She smiled brilliantly.
“See you down here in a few minutes, Saul. VKH out.” Her image vanished.
Saul stood still for a moment. “Yes, dear,” he said at last to the presence she seemed to have left behind. “I do believe we are going to take it quite a bit farther.”
VIRGINIA
MOLECULAR STRANDS, LIKE MULTICOLORED STAIRCASES…LIGHTING FLASHING IN THE DARKNESS…
At the simulation’s finest scale, the molecule was little more than a stylized ladder put together from standard pieces—bright, slivers of blue, green, and red—amino acids, phosphates, and simple sugars linked like ill-sorted parts of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
The chain seemed to twist and writhe as it tumbled in a churning stream. A tracery of silvery lines stitched out electric currents, crackling unevenly through the salty fluid.
Shiny golden radicals smacked into the growing polymer. Most bounced off again in sudden flashes of light. Occasionally one knocked a fragment loose into the flow, diminishing the molecule, leaving a hanging, ragged corner. A little more often, the colliding chunk found a niche with the right shape, and stuck.
As the polymer grew, the scale of the scene enlarged, as if a camera were drawing back. A new strand joined the first, then another, twining together in a jumbled mass. The cluster fell toward a great ocher wall that loomed from below, a rusty plain pocked with jagged holes.
The edge of one of the black openings caught the molecular skein, one end draping into the gap. The cluster tipped for a few seconds, then toppled inside.
“It’s a clay… something like montmorillonite, I believe. Notice how the chain slips right into the open latticework. Only a few of the shapes being synthesized in the open stream will be able to enter this way.
“It’s an early step in the long process of selection. Some theories say it happened this way on Earth lone ago. At last the molecules are sheltered from the tumbling give-and-take of the electrified stream. Only certain radicals can get at them in there… and the shape of the cavity aligns the molecules just so. The buildup—slow and chaotic beforehand—begins now in earnest.
“Funny it being a clay, though. I would have expected it to be.something like iron oxide. But see how the peptides actually seem to catalyze the growth of new clay layers? Amazing. I’d forgotten about that!”
Virginia let Saul ramble on, sharing his excitement but too busy to reply unless he asked a direct question. Right now it was a challenge just integrating all the diverse elements in his complicated program.
She was used to bright pictures and vivid simulations anyway. No, what impressed her was the intricacy of this world of molecules and currents, of clashing atoms and chiming balance. It was a maelstrom of tiny tugs and pulls computed in a eleven-dimensional matrix space, and still the diversity of forms amazed her.
The screen showed only the most superficial part of it—the averaged sampling of JonVon’s stochastic correlator. It was the math, down below, that really kept Virginia occupied. Only occasionally did she look up to see how the images were coming along.
Right now the simulation was following the developing molecules down into their new home. They nestled into crannies in the complex clay latticework, leaving a central passage through which fresh material entered from the outside. New pieces were added, and old ones discarded as dross to float away. The shape of the still-growing chain kept changing, now as a simple helix, elsewhere doubling back on itself, switching handedness left and right.
Saul commented again.
“I’m cheating a bit, here, for the sake of speed. We’ve set up initial conditions and are letting huge numbers of simulated molecules ‘evolve,’ leaving it to your wonderful machine to pick out the most successful line out of billions… coaxing the most promising to do the best it can under these conditions.
“We’ll see if a nudge here and there can take this primitive thing and give us…”
Virginia found her job growing easier, now that JonVon’s expert system was picking up the basic rules of this game.
Or was it because Saul was getting better at his end?
They lay next to each other on a broad, web-hammock in her laboratory, each linked by cable to the intricate hardware/software unit. For Virginia it was a familiar experience, wearing a delicate induction tap and playing her fingers lightly like a pianist on the pattern keys. Saul, on the other hand, was more awkward with his controls. The bulky cortex helmet he wore lacked the compact deftness of her specially designed link.
Yet, he was getting over his clumsiness quickly. And his excitement was contagious. His subvocalised thoughts arrived directly along her, acoustic nerve.
“This is wonderful, Virginia ! Far; far more than a mere simulation program, this construct of yours explores possibilities!”
“JonVon’s processor is bio-organic, Saul. A matrix of pseudo-proteins in a filament mesh. Back home they dropped that approach years ago, because its point-error rate is pretty high. In fact, you’re treated like some sort of nut if you even talk about it, today.” She hoped none of her bitterness carried over into her words.
“Hmmm. More point errors, sure. But you can pack so many circuits into a tiny area that it doesn’t matter, does it?
Virginia felt a thrill. He understands.
“That’s right, Saul. A stochastic processor works with probabilities, not discrete yes-or-no answers.”
“It’s like the way Kunie describes the operation of the human preconscious! Have you read any of Kunie’s work?”
Virginia laughed. Aloud it was a soft chuckle. In their heads, the sound of bells.
“Of course I have! I couldn’t have gotten this far without that man’s ideas on the creative process. But I’m surprised you’ve heard of him, Saul. Conceptual heuristics isn’t anywhere near molecular biology on the library shelves.”
There was a pause as Saul’s attention returned to the simulation. He nudged a particularly large molecular cluster out of one of the gaping clay tunnels before it could jam the flow of fresh material, a minor interference for the sake of this early trial.
“I knew Kunie, Virginia. His family gave me a place to stay after the Expulsion…”
The “walls” of the simulated latticework throbbed slightly, and Virginia moved gently to stabilize the model against further interference by Saul’s emotions. Without letting on, she created another pathway for his feelings—away from the model and into a small side nexus where they might be buffered, studied… touched.
“Was that when you started working with Simon Percell?” she asked. History had never been her specialty. And Virginia knew that there had been more than one “Expulsion” from the land called Israel.
“Good lord, no.” This time it was Saul’s turn to laugh. The tone resonated in the little buffer like low cello strings.
“The Levites were still a small fanatic Jewish fringe in the Judean hills, and their Salawite friends were nothing more than a bunch of seething Syrian exiles, back when I worked with Simon in Birmingham.”
While JonVon kept the simulation going, Virginia was attempting to trace the tendrils of Saul’s pain, more vivid than anything she had ever experienced in a human-to-human link before. But then Saul changed the subject again.
“We sure could have used tools like these, back when Simon and I were working on the gamete-separation problem,” he subvocalised. “All we had then were kilobit parallel processors, gigabyte memories, and inferential sequencers that took days to analyze a single chromosome.