Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

"Hey, stay cool, man! Um, where do you want me to start? This is where we work on the tissue cultures. Over there, that's the incubation lab. You see the far end behind the glass wall? We've got a full filtered air flow and a Class two environment; we're trying to get access to a Class four, but so far AMRIID isn't playing ball, so

there's some stuff we don't dare try yet. But anyway, what we've got next door is a bunch of cell tissue cultures harvested from JAUNT BLUE carriers. We keep them alive and work on them through here. We're using a 2D field-effect transistor array from Infineon Technologies. They're developing it primarily as an artificial retina, but we're using it to send signals into the cell cultures. If we had some stem cells it'd be easier to work with, but, well, we have to work with what we've got."

"Right." The president's opinion on embryonic stem-cell research was well known; it had never struck Eric as being a strategic liability before now. He leaned towards the contraption behind the glass shield of the laminar-flow cabinet. "So inside that box, you've got some live nerve cells, and you've, you've what? You've got them to talk to a chip? Is that it?"

"Yup." Hu looked smug. "It'd be better if we had a live volunteer to work with-if we could insert microelectrodes into their optic nerve or geniculate nucleus-but as the action's happening at the intracellular level this at least lets us gel a handle on what we're seeing."

Live volunteers? Eric stilled a twitch. The "unlawful combatant" designation James had managed to stick on Matthias and the other captured Clan members was one thing: performing medical experiments involving brain surgery on them was something else. Somehow he didn't see any of them volunteering of their own free will: was Hu really that stupid? Or just naive? Or had he not figured out how the JAUNT BLUE tissue cultures came to be in his hands in the first place? "What have you been able to do with the materials available to you?"

"It's amazing! Look, let me show you preparation twelve in action, okay? I need to get a fresh slide from Janet. Wait here."

Hu bustled off to the far end of the lab and waved at the person working behind the glass wall. While he was preoccupied, Eric took inventory. Okay, so James wants me to figure it out for myself. He wants a sanity check? So far, so obvious. But the next bit was a little more challenging. So there's evidence of extremely advanced biological engineering, inside the Clan members' heads. Quantum dots, fullerene stuff, nanotechnology, genetic engineering as well. Artificial organelles. He shivered. Are they still human? Or something else? And what can we do with this stuff?

Hu was on his way back, clutching something about the size of a humane rat trap that gleamed with the dull finish of aluminum. "What's that?" asked Eric.

"Let me hook it up first. I've got to do this quickly." Hu Hipped up part of the laminar-How cabinet's hood and slid the device inside, then began plugging tubes into it. "It dies after about half an hour, and she's spent the whole morning getting it ready for you."

Hu fussed over his gadgets for a while, then plugged a couple of old-fashioned-looking coaxial cables into the aluminum box. "The test cell in here needs to be bathed in oxygenated Ringer's solution at body temperature. This here's a peristaltic pump and heater combination-" He launched into an intricate explanation that went right over Eric's head. "We should be able to see it on video here-"

He backed away from the cabinet and grabbed hold of the mouse hanging off of the computer next to it. The screen unblanked: a window in the middle of it showed a grainy gray grid, the rough-edged tracks of a silicon chip at high magnification. Odd, messy blobs dotted its surface, as if a microscopic vandal had sneezed on it. "Here's an NV5I test unit. One thousand twenty-four field effect transistors, individually addressable. The camera's calibrated so we can bring up any transistor by its coordinates. These cells are all live JAUNT BLUE cultures-at least they were alive half an hour ago."

"So what does it do?"

Hu shrugged. "This is preparation twelve, the first that actually did anything. Most of the later ones arc still-we're still debugging them, they're still under development. This one, at least, it's the demo. We got it to work reliably. Proof of concept: watch."

He leaned close to the screen, muttering to himself, then punched some numbers into the computer. The cam-era slewed sideways and zoomed slightly, centering on one of the snot-like blobs. "Vio -sorry. Here we go."

Hu hit a key. A moment later, Eric blinked. "Where did it go? Did you just evaporate it?"

"No, we only carry about fifty millivolts and a handful of microamps for a fiftieth of a second. Look, let me do it again. Over... yeah, this one."

Hu punched more figures into the keyboard. Hit the re-turn key again. Another blob of snot vanished from the gray surface.

"What's this meant to show me?" Eric asked impatiently.

"Huh?" Hu gaped at him. "Uh, JAUNT BLUE? Hello, remember that code phrase? The, the folks who do that world-walking thing? This is how it works."

"Hang on. Wait." Eric scratched his head. "You didn't just vaporize that, that-" Neuron, he realized, understanding dawning. "Wow."

"We figured out that the mechanosomes respond to the intracellular cyclic-AMP signaling pathway," Hu offered timidly. "That's what preparation fourteen is about. They're also sensitive to dopamine. We're looking for modulators, now, but it's on track. If we could get the nerve cells to grow dendrites and connect, we hope eventually to be able to build a system that works-that can move stuff about. If we can get a neural stem-cell line going, we may even be able to mass-produce them-but that's years away. It's early days right now: all we can do is make an infected cell go bye-bye and sneak away into some other universe-explaining how that part of it works is what the quant group are working on. What do you think?"

Eric shook his head, suddenly struck by a weird sense of historical significance: it was like standing in that baseball court at the University of Chicago in 1942, when they finished adding graphite blocks to the heap in the middle of the court and Professor Fermi told his assistant to start twisting the control rod. A Nobel Prize or a nuclear war? James isn't wrong about that. "I'd give my left nut to know where this is all going to end," he said slowly. "You're doing good work. I just hope we don't all live to regret the consequences."

As forms of transport went, horse-drawn carriages tended to lack modern amenities-from cup holders and seat-back TV screens on down to shock absorbers and ventilation nozzles. On the other hand, they came with some fittings that took Mike by surprise. He gestured feebly at the raised seat cushion as he glanced at the geriatric gruppenfuhrer in the mound of rugs on the other side of the compartment: "If you think I'm going to use that-"

"You'll use it when you need to, boy." She cackled for a moment. The younger woman, Olga, rolled her eyes and sent him a look that seemed to say, humor her. "We'll not be stopping for bed and bath for at least a day." "Damn," he said faintly. "What are you going to do?" Iris said nothing for a moment, while one wheel crunched across a rut in the path with a bone-shaking crash that sent a wave of heat through his leg. She seemed to be considering the question. "We'll be pausing to

change teams in another hour or so. Don't want to Hog the horses; you never know when you'll need a fresh s team. Anyway, you can't stick your nose outside: you* wouldn't fool anyone. So the story is, you're unconscious and injured and we need to get you across to a hospital in upstate New York as soon as possible. If they're still using the old emergency routes-"she looked at Olga, who nodded "-there should be a postal station we can divert to tomorrow evening. If it's running, we'll ship you across and you can be home in forty-eight hours. If it's not running... well, we'll play it by ear; you've been hit on the head and you're having trouble with language, or something. Until we can get you out of here."