The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [44]
“They were experimenting with dextrorotatory proteins in my day,” I said. “There was the stuff Damon’s father and foster mother invented as well: para-DNA, they called it. Damon told me that PicoCon had big plans for that, once he and Conrad had sold out to them. Are those the kinds of things I’m looking at?”
The mechanical voice informed me that dextrorotatory organics had become effectively obsolete once they had begun spinning off dextrorotatory viruses and nanobacteria. The artificial genomic system designed by Conrad Helier and Eveline Hywood had proved to be much more versatile, and its derivatives were still used in a wide range of nanomachines — especially gantzing systems — but more complicated genomic systems devised for use in extreme environments had proved more generally useful when reimported to Earth.
I was assured that the next generation of technologies would be even more versatile, having taken aboard key features of the natural systems evolved on the colonized worlds of Ararat and Maya.
“And I guess you can make all the gold you want from lead,” I suggested. “Everybody’s an alchemist now.”
The humorless voice told me that transmutation wasn’t routinely practiced on Earth because there was no economic imperative. So I asked where it was routinely practiced, and was told that Ganymede, Io, and Umbriel were the principal research and development centers.
I had to put in a prompt to get more data, but I elicited an admission that transmutation research was “controversial,” because fusion-generated transmutation was the technological basis of “macroconstruction.”
A demand for further elaboration brought the revelation that a majority of the Earthbound was currently opposed to all kinds of macroconstructional development, and that “the major outer system factions” were divided even as to the most rudimentary aspects of their various development plans.
I looked around at the fanciful buildings that surrounded my viewpoint, knowing that they could not possibly be what the voice meant by “macroconstruction.” Given that the people of Earth seemed perfectly happy to design and build new continents, and to make drastic amendments to the outlines of the existing ones, I knew that the voice had to be talking about at least one further order of magnitude.
Davida had already told me that there were a dozen microworlds in the Counter-Earth Cluster, two hundred more scattered around the orbit, and a further two hundred located in Luna’s orbit around the Earth. I figured that the voice had to be talking about building much bigger things than that, perhaps in pursuit of the visionary quest of the type-2 crusaders who wanted to build a shell around the sun so that none of its energy output would go to waste. If so, there were only two likely sources of raw material: Jupiter and Saturn.
“You can’t build new planets out of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane,” I said. “Transmuting the stuff of gas giants must be a step beyond mere alchemy.”
The voice wasn’t programmed to praise my deductive skills. It reported, with a laconic ease that the sloth-animated sims of my own era had never quite mastered, that many people resident in Earth orbit became a trifle nervous at the mere mention of “domesticated supernoval reactions.”
That seemed to me to be a nice idea, all the nicer because it was so casually oxymoronic. I probed, and the story filtered out in dribs and drabs. In the meantime, the people of the city born yet again from the ashes of the City of Angels went about their daily business, quite oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by a time-tourist from the twenty-second century.
Would they have cared if they’d known? Would anyone have stopped to wave at the camera? I’d have liked to think that someone would, but I couldn’t be sure. All but a few of them looked like ordinary human beings, but none of them were. Their thoughts, opinions, hopes, and values were probably far more different from mine than their bodies.
“There seem to be a lot of people about,” I observed,