Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (12 page)
‘We’re not micro-robotics and smart sand.’
‘Neither are we true nano, let alone femto.’
‘We’re kind of in between.’
‘Cellular.’
‘Technology that becomes like biology.’
‘Biology that becomes technological.’
‘Bio informatics.’
‘Stop,’ says Leyla Gültaşli. ‘Maybe I’m not a marketing executive - yet - but I do know that if you talk to a venture capitalist like that, they’ll throw you straight out.’
‘Okay okay.’ Yaşar holds his hands up. ‘Let’s go back to basics. The scales. Small tech: micro-robotics, swarm computing, that kind of scale.’
‘Like BitBots,’ Leyla says brightly. ‘Or police bots.’
‘Okay,’ Yaşar says. ‘And at the other end of the scale, there’s smallest - if you don’t count quantum dots - which is nanotechnology, which only starts at the scale of a tenth of a wavelength of light.’
‘It’s what I snort when I need to remember stuff or have to concentrate or want to play at being someone else for a while,’ Leyla says. ‘It’s what makes pictures on T-shirts move and lets you have smartpaper and scrubs extra cholesterol out of your arteries or alcohol out of your liver. It’s why my ceptep and car, if I had a car, recharge in five seconds flat.’
‘Well, there is a bit more to it than that,’ Yaşar says.
‘There’s a scale in between, which is Smaller, and that’s the scale we work at. We’re working with the cells of the human body,’ says Aso.
‘What, like little submarines in the bloodstream?’ Leyla asks.
They both look at her. Zeliha sniggers again.
‘I think you’ll find that is science fiction,’ Aso says.
‘You see, at the cellular level, the viscosity of blood is so enormous . . .’
‘Stop. Enough of the double act. Tell me, this isn’t to do with those replicator things?’
Yaşar and Aso look aghast, as if she has accused them of paedophilia. Even Zeliha is ruffled.
‘We do bio-informatics,’ Yaşar says.
‘Studies into replicators are subject to strict government licence and oversight,’ Aso says. ‘Replicator experiments can only be carried out at government approved research facilities and they’re all in Ankara.’
So someone in this bazaar of wonders is experimenting with replicators
, Leyla thinks. Would that be Small, Smaller or Smallest? Replicators were danger. Replicators were the new nuclear. Replicators got you shot, no questions, no appeal. Replicators were the end of the world creeping up, one relentless atom after another. An enduring childhood terror: unable to sleep, Leyla had gone down the stairs. Quietly quietly, no one hearing. Mummy and Daddy were there on their respective sofas and chairs, big brother Aziz and sister Hasibe sprawling across the floor. News time; their faces were blue with the world pouring from the flat screen that occupied an entire wall. At that scale the horror can’t be avoided. The world was coming to the worst possible end. Later Leyla learned that there was a name for this apocalypse; the Grey Goo scenario. She saw a slow tide of grey devour a town like Demre. Houses, streets, the mosque, the shopping centre, the bus station, the buses, the cars in the street, all were gradually over-run by this creeping corruption, silver as the botrytis mould that stalked the greenhouses and reduced tomatoes and aubergines to undulating velvety grey.
, Leyla thinks. Would that be Small, Smaller or Smallest? Replicators were danger. Replicators were the new nuclear. Replicators got you shot, no questions, no appeal. Replicators were the end of the world creeping up, one relentless atom after another. An enduring childhood terror: unable to sleep, Leyla had gone down the stairs. Quietly quietly, no one hearing. Mummy and Daddy were there on their respective sofas and chairs, big brother Aziz and sister Hasibe sprawling across the floor. News time; their faces were blue with the world pouring from the flat screen that occupied an entire wall. At that scale the horror can’t be avoided. The world was coming to the worst possible end. Later Leyla learned that there was a name for this apocalypse; the Grey Goo scenario. She saw a slow tide of grey devour a town like Demre. Houses, streets, the mosque, the shopping centre, the bus station, the buses, the cars in the street, all were gradually over-run by this creeping corruption, silver as the botrytis mould that stalked the greenhouses and reduced tomatoes and aubergines to undulating velvety grey.
There were no people in this death-Demre. But the film did show a cat, a black cat with white feet and tail, cornered by the inevitable grey, swamped, reduced to a cat-shaped patch of silver carpet that heaved and kicked for a few moments and then melted. She started screaming.
