Cripes
"If God truly is in the details, then DNA must be God."
When Jared Friedman, the biocomputist who invented the DNA bubble computer said this, he failed to understand that it meant the details reflected God's work, not that God was just a bunch of details.
So much for details.
Maybe it was a tiny mishap in the sequencing of Jared's own DNA that caused him to misunderstand Goethe, or maybe he was just blinded by the boggling enormity of his invention: a computer that used simulated DNA structures to store information and to perform computing operations, though "computing" was not what it did in the traditional sense. Jared's computer used strings of programming similar to DNA codes riding on waves of bubbles smaller than atoms to simultaneously access enormous data warehouses and spit out results trillions of times faster than any computer before it.
Jared's computer was based on a biological entity that could replicate life, which on second thought, might make him right and Goethe wrong after all. But who really cares? They're both dead; Goethe for centuries and Jared, for, oh, about ten minutes. The details were just too much for him, so he jumped off his balcony-about an eight-foot drop, but he landed on his head and broke his neck.
Details.
What drove Jared over the railing was the realization that this new computer of his-a computer that could fit into this period but could store all the information currently contained on earth a billion trillion times over-was beyond anything he could ever hope to comprehend. Its implications were more staggering than his mind could handle.
Cripes, he thought, and jumped.
It would be a couple of hundred years before a young Virtual Code Geneticist would crack the encryption on Jared's work and actually build a working DNA computer. And when that happened, he wouldn't go crazy like Jared. He would keep his wits and neck intact because he would build his DNA computer for something far larger than eternity. He would build it for love.
A Hundred and Fifty Years Later...
Copyright © 2004 by Biff Mitchell
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