The Nano Flower

CHAPTER THIRTY

As soon as Royan shimmered through the protective programs Julia had thrown round her processor implant she could tell he was excited, face all tight and bright.

Snowy, how's it going?

Not good. I've got you mucking about with microbes. Event Horizon is under threat from superior technology. My hold over the New Conservatives is slipping. Greg's off chasing after an alien. And Victor's furious with you for hiding this personality package in Kiley's 'ware. He had to go out to the Farm in person.

Some of his infuriating bonhomie faded, the image turning translucent for an instant as the features reshaped themselves into a more serious attitude. His sympathetic expression offered concern.

That was him all the way through, knowing exactly which buttons to press. And she always bloody let him.

I'm sorry, Snowy. Truth to tell, I'm surprised you needed to access this package at all. It's been going so well, really. I was right about the microbes, they are the greatest discovery since America, since… the wheel. God, Snowy, they're magnificent. Truly. They're going to make you mine again, Snowy. They'll bring us back together. Equals and lovers. He gave her a lopsided smile. Fated, it's written in the stars.

Once he'd been able to make her smile and dance and blush with his romanticism. Fifteen years ago, when the peace of a beachside bungalow and whole days spent making love were more important than anything. When just the touch of him lit a fire in her blood.

The only thing I see in the stars these days is how much New London has cost me, in red figures a thousand kilometres high. And only mental cripples leading Mild lives believe in astrology, as you so often told me. Now what the bloody hell have you been doing? Have you stitched that space plant together yet?

There was no movement in the pixels that composed his face, no show of hurt, which just made it worse. Julia responded with her own front of stubbornness, refusing to be bullied.

I discovered something about the microbe genetics, Royan said. Did my earlier recordings tell you about the inner toroid shells being inert?

Yes.

Well, I did a bit more work on them. A second project, alongside my asteroid dissemination plant. I was curious that only the outer shell contained active gene toroids; so I removed the outer shell from one sphere, and used the remainder as the basis of a clone.

You did what?

Cloned it.

His image dissolved. The cell which replaced him was a sac of white shadows, foggy inside. It reminded her of a flaccid jellyfish. The nucleus was a dark ovoid core at the centre, surrounded by a snowstorm of white organdies.

Her perception point drifted through the cell wall, carrying her up to the nucleus. She stopped just outside, observing the internal structure through a smoky membrane which gave everything a rusty tint. At the heart of the nucleus was the sphere of alien chromosomes. She felt like a small child pressed up against a shop window, complacent and dreamy.

I used an ordinary moss cell as a base, Royan said. I removed its terrestrial DNA, and replaced it with the modified alien gene sphere. I studied the sphere's reproduction process, it's very similar to DNA replication. Cell division starts with a generation of ring-like threads, chromonemata equivalents, which anneal to the toroids, facilitating duplication; then the two sets of toroids are split apart and regroup at separate ends of the cell, ready for the fusion.

Chrome-black rings tumbled through the nucleus, swooping towards the toroid sphere. They began to cluster over the surface, dropping down sharply to mate with a toroid. A fuzz of molecules began to build round each one. The outer shell of the gene sphere split into thirteen crescent segments, and opened like a flower. Rings started to fall in towards the second shell. The process was repeated with each of the shells, accelerating with each layer. As the shell segments continued to unfold the nucleus membrane dissolved, allowing them to spread through the cell like the wings of a dark bird.

Julia could see the duplicate toroids building, swelling out of the rings which had latched on to the originals. The last shell opened to expose a single molecular globe at the core, individual atoms arranged in what resembled a geodesic framework. Then all the twinned toroids were peeling apart. Two complete sets of the unfolded genes were now diffused throughout the cell. She thought it looked as if the membrane had been filled with a pair of crumpled oil stains, unable to merge, slithering endlessly round each other. Then they began to contract. It was the unfolding in reverse, shell segments recombining with bewildering speed, weaving round each other in a perfectly synchronized dance, snapping shut.