‘It’s all right darling, it’s all right darling, it’s only the television, it’s just made up, just a silly old thing.’ Her mother scooped her up as her father flicked away to some psychic show. But Leyla had seen the logo in the corner of the screen and knew what it meant. This was the news, this was true. Where had this come from, where was it going? She was seven, maybe halfway to eight, but the image of her world, her parents, everything and everyone she loved but especially Bubu the cat who hunted polytunnel vermin, being turned to grey mould still gave her screaming nightmares. Years later, when she retold the story at a family gathering, she had finally learned that it was an opinion piece in response to Ankara announcing special economic status for new nanotechnology developments to boost Turkey’s research status as an EU candidate state. It was a clever computer animation of runaway replicator nanotech devouring the world. The prophet of nanotechnological doom was a tight, elegant man with a very well trimmed grey moustache and the narrowest eyes she had ever seen. She’s seen Hasan Eken many times since - he’s still the expert-of-choice on the dangers of the race to nanotech: Dr Goo, the columnists call him but that night he was the angel of death. He terrified her more purely than anyone before or since. Replicators are death.
She’s accused her potential new clients of being geek boys and criminal replicator-runners. This isn’t how it works in the client management hand-outs.
‘Okay, bio-informatics is the science of how the DNA - that’s the material in the nucleus of every single cell of your body that programmes how the proteins that build living material are put together,’ Yaşar says.
‘I know what DNA is.’
‘Well, bio-informatics looks at DNA not so much from the point of view of inheritance and cell-building, but as information processing; programming almost. Each strand of DNA is a complex piece of biological software that the ribosomes process to print out proteins. DNA can be used to make chemical computers, and I’m sure even you’ve heard of biochips - there are half a dozen labs here working on biochip projects - the media are always on about them, direct interface between technology and the human brain, the self as the final frontier, opening up the skull, ceptep calls right into someone else’s brain, sending pictures straight into someone’s visual cortex, all you have to do is think a thought at someone and it will go through the ceptep net straight into their brains.’
‘Now that sounds like science fiction to me,’ says Leyla. She’s only said this because she’s noticed that Aso, when he tries hard to explain, has a nice, introverted frown, as if he must convince himself before he tries to persuade anyone else.
‘Do you know what non-coding DNA is?’ Yaşar asks.
Leyla tries to think of a smart answer but shakes her head.
‘Well, the human genome has massive redundancy - that means that two per cent of the DNA does all the work of instructing the ribosomes that build the proteins that make up the cells of your body. Ninety-eight per cent of your DNA just sits there doing nothing. Taking up space in the gene.’
‘To bio-informaticists, that’s memory space going begging,’ says Aso. ‘Wasted processing power. Until the Besarani-Ceylan Transcriber.’
‘Ceylan-Besarani Transcriber,’ Yaşar says quickly.
Aso holds up a finger. He has started so he will finish.
‘The Besarani-Ceylan transcriber is a molecular engine that takes information from bloodstream programmed nano and transcribes it on to junk DNA.’
Leyla knows she is supposed to look impressed here.
‘This transcriber writes information on to the spare capacity of this non-coding DNA,’ she says.
They’re still waiting.
‘Okay.’
‘Think a minute about the implications,’ Aso says.
‘You’re storing information inside cells.’ They’re expecting more. ‘You’re turning living cells into . . . tiny computers?’
They’re looking happier now.
‘And how many cells are there in the human body?’ Yaşar asks.
‘As many as there are stars in the sky!’ declares Zeliha unexpectedly.
‘Ten trillion cells,’ Aso says. ‘And inside each cell are thirty-two thousand one hundred and eighty-five genes, three billion bases, eighty-five per cent of which are non-coding.’ There’s an odd look, fundamentalist look in his eyes now.
‘So multiply the numbers,’ Yaşar cajoles. Leyla has never been very good at carrying zeroes in her head.
‘A thousand billion,’ she says uncertainly. ‘Zillion.’
Yaşar shakes his head. ‘No no no. One thousand three hundred and fifty zettabytes of information, storable inside every human being. That’s
zetta
bytes. These are numbers they haven’t made up names for yet. And what can write can also read. And what is a computer other than something that reads an instruction in one place and writes the answer in another?’
zetta
bytes. These are numbers they haven’t made up names for yet. And what can write can also read. And what is a computer other than something that reads an instruction in one place and writes the answer in another?’
