Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Moon colonies are pressurized to normal atmospheric levels using an admixture of oxygen and helium, the most plentiful element in the universe, except for hydrogen. Helium’s isotopes are especially plentiful in Moon rock, the result of billions of years of exposure to solar wind. Cavern-based colonies, like Artemis Seven, are divided into sealed sections, and, occasionally, the seals leak. Usually this is not serious enough to cause respiratory problems. But for those in whom the P2 virus is far advanced, even the smallest change in available oxygen levels can cause a condition akin to hyperventilation in which the subject’s blood pressure falls, thereby causing him or her to hallucinate.

Much less energy is required in escaping from the Moon’s gravity than from Earth’s. Rockets are used only by wealthy tourists. Everyone else uses the Tranquillity Base’s Space Superconductor, a magnetic-field monorail that gently rises some fifty feet from the surface of the Moon for some fifteen miles before the escape velocity of 1.4 miles per second is finally achieved. The Moon has proved to be the ideal environment for transportation that utilizes high-temperature superconductors. On Earth a major problem in the development of anisotropic technology had proved to be the instability of the chemical environment due to moist air, which is, of course, not a problem on the Moon.

Self-contained gravity pod, capable of withstanding 15 g’s, for the transportation of sick and injured people aboard a Superconductor.

Tranquillity Base.

Kelvin. The SI unit of thermodynamic temperature.

The temperature below which the monorail becomes superconducting is called the transition, or critical, temperature.

See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I, Book VII. Cf. Herodotus in his account of how a Greek mercenary army in the pay of the Egyptians took the blood of the sons of their enemy Palmes, mixed it with grape juice, and then drank the mixture to give them strength and courage.

Blood transfusion was also a subject of satire. For example, see Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, 7711: ‘Many are spoil’d by that pedantic throng, / Who with great pains teach youth to reason wrong. / Tutors, like Virtuoso’s, oft inclin’d / By strange transfusion to improve the mind, / Draw off the sense we have, to pour in new; / Which yet, with all their skill, they ne’er could do.’

‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842.

When B19 was first discovered in the serum of asymptomatic blood donors as a cause of false-positive results in CIE tests for the detection of hepatitis B virus surface antigen, it was one of only two known human parvoviruses. B19 takes its name from the code number given to one of the serum samples in which the virus was initially found.

The word ‘influenza’ is of mid-eighteenth-century Italian origin. It meant ‘influence of a miasma,’ or ‘of the stars.’

The Shevchenko nuclear reactor complex on the Mangyshlak Peninsula in Kazakhstan was the world’s worst nuclear accident; as a result of the explosion, an area of some two hundred square miles between the Caspian and Aral Seas was rendered uninhabitable.

Oxygen is carried in the body from the lungs to the tissues by the specialized protein hemoglobin. This is a complex structure, carried around in the blood by the red cells in high concentration. It has the special property of binding oxygen in the lungs but releasing it in the low-oxygen environment of the tissues, whereupon its function changes to enable the uptake of large amounts of carbon dioxide, which is transported to the lungs, and the reverse process takes place. That this can happen is due to the unique structure of hemoglobin, which is a complex of two pairs of protein molecules that are known as alpha and beta chains. These are arranged in close juxtaposition and provide the supporting structure for the active part of hemoglobin, the heme molecule, a porphyrin structure containing iron. It is within this component that oxygen is bound. A remarkable physical change occurs during the cycle of uptake and release of oxygen, which has been likened to the hemoglobin molecule breathing.

Similarly the particularly virulent form of syphilis that struck Europe during the late fifteenth century may have mutated to a less immediately severe form that subsequently existed, with fewer ugly pustules and less pain. The dramatist Oscar Wilde lived with syphilis for many years longer than would have seemed possible in 1495, when King Charles VIII of France sacked Naples, and his syphilis-ridden troops set in motion a new venereal plague.

‘Utopia’ was a word coined by Sir Thomas More with his book of the same name (1516); it is derived from two Greek words: eutopia, meaning ‘good place,’ and outopia, meaning ‘no place.’ From this, the real ironic sense of the book may be derived, i.e., that an ideal society can exist nowhere, and to seek such a thing is no more than human folly. However, the term is commonly taken to mean an ideal society. Dystopian literature refers to societies that are just the opposite of ideal. They arc nightmare societies. That works of dystopian literature greatly outnumber works of utopian literature may simply be a function of the fact that the creation of a universally unappealing society presents the author with a much more challenging task than the creation of an ideal one about which everyone might agree.

Intelligent.

The Marcus DNA Comparator, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180), who once said: ‘Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part’ ( Meditations, Book II, Chapter 2). The device works thus: carbon dioxide is cleared from the blood by the lungs; during the pulmonary circulation process, small quantities of hemoglobin bind to the CO 2; when expirated this CO 2shows minute traces of the hemoglobin protein, and the DNA molecule, unique to every individual, can then be matched with a computer record in less than a second.

Digital thought recording. The DTR technique relies on the principle of magneto-encephalography, or MEG, first demonstrated as long ago as 1968 by David Cohen at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, it was another seventy years before Yosuke Konoye and the Sony Corporation of Greater Japan perfected the world’s first DTR machine.

Basis fringe. An elemental fringe pattern computed to diffract light in a specific manner. The phrase ‘basis fringe’ is an analogy to mathematical basis functions. Linear summations of basis fringes are used as Motion Parallax or holographic patterns.

Multicursal route. Also known as a labyrinth, although strictly speaking, labyrinths can also be unicursal routes. The MR suggests a series of choices between paths. The UR contains only a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no dead ends or choices between paths.

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, genetic engineers labored to produce scarce medicines from transgenic animal bioreactors, or TABs. This involved the injection of human DNA into the embryos of dairy animals such as sheep, goats, and cows. Mammary tissue from genetically engineered livestock contained cells that produced a therapeutic human protein that flowed through the animal’s secretory channels along with other components in the animal’s milk. What was not known at the time was how human genes in certain genetic manipidations are also able to produce foreign protein in a way that alters surrounding tissue. This was how mutating human/animal genes were able to enter the food chain. Neither was it properly understood how genetically engineered proteins actually functioned in people. After the first TABs were engineered, a whole generation was to pass before these two fundamental misunderstandings were perceived to have resulted in hundreds of human/animal genetic birth defects — transgenic creatures that were half animal and half human. Also known as genetors.