CultureCitizen
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2023
- Messages
- 124
"There's a rain programmed in half an hour," warned Renan.
"Yes, it's okay, I like the rain," Alena said.
Renan agreed to move to one of the tables on the terrace.
“Why do you always prefer the interior, Renan?”
“Security. Interiors are secure. Doors can be closed and made airtight. There's an emergency tunnel connecting all the buildings. The exteriors are dangerous.”
“For all the gods, Renan. It's a triple-layered dome. The outer layer could collapse and you would never know.'
“It's a habit, I guess,” he said with a sigh. “there weren't many open spaces when I was a child. The first dome was built just twelve years ago and I was already used to underground bases by then.”
They used the table's touch screen to order drinks. Renan ordered iced tea with lemon and Alena ordered orange juice. Five minutes later, an old wheeled robot arrived with their drinks and skewers of roasted pumpkin, peppers, and onions. Alena took seven pieces and put them on her plate.
“How was your day, Renan?”
“Pretty good. Turing explained to us the principles governing the columnar structures of neural networks. The question and answer session went on and that's why we left late.”
“That's strange,' said Alena, frowning. “That an AI gives lectures on its own functioning.”
“That's only because I'm still in training. My role will change once I've passed the intermediate level. The next step is to find theories to explain the response patterns of different neural networks...or so I hope.”
A light breeze began to fall from a thousand nozzles located in the dome. The umbrella in the center of the table opened automatically. Renan approached the table to avoid getting his back wet.
"How's your research on cancer going?"
"Today I finished a series of experiments to define the treatment protocol. According to Gene, in the best case scenario it could extend the lives of patients by five years."
"That sounds good."
"No, it's not good enough," Alena replied, shaking her head. "I've been working with the molecular editor for two years to find a treatment that will achieve total remission. I even modified several nanobots created by another lab section to scan specific sequences and repair them if possible, or trigger apoptosis if the damage is irreversible."
"Like a cycle redundancy check?"
"Yes, something like that."
"What went wrong?" Renan asked.
Alena looked at the sky in a desperate gesture.
"I don't know, Renan. It's not as simple as finding an error in a piece of code: I'll have to review all the tests, make hypotheses and do more experiments. That, and repeat the test with tissue where I didn't introduce the oncovirus."
Renan remained silent while he chewed on the skewered vegetables with a distant look. The robot brought them several more: gluten meat, some beef and lab-grown chicken meat. Alena served herself half of each.
Finally, Renan came out of his trance and asked:
"Do you insert the nanobots before or after the oncovirus?"
"After, why?"
"Maybe you should insert them before."
"But then it wouldn't be a treatment for curing cancer."
"No." But it probably is an effective treatment to prevent it.
"Yes," she replied after a while, "maybe you're right."
Renan served himself the rest of the three skewers. After finishing, he paid the bill: eight Pergs.
"Will you accompany me to my apartment?" Maybe I could help you with that back pain.
"Renan! Don't you even start!"
It wasn't the first time Renan proposed spending the night in his apartment. Renan seemed attractive to her despite his extreme thinness and being half a meter taller than her, and she enjoyed being with him. The only problem was that Renan was a hardened womanizer and she wasn't willing to become part of his collection.
"Anyway, I'll accompany you to your dormitory, Alena."
They walked a kilometer to the east, to the base area closest to Mount Olympus. It was a new area, with a very different architecture from the rest of the base. Renan was continuously surprised by the shape of the building that housed the simulated gravity dormitories: it looked like a hill covered in vegetation from which several streams descended, forming waterfalls and pools. Inside the building, each floor rotated once every twenty-two seconds to simulate Earth's gravity. Alena said goodbye to Renan with a kiss on the corner of her lips and descended a staircase that led to the building's access tunnel. She walked eighty meters through the wide hallway to the center of the building. There, she boarded the elevator and went up to the third floor, where her room was located. She emerged into a narrow circular hallway with four horizontal elevators, she walked to the nearest elevator, which silently advanced to the rim of the building. Upon exiting, she felt slightly dizzy. She waited a few seconds to get used to the Coriolis effect, the incline of the floor, and her new weight. She walked several meters down the narrow circular hallway until she found her room. She placed her palm on the reader and entered.
