The office and laboratory facility of Quantonix Researchers Reg. was located in a multilevel jumble of industrial and commercial premises that had grown in and under a complex of domes called Wuhan, forming the outer end of Gorky Avenue. The firm's appearance was modest and utilitarian, with an unpretentious sign beside a plain entrance to proclaim its existence, and inside, a counter separating two clerks from the vestibule. Nobody had any delusions of lasting grandeur or of erecting monuments for the benefit of posterity in this business.
It was more crowded and busy than felt normal for a place of its size when Kieran and June arrived—which was hardly surprising in view of what had happened there two days before. A half-dozen or so people, fidgety and impatient, were waiting in the narrow entry space, and there was a constant bustle of others coming and going, phone beeps and call tones, on the far side of the counter and in the partitioned spaces beyond. "Did I ever tell you that story about the after-dinner speaker?" Kieran asked as they waited while the receptionist June had spoken to endeavored to locate one of the Morches.
"Which one?" June queried.
"Well, this fella is introduced as `John Jones, who made three-hundred-sixty million dollars in two weeks on uranium, and who's going to share some of his insights with us.' "
"Uh-uh," June said, looking mystified as to where this was leading.
"So Jones stands up and says, `Thank you very much. First, I'd just like to correct a couple of small details. It wasn't uranium; it was uranium oxide.' " Kieran shrugged with the sheepish smile of a toastmaster conceding, yes, well, who couldn't have got that wrong? " `It wasn't three-hundred-sixty million dollars; it was three-hundred-sixty-two million. It wasn't two weeks; it was fifteen days. . . . And I didn't make it; I lost it.' " Kieran showed a palm. "You see—my point: a little detail, but it makes a big difference."
They were directed up to the office of Herbert Morch, managing director and TX Project chief, on the floor above the labs. His brother Max, the financial vice president, joined them shortly after. After June performed the introductions, Herbert ushered her and Kieran into two visitors' chairs and then retreated back to the far side of his desk. It was molded, simulated-wood grain with a scratched top, bearing an unruly litter of papers, and a couple of comscreens at one end. The fleshy features beneath his balding dome were smiling, but the eyes gave away nothing. Max perched his sparse frame on the edge of a seat by the wall to one side, outwardly composed but unconsciously tapping a tattoo on the floor with a foot. Kieran took them as typical, stressed-out sunsider management, totally preoccupied with holding the act together until the gamble either died or paid off big. Getting a working, salable technology out there before the others was the only consideration. If Sarda could give it to them, and Kieran had no qualms about the details of what went on, they weren't going to argue. At the same time, he detected them as having something of a fondness for June, which doubtless had a lot to do with their agreeing to accommodate him at such a busy time. He would have been more surprised if he hadn't had long experience of her ways with people before.
She described Kieran as an old professional friend and "planetary privateer." In answer to the four raised eyebrows that greeted the remark, she explained, "Frontiers always create adventurers. He's one of the new kind."
"So . . . what kind of adventures do you find, Mr. Thane?" Herbert asked.
"Anything that helps pay the rent," Kieran replied, crossing a foot over the other knee and smiling easily. "Preferably unusual and interesting. All the better if it helps spare unworthies the temptation of spending ill-gotten gains. It must be a moral calling."
"It sounds as if you make a point of delivering comeuppances to criminal elements," Max commented. And then, half jokingly, "I hope you're not expecting anything in that direction here."
Kieran grinned. "A market of this kind of potential is bound to attract interests of every color, stripe, and persuasion," he said. "Let's just say that with possible future involvements in mind, I'd like to learn as much about it at an early a stage as I can."
Leo Sarda joined them a few minutes later. Maybe in his early forties, with a mane of streaky yellow hair skirting his collar, a droopy mustache to match, and the ruddy appearance that resulted from the absence of UV-screening ozone in the Martian atmosphere, he had the kind of shaggy, weathered look that put Kieran in mind of a fishing-boat skipper or the "doc" from an old-time Western movie.