She let it all happen without protest, absorbed by the complexity and dynamics. Life reduced to fundamentals, its fabric more grandiose than any human cathedral. Royan was right, it was hard to believe nature, chance, could produce this chemical mechanism unaided.

When it was finished there were two gene spheres with nucleus membranes gradually thickening around them. The cell began to elongate, the separate nuclei pulling apart. A pinch began halfway between them. Then there were two cells, just touching.

Fascinating, isn't it? Royan asked; he used a hollow tone.

I've seen terrestrial cell duplication. This is no different. Evolution obviously results in the simplest solution to the problem each time. A galactic constant. She observed the two cells; their organelles seemed firmer now, more compact. Black rings were beginning to flood each nucleus again.

You've grown very cynical, said Royan. The point of all this is that the second shell pattern is a viable one. I only initiated the first division; as you can see the reproduction mechanism carried on.

And it grew into a plant, she said. One that looked like a cross between a fern and a cactus.

How did you know?

You carried it with you when you left the North Sea Farm.

Oh. Trust Victor to find that out. He's keen, that one.

What's all this supposed to prove? she asked.

Come on, Snowy! The second shell was a completely new species. Doesn't that strike you as being incredibly neat? The alien genes are arranged in a numerical sequence. Since when has mathematics governed nature?

Life is chemistry, she said. Everything can be reduced to numbers and formulae in the end. That's what genes are, ultimately, chemical numbers. The microbe's genetic structure is neater than ours; that's only to be expected in something a couple of billion years more advanced than we are. The second shell plant is probably the form the microbe evolved from. Human DNA contains all sorts of vestigial codes—tails, pelts—and we still haven't got rid of our appendix.

No way, Snowy. Nothing as complex as a plant could devolve into a microbe in one generation.

There's all that garbage in the outer shell's toroid sequence. How much did you say, ninety per cent of it? That will represent the intermediate stage, the devolution process; the garbage has to come from somewhere, after all.

Possibly, but it's still very strange.

What about the third shell? she asked. Did you try cloning that?

Not when this recording was made, I haven't had the time. Perhaps I'm a little bit afraid. That plant unnerved me, Snowy. It shouldn't exist, it really shouldn't.

Did it flower, Royan? Did the bloom remind you of us, how we used to be?

There was a bud forming when I left the Farm, that's all I know.

You sent me a flower—

Because I love you.

No, it's a warning, like all these packages. What could you be warning me about? The asteroid disseminator plant? What happened to that project?

Success, I think I used modified microbes in symbiosis with gene-tailored landcoral.

He flipped the image again. She was tiring of his pixel virtuoso act, her teeth pressing together somewhere outside the void of this node generated universe. Patience was the one quality she always cherished, like water it could erode any resistance, a weapon she could always rely on. But now she wanted all this settled, finished, over with.

It was the microbe again, that same black tacky globe Kiley had scooped up. But different this time. Flattened slightly. And the surface texture was silkier, she was sure. A second appeared beside it; egg shaped. This one was even darker. They turned slowly below her perception point, giving her an all-over view.

This is what I was after all along, Snowy. The flat one has had its miners/absorption process beefed up. While the ovoid's thermal conversion efficiency has been enhanced by a factor of five. I combined them with landcoral in a sandwich arrangement. The landcoral will act as a basic organic framework, growing a crust over the asteroid which provides a skeleton for the microbes to grow on. Its outer surface will support a layer of the thermal conversion microbes to energize the polyp's nutrient fluid, rather than photosynthesis, while on the inside, the other microbes gobble up the rock. I had to sequence in a second capillary network to transfer the dissolved compounds to the discharge pores. Later I'll add collection pods, and hopefully some kind of filter mechanism so you get pure deposits in each pod. Gases might be a problem, though. But this will do for now.

This symbiosis arrangement is a bit crude, isn't it? Julia asked. Somehow, wholehearted praise would have seemed like surrendering.

It's only a proof of concept prototype, Snowy. The first generation. I'm not even sure if it will work externally, exposed to a vacuum. Maybe we'll have to gnaw at asteroids from within. Once I've demonstrated its viability, we can get the research divisions to work on refining it. Top-grade geneticists should be able to splice all this into a single genetic structure.

