Idolon (12 page)

He nodded. "Do you know if any other images like these have shown up anyplace else?"

"Together, you mean? In the same context?"

"Yeah. Maybe there's a connection to some larger audience, a new political smob or philm cast."

Slowly, reluctantly, she withdrew her hand. "I'll ask around. See what I can find out."

Figure that out and he might have a better idea of where he stood, what plans IBT had for the 'skin, and what role he would be expected to play.

 One of the flies in Zhenyu al-Fayoumi's latest experimental test group had acquired a new face.

Al-Fayoumi stared at the magnified image on a virtual d-splay. The face was female, with kohl-etched almond-shaped eyes, a long, narrow nose, full lips, and a graceful neck. According to the datician he queried for enhancement and face-print comparison, the features matched a stone statue of Queen Nefertiti.

How had the latest image, the idolon, been transmitted? Where had it come from? Had it been inherited from a parent, another unrelated fly, or the environment? Was it an entirely new image, or a permutation of an existing one?

The fly had emerged from its pupa late last night. Early that morning, al-Fayoumi had separated the offspring flies from the parent population and applied a layer of electronic skin to the head and wings of each. Several hours later, the mutant image had appeared.

None of the fly's siblings had acquired this particular idolon. They had expressed the parent image: David Hedison from the original 1958 version of
The Fly.
That was typical of the epigenetic mode of inheritance he was hypothesizing: images were being transmitted from flies to their descendents without the information being encoded in either the soft or digital DNA of the parents. To complicate matters, every so often a spontaneous and apparently random mutation occurred. Inexplicably, an offspring fly inherited a new face.

The faces had started out as a gimmick. As part of a grant proposal to study image expression in digital allotropes, he had philmed a batch of flies, adding the gray and yellow feathers of a goldfinch to their wings.

Ha-hah. Everyone in the Developmental Nanobiology Department got a kick out of it, undergrads, grad students, staff, even faculty.

Could he do faces? they wanted to know. Sure. Airplane wings? Why not? After all, anything was possible.

The requests poured in. So he became a fly guy. A strict vegetarian for most of his life, he had purchased meat, bred maggots, and philmed his flies with the faces of old comedians, politicians, and big-screen movie stars. He gave the flies the Rising Sun wings of kamikaze Zeros, Iron Cross biplanes, and Hammer and Sickle MIGs.

It became a game. The game ended after he 'skinned a new batch of flies but had to leave before he could philm them. When he returned a few hours later, he found that all of the new flies had inherited the philm image of the parent fly, the gold- and-blue mask of King Tutankhamen.

A practical joke, his detractors claimed. That's all he was seeing. Not a new form of phenotype transmission or epigenetic inheritance. Certainly not Lamarckian inheritance.

 At first he agreed. What else could it be? Someone, a colleague, was having a bit of fun with him.

Without telling anyone, he repeated the process. The result was the same. The offspring flies inherited the primary image after only a few hours. Somehow it was being copied, transmitted from one generation of electronic 'skin to the next.

How? For weeks, the question haunted him. The inheritance appeared to be Lamarckian, as absurd as a kid being born with a tattoo identical to one inked on one of his or her parents. Clearly, there must be some other mechanism. But, fearful of damaging his credibility, he was afraid to investigate openly. Safer, at first, to pursue the matter in secret, on his own time. That way, he wouldn't be risking his reputation. He could always go public later, after he had a better idea of what was going on and whether it was a valid line of inquiry or not. For the time being the less anyone knew about what he was doing the better. Except for a couple of bootleggers and rip artists he occasionally contacted for information about black-market ware, he had managed to maintain a low profile.

Until now.

Al-Fayoumi checked the time. Not quite eleven. The man hadn't shown. Possibly he wouldn't. Possibly he was having second thoughts. Fine. Al-Fayoumi should never have agreed to meet with him in person, and especially not in his lab. A mistake. Neutral ground would have been better, a restaurant or a hotel lobby.