"Leo, I hope things have calmed down a bit," Herbert opened as Kieran stood to shake hands. "This is June's friend, Kieran Thane, that I told you about—the one who's interested in everything. He just arrived on Mars yesterday, and because of the splendid job June's been doing for us, we agreed to let him see the system. Would you do the honors and give him the tour?"
Sarda nodded. "Okay, let's go," he said briskly, looking at June in an unspoken invitation for her to join them if she was going, too.
"Thanks for setting it up," Kieran said to Herbert as June stood up. "Will I see you again before I go?"
"No need to come back here. June will take care of you. But we'll probably see you again sometime. Enjoy your stay."
"Is it your first time on Mars, Mr. Thane?" Sarda asked as they followed a corridor on the floor below Herbert Morch's office, past walls of windows behind which people were working among computer screens and laboratory equipment.
"No," Kieran answered. "I was here about six months ago—some immigrants were being taken in by crooked land deals."
"What brings you here this time?"
"Mostly taking a break. Although, I thought I might look into getting myself a place while I'm here—as an investment as well as a convenience. The market feels about right. And I figure I've got the experience now not to get burned."
"Got any particular area in mind?"
"Not really . . . Probably somewhere here, around Lowell."
"It isn't bad. I've been here about a year."
"Kieran appears from time to time," June said. "And it isn't usually very long before interesting, adventurous, and usually profitable things start to happen."
Sarda raised his eyebrows. "I'm not sure we can promise anything like that here."
"Don't worry. From what I've heard, I'd say that this project of yours is interesting enough," Kieran told him. "As for the rest, oh . . . give it time."
Sarda's stride was springy and exuberant, as if he were bombproof and the worst that life had to offer was rain—possibly the aftereffects of having come through the process unscathed, Kieran reflected. Although he had made a point of not staring earlier, he couldn't resist glancing at Sarda surreptitiously as they came to a flight of metal-railed stairs and descended. Even after listening to June the previous evening, it seemed incredible that this person walking beside him could have been a formless aggregate of nonliving molecules just two days before. Every hair, every pore—even nongenetic, environmental effects such as the sunburn and evident wear and toughening of the hands and fingers—were exactly reproduced. Kieran was unable to find a flaw. It was uncanny.
They came to a concrete-walled room filled with consoles and equipment racks, items of unidentifiable apparatus, tangles of wires and piping, several desks partly hidden amid it all, and a workbench along one wall. But the centerpiece was a padded, recliner-like piece of furniture surrounded by more gadgetry, obviously built to take a human body. A sturdy white metal door was set in the wall nearby. Sarda ran over the basics of the process, keeping things short in view of the limited time that he could give them. Kieran could probably have helped a little by airing some of what he had learned from June, but it seemed wiser to just shut up and listen.
"You could think of a factory, along with all the machines and people in it, as a computer that translates design information and raw materials into products—an automobile, or a space plane, say. In the same kind of way, the protein transcription machinery in a cell is a chemical computer that translates DNA information and raw material into . . ." Sarda glanced at June for a suggestion.
"A cat," she supplied promptly.
"Right." Sarda looked at Kieran questioningly. Kieran nodded that the concepts were familiar. Sarda continued, "But it's unimaginably more complicated. The DNA tells you not only how to make a cat, but a self-assembling cat. You don't have an equipped factory and a bunch of engineers standing by already there, waiting to just read the blueprints and make a plane. The whole works has to make itself as well as make the plane. Can you imagine writing any kind of computer program to do something like that?"
Kieran did find himself staring this time, but it was from fascination, not impertinent curiosity. Although he had been aware of as much before, the implication had never struck him so forcefully.
Sarda waved a hand. "And that's not all. Everything the cat inherits that tells it how to behave is coded in there too: the variability for adapting to different conditions; its immune reactions, repair mechanisms for wear and tear, cuts and burns, broken bones. . . . It's all in there somewhere, implicitly. You just need the right computer to express it."
"Like a mathematical system," Kieran remarked. "Everything it says is contained in a few premises. But it takes thousands of theorems to make it explicit."
"You've got a good grasp of principles," Sarda said, showing some surprise. "Do I hear a scientific background talking?"
"Nothing formal that I could wave degrees in your face about. I just like keeping abreast of what interests me."