The interior was austere: a bed, a desk with drawers, a wardrobe, a small bathroom, and a screen that simulated a window with a view to the outside. She undressed, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.
The next day she got up early to repeat the experiment. As always, she prepared the tissue samples without Gene's help and continued to examine the shell that she had left in the refrigerator the day before. She was still intrigued by the state of the organelles.
"Gene, how many times have the cells of this sample replicated?"
The artificial intelligence took several seconds to give her the answer. Renan had told her that the delay was artificial and that in reality, the computer could respond instantly.
"Eighteen thousand seven hundred times."
"Good, I want to repeat the experiment, but this time we will continuously introduce the nanobots after the first thousand divisions and the oncovirus when we reach the two thousandth division. I want to apply the same variations in the doses of nanobots and oncovirus as in the previous experiment."
"Will the same proportions of Eg5 and monastrol be applied?"
"Yes. Meanwhile, I want to continue studying this sample, although this experiment is likely to give us a much clearer idea of what happened."
While Gene introduced the samples into the cultivation chamber, Alena performed several analyses of the tissue cells she had stored in the refrigerator the day before. The telomeres of the cells were extremely short.
"How is this possible?" he wondered. "The senescence process should have started several days ago."
She separated some cells and prepared several culture shells. Then he prepared several nanobots and injected them into the cells. Afterward, she programmed the culture equipment to introduce kinases and phosphatases in fifteen-minute cycles. She spent the rest of the day investigating the controversial role of telomeres in cellular aging: they seemed to be the key to stopping the senescence process in human cells; however, there were strains of mice with hyper long telomeres and that did not make them particularly long-lived. She left the laboratory after midnight still without a clear idea of what was happening with his cellular cultures. She went to bed without eating.
Alena spent the next few weeks alternating between the library, the laboratory, and several molecular biology conferences. Every day she checked the two groups of cultures that she had in the laboratory. The first group had not developed cancer, while the second group showed only slight deterioration. She toyed with the idea of combining her treatment with an adenovirus that inserted an extra-long telomere sequence. She searched several articles on the Tharsis intranet to see if she could find any nanobot or virus that was already made, but she could not find any.
"There's something eerie going on here," she thought.
"Yes, it's okay, I like the rain," Alena said.
Renan agreed to move to one of the tables on the terrace.
“Why do you always prefer the interior, Renan?”
“Security. Interiors are secure. Doors can be closed and made airtight. There's an emergency tunnel connecting all the buildings. The exteriors are dangerous.”
“For all the gods, Renan. It's a triple-layered dome. The outer layer could collapse and you would never know.'
“It's a habit, I guess,” he said with a sigh. “there weren't many open spaces when I was a child. The first dome was built just twelve years ago and I was already used to underground bases by then.”
They used the table's touch screen to order drinks. Renan ordered iced tea with lemon and Alena ordered orange juice. Five minutes later, an old wheeled robot arrived with their drinks and skewers of roasted pumpkin, peppers, and onions. Alena took seven pieces and put them on her plate.
“How was your day, Renan?”
“Pretty good. Turing explained to us the principles governing the columnar structures of neural networks. The question and answer session went on and that's why we left late.”
“That's strange,' said Alena, frowning. “That an AI gives lectures on its own functioning.”
“That's only because I'm still in training. My role will change once I've passed the intermediate level. The next step is to find theories to explain the response patterns of different neural networks...or so I hope.”
A light breeze began to fall from a thousand nozzles located in the dome. The umbrella in the center of the table opened automatically. Renan approached the table to avoid getting his back wet.
"How's your research on cancer going?"
"Today I finished a series of experiments to define the treatment protocol. According to Gene, in the best case scenario it could extend the lives of patients by five years."
"That sounds good."
"No, it's not good enough," Alena replied, shaking her head. "I've been working with the molecular editor for two years to find a treatment that will achieve total remission. I even modified several nanobots created by another lab section to scan specific sequences and repair them if possible, or trigger apoptosis if the damage is irreversible."
"Like a cycle redundancy check?"
"Yes, something like that."
"What went wrong?" Renan asked.
Alena looked at the sky in a desperate gesture.
"I don't know, Renan. It's not as simple as finding an error in a piece of code: I'll have to review all the tests, make hypotheses and do more experiments. That, and repeat the test with tissue where I didn't introduce the oncovirus."