Or not at all.

Al-Fayoumi stared into the gloom of his basement. The makeshift lab was jammed with flimsy steel shelves, storage cabinets, and recycled lab equipment, most of it purchased at flea markets and scavenger shops in the Trenches. The only light came from the red heat lamps over the terrariums, and the phosphor-bright traces of the flies buzzing about.

How had the man, who called himself Yukawa, heard about what he was working on? Who had told him? One of his black-market contacts? Or was there another source he didn't know about?

Troubled, al-Fayoumi wrung his hands. He needed to know. That was the main reason he had agreed to meet. There had also been a hint of private funding, dangled in front of him like a bright lure.

After a year he still didn't know how the images were transmitted or inherited. He was at a dead end. All he had were a couple of working principles he had been unable to prove: one, all philm-based images were the same image, and two, all programmable matter was the same matter.

A message d-splay opened and a DiNA signature code blinked in his field of view. Al-Fayoumi's hands grew chill, his underarms damp.

Yukawa had arrived.

_______

The man wore silk shirt and slacks, both an unostentatious silver-gray. His jacket was a tasteful Art Brico collage of fabrics that successfully integrated African tribal weavings and Indian reshamwork. Despite its slapdash appearance, the design was very calculated. There was nothing arbitrary about it.

He had philmed himself as a Japanese zaibatsu samurai: high cheekbones, straight nose, coarse black hair parted in the middle and smoothed back. The smooth patina of the philm and the waxy stiffness of the 'skin combined to create a portrait of quiet reserve and firm candor. It wasn't a face al-Fayoumi immediately recognized. It was probably a composite image, fashioned from obscure cinematic references he was unfamiliar with.

Clothing had always been an indicator of attitude, values, or status. Philm was no different. Except that it also exhibited certain traits of epigenetic inheritance, mainly the transmission of phenotype through virtual updates and downloads.

"Mr. al-Fayoumi." The man bowed. At the same time he held out his hand. "A pleasure to meet you. Thank you for agreeing to see me." He peered at al-Fayoumi from over the tops of vintage WWII-era eyeglasses.

"Mr. Yukawa." They shook. Then al-Fayoumi led him down a narrow hallway to the main lab.

The man claimed to be with Sigilint, a philmware development firm that specialized in dynamic imaging systems and remote, downloadable plug-ins for electronic skin.

"Can I get you something?" al-Fayoumi asked. The words felt awkward, atrophied. It had been months since he'd had a visitor.

"I'm fine. Thank you."

Al-Fayoumi nodded. So much for formal niceties.

Yukawa solved the problem by taking an interest in the terrariums, with their dizzy electron clouds of flies. "Is this what you are working on now?"

"Idolons," al-Fayoumi said.

Yukawa shook his head politely. "I'm not familiar with the term."

"Phenotypic expression of images with social and/or cultural content," al-Fayoumi said. How to explain? Tongue-tied, he groped for the right words.

“Architecture parlante,"
Yukawa mused after a moment.

Al-Fayoumi found himself at a loss.

"It's an architectural term for a building taking on the physical form of the task it's designed to do," Yukawa explained. "For example, a donut shop constructed in the shape of a donut. Or, in the case of electronic skin, programmable matter adopting the shape of acquired images."

"Inherited," al-Fayoumi said.

Yukawa raised one brow, more puzzled than skeptical. "Inherited from what?" he said.

"A parent image. Images that have the same digitype but different iconotypes, the way cells with the same genotype can have a different phenotype."

"Lamarckian inheritance," Yukawa said with a sly smile. "The expression of acquired characteristics. In this case electronic images instead of a physical alteration or learned behavior."

Al-Fayoumi nodded. His throat felt tight and dry. He didn't trust himself to speak.

Yukawa pursed his lips thoughtfully. "What's the mechanism for inheritance?" he said. "How are the images, the idolons, transmitted?"