Sarda turned toward the recliner and its surrounding equipment. "What we've done, in essence, is use a different kind of computer to extract that information rapidly and speed up the assembly of what normally takes years. It's still a lot of computing, but we end up ahead of the game. You could think of our way as generating an image by taking a photograph to capture the scene all at once, compared to scanning it as a bit stream. All those guys who are trying to scan at the atomic level . . ." Sarda shook his head. "They're not going anywhere. All the computers in the world couldn't hack that amount of data, even if they ran till the end of the universe. But the way we do it, you don't need that amount of raw data because implicitly the DNA can tell you how to generate almost all of it—if you know how to read the DNA."
"The way Leo described it to me compared it to sending a code to specify a phrase from a code book," June put in. "Most of the information is already there, at the receiving end. The code just triggers which part to use. It's the same with what DNA specifies. Most of it's general and can be supplied in advance at the receiving end to begin with, so you don't have to send it."
Kieran nodded. Natural language worked in a similar way. Most of the meaning derived from a sentence was in the listener's head already from a human's knowledge of the world, and not contained in the words. That was why predictions of translation machines within five years, heard from the AI community in the 1960s, had turned out to be wildly optimistic. He looked around the room, unable to decide whether it felt more like something surgical or a macabre, sophisticated form of torture chamber. His eyes came to rest on the sturdy white door. Suddenly, he suspected that he knew its significance.
"Almost all the data," Sarda repeated. "Environmental modifications, we have to derive from the original. I came out of the process with my hair cut like I wear it, my nails clipped, and a few other things that obviously didn't come from DNA." Which took care of the first question that Kieran had been forming to ask. "Likewise, the acquired memory patterns in the brain have to be derived and implanted. But again nature gives us a break. There are ways of getting enough out of the wave functions such that you don't have to go down to quantum levels of detail."
"So this is where you get the information from the original," Kieran summarized, indicating the recliner with a nod.
"Right," Sarda confirmed.
"And the reconstituted version comes together . . . where?" Kieran looked inquiringly in the direction of the door, even though he knew that to be incorrect—June had told him Sarda was "sent" somewhere upstairs.
Sarda shook his head. "In the R-Lab, upstairs. This is the T-Lab. `Transmit' and `Receive.' "
"What order of time are we talking about?" Kieran asked. "Between the process commencing down here and you walking out at the other end up there."
"Right now, about three hours. In the future that should come down a lot." Sarda's mouth twitched beneath the shaggy yellow mustache. "I can't say it will ever be as instantaneous as they like to show it in the movies . . . but we'll see where it goes."
Kieran decided to play dumb a little longer. "So how does it work? . . . For three hours do you have the original you coming apart, being unraveled layer by layer like a ball of string or something, as the other one upstairs is being constructed? . . . But that would be a hell of a risk to take, wouldn't it? Suppose the system seized up halfway through? What kind of protection do you have against something like that?"
Sarda frowned, as if unsure whether he wanted to go into it. Kieran got the feeling it was a subject he had learned to give a wide berth to if possible. Finally Sarda said, somewhat reluctantly, "It's not quite the way you assume, Mr. Thane. The original has to be reduced to a suspended state for the process to work—totally inert. But the decomposition phase can be deferred—which was the choice that was exercised in this instance." He made a quick dismissive motion with a hand. "Of course, once you've raised the confidence level sufficiently, you can make the two phases virtually simultaneous. But in the present case, the option to reactivate is still available. So that risk was covered."
Kieran went through the motions of absorbing this information for the first time, then nodded at a vista of light slowly dawning. "Oh, I see! . . . You're saying that the original is still intact. So where . . . ?" He turned his head toward the white door, letting his eyes widen in an expression of sudden revelation.
"Yes," Sarda confirmed. "It's being kept in there until all the tests are satisfied . . . just in case."
"So when will they . . . deactivate it?" June asked.
"Midnight tomorrow—unless anything negative shows up in the meantime. But that's looking less likely." Sarda obviously had no qualms—at least, this one didn't. Crazy or whatever, or not, Kieran wondered if the one behind the door had felt equally dispassionate all the way through to the final moments.
