The room contained a console, holojector and camera, as well as optic feeds leading to the outside of the shell. Nothing seemed damaged here, though he had no idea what condition the exterior emitter was in. Reaching down, he tore away the tattered remains of his hotsuit, then his similarly damaged syntheskin. Groping inside his gut, he found a shielded power cable, tracked it up into his chest and unplugged it. His vision dimmed and his movements slowed, but not enough to prevent him plugging the cable into the universal adaptor underneath the console. Immediately the device’s displays lit.
With slow precision, he pressed the touch sequence for a diagnostic check, and soon found the U-space transmitter to be in perfect working order. Using the keyboard, he typed out the message he wanted to send, and the all-important coordinates. Now it was time to send—and to sleep. He instructed the device to transmit continuously until it received an acknowledgement. He had time only to reach out and clamp his hand shut on the handle beside the console before his artificial consciousness left him—the transmitter using up the bulk of his own power output.
The quarantine pod Mika had occupied, along with all its equipment, had been destroyed in one of Jerusalem’s fusion furnaces, then the surrounding area had been scanned down to the molecular level and classified at ‘contamination level 5’. She already knew that anything coming into contact with Jain technology could never be classified as clean. She now occupied a work station where she studied, by proxy, the mycelium on the bridge pod, which the AI was holding at not much above absolute zero.
‘There is stuff here,’ she gazed at a screen, ‘that could probably be called picotech. In fact much of it can only be extrapolated, as we haven’t the instruments to study it directly.’
‘That is not so unfeasible—my own etched-atom processors come under that classification,’ replied the disembodied voice of Jerusalem.
Mika nodded, then walked over to the partial VR immersion frame, which was her main tool of study. She backed into the frame and it closed about her arms and legs, gloved her hands and closed its cowl down over her face. The immersion here was partial because it did not engage all her senses, only her sight, her hearing and the touch of her hands. She would go to total immersion if she ever needed to smell Jain-tech—or have sex with it.
In VR, she suddenly occupied a vast plenum below a flat white sky. Beside her floated the multicoloured cubes, tetrahedrons, spheres and other Euclidian solids of her main controls. She reached out, touched one face of a heptahedron, and broke it into a rainbow of pyramids. Taking hold of the blue one, she said, ‘Image.’
Immediately the nanoscope view she had been earlier studying on a screen spread out before her like a mountain range. Manipulating the icon she held, then a sphere she selected out of the air, she transplanted a single large molecule and expanded it hugely before her, whilst wiping out the original view. ‘Just on the molecular level this alone will take me days of processing time to work out, and having done that I’ll only know what it can do by itself, not how it interacts with the billions of others that make up this mycelium.’
‘Yes, it’s like studying DNA.’
Mika glanced at the silver eyeless head which Jerusalem favoured as a representation of itself. She continued, ‘Worse than that. At least with DNA you know that its function remains at the molecular level — nothing smaller than that.’
Jerusalem paused before replying. ‘There are those who would disagree with you concerning DNA, but that’s moot. You did manage to ascertain the purpose of a chain of these molecules, and from them create the mycelium that kept Apis Coolant and yourself alive.’
‘Ninety-nine per cent guesstimation of its overall purpose, and in the end I got it wrong anyway.’
‘Nevertheless…’
Mika gazed up at the huge edifice: each atom was something she could take in her hand. She turned a small virtual control and revolved the giant molecule. For some people she supposed that the complexity of the task ahead would be intimidating, but despite her words she only felt excitement at the prospect. Already she had spoken to other researchers on the Jerusalem, and discovered that they felt much the same. And there were thousands of them aboard, each studying one small facet of Jain technology, one piece of the 3D jigsaw, while Jerusalem itself put it all together.
Selecting a red coin with an ouroboros on its face, Mika started a program designed by the AI, which ran a virtual analysis of the molecule. Dropping down like a net, a cubic grid of glowing lines now enclosed it. The program selected some cubes and detached the atomic structures they enclosed from the main body, and turned them in mid-air, spitting formulae and reams of data like glyph-written insect wings. Beside her, flat screens rose out of the virtual floor and began displaying the results as they came through. Selecting from an arc of coloured coins bearing Life-coven icons, she began running those results through her own programs, then back again and around. Testing scenarios and a vast range of environmental parameters, she began to plumb the theoretical function of the molecule. Sometimes her theories collapsed under virtual tests, sometimes they survived.
A wizard surrounded by visible spells and conjured jewels, she worked faster and narrowed her focus. She saw that, in an oxidizing atmosphere, part of the atomic structure—in the same manner as a pigment such as haemoglobin—collected oxygen. It then acted as a catalyst, using the oxygen to burn the molecule into any solid substance it touched. Hours later she realized that the metallic atoms in the molecule caused an ionization process in some substances, complementing the burning process. Simply put, a visible quantity of this compound would act like a potent ever-active acid. But even that wasn’t enough, it seemed. Mika started to get excited when she saw what it did to carbon: forming it into buckytubes as it ate its destructive course. This was already familiar to her from Polity nanotechnology.
‘The drilling head, and the cable layer.’ she stated abruptly.
Jerusalem, having silently disappeared from beside her, now reappeared. ‘Part of it, yes. D’nissan, Colver and James are each working on other parts.’ With that, three other greatly enlarged molecules appeared high up, like lumpish moons. ‘The molecule you are studying will not, for example, work in vacuum. D’nissan has discovered a molecule that uses nanoscopic ionization entirely, it being fed electric current from the main body of the Jain structure, whilst Colver has found a metallobuckytube that drills mechanically.’ As the AI spoke, each function it described appeared briefly in VR representation to one side, then faded; Jerusalem thus signifying that her fellows’ research results were available to her should she require them.
‘What about James?’ Mika asked distractedly, then suddenly realizing what she had said, was delighted at how naturally the question had slid from her tongue.
‘Susan James has found a molecular structure similar to yours, but which lays angstrom-width optical tubes inside larger buckytubes of doped carbon, which itself acts as a superconductor.’
‘Hell,’ said Mika, staring with fascination at the view of said molecule in action.
‘Indeed,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘Even so, due to this research, Polity science has probably advanced in just the last hour as much as it would have done in ten years without it.’
‘You know,’ said Mika, realizing she had only ascertained the function of about ten per cent of her molecule, ‘we could learn a lot more, and much quicker, if we could study this in action.’