Terminal Run

“The problem of how to route current into specific terminals of the molecular devices had us stumped for a year until the organic chemists came up with what they called ‘chemical self-assembly.” With the simplest form of self-assembly the molecular devices drifted toward gold terminal plates while in solution. The chemistry of self-assembly grew more complex as we assembled more complicated circuit structures. We developed an organic structure for holding the molecules in place, freeing the scientists from the bother of having coin sized gold plates littering the circuits. We went to work on a tunnel like molecular tube capable of passing electrons — current — from one location to a distant point of the circuit assembly, sort of an artificial neuron branch. That was eight years ago. The following year we synthesized a molecule that could hold an electron within a cavity formed by the surrounding atom’s electron clouds, the captured electron creating a digital memory site. The presence of an electron forms a ‘one’ while the absence of an electron symbolized a ‘zero.” The memory node holds the electron memory state for an amazing ten minutes. Sounds pretty short, but not when you compare it to the silicon semiconductor memory sites that last only for a few milliseconds and have to be constantly refreshed. We’d just made a gigantic leap in computer technology with that one development.

“By this time we’d hired some of the Japanese developers of the Destiny III submarines, the ones that were biological computer controlled. The Japanese came to us about the time we were getting bogged down in trying to assemble huge arrays of molecular circuits, the placement of vast quantities of individual molecules in specific locations becoming drudgery. The Japanese had managed to wire up lower mammalian brains to the terminals of a neural network silicon computer processor well before the Japanese Missile Crisis, but even they didn’t know what was happening on a molecular level.

They had approached the biological processor as a black box that had to be dealt with empirically, using trial and error to make it function. So they too were stumped by the problem of assembling these gigantic complex circuits. Even now I wonder whether the solution to the problem was invented and developed by our lab scientists or plagiarized from nature when we took simple chromosomes and altered them one molecule at a time to embed them with instructions on how to develop an organic circuit board in three dimensions from more basic cells. The circuit fabrication in the lab was the result of ‘programming’ the chromosomes and allowing them to grow the molecular circuit tissue over the course of months, the tissue growing to several grams, with the circuit density required to exceed the performance of its silicon counterparts. After five thousand failures, we managed to assemble a large molecular circuit that functioned as a processor, and could ‘survive’ unchanged for up to weeks at a time before disassembling. “Dying’ might be a better word.

“So the big day in artificial intelligence history was forecasted to happen roughly two hundred years from now, the far distant day that a carbon-based tissue-matrix molecular computer exceeded the performance of the most advanced silicon semiconductor supercomputer, the day named “C>Si’ for the chemical symbol of carbon becoming greater than silicon. Two centuries, gentlemen, but C>Si happened in the DynaCorp Nanoscale Technology Molecular Electronics Lab in Denver, Colorado, seven years ago.”

Wang paused to drink from his glass. Krivak looked over to Sergio, who was hanging on Wang’s words.