I was looking at the oak and recognizing the acorn.
I spooled through the information as quickly as I could, taking in the first and last paragraphs of the reports, glancing at the diagrams and data just long enough to take a general sense of them and then moving on. The navigation keys of the hand terminal clicked as I pressed them, like I was crushing tiny beetles. There was clearly a deeper structure that the development of the beta sheets was protecting and promoting. I didn’t begin to understand the energetic dynamics of it, but there was, I thought, a privileged group. Something about the logic of the individual particles reminded me of a paper I’d read in Tel Aviv that reexamined sperm. The thesis was that rather than a homogeneous collection of equally competing cells, there were classes of sperm; subspecies that acted as a team to present a chosen cell or class of cells to the ovum.
Alberto said my name, and I was aware of it the way I might have been aware of a candle flame in the noonday sun. It was there, but it had very little impact.
The privileged group could probably be identified by its place within the logical structure of the network, but something about that felt wrong. I paged back through the diagrams. I had the sense there was an asymmetry in the network someplace that I could almost—not quite, but almost—place. It was analogous to something I already knew about, but I didn’t know what. I growled and went back to the start. Alberto said my name again, and I looked up too late.
Fong stood over us both, her expression carved from hardwood. I felt a flash of resentment at her interruption and swallowed it quickly. I held out the hand terminal.
“Look what I found,” I said.
She took it from me and paused. I could see the desire to punish me in her mouth and the angle of her shoulders. Alberto squirmed beside me and Navarro appeared at Fong’s side. I heard Brown yawp with delight. He’d caught sight of his lost treasure. I anticipated Quintana’s anger and disappointment, but it didn’t matter to me. My goal had never been to help him.
“Quintana’s an asshole, but he isn’t wrong. He won’t solve it,” I said, and Fong shook her head as if to say I don’t know what you’re talking about. I smiled tightly. “Brown won’t solve it. He won’t give them what they’re looking for. We may not get another chance.”
“That’s not how this works,” she said.
“I can help,” I said. “Tell him to let me help.” For a moment, it seemed as if she might reply, but instead she turned away without pressing the issue.
It felt like a victory.
My advisor at Tel Aviv—David Artemis Kuhn—had a beautiful name, a way of wearing a formal jacket just messily enough to say he was in on the joke, and a voice that sounded like the first sip of rum feels: sharp and warm and relaxing. His office smelled of coffee and freshly turned soil. I admired him, I crushed on him, I aspired to be him. If he had told me to quit the university and write poetry, I probably would have.
“Nanoinformatics is perfect for you,” he said. “It’s deeply interdisciplinary. You can apply it to a career in medical research or computer architecture or microecology. Of all the degree programs we have, this is the one that will keep the most doors open for you. If you’re not sure what direction you want your studies to take you…” He paused and tapped his desk three times with the tip of his index finger. “This is the one.”
There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.
A thought experiment from my first course in the program: Take a bar of metal and put a single notch in it. The two lengths thus defined have a relationship that can be expressed as the ratio between them. In theory, therefore, any rational number can be expressed with a single mark on a bar of metal. Using a simple alphabetic code, a mark that calculated to a ratio of.1215225 could be read as 12-15-22-5, or “l-o-v-e.” The complete plays of Shakespeare could be written in a single mark, if it were possible to measure accurately enough. Or the machine language expression of the most advanced expert systems, though by then the notch might be small enough that Planck’s constant got in the way. How massive amounts of information could be expressed in and retrieved from infinitesimal objects was the driving concern of my college years. I swam in an intellectual sea of qubits and data implication, coding structures and Rényi entropy.
I spent days in the computation labs with their leather couches and ancient ceramic lockers, talking with people from all across the world and beyond. The first Belter I met was a woman from the L5 station who had come down to study crystallography, though since she lived in the consistent spin gravity of that station, she looked more like a Martian than the elongated soldiers who would eventually become my guards. My nights I divided between my dorm room and the bright bars and sober coffeehouses along the edge of the campus.
Slowly, I began to take the sad, traumatized boy who had fled Londrina and a life on basic and build from him a deeper, more serious, more focused man. I styled myself a scientist and wore the thin black vests and sand-colored silk shirts that the biology students had adopted as their fashion. I even joined the student union for scientific outreach, sitting through the long, angry, clove-cigarette-hazed meetings and arguing when people from the more traditional programs complained that my work was closer to philosophy than engineering.
I drank a bit of wine, I smoked a little marijuana, but the drugs that fueled the university were not recreational. Tel Aviv Autonomous University ran on nootropics: nicotine, caffeine, amphetamine, dextroamphetamine, methylphenidate, 2-oxo-pyrrolidine acetamide. Aaron, my roommate, provided both a route for these to reach me and the worldview that justified them.
“We’re the bottom,” he said, leaning on the arm of our cheap foam-sculpt couch. “You and me and everyone else in this place. If we weren’t, we’d have gone to a real school.”
“We’re at a real school. We’re doing good work here,” I said. We were eating noodles and black sauce that they sold from a cart that passed down the halls of the dorm house, and the smell of something like olives rose from every mouthful.
“Exactly,” Aaron said, stabbing a fork in my direction. “We are keeping up with the most advanced, best-funded schools anywhere. Us, a bunch of basic jump-ups. Our mommies aren’t giving multimillion-dollar grants to the school. We aren’t skating on discoveries made by some department chair seventy years ago. Do you think they have a nanoinformatics program at the École?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling contrary.
“They don’t. We do. Because we have to be on the cutting edge to survive. We don’t have status, we don’t have money, we don’t have any of the things you need to get a foot in the door with recruiters or unions or grant specialists. So we make our own.” With this he took a thin case from his pocket and rattled it. “What the others can’t, or won’t, or don’t feel like they need to do is just necessary for us.”
Deep in my chest, a sluggish sense of fairness twitched in its sleep, but I could find no argument against, especially since it seemed as though everyone else in the program agreed. What would make it unfair, I told myself, was if the drugs tilted the playing field. If everyone was using them, then it stayed even.
As my career at the university went on and I came nearer to the knife-edge horizon of graduating, I found myself caring less and less about the fairness of the situation and more and more about my own well-being. Since nanoinformatics was a new program it didn’t have its own permanent faculty. Half of the classes on its requirements list were borrowed from other programs, and the professors often hadn’t tailored the content to include me. In my culmination-level seminar, all of the other half-dozen students were strict biologists working from a shared curriculum that I had only brushed against. Taking focus drugs in that context seemed like the obvious thing.