Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone
Page 5
***Maybe more than a little, Dr. Falkland…there seem to be some anomalies in the drivers…perhaps I could help?***
“I was hoping you’d say that…I’ll load up the routines and we can both take a look.”
It had long been a dream of Falkland’s to find a way to re-assemble deconstructed objects, to reverse the process that the Assimilationists were using to disassemble their nutty volunteers and send them on to the Greater Swarm, or wherever it was they went to. It ought to be a simple matter of scanning the entire configuration of a living person, then imposing that same configuration, that same pattern of atom bond energies and geometries, on new feedstock and re-assembling the same person.
Falkland had been experimenting with a special kind of configuration pattern emitter that imposed a sort of memory field on the new molecules. A memory field that was supposed to hold the scanned pattern and impress that same pattern on the new molecules. But it was damnably hard to do this with living systems, always had been. Nanobotic assemblers could break down anything they could get to. And the same assemblers could slam atoms and pretty much build anything that had a repeatable pattern, even now, organic material.
But the great question was this: was the re-assembled pattern actually the same as the deconstructed pattern? Was B = A? Or was it just a clever analog, a simulation, an angel swarm entity like Doc III? Philosophers called this conundrum the Ship of Theseus. Was a ship that was maintained by swapping out all of its wooden planks still the same ship, once all the planks had been changed?
So he had been experimenting on living things the last few weeks, spiders, cockroaches, lab rats, and now one of his two pet Shih Tzus…Mr. Jiggs. He’d finagled with the pattern configs for weeks, trying different approaches. He’d tested the emitters, buffers and injectors with all manner of atomic feedstock, just to be sure. He’d managed to disassemble and reassemble all manner of critters, but you could never really tell with rats and cockroaches. It wasn’t like you could ask them questions: Are you really the same thing I just disassembled?
Jiggs had been placed inside the small containment cell, after he’d done his business outside in the bushes, of course. No sense introducing any more organic matter into the experiment than necessary. A small-mass nanobotic swarm had been released into the cell. Jiggs was rapidly disassembled and the resulting atomic debris was held in a special containment field that kept the relevant atoms in close proximity. The pattern buffer also read and maintained a ’memory’ of the original configuration. This memory field was a new design of Falkland’s, in which all the original atom and molecule configurations and their bond energies and geometries were stored and used to re-construct the original.
The memory field containing the atomic patterns of the original Jiggs was then run through a new config pattern processor and the new config re-imposed on the atoms in the memory field. The result was a ghostly likeness of Jiggs, but the shadowy image wouldn’t hold on its own and Falkland, reluctantly, had to let it go, let it disperse. The technique still needed work. And Falkland had only Simon left. He wasn’t too keen on donating his only remaining pet to Science just yet.
For nearly an hour, Falkland and Doc III examined the software loaded into the pattern buffers, debugged the configs and speculated on what might be happening, why the new field didn’t hold the originally scanned pattern and thus why the original object could not be properly reconstructed.
It was well after noon, when a loud buzzing at the Lab entrance shook Falkland out of his funk. Someone was at the secured doors outside the Containment Center. Falkland checked…it was Major Lucian Bridges. Oh, crap…he’d forgotten completely. Bridges had been invited to a little demo that afternoon…only Falkland no longer had anything to show the Quantum Corps officer. He let the Major into the containment center anyway.
Bridges was a program manager from Table Top, overseeing several efforts that ASL was running for the Corps. He was a likeable, if someone prickly administrator…program managers tended to be that way…. Tall with a red hair buzz cut and long delicate fingers like a pianist, which he sometimes was in his spare moments, Bridges came over and peered into the containment cell.
“I don’t see anything, Dr. Falkland. You said you had something to show me, some new kind of config generator.”
“I did,” Falkland admitted. “But the results of my last test weren’t worth keeping around.” He explained what had happened that morning.
Bridges shrugged. “So where do you go from here?”
Falkland ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Is the Corps still interested? I’m not that far…I’m sure of it.”
“Hell, yes, Doctor. The Corps’ interested in anything that can counter what the Assimilationists are doing. What I’ve seen of your work…there’s still a lot of promise. What else do you need from me?”
“Well, Doc and I are still working out the kinks in this blasted pattern buffer and emitter. What I’d like to do is this: once we’ve got the buffer working…I’d like to have the Corps’ permission to do some live experiments, with actual people.”
Doc III’s shadowy face made a slight tightening of its lips, at least that’s what Bridges thought he had done. It was hard to tell with some angels…it depended on how good the config was.