seriously working on nanopores, despite the technology being more important than fire, the wheel, and the internet combined.
The dirty secret of nanopore research: It's so fucking hard that most people would rather do literally anything else. It's like playing Dark Souls blindfolded while someone periodically hits you with a chair.
A traditional biotech company would attack this by:
Fuck. That. Noise.
Here's what I realized while having my seventeenth existential crisis in the lab:
A nanopore research lab can fit in your fucking hand.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The entire setup—the electronics, the pores, the fluidics, the detection system—can be smaller than a Nintendo Switch.
And if you can hold a lab in your hand, and labs can be mass-produced, then why the fuck are we gatekeeping this behind ivory towers and VC boardrooms?
What if—and hear me out here—what if we just... gave everyone a lab?
What if instead of 200 PhDs in a building, we had:
I realized we weren't building a company. We were building a RAID.
And not just any raid—the most epic raid in human history. The boss? Death itself. The loot? Immortality. The strategy? Distributed parallel processing using human pattern recognition and creativity.
World of Warcraft had 12 million players at its peak. They collectively spent 50 billion hours playing—that's 5.7 million years of human effort. Directed at killing digital dragons.
What if we directed that energy at killing actual death?
In every epic quest, you need a party. But this isn't some balanced 5-person dungeon group. This is a MASSIVE RAID, and we need every class:
You magnificent bastard. While others see closed doors, you see doors that haven't been kicked hard enough. You storm VC offices like they're villages to pillage. Your battle cry of "FUND OR DIE!" echoes through Silicon Valley. You're not here to make friends—you're here to make sure we don't run out of gold before we slay the dragon. Your spirit animal is a honey badger with an MBA.
You speak in tongues—Python, Rust, C++, and cursed languages that shouldn't exist. You look at our 10TB/day data stream and say "that's adorable." You're building the Matrix, except instead of enslaving humanity, it's reading their pee. You've never met a problem you couldn't solve with enough recursion and coffee. Your code comments are 50% profanity, 50% poetry.
You beautiful bureaucracy wrangler. You read FDA guidelines for fun. You negotiate contracts like a hostage negotiator. When someone says "that's legally impossible," you hear "challenge accepted." You're part lawyer, part therapist, part exorcist. You keep us on the right side of the law while we're busy breaking the laws of physics.
You're the type of person who looks at a $50,000 piece of lab equipment and says "I can build that for $50 and some duct tape." And then you DO. Your workshop looks like Tony Stark and MacGyver had a baby. You speak G-code fluently. You've never met a problem that couldn't be solved with the right adapter. Your porn is McMaster-Carr catalogs.
You understand the deep magic: that fun is the most powerful force in the universe. You can turn the most boring lab protocol into a boss battle. You know that dopamine is the ultimate renewable resource. While others see "data collection," you see "legendary loot drops." You're here to make sure our player scientists would rather pipette than play Fortnite.
You're the one who actually knows what the fuck we're doing. You've forgotten more about molecular biology than most people will ever learn. You look at our technical challenges and crack your knuckles. You're part researcher, part wizard, part madman. Your browser history would make the FBI concerned and the Nobel Committee aroused.
You commune with electrons like they're your personal army. You build amplifiers so sensitive they can hear a flea fart in a hurricane. You look at Johnson noise and say "not in my house." Your oscilloscope is your crystal ball. You're the type of person who gets genuinely excited about ground loops (but only to destroy them).
You're our bridge to the muggles. You can explain quantum tunneling using only sock puppets and interpretive dance. Your memes are 🔥. Your TikToks make science sexy. You're here to make sure the world understands what we're doing before we accidentally save it. You're part educator, part propagandist, part prophet.
Pick a Major and a Minor. Mix and match. Be a Barbarian/Bytebender who fundraises through code. Be a Sciencer/Spellbinder who publishes papers in meme format. Be whatever unholy combination calls to your soul.
