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Once an archive is selected, it will be written into a computer file and coded into DNA base pairs. The sequences will then be synthesized by conventional protocols. Then the archival DNA will be ligated into cockroach intron DNA via injection into eggs.
Once the archival roaches are born they will be cultivated until the population achieves at least the specified volume (8 cubic feet). The roaches will be released in selected locations in Manhattan. Further cultivations and releases will follow, carefully calculated to assure that the archive is widespread enough to survive for the specified period of time.
Within approximately fourteen years, the archival roaches will inexorably become so endemic as to become an ubiquitous and permanent feature of the island.
In order to decode the archive, a future historian would make use of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to amplify and then sequence the fragments, turning the DNA sequence once again into the contents of a computer’s memory. In order to facilitate decoding, the archive will not make use of data compression or encryption technologies.