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universe, a marvel of complexity. I tried to fathom the sheer magnitude:
Each brain actually con-tained about six-hundred quintillion of molecular
machines, an amount ten times greater than the number of connections required
to link all eight billion people on Earth to every other person! No wonder
humans had always refused to think of themselves as mere machines. The brain
was far too com-plex to fathom in those terms. It would be like describing the
Sistine Chapel as an amalgam of wood and paint.
The study of the brain was nanotech s critical frontier. Scien-tists had long
ago discredited the tenets of vitalism: that humans possessed souls apart from
physical matter. The brain s enor-mous complexity was now deemed finite, and
therefore ulti-mately fathomable.
Near-death experiences, for example, had been synthesized decades earlier by
carefully depriving volunteers brains and eyes of blood flow. These had been
categorized into seventeen distinct types.
Now AI machines could actually predict which type of  NDE any individual s
rods and cones would project into their ebbing consciousness.
There was no apparent reason why evolution would have induced dying human
brains to dream of the tunnel and the white light. Yet so many of them did.
Perhaps, I thought, NDEs were simply one of humanity s many gifts from
God.
The newest science continued to suggest that personality, identity, and all
long-term memory were recorded through the continuous reorganization of
protein molecules in the brain s neurons. Perhaps some short-term memory
was energy--related, or recorded at the subatomic level, but that hypothesis
seemed unlikely. Probably, every facet of human thought boiled down
to the quintillions of protein molecules, or at worst, the atoms composing
them. Hopeful tidings indeed for anyone who happened to lie frozen in
soft-nite.
August 14, 2051
 Lunar Power Systems an-nounces plans to build 41,600 additional collectors on
the moon s surface. LPS already supplies 29% of the earth s energy needs, and
the new construction will double its capacity. CEO Rob Campbell explains,
 The moon s an ideal environment for collecting solar en-ergy, since it has no
atmosphere and the iron and silicon needed for solar power collectors
are abundant. Once collected, the energy is converted to microwaves
and transmitted to receivers on Earth. Reacting to public uproar over six
irreversible deaths caused so far this year by intoxicated or sleep-deprived
pilots, Raytheon announces it will add competence sensors to all its
gyro-copters within 24 months. The new devices will prevent the machines from
starting unless the operator is sober, drug-free, and alert.
Now forty-five years of age, I d never felt pressure to marry. Of course I
knew the AI shrinks would blame such inconstancy on childhood loss of both
parents and the inevitable fear-of-attachment such tragedies produce. My
few relationships with women had been pleasant, tender, and brief.
But Wendy was a different story.
For sixteen years I d brought Wendy-girl everywhere with me: to the lab, to
meetings, to conferences around the world. Giants of international
science were no doubt bemused by the spectacle of this well-known
nanoscientist, on hands and knees on the conference floor, coaxing my golden
retriever to walk on hind legs, or to lift her snout and sing along with me.
That is, until the day, three months ago, when the decay of her advanced age
had forced me to place her in biostasis.
Coincidentally, Wendy s suspension took place the day after the Armstrong
Aging Models had been released. The foremost software genius of the
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twenty-first century had spent the pre-vious two decades working with an array
of state-of-the-art AI machines to produce the most intricate
programming in history, allowing biologists and other researchers to perform
quantifi-able cyberspace experiments on
human aging.
Of course, Randall Petersen Armstrong s work was readily applicable to
canines, a nuance not lost on me.
Even before Wendy s suspension, I d begun studying the phenomenon of aging
with an obsession matching my previous delvings into nanotech and
neuroscience. My own appointment with death-or-ice seemed too distant to
warrant preparation- my present prebiostasis life expectancy was at
least
110 but the impending demise of my first golden retriever had filled me with
an overwhelming sense of urgency.
Over the previous half century, even as medical knowledge ex-panded
exponentially, the fundamental theories of aging had changed little. Most
specialists still believed that aging arose from a combination of three
factors:
(1) Ionization damage to molecules and DNA caused mainly by natural [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]