---

Chapter 5

Padma

---

Kei made her way toward the biology lab in the rotating disk that housed the science labs. She was working with her brilliant friend, Dr. Padma Berryman, on a particularly fascinating piece of research. Padma was experimenting with biological memory storage.

During her undergraduate work at the University of Calcutta, Padma’s insightful manipulation of RNA molecules drew the attention of the AI community. In graduate school at Oxford, she demonstrated the possibility of transferring synaptic patterns from parents to their offspring using genetically altered DNA.

She successfully passed information regarding maze solutions from one generation of rats to another. The progress of her research gained the recognition of her peers and the attention of the Cosmos project.

After she received her doctorate, Padma was hired by Genetica Sciences in the European Union, but when granted the opportunity she resigned her position and became a part of the Cosmos' crew.

She was dark complected, like most women of Hindi decent, and wore her long black hair loose and often disheveled from her quick movements. Her standard choice of dress was a comfortable pantsuit with a characteristic white lab coat. She had a curvy figure and probably would have been overweight if not for the medical nanobots that regulated her body mass.

Kei entered the biology lab and saw Padma gazing into the eyepieces of a sub-atomic quantum microscope. “Yes,” exclaimed Padma and did a little fist pump! “Look at this Kei. See the three strands of DNA near the center right of the visual field?”

Peering into the eyepieces, Kei observed three distinct double helix shapes floating near each other.

Source

“So, you’ve finally isolated them?” asked Kei.

“I think we have, watch this.”

Padma spoke a command to the lab, and a white screen appeared on the opposite wall. She activated a visual simulation and Kei watched while her friend explained the process.

“Here are three different strands of DNA.” Padma used a laser pointer to indicate the image. “These two are from the father and mother. This one will be modified to store digital data that mimics the nerve synapsis of the parents. We'll call it the data strand, and it will be inserted into the double helix using molecular manipulation.”

She advanced the frame to show the three strands of DNA uncoiling.
Advancing the simulation once more the animation of the three strands of DNA began unzipping themselves into six RNA strands.

“Now,” said Padma, “if we can design and introduce a nanomachine that will start the rebonding process,” she pointed to the end molecules on the six strands. “We will end up with this.” The RNA came together into two groups of three and zipped themselves together. There were now two strands of three chains of bonded molecules that slowly coiled together to form two distinct triple helixes.

“And,” continued Padma, “to complete the process watch this!”

She advanced the simulation, and the triple helixes fold around themselves to form a coiled spring that came together at each end. With the help of the nanomachine, the molecules bonded into the shape of a donut.

Source

“This donut shape,” explained Padma, “occupies a bit more space inside the cell as a regular strand of DNA, but I ran several simulations to test for stress and found no negative results. If this works with human cells, it means that future generations can pass down synapsis patterns, all of the parental memories, up to the point of conception, genetically."

"Imagine a child born with the knowledge of both parents! That's scary!" said Kei.

"You're telling me!" said Padma, "I shudder to think of having a memory of my parents having sex!"

They both laughed at the prospect.

Kei grew quiet, and her expression turned to one of disappointment. Padma glanced at her whiteboard and back to Kei a few times and asked, “What?”

“Oh, nothing I was thinking, even with the billions of molecular bonds in the third strand, it still isn’t enough to transfer our AI individuals into a biological form. It’s too bad that humans don’t come equipped with a supercomputer.”

“Kei, humans do come equipped with a supercomputer. Our human brains. We don’t use them at one hundred percent. But this changes everything. Storing AI core code in embryonic brain tissue by molecular memory will be easy. It will ensure that future humans have the processing power of an AI and the inspiration of humanity in one identity.

Future humans with artificially intelligent computing capability! Imagine it!"

She rolled her chair across the room and sat down before a keypad and screen and began typing furiously at the work terminal.

Padma zoned out when solving a problem. It may be days before exhaustion forced her to sleep.

Kei decided to leave her to her work.

Padma leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling in abstract thought. She hadn't even noticed when Kei left the room. Shaking her head, she said, “Coffee, black, 190 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Across the room, a small molecular assembler began to hum as it extracted the correct molecules to make a perfect cup of java from the All-Goo piped to it from elsewhere in the ship.

Source

All-Goo was the brainchild of a brilliant chemist working with Mira, an AI from the supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory in the USA.

This substance was a viscous liquid with all the standard elements combined in proportions similar to those found in nature.
Anything needed to produce a product manufactured by a molecular assembler was available in this slurry. A large part of one of the starship’s gravitational rings was devoted exclusively to the manufacture, restoration, distribution, and production of All-Goo.