Al-Fayoumi swallowed. Had he already revealed too much? "I'm not sure."

Yukawa seemed to accept this at face value. He returned his attention to the batch of test flies. "Do the images ever change? Evolve?"

"Every few generations a new variant appears," al- Fayoumi said.

"In response to what?" Yakuwa said. "The environment, or some other stimulus?"

Al-Fayoumi hesitated, reluctant to say more. He was venturing into terra incognita and unwilling to commit himself to speculations that could be held against him. A simple slip of the tongue, no different than that of a knife.

Mesmerized by the flies, Yukawa didn't seem to notice. The polished lenses of his spectacles flickered. "Tell me," he said. "Have you ever observed any quantum effects in the idolons?"

Al-Fayoumi blinked. "How do you mean?"

Yukawa waved one hand casually, implying that they were speaking off the cuff now, engaging in speculation. "Superposition of states, for example. The same idolon simultaneously possessing several different images or values. Eigenstates, to be precise."

Al-Fouyami frowned and moistened his lips. "You mean images that appear to be different are really just different expressions of the same image? The way a photon is in two places at once until it collapses into a location."

"Exactly. When an idolon is in one state, it might look different from when it's in another state. That might explain the sudden appearance of a new image; it could be the same image collapsing into a different state."

As opposed to a mutation. Yukawa was suggesting a different expression of the same image with higher or lower probabilities of appearing. That still didn't explain how the images were transmitted, but—

"Entangled inheritance is another topic we're interested in. EPR effects," Yukawa said, as if anticipating his train of thought. "The instantaneous transmission and expression of information in programmable matter over long distances."

EPR. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. Sometimes referred to as “spooky action" at a distance, where quantum-entangled particles communicated with one another instantly no matter how far apart they were.

"You think that might be a possible mechanism for the transmission of the images?" al-Fayoumi asked.

"The philm project we're currently developing," Yukawa said, "has a shared social component. We're interested in mathematical tools, software applications if you will, that can be used to predict the habits, tendencies, and behavior of groupware within a structural inheritance system. One that uses programmable matter to express phenotype."

Al-Fayoumi's brow pinched. "You want people waring the same philm to be able to inherit and express specific acquired traits?"

"In this case the traits would be images," Yukawa sad, "and any three-dimensional component they code for."

Al-Fayoumi rubbed his jaw. "What would be the source of these traits?"

"Existing philm. Or new source philm that acts as a template for new versions and releases."

"So the inheritance would be directed," al-Fayoumi said. "Engineered."

"Yes."

"By whom?"

Yukawa shrugged. "Clearly, I can't get into specifics. The details are proprietary and confidential, subject to strict nondisclosure. All I can say is that it involves electronic skin with a single quantum state, so that spatially separated portions of the 'skin are quantum-entangled."

"Able to share information," al-Fayoumi said.

Yukawa nodded. "And influence one another."

Al-Fouyami started to pace, caught himself, stopped. "What exactly do you want from me?"

"You would be formulating inheritance models and helping cut the source code to manage the emergent shareware."

In other words, quantum inheritance. The instantaneous transmission of phenotype from one person to another.

Yukawa regarded him with calculated intensity. "Are you interested?"

Al-Fayoumi cleared his throat. "Why me?"

"I should think that would be obvious. You are one of the few scientists who is doing any work in non-Darwinian inheritance, especially when it comes to the epigenetic transmission of images."

"How much time would I have?"

Yukawa smiled, baring exquisitely lacquered teeth. "I take it that's a yes."

Al-Fayoumi hollowed his cheeks and nodded.

_______

When Yukawa had gone, al-Fayoumi went back to his office. He turned down the main lights and watched a new batch of maggots seethe under the heat lamps.

Plausible deniability. That was the reason Yukawa had come to him. If there was a problem, if the project failed, Yukawa could blame him. He would make a convenient scapegoat.