Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [59]
“Wow,” Frank said. “The stall.”
“That’s right,” the woman at the computer said. “But now:”
The image lightened; tendrils of yellow appeared, then orange; then ribbons of red appeared, coalesced in a broad band. “It’s about ninety percent what they first measured at the sill.”
“Wow,” Frank said. “Everyone should see this. For one thing, it’s so spacy.”
“Well, we can make DVDs, but it’s never the same as, you know, what you have here. Standing right in the middle of it.”
“No. Definitely not.” For a time he stood and luxuriated in the wash of colors running past and through him. It looked kind of like a super-slo-mo screening of the hyperspace travel at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The underside of the Gulf Stream, flowing through his head. “Very pretty,” he finally said, rousing himself. “Say thanks to Mark for getting me down to see this.”
Then it was less than a mile’s walk back up the road (though he was the only person walking it), and he was north of the university, at the old Torrey Pines Generique facility, now the National Science Foundation’s Regional Research Center in Climate and Earth Sciences, RRCCES, which of course they were pronouncing “recess,” with appropriate comparisons to Google’s giant employee utopia in Mountain View—“They’ve got the playground, but we’ve got recess.”
Inside, the reception room was much the same. The labs themselves were still under construction. His first meeting was in one of these, with Yann Pierzinski.
Frank had always liked Yann, and that was easier than ever now that he knew Yann and Marta were just friends and not a couple. His earlier notion that they were a couple had not really made sense to him, not that any couple made sense, but his new understanding of Yann, as Marta’s housemate and some kind of gay genius, like Da Vinci or Wittgenstein, did make sense, maybe only because Yann was odd. Creative people were different—unless of course they weren’t. Yann was, and in a strangely attractive way; it was as if Frank, or anybody, could see the appeal Yann would have to his partner.
So, now they discussed the latest concerning the new institute, comparing it to the Max Planck Institutes that had been its model. It was an intriguing array of sciences and technologies being asked to collaborate here; the scientists ranged from the most theoretical of theorists to the most lab-bound of experimentalists. In this gathering, as one of the only first-rank mathematicians working on the algorithms of gene expression, and one with actual field experience in designing and releasing an engineered organism into the wild, Yann was going to be a central figure. The full application of modern biotechnology to climate mitigation; it got interesting to think about.
Yann’s specialty was Frank’s too, and to the extent Frank had been on Yann’s doctoral committee, and had employed him for a while, he knew what Yann was up to. But during the two years Frank had been away Yann had been hard at work, and he was now far off into new developments, to the point where he was certainly one of the field’s current leaders, and as such, getting pretty hard to understand. It took some explaining from him to bring Frank up to speed, and speed was the operative word here: Yann had a tendency to revert to a childhood speech defect called speed-talking, which emerged whenever he got excited or lost his sense of himself. So it was a very rapid and tumbling tutorial that Yann now gave him, and Frank struggled just to follow him, leaping out there on the horizon of his mind’s eye.
Great fun, in fact: a huge pleasure to be able to follow him at all, to immerse himself in this mode of thinking which used to be his normal medium. And extremely interesting too, in what it seemed might follow from it, in real-world applications. For there was a point at which the proteins Yann had been studying had their own kind of decision tree; in Yann’s algorithm it looked