Imagine if a Nintendo Switch fucked a mass spectrometer and their baby was raised by cyberpunk anarchists. That's the MR1.
What it does today: It's like Twitch streaming but for molecules. You pour stuff in, molecules go through holes, signals stream out, AI gets smarter.
What it will do tomorrow: Read any molecule faster than WebMD can convince you it's cancer.
Why $300?: Because $299 is insulting corporate bullshit and $301 is just weird. Also, it costs us $60 to make, and we need the margin to keep the lights on and the Red Bull flowing.
Every good MMORPG has multiple quest lines. Here are ours:
Named after Nick Bostrom's fable about a dragon that demands human sacrifice (spoiler: the dragon is aging). You'll literally track your own biomarkers over time. Watch your telomeres shorten! See your proteome shift! Catch cancer before it catches you! It's like a fitness tracker but for your actual molecules instead of just steps.
Listen, I know it's gross. But your shit contains more information than the Library of Congress. Every dump is a data dump. Your gut microbiome is writing your life story in bacterial prose. We're going to read it, understand it, and optimize it. Your morning constitutional will become a morning contribution to science.
The holy grail. The white whale. The final frontier. Nobody has EVER sequenced DNA with a solid-state nanopore. Oxford did it with proteins, but proteins are divas. We're going to do it with materials that could survive a nuclear holocaust. You'll be part of the team that cracks the code on reading the code. Imagine being there when Watson and Crick figured out the double helix, except instead of stealing credit from Rosalind Franklin, we're open-sourcing everything.
What's REALLY in your food? Not the lies on the label—the actual molecules. That "natural flavoring"? We'll tell you exactly which beaver's ass it came from. That organic kale? We'll show you its pesticide fingerprint. You'll analyze your cooking in real-time. It's like having a mass spec in your kitchen, except it doesn't cost more than your house.
We're literally going to put Martian soil simulant through nanopores. Why? Because fuck yeah, that's why. Also because if we're going to terraform Mars (and we are), we need to understand its chemistry at the molecular level. Plus, when we find life on other planets (not if, when), we'll need universal sensors that don't assume Earth-based biochemistry. Your MR1 could be the device that detects first contact.
What if you could see your thoughts? Not metaphorically—molecularly. Track your serotonin. Monitor your dopamine. Watch your neurons fire in chemical semaphore. This is the quest line for understanding consciousness itself, one molecule at a time. Fair warning: staring into the neurochemical abyss means the abyss stares back.
Listen up, because this is important and every other project gets this wrong:
XP IS NOT CRYPTO.
XP IS NOT AN NFT.
XP IS NOT WORTH MONEY.
XP is a score. Like your high score in Pac-Man, except instead of eating dots, you're eating the universe's secrets.
Here's the deal:
No blockchain bullshit. No "utility tokens." No rug pulls. Just good old-fashioned "you helped build this, you own part of it."
Why this model? Because traditional equity vesting rewards showing up, not showing out. You can be an advisor who signs papers and ghosts, and still vest your shares over time. Fuck that. Our system rewards ACTUAL CONTRIBUTION.
If we fail? You still leveled up skills that make you a molecular wizard. You still contributed to pushing humanity forward. You still get to put "Saved the World (Attempt #1)" on your resume.
Let me be crystal fucking clear about what we're attempting here:
Not metaphorically. Not eventually. Not in some hand-wavy "technology will save us" way.
We're building the actual infrastructure—the sensors, the software, the community, the data, the algorithms—that will let humanity see what's killing it in real-time and do something about it.
Every other approach is too slow, too expensive, too gatekept, or too limited:
We're doing something different. We're building a techno-anarchist molecular commune where:
This isn't some hippie "wouldn't it be nice" fantasy. This is hard-core engineering meets distributed systems meets game design meets molecular biology meets punk rock ethics.
