Analog SFF, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  His Edison/Tesla hybrid was showing great promise, with double blooms and a spicy fragrance that hinted rather than shouted its presence in the garden. It seemed hardy enough, even in California's muggy swelter. The change in climate since the turn of the century had killed many a stalwart standby, but the E/T rose, as he had come to think of it, kept struggling on even, when the Floribunda and England and Peace varietals tossed in the towel. He was becoming quite excited over its progress and was already dreaming of the accolades he would receive when he brought his new creation to the garden show that fall, but those dreams came to an abrupt halt the morning he entered his garden and discovered aphids munching happily on his hybrid hopes.

  Aphids! Plant lice. Tiny sapsucking parasites that drained the strength from their hosts like politicians draining money from a researcher's budget. Not a death knell for the plant, but a definite setback, and one that would cost him dearly in time, prestige, and satisfaction.

  He should have expected it. When you combined two sets of genes, you not only combined their strengths, but their weaknesses. Obviously, his Edison and his Tesla variants were each slightly susceptible to infestation, and their progeny had unfortunately inherited the gene from both parents. It would undoubtedly be possible to recross the lines and try for a variant that retained the blossom size and fragrance yet showed resistance to aphids as well, but those variants could be susceptible to heat, or mildew, or a host of other perils. He would be casting his fate on the seas of random chance, hoping for luck to hand him a freebie.

  He shouldn't have to rely on luck. Genetic mapping was becoming more of a science every day; it should be possible to learn which genes were responsible for which traits, and select which ones a person wanted in his final product. And if he left out all the “junk” DNA, the unexpressed genes left over from ancestral generations, the new varietal would breed true. There wouldn't be any bad genes to pass along.

  The possibilities stretched before him in a direct line to the Nobel, but as Robert knelt before his infested E/T hybrid, he forced himself to focus on the problem at hand. He had aphids on his roses now, today, and he wanted them gone.

  There were two basic treatments for aphids. Ladybugs would eat them, or diatomaceous earth would destroy them from within. Robert was a nano-engineer, a designer of machines that manipulated individual atoms; it amused him to think of using the skeletons of microscopic algae to fight the invaders. That's what diatoms were: little single-celled creatures, neither plant nor animal, that filtered silicon dioxide out of seawater and built elaborate, lacy shells out of it. They looked like aquatic pollen grains, spiky and sharp-edged, and when you dusted an aphid with their dried shells, the gritty powder got into the aphid's joints and literally wore them out. It was like throwing sand into an engine; the engine's own movement provided the energy that eventually destroyed it.

  Robert had had an aphid problem once before, early in his gardening days. He rummaged around in the back of his equipment shed until he found the can of diatomaceous earth, took it out to the garden and gave all his roses a generous dusting. Then he headed to work at the lab, shifting mental gears during his commute until the aphids became a distant worry.

  The lab held troubles enough to occupy him. Nothing new, but certainly persistent. Robert's team had designed a beautiful assembler, able to stack atoms in just about any shape they wanted, but they were still foundering on the energy problem. Dragging atoms from place to place required energy, and an autonomous assembler couldn't carry a battery pack around with it. It required a chemical power supply, one that could be recharged continuously through its environment. Fed, as it were, like a bacterium in sugar broth.

  The more he worked at it, the more convinced he became that the answer lay not in more and more clever mechanical systems, but in biological mimicry. Evolution had already designed the perfect power source for a nanoscale device: the mitochondrion that powered nearly every eukaryotic cell. Keep feeding it glucose, and a mitochondrion would produce enough energy to wave a hundred cilia all day. Why not harness that ability in an artificial cell, rather than design a completely new device?

  Robert had discovered several good answers to that question, among them the unfortunate discovery that mitochondria were as much a mystery as the cells they powered. Biologists knew that the instructions for building one were encoded in its own DNA, and they could even unravel that DNA and tell you what genes coded what parts of the mitochondrial structure, but they couldn't tell you how to hook one up to a tiny device that would build, say, a rocket engine one atom at a time.

