“A cat,” she supplied promptly.
“Right.” Sarda looked at Kieran questioningly. Kieran nodded that the concepts were familiar. Sarda continued, “But it’s unimaginably more complicated. The DNA tells you not only how to make a cat, but a self-assembling cat. You don’t have an equipped factory and a bunch of engineers standing by already there, waiting to just read the blueprints and make a plane. The whole works has to make itself as well as make the plane. Can you imagine writing any kind of computer program to do something like that?”
Kieran did find himself staring this time, but it was from fascination, not impertinent curiosity. Although he had been aware of as much before, the implication had never struck him so forcefully.
Sarda waved a hand. “And that’s not all. Everything the cat inherits that tells it how to behave is coded in there too: the variability for adapting to different conditions; its immune reactions, repair mechanisms for wear and tear, cuts and burns, broken bones. . . . It’s all in there somewhere, implicitly. You just need the right computer to express it.”
“Like a mathematical system,” Kieran remarked. “Everything it says is contained in a few premises. But it takes thousands of theorems to make it explicit.”
“You’ve got a good grasp of principles,” Sarda said, showing some surprise. “Do I hear a scientific background talking?”
“Nothing formal that I could wave degrees in your face about. I just like keeping abreast of what interests me.”
Sarda turned toward the recliner and its surrounding equipment. “What we’ve done, in essence, is use a different kind of computer to extract that information rapidly and speed up the assembly of what normally takes years. It’s still a lot of computing, but we end up ahead of the game. You could think of our way as generating an image by taking a photograph to capture the scene all at once, compared to scanning it as a bit stream. All those guys who are trying to scan at the atomic level . . .” Sarda shook his head. “They’re not going anywhere. All the computers in the world couldn’t hack that amount of data, even if they ran till the end of the universe. But the way we do it, you don’t need that amount of raw data because implicitly the DNA can tell you how to generate almost all of it—if you know how to read the DNA.”
“The way Leo described it to me compared it to sending a code to specify a phrase from a code book,” June put in. “Most of the information is already there, at the receiving end. The code just triggers which part to use. It’s the same with what DNA specifies. Most of it’s general and can be supplied in advance at the receiving end to begin with, so you don’t have to send it.”
Kieran nodded. Natural language worked in a similar way. Most of the meaning derived from a sentence was in the listener’s head already from a human’s knowledge of the world, and not contained in the words. That was why predictions of translation machines within five years, heard from the AI community in the 1960s, had turned out to be wildly optimistic. He looked around the room, unable to decide whether it felt more like something surgical or a macabre, sophisticated form of torture chamber. His eyes came to rest on the sturdy white door. Suddenly, he suspected that he knew its significance.
“Almost all the data,” Sarda repeated. “Environmental modifications, we have to derive from the original. I came out of the process with my hair cut like I wear it, my nails clipped, and a few other things that obviously didn’t come from DNA.” Which took care of the first question that Kieran had been forming to ask. “Likewise, the acquired memory patterns in the brain have to be derived and implanted. But again nature gives us a break. There are ways of getting enough out of the wave functions such that you don’t have to go down to quantum levels of detail.”
“So this is where you get the information from the original,” Kieran summarized, indicating the recliner with a nod.