Imagine waking up in 2040:
Your toilet ran diagnostics while you slept. Your shower checked your skin. Your toothbrush analyzed your saliva. By the time you're having coffee, you know:
Cancer? Caught at the single-cell stage and zapped before it could even think about metastasizing.
Aging? A choice, not a sentence. Like choosing whether to dye your hair, except for your telomeres.
Pandemics? Your toilet is part of a global sensor network. New virus appears in Wuhan, Warsaw, or Washington? The world knows in hours, not months.
This isn't sci-fi. This is engineering. And we're the engineers.
Here's what happens next:
The MR1 devices ship soon. The games are launching. The future is being built.
We're not asking you to quit your job. We're not asking for money. We're not asking you to move to a commune in the woods (though we'd build awesome nanopore labs there).
We're asking you to join a quest. To contribute what you can. To be part of something bigger than yourself.
Because here's the truth: Every day we delay, 150,000 people die. That's not a statistic. That's 150,000 consciousness-having, dream-pursuing, love-feeling beings getting deleted from the universe.
We can stop that. We WILL stop that. The only question is whether you'll be part of the "we."
In 2060, when death is optional and suffering is a choice, they'll ask you: "What did you do during the Molecular Revolution?"
Will you say "I watched from the sidelines"?
Or will you say "I WAS THERE. I RAN THE EXPERIMENTS. I WROTE THE CODE. I SPREAD THE WORD. I HELPED BUILD THE TOOLS THAT FREED HUMANITY FROM ITS MOLECULAR PRISON."
The choice is yours. The portal is below. The game begins when you're ready.
Welcome to Epic Quest Bio™.
Welcome to the rest of your extended life.
Mission: Develop utility-scale molecular sensing infrastructure through solid-state nanopore technology and distributed research methodology.
Core Technology: The MR1 device employs solid-state nanopore sensors for resistive pulse sensing. Unlike biological nanopore systems (e.g., Oxford Nanopore R10.4.1¹), solid-state pores offer superior environmental tolerance, vastly greater size range, and direct integration into established CMOS manufacturing processes². Device specifications: 10-125 kS/s ADC sampling, ESP32-S3 processor, modular flow cell cartridges with various pore materials (SiN, graphene, MoS₂).
Technical Challenges:
Research Methodology: The Molecular Streaming Corps will distribute research across ~10,000+ citizen scientists using gamified protocols. This enables parallel testing of thousands of experimental parameters simultaneously, generating training data for a Large World Model of molecular interactions. Data quality control employs tiered validation and AI-assisted anomaly detection⁴.
Development Roadmap:
Key Innovations:
Validation Framework: Performance benchmarking against established platforms (qPCR, mass spectrometry) for defined analyte classes. Statistical validation through cross-user reproducibility metrics and reference material testing.
References:
¹Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Platform accuracy. https://nanoporetech.com/platform/accuracy
²He et al. Solid-state nanopore systems: from materials to applications. NPG Asia Materials volume 13, Article number: 48 (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-020-0229-6
³Miao, Zhaohong, et al. (2022) "Dual-Responsive Zwitterion-Modified Nanopores: A Mesoscopic Simulation Study." Journal of Materials Chemistry B, vol. 10, no. 10, 2022, pp. 2740–49. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2022/tb/d1tb02416g
⁴Kipen and Jalden. Brownian motion data augmentation: a method to push neural network performance on nanopore sensors (2024). https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.10.612270v1.full.pdf
⁵Mass-manufacturable and stable solid-state nanopores for single-molecule sensing. https://www.imec-int.com/en/articles/mass-manufacturable-and-stable-solid-state-nanopores-single-molecule-sensing
⁶Kemmish, S.K. Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof. US Patent 10,908,144 (2021).
⁷Iarossi, M. et al. High-Density Plasmonic Nanopores for DNA Sensing at Ultra-Low Concentrations by Plasmon-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy. Adv. Functional Materials Vol 33, Issue 41 2301934 (2023). https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.202301934