  Today, as he ran yet another dreary computer simulation of another doomed power interface, he found himself thinking back to the diatoms he had sprinkled on his roses. There was a nano-assembler. Diatoms seemed to exist for no other reason than to build their amazingly elaborate shells. That and reproduce. The seafloor was covered with their skeletal remains, and sediment beds hundreds of feet thick proved they had been doing so for millions of years.

  On a whim, Robert did an internet search for information on them, and learned several surprising things, the most interesting being their genome, which was full of junk. Only 20 percent or so of the genes in a given diatom species were active. Furthermore, the unexpressed genes were different for each species tested. If every one of those genes were expressed, diatoms would be as different as apples and wallabies. He wondered what all that extra DNA could possibly code for.

  He knew just enough about genetics to be dangerous. An afternoon on the internet taught him enough to be really dangerous, because unlike the molecular biologists who sequenced the genome, he had a prototype nano-assembler that could manipulate a DNA molecule the way he could build a trellis for his Climbing Dawns. It didn't have a self-contained power supply, but that didn't matter for this. His test subjects weren't going anywhere.

  On the way home from work, he stopped by the beach and collected a bottle of seawater. That would give him plenty of diatoms to experiment on.

  He promptly forgot about that when he got home. He rushed through the house to his rose garden and examined his E/T hybrid, hoping to see it completely free of aphids, but there were still dozens of the little green parasites lined up along the stems like moviegoers at a ticket booth. He dusted them again with diatom skeletons, and again in the morning before he went to work. By then the aphids were definitely on the wane, so he dived into his work without any nagging worries, focusing completely on the genetic experiment.

  It would take months—maybe even years—to sort through a diatom genome and pick and choose which genes he wanted to activate. On the other hand, it would be the work of days to find the master “on” switch and throw it for every gene in every diatom in his culture. Then he could feed them and let them reproduce and see what he got, and if something interesting emerged, he could winnow out the genes that coded for that particular trait.

  Within a week he had his superdiatoms. He put them in a saltwater aquarium, where they wouldn't face competition from natural diatoms, and in the days that followed he monitored the water for growth.

  By the next morning, the water was cloudy with his experiment's progeny. He put a sample under the microscope, but was disappointed to see normal, everyday diatoms. They weren't exactly like the ones he had started with, but they were nothing like what he had expected. Turning on all their DNA had barely changed them.

  He let the tank go for a week, but nothing more happened. Someone put a castle in it as a joke, but that was it. Eventually Robert lost interest and dumped the whole works down the drain—after pouring a gallon of bleach in it and letting it soak for a couple of hours first. Nothing known to mankind could live through that, certainly not a diatom, so he didn't give it another thought until several weeks later, when a worker at the sewage treatment plant noticed something odd in a settling pond. It looked like someone had driven a car into the pond, but when a crew hauled it out, they realized it was like no car ever built. It was twice the size of even the
most outrageous SUV, and it had stubby little pods where the wheels would normally go. When the sewage treatment people hosed it off and opened it up, they found a fully functional cockpit that powered up when they pushed the big orange button in the middle of it. The car lifted about a foot off the ground and hovered there, and when one of the work crew climbed in, closed the door, and pushed another button, the car shot off into the sky, taking him on a terrifying but ultimately successful trip into fame and fortune.

  It didn't take long to discover what had built the mysterious flying car, nor to learn that the sewage lagoon was full of rapidly growing gadgets of nearly infinite variety. The mutated diatoms—for that was the official explanation for their existence, Robert wisely having decided not to step forward and claim responsibility for them—were apparently building everything in the extensive repertoire of objects that they had originally been programmed to assemble. They weren't restricting themselves to the sewage lagoon, either; that was merely the richest source of raw materials and therefore the first place that they had shown up. Once people began to look, they found them everywhere. The mutated diatoms didn't even require water; they drifted like dust particles with the wind, and wherever they landed they happily began building the accoutrements of a society that had apparently flourished and died on Earth long before humanity was even a concept. Some people thought the dinosaurs must have designed them; others favored a passing alien race that had inadvertently—or deliberately—left behind their technology while picnicking on a beach somewhere.

