Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***I detect no anomalies in the field emitter, Dr. Falkland…containment field also holding well…disassembly operation now sixty five per cent complete…structure file buffer overload…I recommend truncating peripheral details until the buffer clears…***

  Falkland saw instantly what Doc was talking about. The atom bond energies and geometries that made up Simon were overloading the memory registers of the system. Well, Simon was a complicated guy, Falkland thought. I mean is a complicated guy, he corrected himself.

  When deconstruction was over, if all went well, Simon the Shih Tzu would be reduced to a hopefully well-contained field of disassembled atoms and molecules and nothing more. At that point, Falkland’s memory field would sweep through the chamber, reading each and every atomic bond, measuring electron-volt energies, analyzing each atom’s geometric construction, recording it all and saving it in a massive file that constituted the physical ‘essence’ of what had once been a wiggling, yapping little dog.

  And if all went well, Falkland would write that same memory field over the contained atoms of the now disassembled Simon, instructing the bots to re-build the very same structure, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, according to what was held in the memory field.

  When it was all done, if Falkland had done his homework, the new structure would be Simon once again, at least in every physical way that mattered. Whether his mind and thoughts and habits would return as before….well, Dr. Ryne Falkland had long ago decided to leave that to the philosophers.

  First things first, he told himself. “Doc, let’s see if we can bring Simon back to physicality. We have good structure on the containment?”