Assemblers manufacture products atom by atom. The ship's assemblers routinely produced sheets of three-inch steel with ten times the strength of forged steel for hull construction. These weighed no more than the thinnest panels of aluminum. Layered carbon allotropes replaced plastics. Materials Engineers, aboard the starship, came up with new and magical substances each day. Anything the starship required, they invented with state of the art assemblers using All-Goo.

Padma used software she and Kei developed to arrange the molecular structure of the information strands. It would take some time, but she was confident the AI core code could be biologically imprinted. She added a few lines of code then tested to see if it would convert to the molecular memory of the triple helix. More often than not it would fail to bond, and she would have to go back and work in another line of code that would. It was slow, painstaking, but brilliant work.

The lab door hissed open and her smiling husband, Eric Berryman, one of the starships nanoengineers, walked in.

“Hey sugar,” he said. “I ran into Kei, and she said you were on another marathon think session.”

“Uh huh,” muttered Padma hardly looking up from her work.

Eric walked up behind her and bending down put his arm around her nuzzling a kiss on her neck. Looking over her shoulder, he saw her split screen with computer code on one side and diagrams of organic molecules on the other.

“What are you working on, honey? Looks pretty deep,” he said.

“Hey,” she said sitting up straighter. “You’re the man I need. Do you think you and your buddies in Nano could design a nano-mite to start the first bond linking these,” she brought up an image of the three strands?

“Hmm,” he said studying the image closely. “Looks impossible because these bipolar molecules here,” pointing to the images on the screen, “present positive ends to each other in these two strands... However, you know what I always say. ‘The impossible is just a little harder than the difficult.’"

"And,” he said nuzzling her cheek and cupping her breast, he pinched her nipple gently, “if you throw in a few sexual favors I’ll get my people right on it.”

She giggled and slapped his hand away then turned her head for a kiss. “You got a deal, stud!”

She cropped out the critical section of the diagram, copied it and sent it to his email account. “There you go, I won’t need it for a few weeks, but you can expect partial payment after work tonight!”

He pecked her on the cheek and said, “Well, I better get out of here then, I have places to go and people to see ya know.”

The door hissed closed behind him.

“If this works it will be an evolutionary step forward for mankind,” she thought to herself. Working out the methodology would be the simple part. Dealing with the ethics of implementing it would be enormous.

She sat thinking about having a child that had access to all of her memories up to and including the time of its conception. Things she knew, things she was ashamed to have done, all known to her child in vivid, colorful memory!

“OMG,” she thought again, “Both parent's memory of the sexual act of its conception!”

This experiment might produce children that were so far advanced they would seem like gods in a few generations. Suddenly the significance of what she was doing occurred to her. Should she continue with this research or quietly let it die?

She decided to continue but would bring up the issue with Kei before actually perfecting a process to implement the technology.
She also decided to discuss it with her friend, Lydia Jess, who had come aboard this afternoon. Padma admired the calm approach Lydia had when confronted with particularly tricky situations. She was known to keep her head about her and methodically tackle problems that seemed overwhelming to others. Yes, she definitely would involve Lydia in deciding the ethics of this issue.

She tapped her temple and said, “Eric, please.” In her inner ear, she heard, “Miss me already darling? Do you want me to zip back and have my way with you over your desk?”

“Behave!” she said amused with her incorrigible husband.
“I’d like to invite the Jess’s for a couples night tomorrow, will that fit into your schedule?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’d like to beat Carter at chess at least once while you ladies chat.”

Eric and Carter were an even match at chess and loved to play anytime they got together.

Source

“I’ll invite them for seven then, see you tonight lover boy. Love you!”
“Bye, sweetie,” she heard him say and tapped her temple to close the connection.

Padma minimized the diagram she was working on and dashed off an invitation to Lydia and Carter asking them if they were free to meet at the Berryman's quarters tomorrow night at seven. She brought her work screen back up and resumed the mind-numbing task of plugging in code and running simulations to test for errors. She was working through a particularly tricky area that had her back-tracking and re-combining several gene sequences when her inner ear implant tweeted to notify her of an incoming instant message.

She tapped her temple to activate her HUD and read, “Hey BFF, (best friend forever) Carter is giving me a tour of the ship right now. He said he’d love to come and beat Eric at chess. We will be there at seven. I'm looking forward to catching up on our girl talk. I doubt if we will make it to your lab on this tour, but we’ll see you tomorrow night.”

Padma zipped off a quick acknowledgment and closed her HUD.

---

Thanks for reading Chapter Five
in my first attempt at
Science Fiction
Read Chapter One here

Thumbnail Source

---

---

---

​