Black Liquid

Professor Manila was an engineer by profession, he had specialized in interactions between organic and inorganic matter for the purpose of producing hybrid machines, exploiting some of natures advantages, such as the ability to heal and operate energy efficiently. He had originally been fascinated by the potential of making machines with organic components, just imagine if you could feed your car the leftovers from dinner and have it transport you to work on that alone! As time had went, Manila became a proficient hyb-eng, hybrid engineer, part classical mechanical engineer, part biological researcher and part traditional doctor. He had gotten his first job at Greentrans Inc, a pioneering company in exactly the field of application where Manila saw the greatest potential. He had worked together with Francis Miller and Joe Donner who were also considered pioneering in the field of hybrid engineering, they were both biochemists who together with Joe's older brother, Nathan Donner, who by way of a 10 year head start in life, had become a successful investment banker prior to the start up adventures of his little brother. Greentrans Inc, had been the first company to develop a self-recharging electrical car, utilizing the mechanical motion of organic muscles to charge conventional batteries. The car looked like a car, except for a rather small trunk which provided storage for nutrition and waste containers for the EORS (Electro Organic Recharging System) which took up the rest of the trunk and a good portion of the room under the back seat. The EORS was in practice a clone of a genetically modified bull, that was, it had the two stomachs of a bull, it had the strong muscles of a bull and it had a rather large part of the central nervous system of a bull, but the nervous system had been where the brothers had made their breakthrough. Francis was interested in neuroscience, and had found a way to inhibit the development of the fetal brain in such a way as to produce a fetus with most of the autonomic nervous system intact but without much of anything else. The result of their first experiments, which were reluctantly founded by Nathan, were a few brain dead calves that all died within a week or two from not being able to breathe by themselves. They discovered that by implanting electrodes into the spinal cord at certain places, they could stimulate the breathing reflex, along with three of the legs. David Manila joined the company as the first employee, and it was he who worked out a method for efficiently fastening the relevant support structures to the embryo in such a way as to grow a bull in a metal box, exposing upper-leg muscles to a rotary gearbox. Their first prototype was built and it was horrible in every way. For one thing, it smelled like a mixture of rotting flesh and wrongly-digested food, another, worse thing, was that it was very slow. Stimulating a brain dead bull to move its legs smoothly enough to give a pleasant ride proved a challenge, and there was also an issue with moving quickly enough while providing enough torque. Another few bulls died before the three slightly odd people realized that cars weren't used all the time, and that a slow, almost constant moving meat-engine could be used instead of driving the car directly, to drive a generator and charge batteries. And such is the story of the first generation of self-recharging organic-electric hybrid cars. It would take another few attempts, and a few rather vocal public outbursts questioning the ethics of the whole procedure before Greentrans became the megacorp it is today, making its four founders wealthy enough not to worry about anything ever again. So they did not, or rather, all but David Manila, who now worried about dying. He had always found it odd that humanity had not focused the majority of its resources on curing death, but he was not interested in psychology. He was interested in survival, and so he put his fortune to work, not only founding InfiniLi - for he, like the founders of Greentech, was not talented when it came to coming up with names - but also into his further education. While seeing the potential of integrating meat with machines, he saw even stronger the potential of replacing meat with machines. Meat is fragile, it ages, and geneticists have yet not much luck in slowing down to an acceptable rate, the process of aging, and even if they did, Manila argued, they wouldn't very well find a way of protecting against death from physical damage. So what did Professor Manila study, and what gave him the title of Professor ? In the first place, he became a professor of biochemistry, and then of Philosophy of all things. As much as he wanted rational and scientific reasoning to lead his research, he saw no way of achieving infinite life, the cure of death and his goal of staying on earth forever if he did not know what he himself was. Many issues where dealt with in the early stages of his project, many were philosophical thought experiments. Questions such as, if I upload myself into a computer, by means of copy, am I not still left outside while my copy is granted the ability to live forever? Other questions where less obvious, such as, if I upload myself to a computer simulated brain, and my simulated image retains or regains consciousness, and the simulation is slowed down to half speed, is it as conscious as before, and what if the simulation is paused, how does this differ from death? Many of these questions have not yet been answered, and yet, Professor Manila lives on forever. By was of practical thinking, he came to the conclusion that, since separate individual neurons can die within the brain without substantially, or even at any practical level, changing the consciousness of a person, it can be argued that the consciousness is made up of the whole, but not in any way by any individual neuron. It took only the complete output of the top ten universities of the world to produce the teams of nanotech researchers who would end up working together with a slightly larger team of neurospecialists to come up with the black liquid that was injected through a glass needle and into a main artery supplying blood to the brain of Professor David Manila. The liquid was a suspension of nanomachines in a liquid which served both as an antioxidant and energy source for the machines, as they attached themselves to every single neuron of his organic brain. Professor Manila had been put into a coma for the initial injection, and as he came to, he noticed nothing distinctly different except for a mild headache which was caused by the slight increase in pressure inside his skull. Luckily, nanomachines are smaller than braincells, and the total amount of volume increase was only about 80 ml, but it was still enough that it'd hurt quite a lot as it displaced his cerebrospinal fluid. The method was easy enough to understand. Many practical obstacles had been overcome, such as simulating efficiently neurons and synapses in both electrical, mechanical and chemical function, along with methods of reading those same interactions from the organic counterparts and also preventing reading of simulated events. After the nanomachines had attached themselves to every part of his brain, they interconnected, following the same structure as the organic brain, and then, started the simulation, a meta logic layer was present in the newly simulated brain, to allow observance of how closely it adhered to the organic counterpart. At this time, two distinct but identical conscious instances of Professor Manila existed, though either felt the other and they both felt exactly like they had always felt. After adherence had been established, the metalayer of the nano brain gave signal to a computer outside, and both brains decided to move the hand of Manila to press the continue button, giving the go for neuron replacement to begin. Over the course of the next 56 hours, every organic neuron of Manilas brain was physically cut out, the nano counterpart extending electrodes to counter the loss and act as an emulated interface to the rest of the organic brain. As the process completed, a nanostructure of two identically connected brain structures remained in the skull of Professor Manila, and the primary problem of transferring consciousness had been solved elegantly, the experience of every instance of Professor Manila had been intact. Now however, two distinct versions of him existed, in complete synchronization of each other, and they continued to exist like that, at least until he could find a way to merge them completely into one, for even though the same actual nano-neuron was simply emulating two organic neurons, it would be impossible to stop emulation of any of them without destroying one of the beings. Next steps included transferring backups into computers, these could be used in worst case, to restore Manila, who really didn't want to die.