Renan remained silent while he chewed on the skewered vegetables with a distant look. The robot brought them several more: gluten meat, some beef and lab-grown chicken meat. Alena served herself half of each.
Finally, Renan came out of his trance and asked:
"Do you insert the nanobots before or after the oncovirus?"
"After, why?"
"Maybe you should insert them before."
"But then it wouldn't be a treatment for curing cancer."
"No." But it probably is an effective treatment to prevent it.
"Yes," she replied after a while, "maybe you're right."
Renan served himself the rest of the three skewers. After finishing, he paid the bill: eight Pergs.
"Will you accompany me to my apartment?" Maybe I could help you with that back pain.
"Renan! Don't you even start!"
It wasn't the first time Renan proposed spending the night in his apartment. Renan seemed attractive to her despite his extreme thinness and being half a meter taller than her, and she enjoyed being with him. The only problem was that Renan was a hardened womanizer and she wasn't willing to become part of his collection.
"Anyway, I'll accompany you to your dormitory, Alena."
They walked a kilometer to the east, to the base area closest to Mount Olympus. It was a new area, with a very different architecture from the rest of the base. Renan was continuously surprised by the shape of the building that housed the simulated gravity dormitories: it looked like a hill covered in vegetation from which several streams descended, forming waterfalls and pools. Inside the building, each floor rotated once every twenty-two seconds to simulate Earth's gravity. Alena said goodbye to Renan with a kiss on the corner of her lips and descended a staircase that led to the building's access tunnel. She walked eighty meters through the wide hallway to the center of the building. There, she boarded the elevator and went up to the third floor, where her room was located. She emerged into a narrow circular hallway with four horizontal elevators, she walked to the nearest elevator, which silently advanced to the rim of the building. Upon exiting, she felt slightly dizzy. She waited a few seconds to get used to the Coriolis effect, the incline of the floor, and her new weight. She walked several meters down the narrow circular hallway until she found her room. She placed her palm on the reader and entered.
The interior was austere: a bed, a desk with drawers, a wardrobe, a small bathroom, and a screen that simulated a window with a view to the outside. She undressed, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.
The next day she got up early to repeat the experiment. As always, she prepared the tissue samples without Gene's help and continued to examine the shell that she had left in the refrigerator the day before. She was still intrigued by the state of the organelles.
"Gene, how many times have the cells of this sample replicated?"
The artificial intelligence took several seconds to give her the answer. Renan had told her that the delay was artificial and that in reality, the computer could respond instantly.
"Eighteen thousand seven hundred times."
"Good, I want to repeat the experiment, but this time we will continuously introduce the nanobots after the first thousand divisions and the oncovirus when we reach the two thousandth division. I want to apply the same variations in the doses of nanobots and oncovirus as in the previous experiment."
"Will the same proportions of Eg5 and monastrol be applied?"
"Yes. Meanwhile, I want to continue studying this sample, although this experiment is likely to give us a much clearer idea of what happened."
While Gene introduced the samples into the cultivation chamber, Alena performed several analyses of the tissue cells she had stored in the refrigerator the day before. The telomeres of the cells were extremely short.
"How is this possible?" he wondered. "The senescence process should have started several days ago."
She separated some cells and prepared several culture shells. Then he prepared several nanobots and injected them into the cells. Afterward, she programmed the culture equipment to introduce kinases and phosphatases in fifteen-minute cycles. She spent the rest of the day investigating the controversial role of telomeres in cellular aging: they seemed to be the key to stopping the senescence process in human cells; however, there were strains of mice with hyper long telomeres and that did not make them particularly long-lived. She left the laboratory after midnight still without a clear idea of what was happening with his cellular cultures. She went to bed without eating.
Alena spent the next few weeks alternating between the library, the laboratory, and several molecular biology conferences. Every day she checked the two groups of cultures that she had in the laboratory. The first group had not developed cancer, while the second group showed only slight deterioration. She toyed with the idea of combining her treatment with an adenovirus that inserted an extra-long telomere sequence. She searched several articles on the Tharsis intranet to see if she could find any nanobot or virus that was already made, but she could not find any.
"There's something eerie going on here," she thought.