‘All human music ever written fits into your appendix,’ Aso says. ‘Every book in every library is a few millimetres of your small intestine. Every detail of your life can be recorded - and replayed. That’s maybe the size of your stomach. You can live other people’s lives. Talents and abilities and new skills can be downloaded and stored permanently. Not like now where it wears off as the nano is purged from the system. The Besarani-Ceylan transcriber writes it into the cells of your body. You want to play the piano? It’s yours. You want to memorize a play, or you want to learn every test case in the law library? Foreign languages, home plumbing, programming code, physics, chemistry, you’ve got them. Now, what you do with them once you’ve got them, what you make of them, that’s up to you. We don’t guarantee expertise, only that it’s there, coded into your DNA.’
‘Come and see,’ says Yaşar. Everyone shuffles round to let Yaşar out from behind his desk and round to a door in the back wall.
The warehouse behind the door is as dark and cool and spacious as the front office is bright and hot and crammed. It smells of fresh cinder-block, still drying cement, paint and electronics. Aso clicks on batteries of lights. In the centre of the unit stands a single bladeserver tower, swathed in pipes that run to a massive cooling unit on the ceiling. Other than that the unit is the domain of cobwebs and birds’ nests glued under the eaves and dust sparkling in the light that slants through the narrow, high windows. She draws an arc with the point of her good shoes in the dust on the concrete floor.
‘What am I looking at exactly?’ Leyla Gültaşli shouts. The roar of fans and cooling pumps and dust extractors from the black monolith defeats conversation.
‘A real-time modelling farm running X-cis, Atomage and Cell-render 7,’ Aso announces proudly.
‘Licensed copies,’ Yaşar adds.
‘You’re looking at forty thousand euro of high-end commercial molecular modelling ware,’ Aso shouts.
‘And that’s a reconditioned ex-EnGen render unit,’ Yaşar says. ‘We’ve made ten thousand euro worth of modifications and upgrades - it’s a Refiğ Brothers custom overclock; that’s almost five hundred terraflops Rpeak. You don’t want to know how much electricity and water this thing eats.’
‘I’m looking at a big computer.’
‘You’re looking at a state-of-the-art real-time molecular design and modelling suite.’
‘Let me get this right, you don’t actually make anything here.’
The men looked as shocked as if she has accused them of running a porn studio.
‘We’re designers,’ Yaşar says coldly. ‘Nobody who’s anybody makes stuff. That’s just production.’
‘I think you need to see it,’ Aso says. ‘What’s the bandwidth on your ceptep?’
Leyla meekly offers up the base unit from her bag. The boys huddle over it, stork and starling, turning it over in their hands, taking it without a word from each other.
‘It should be all right but you’ll need these.’ Aso gingerly fits a pair of lenseless spectacle frames on Leyla’s face, adjusting their set on her nose with an optician’s care. ‘You really only get the full idea in 3D.’
Leyla blinks and flinches as the write-lasers drop down in front of her eyes. Her ceptep rings in her bag, then she is dropped face-forward into the world of DNA. The dusty concrete vault is filled with helical hawsers like the bridge cables reaching out before her, through the walls of the fabrication unit. They rotate along their axes, corkscrews, spiral staircases, Archimedes screws. DNA; the double-helices linked by rungs of base pairs. The atoms waltz around her, stately, relentless. It is engulfing, huge, hypnotic yet deeply relaxing. Leyla is thinking how she could market it as a spa experience when she becomes aware of movement up ahead of her. Little scurrying whirligig things, like the beetles she used to see on the water tanks back at home, gyring around on the surface tension, haul themselves atom by atom up the endless spiral staircases of the DNA helices. The simulation focuses on a cluster of DNA strands, bringing Leyla in closer, closer until the DNA climbers seem the size of buses. This is the atomic scale; a tinker-toy universe built from balls: beach balls and footballs and tennis balls and tiny bouncing ping-pong balls. Cogs made of linked spheres, cranks and levers and wheels, built from balls. Balls made from smaller balls from smaller balls. It’s a crèche playroom reality, everything soft and rounded and playful. But these are not soft children’s toys. They are purposeful, tireless, unstoppable crawlers, base pair by base pair heaving the thread of DNA through their interiors, snapping the bases, fusing them together behind them, but changed, spinning like blobs of spider glue running down a thread of spun silk. She watches molecular shears snap atomic bonds and reweave them into new patterns. Heave, shear, weave, heave. Atom by atom up the endless chain of DNA.
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