Event Horizon genetic research divisions, Julia thought privately. She reviewed the arrangement again, implications sleeting through her mind, if Royan was right, if the microbe's traits could be loaded into landcoral cells the way he said, producing a single space-adapted bioware organism, then there really would be rivers of metal pouring into the global economy. Enough to support Western-level consumerism right across the globe. Nice idea. No, nice theory, she corrected herself sharply; she'd had too many dreams stall and degenerate into mediocrity to believe in technology based utopia ideals now.

For all his determination, Royan wasn't rooted in the real world. The central concept was sound, but the ancillary industries—the fleets of spaceships needed to pick up the metal and minerals, the industrial modules necessary to convert it into foamedsteel landing bodies, more recovery fleets, more factories to use it, the energy they would need—that would take time and money to organize. Besides, New London had cubic kilometres of ore in reserve already; and there were four more asteroid capture missions currently underway. Taken together, just those five asteroids would produce enough exotic metal and raw material to supply global demand for another twenty years.

Sounds too good to be true, she said carefully. Have you considered what it would take to put it into practice?

Nothing else, he said. The answer she knew he would give her. Don't you see, Snowy? The asteroid disseminator plant is a living machine. The very first. I'm on the verge of creating nanoware here, Snowy, the most powerful technology there is. Once you've cracked this you can do anything, it's pure von Neumannism, self-replicating, and capable of producing anything you can supply a blueprint of. After they've been developed properly the cells can be programmed to dismantle an asteroid, or carve out a chamber like Hyde Cavern; they can be grown Into an O'Neill colony or a teaspoon and anything in between; you can put together minute specialist clusters that'll float through the human bloodstream repairing tissue damage, airborne spores that can break up the world's carbon dioxide, reverse the Warming. Nanoware rules the micro and the macro, Snowy. And this splice is only the beginning.

She wondered how that would square up against atomic structuring technology. Were the two complementary, or antagonistic? If she didn't get the nuclear force generator data for Event Horizon, could she counter with asteroid dissemination? Save the company that way. More questions, problems.

And who would benefit? The turmoil from one new revolutionary technology was bad enough, introducing two that were this radical would produce utter chaos. She remembered what had followed Event Horizon's success with the gigaconductor; whole companies becoming obsolete overnight, workers thrown on the dole; it had redefined economies all over the planet. And that was in a time when the power and transport industries had declined to virtually nothing.

But right now the global economy was powerfully upbeat, expansion was running at nine per cent, there was investment, confidence, stability. The planet was in better shape than it had been for decades.

In any case, present-day cybernetics was a form of large-scale von Neumannism. And at least with cybernetics there was room for people—designers, maintenance crews, civil engineers who built the factories. Their hierarchy might be top-heavy with 'ware-literate staff, but there were still jobs for the semi-skilled, semi-literate, some dignity, keeping them off the dole. What would they do in a world where you could get a ten-bedroom mansion just by planting a nanoware kernel in the ground, then watch it grow like a flower?

Should I suppress this before it starts? Do I have the right, or even the wisdom? That's what it boils down to. Another bloody decision I have to make. Always me.

She felt the blood hot in her cheeks. All right, you've modified the microbes in the laboratory. Does this arrangement actually work in practice?

It has up until the moment I was recorded, he said. I grew a small prototype in the Farm laboratory's clone vat, checked that the two modified microbes functioned the way they were supposed to. I had to do a bit more tailoring, a few modifications. But the penultimate stage is completed. That's why this recording exists, to tell you I'm ready to see if the asteroid disseminator plant works, if the polyp and the microbes will operate as an integrated unit. I'm going up to New London to run some field trials.

Then something must have happened, she said.

The image of the microbes popped, Royan was standing before her perception point. Snowy, if it has, if I've screwed up, then do whatever you have to.

Yeah.

I love you, Snowy.

I'll remember.

He hung his head, and vanished.

Calculated, she reminded herself sternly, a coldly logical emotion.