  Either way, the diatom-assembled devices worked, and scientists were suddenly busy taking them back apart and figuring out how. Not that it mattered to the average person; within months everyone who wanted one had a flying car, plus a customizable house and all the technological gadgetry they could wedge into it. Robert quietly went to work and figured out how to turn the assemblers on and off, much to the relief of environmentalists everywhere, who had been afraid that they would convert the entire planet into one vast city.

  During it all, Robert continued to refine his Einstein/Tesla hybrid, using the time-honored tradition of winnowing crossbreeds for desirable traits until he found one that had not only the flowers and the aroma that he wanted, but also resistance to aphids. He took it to flower shows, but he was disappointed to learn that his status as a nanotechnologist now overshadowed his status as a botanist.

  "Have you seen the new telescope those nanocritters have built?” people would ask him. “I hear they're building a fusion power generator up in Monterey Bay. And the tower rising off the coast of Hawaii is starting to look suspiciously like an interstellar spaceship."

  "Yes, yes,” Robert would say. “But have you seen my new rose?"

  Copyright (c) 2006 Jerry Oltion

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Technetium Rush by Wil McCarthy

  Materials can have many uses, some of which are talked about more openly than others....

  Bangalore Daily News, 26 July 2011

  Byline: Hemant S. Tripathi

  Fact: The element technetium is produced in minute quantities by red giant stars so far away that the light they're emitting now will someday shine on your grandchildren's grandchildren. For our purposes here, that's far enough not to matter. Closer to home, the element is sometimes generated by the collision of molybdenum atoms and “heavy hydrogen” from the sun, or by the natural decay of uranium. These are freak occurrences, though; aside from the transuranics (which are about as stable as a life of crime), technetium is the rarest element in the natural universe and forms no known minerals.

  Fact: Of the thirty-two possible crystal classes, only one—the gyroidal isometric—had, until recently, never been found in the mineral world. Is it mankind that abhors a vacuum?

  Fact: On March 20, 2008, Delhi University-trained geologist Rakesh “Rocky” Solanki, on an apparently routine survey of the alluvial clays north of Bhilwara, Rajasthan, found a deposit of fluorescent orange crystals that he couldn't identify, and so brought back to his Jaipur office for examination. Later named Tc solankite, the crystals were hard, translucent, vaguely lustrous and—considering their gyroidal structure and 20 percent technetium composition—quickly valued at $5,000 per gram. This is 300 times the price of platinum and twice that of clear uncut diamonds, so we're talking about serious money here. Let's be clear about that.

  Since the material had apparently washed down from the nearby Arvalli Mountains sometime in the past thousand years, Solanki's discovery touched off, almost immediately—the greatest land rush since the Canadian diamond wars of the 1990s. But can we really believe Solanki's gambling debts, criminal connections, and curious patterns of stock and land ownership have nothing to do with his sudden good fortune?

  Hey, no one's on trial here; the guy may be as innocent as a bride. Or, this may be one of the most sordid chapters in the oft-opprobrious history of mineral science. Place your bets and let's get moving; this rag doesn't pay me by the hour.

  * * * *

  Our story begins with the Canadian Diamond Rush of 1991, when geologists Charles Fipke (a forty-five-year-old with a mere bachelor's degree) and Stewart Blusson (with a pilot's license and twenty years in the bush) braved arctic winters and hungry bears to outwit the De Beers cartel and 258 other mining companies to lay claim to four of the world's richest diamond sites, imprisoned romantically beneath the arctic permafrost. Over a three-year period, fueled by hope and JP4 kerosene, a swarm of helicopters and geological shock troops staked out fifty-three million acres of mineral claims. It was a tale of rogues and spies, claim-jumpers and border skirmishes, camouflage nets, and electronic spoofing. But Fipke was born for this world, staying always one step ahead, and ultimately it was his science, more than any skullduggery, that sealed the day. Diamonds are found in volcanic chimneys called “kimberlite pipes,” and when the dust and snow had settled he was in possession of all the important ones, leaving only dregs and downwash for his rivals. Unpretentious as any storybook hero, Fipke was worth a billion rupees by the turn of the millennium and yet maintained a modest lifestyle, even continuing his fieldwork. Dirt beneath his fingernails, yes. What a bloke.