Author's Note

Be hard on me, I'm new so I suck.

Reviews

[History_Birdman]

Holy.... that is one hell of a scientifically backed up short story. You`ve obviously done your research which is a great plus to your story. I definitely would not say you "suck" as I thoroughly enjoyed it. As you can probably imagine, most people will have trouble understanding the plot and scientific speech, but if you can add more simplified explanations throughout, it would do wonders for the story as a whole. Regardless, I cannot wait to see more from this story.

[Al Javier]

Okay. It's definitely science, and definitely fiction. There's a lot of things that can overlap with the real world here, that I will say is commendable enough. I personally like settings like these, they make me think that there really something more to our mundane way of life.

Now then, the most glaring issue here is the formatting. To put it bluntly, it's kind of a chunky mess; a massive wall of text perfect for destroying my already-terrible eyesight. As I read through it with my thick glasses, I found it extremely hard to understand everything given the way it is currently presented. The sentence-fragmentation is also incredible, sometimes less is more, but be consistent.

The concept and story itself, well, there is something here. There's something happening, and the world was built well-enough, a little too well if you ask me. Lots of stuff, way too much stuff. We want to know more about what the protagonist wants and why he wants it, we want to know more about his past which will help drive the plot.

Yeah, the plot. I swear I got lost in the middle. The technobabble is quite intense in one glance, at my second read, I kinda got the gist of it I suppose. At the surface, it's just one man pursuing progress while at the same time being a victim to circumstance. It's not bad of an idea, but where's the drive? What does the main character truly want? All I can see here is a bunch of science-talk that leads to something, but ultimately the protagonist goes nowhere plot-wise.

I hope I wasn't too harsh. Believe me, I've done many mistakes before I started to have confidence in writing. You need a little more reading to do, but otherwise your imagination is wide enough to build magnificent worlds, and that is the important thing. Never stop writing, don't let harsh critics get in your way of writing, though you must at least try to understand the criticisms laid down.

Okay, this is by far a lengthy-enough review. Will there be more of this piece? I will read it as soon as I can if it comes out.