Sarda followed their gazes, and then seemed to feel uncomfortable about the whole thing, suddenly. "Let's go back upstairs," he said. "I'll show you the reconstitution chamber in the R-Lab—where the other half happens."
But Kieran wasn't prepared to let the matter go so easily. "But doesn't that change everything that we've gotten so used to hearing?" he persisted as they went back up the stairs. "You're saying there are two of you. If I were due to go through that today, I don't see how I could feel any sense of . . . continuity with a replica that was going to walk out of a chamber upstairs—or maybe out at Jupiter one day, from what we're told. It might look, talk, and think like me, and satisfy everyone else . . . but I wouldn't find that very convincing. As far as I'm concerned, everything that's me becomes history."
"Would you feel better if we sent your own atoms through as well as the information, and rebuilt you from them?" Sarda asked. "But that would be pointless. All atoms of a kind are identical. I feel just fine. Never better. I've no doubt that I'm the same person I was. You can check all the test results for yourself."
"I'm sure you do. But you're through it. What would that other character that we just left downstairs say if we asked him?"
Sarda answered without hesitation. "That form behind the door we've just left is just a mass of biological material now. It doesn't have any of the attributes that define a live personality anymore. They're all transferred here." He spread his arms and indicated himself with a gesture of his hands as they walked. "Think of it another way, Mr. Thane. A few years from now, your body won't contain any of the atoms that it's made from today. Every one will have been replaced as new material is taken in and old tissue lost. So all we're really doing is speeding up a little what happens naturally, anyway. Why should you feel any less a sense of continuity with the natural analog of yourself that will be walking around then, than you would for an artificial one created more rapidly? The personality that you insist is you will have moved from the molecular configuration that it resides in now into a different one no less in one case than in the other. Essentially, they're both the same thing."
Before Kieran could take it further, they came to the open door of another laboratory, this time with sounds of voices and people visible inside. The R-Lab seemed to have attracted more visitors than the one downstairs. "Here he is!" someone called out. Then, "Leo, we need you to verify something here."
Sarda observed the exchange of dubious looks between Kieran and June. "Don't worry," he told them confidently as they entered. "Fifty years from now it will be accepted as routinely as organ transplants. Nobody will think twice about it."
"And it was just getting interesting," June said. Sarda spread his hands and indicated his situation with a helpless nod. "Maybe we could grab you for lunch tomorrow, Leo," June said on impulse. "How are you fixed?"
"Nothing scheduled, I think . . ."
"You have to try the new restaurant at the Oasis, out at the spaceport. Kieran and I were there last night. Come on. You need to get away from this insanity for an hour." She was doing it again. The dancing dark eyes, challenging him to rise above the mundanity of a planned routine, were irresistible.
Sarda raised his palms in capitulation. "Okay, you've got it." He grabbed the arm of a frizzy-haired man wearing a gray lab smock. "Stewart, can you show Mr. Thane the reconstitution chamber quickly before he leaves?" He turned back to Kieran and June as the horde closed around him. "Say, twelve-thirty—if I don't have to cancel between now and then, I'll meet you there."
Afterward, they went down through the regular offices to the cubbyhole with a cluttered desk and multiscreen c-com layout that June used for work space, and met some of the other people that she knew. During one of the lulls, Kieran asked her, "Did you ever hear that old puzzle about the ship? I think it came from the Greeks."
"Which one was that?"
"If you replace a rotting piece of timber on a ship, is it still the same ship?"
"Sure, I guess."
"How about if you replace two pieces?"
"Okay." June saw where he was going. "Then three, then four . . . So if you end up replacing all of them . . ."
"Is it still the same ship?"
June had to think about it. "There's nowhere to draw the line," she said finally. "So I'd have to say, yes it's the same ship."
"And by his logic, so would Leo," Kieran agreed. "But now suppose you'd saved all the pieces of the original, and you put them together again. You've got two ships. How could they both be the same one?" He made an inviting gesture. "It's a good question to liven things up in a bar if things start getting dull. You see, even after a couple of thousand years, most people can't agree on that one. How are they ever going to figure out an answer to what we're talking about?"