  Did Rakesh Solanki—then an impressionable teen on a middle-class Bahawalpur cotton farm—hear the tale on NDTV, or read about it somewhere? Or did it simply echo in the public spirit until that afternoon in Bhilwara, when it suddenly gelled?

  * * * *

  Jump ahead two years, to 1996. While America's Internet balloon began its historic inhale, while India's economy struggled out of a thousand-year recession, Rakesh Solanki was a farm boy in a big-city college. In pictures of the day he peers out from behind thick glasses, exuding the funny, cheery confidence of a man well out of his depth and loving it. His grades were fine, his studies went well, but on the side, he was prowling the streets of Delhi, looking for the things young men have always sought. No doubt panning for loose women, our intrepid Rocky instead discovered beer, then hemp, then betting parlors where dice and football could—and often did!—finance the next round of amorous prospecting.

  And still his grades were good. Never ruled by his wild side, Solanki ploughed his way through three semesters of foundation courses and was showing particularly well in the earth sciences, which would, he seemed to assume, become an interesting, if modest, career. And then something happened. Like a thunderclap, the petite poetess Abha Abhilasha Vyas crashed into his life. Although we may suspect the irony was lost on our randy young fellow, Ms. Vyas's name can of course be translated as “desire for things that glitter"—an omen further punctuated by the manner of their meeting, in Kamla Nagar's dilapidated Kothari Gamehouse.

  It's hard to believe all the witnesses who claim to have been there at the time, but this much seems certain: Clad in a green and gold blouse of questionable opacity, she leaned in front of Rakesh Solanki, so that his view of the TV was replaced with a view of her slight but shapely bosom, and said in Hindi, “Hey, goggles, be a darling and lend me a fift
y."

  "Buzz off,” he answered in English, craning for a view of the game.

  To which she replied, “Come on, mate, I've seen you up at the college. I'm a physicist, right? Fascinated with the laws of probability. Help a girl with her homework."

  For Vyas this was presumably no big deal. She was indeed studying physics at Delhi, but she'd grown up in this neighborhood and was known here, and the young man before her did have a certain awkward charm, a bit of money, and an obvious taste for the calendar girls posted round on the walls. Did she really expect the loan? Was she just kidding around? Alas for Solanki, still picking metaphorical cottonseeds out of his sandals, it was love at first (well, second) sight. Here was everything he'd ever dreamed of: a pretty, intelligent woman with a smart mouth and a taste for big-city adventure. The aforementioned bill was handed over with a smirk, and when wagered and lost, was gallantly replaced with another. And thus in five quick minutes was the pattern of their relationship set for all that followed.

  Pity him if you like. Pity them both if you must. But listen to all of it before passing judgment; youthful innocence can turn on a heel only, and I mean only, if we choose to allow it.

  * * * *

  Jump ahead to the turn of the millennium. Stock markets were high, cash was flowing as freely as water, and armies of young programmers in Mumbai and Calcutta were sweeping Y2K bugs out of American and European software. Even Kashmir was working its way toward a ceasefire, lending a dreamy (if fragile) quality to the season.

  Having completed two years of graduate school, Solanki's darling Abha Vyas had taken a job at the WRC or Waste Reprocessing Centre of the Kakodar Nuclear Power Station in Jaipur, “breaking big ones into little ones,” as they say. That is, bombarding spent uranium fuel rods with the neutron emissions from a thorium reactor, so that massive, long-lived radioactive elements, like plutonium and neptunium, could be broken down into short-lived ones, like radon and actinium. On the side, she was now seeing her science-orientated poems published regularly in Varnamala and Kavya Bharati, which paid almost nothing but which stoked her professional reputation and, presumably, her self-esteem. Not that she needed much help in that area.