“It would be more realistic to take up with a fresh young moldie, Randy. A one-year-old. Instead of quixotically squandering so many rupees to keep a four-year-old moldie alive.”
“Are you gonna help me or not?”
“Of course I will help,” sighed Neeraj. “I can tell Ramanujan that you are a reliable and uniquely adaptable employee. The work you’ve done on the electric power network in the sub fab is very ingenious; this work evidences your ability to extrapolate beyond plumbing. Indeed, now that I think upon it, it seems possible that Ramanujan may choose you. He is a very strange person.”
A week later Randy started work in Ramanujan’s lab, a large room off to one side of the fab. Half of Ramanujan’s lab was a walled-off clean room, and half of it was the man’s messy office, which included a small kitchen area. Ramanujan was a short uncouth man, stout, unshaven, and not overly clean. His brown eyes shone with preternatural intelligence.
“So, Mr. Tucker, you are the new chap to be helping me,” said Ramanujan in welcome. “Don’t be shy, I too have bucolic origins—although of course I am Brahman. Neeraj Pondicherry tells me that you are very dexterous with complex systems. As it happens, your complete lack of academic credentials is a plus rather than a minus. For reasons of industrial security, I prefer that my assistants are not able to fully understand what I am doing.”
“I’m rarin’ to go, Sri. Can you walk me around and tell me what’s a-goin’ on? And what all a process engineer does?”
“A research scientist makes things begin to happen; a process engineer arranges that the same things may continue to happen for a very long time. In this laboratory I am creating some experimental designer imipolex that I use to make leech-DIMs. At present I am crafting these DIMs one at a time; my immediate problem is how to avoid doing all this work by myself so that I can focus on the question of how to enhance the functionality of the leech-DIMs. You do know what leech-DIMs are?”
“You bet,” said Randy. “I have a moldie girlfriend, and I put one of your leech-DIMs on her all the time. After we fuck, I’ll chew up a couple of her camote nuggets and slap the leech-DIM on her and then—” Randy broke off when he noticed Ramanujan’s shocked expression. This was the first time he’d tried to tell a human the details of what he habitually did with Parvati.
“Please go on,” said Ramanujan dryly. “I am on tenterhooks.”
“Well, Sri, it’s like Parvati and me see God. Everything gets white and then it breaks into beautiful colors. And Parvati is in there with me. It’s not really magic, even though it feels that way—she wraps herself around my head while we’re tripping, so I guess she’s like a big uvvy echoing the camote hallucinations. She says the leech-DIM sets all of her thoughts loose at once. Did you ever realize that Everything is the same as Nothing?”
Ramanujan frowned and shook his head. “The whole point of my inventing the leech-DIM, Mr. Tucker, was to provide a means of protection from moldies. Yet you are drugging yourself like a sadhu and wrapping a moldie around your head? I think before we go any further I must give you a brainscan to make sure that you don’t have a thinking cap in your skull. It would be a security disaster to have the moldies looking out through my assistant’s eyes.”
“Parvati and I love each other, and she promised not to put no thinking cap on me. But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and scan me, Sri. Where’s the brainscanner at?”
“Right here,” said Ramanujan, pointing to a small circular hatch set into his office wall at waist height. “Just lean over and stick your head inside.”
“You’ve got a scanner built into your wall?”
Suddenly there was a needler in Ramanujan’s hand. “No temporizing, please, Mr. Tucker. Get over there and stick your head into the scanner. For all I know, you’re a moldie-run meat puppet playing the part of the innocent oaf.”
“Shitfire,” said Randy weakly and stuck his head into the round hole in the wall. There was a buzzing, a flash of purple light, and then it was over.
“All’s well and good,” said Ramanujan, his needler already back out of sight. “I’m sorry if I frightened you. Would you object to being scanned every day?”
“Is it bad for me?”
“Not particularly. Especially as compared with your other habits.”
“Don’t you like moldies, Sri?”
“I’m fascinated by them, Mr. Tucker. But I fear them. My ongoing work is to find ways for human logic to control them. My first leech-DIM is a crude design—it zeroes out all of a moldie’s neuronal thresholds to produce an effect that I suppose could be thought of as similar to that of a mystical union with the One as you suggest. In the future, I hope to have leech-DIMs which allow human users to more directly control the behavior of a moldie. Enlightenment is easy, but logic is hard.”
“How do you make leech-DIMs?”
“The abstract answer involves a great deal of higher mathematics which would be quite impossible for you to understand. The concrete answer lies in there.” Ramanujan gestured toward the clean room half of his lab, which was separated from them by a narrow transparent chamber holding bunny suits and an air shower. “Shall we go in?”
The lab had a long, cluttered workbench on either side of the room—a chemical bench on the right and a biological bench on the left .
The near end of the chemical bench held a miniaturized refinery, which was fed by lines coming up through the floor from the sub fab. As Randy now knew, the tubes carried such things as water, glycerol, ethanol, polystyrene, ethylbenzene, tetrafluoroethylene, isopropylacrylamide, and solutions of natural resins and alkaloids extracted from the plants and animals of Gaia’s jungles and seas.
The refinery cracked and cooked the chemical compounds into imipolex variants for Ramanujan to decant into a multitude of small beakers, tanks, trays, watch glasses, and crucibles that were ranged all down the length of the chemical bench.
The center of the room held a large brightly lit aquarium. Inside the aquarium, small imipolex slugs crawled and floated about like the shimmering nudibranchs, ctenophores, and jellyfish of the Indian Ocean—or, no, they were like Kentucky leeches—like freshwater horse leeches lazily stretching and shortening their bodies as they waited for prey.
“I keep them in there while I’m working on them,” said Ramanujan. “When I’m ready to ship one of them, I dry it into a hibernation state.”
“You make them by just pouring out some special imipolex, and that’s that?”
“Of course not. In order to get any computational power, the little slugs of imipolex need to be doped with metals and seeded with chipmold. The main fab breaks that into numerous steps, but in here I have a nanomanipulator that can do everything at once.”
Set into the back wall of the lab there was a three-dimensional nanomanipulator with a heads-up holographic display showing a magnified electron microscope image of the DIM inside it. The device also had a VR uvvy that allowed the user to fly about inside the image, using and programming the nanomanipulator’s individual nanopincers and nanofeelers.
“It’s fairly easy to train the nanomanipulator to do repeated steps,” said Ramanujan. “If it was very much smarter, it would be a full-fledged moldie, and my security would be smashed to blazes. It’s an awkward position I’m in. Hopefully you can learn to emulate in some measure the efficiency of a moldie. Go ahead and try on the manipulator’s uvvy.”
Randy put it on. He was in an ocean of imipolex, with hollowed-out tube tunnels leading here and there. Some of the tubes held bright geometric icons—these stood for rare-earth metal crystals. Elsewhere in the mazes of the tubes were fuzzy globs—these represented the spores and algae of the chipmold. Myriads of little claws were scattered about—his nanopincers.