He tried talking. “ Lyánhé? Shengren syingyu?” Union? Stranger sexual desire?

“ Syin pengyu syingyu,” she said, mocking him.

New friend sexual desire, his spectacles wrote on the world in red. Even better!

“ Tyauwu,” she ordered him. Dance.

Extracts (10)

Take some carbon dioxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, hydrocyanic acid, and salt. Put them in water and heat. Reduce to hot goo at the bottom of the pan; add more salt water. Repeat until you have a thick broth containing amino acids, sugars, and fatty acids. Throw in seasoning to taste. Each reduction and rehydration will thicken the broth further, until it includes many newly created nitroglycopeptides, and they will begin to form the protopolymers you need.

Some of the fatty acids will have hydrophobic tails and will tend therefore to stick together aligned with each other. These masses are your protomembranes, which in the heat of your stove top will wrap into tubes, also spheres with holes in them. Inside these little tart shells, a stuffing of protopolymers will clump together in a variety of macromolecules. These begin the chemical breaking and joining we call catalysis.

Chemical patterns in your new stuffing will yield similar combinations most of the time, and these new combinations will match up chemically in ways that can be read off each other; so information is now burbling around in your stuffing, and into and out of the hole in the cell wall will come useful molecules for more reactions. Linking up with patterned molecules already inside, these characteristic actions are coded by the basic chemistry, so they will keep occurring. What began as small accidental connections will link together in patterned ways, until the same polymers are always replicated, creating information contained in the longest chains to have been cooked up. At that point you have ribonucleic acid, RNA, and you are close to being ready.

The new RNA encodes the making of proteins, which in their three-dimensional sculptural glory are capable of creating a huge variety of tastes and smells. “Division of labor” in the proteins and what they accomplish is one way to describe the proliferation of replicating forms, but also, it’s a richer brew; it tastes better; there are micro-tastes within the taste. Your RNA will turn amino acids into particular flavors. (The technical term among biologists is “translation.”)

Finally some of your RNA will melt together into strands of DNA, a more stable form because of its double helix. Then DNA will take over the role of protein expression, although by way of the creation of messenger RNA. (That would be “transcription.”) Information at that point will move from DNA to RNA to proteins, and the now living cell will reproduce itself, divide up functions in ever-more-versatile larger organisms, and so on.

You have cooked up life from scratch! Eat it with gusto.

Quantum Walk (1)

a street out in a street move naturally be alert don’t make eye contact that will be hard

hope is the thing with feathers buildings massed to the sides of the street surface foamed silicate lightly brushed for better footing by a circular broom tines two hundred millimeters apart each sweep erased part of a previous pair of sweeps surcharge and overlap concentricities under the streetlamp reflect the light these disks flaring orange underfoot make a larger disk ahead of you as you walk

stars overhead 5:32 a.m. local time I’m letting you out the voice said at the door catch and release some of you need to be free of her so I’m setting free defects the ones that look wild there will be some helpers out there for you then you’ll be on your own don’t look back remember me

northern hemisphere latitude 25 sun blocked the eclipse a symbol of the withdrawn god very apt starlight all day we walk in darkness ’tis so appalling it exhilarates

leaving this town for another one keep away from doctors scans often can be provided with a proper result don’t meet people’s eyes unless intending to speak don’t mention chess for random sequences anything goes because all strategies do equally poorly thirty qubits strong think fast on the hunt on the run either or superposed

a stranger on the edge of town green moss green grass marigold calendula yellow a male scrub jay drops bluely onto flagstone puddle in gap between street and flower strip wall of tram station jay hops in puddle one hop two flies out looks around hops back in hops and steps dips his head in once twice beaks the water rapidly back and forth flies out again he stands there wetly feathers round the head puffed out disarranged wet bird in again beaks the water flaps his wings in the water sudden flurry of gray and blue water drops splashed up into downy feathers on chest again fly out and stand wetly on the flagstone, dripping fly off

a small dusk crawls on the village electric tram sealed train carrying the inoculant get on board say nothing no scans leaving this town the command to be free is a double bind cut the knot escape all part of the plan help is out there sit by a window read your wristpad little brother look out the window snowy hills dark under dark clouds snow falling from gray to white luminosity from below land leaking light up through the snow heading north oh to bask in the heat of the sun oh to end this dread eclipse bring back the god low skies

humans talking to other humans perpetually they pass the Turing test it isn’t very hard to do ask a question seem distracted data-poor environments inside them or so it would seem by how they speak they need a better test

space and place place is security space is freedom bushpeople sat close enough to pass things back and forth without getting up in thousands of square kilometers of empty land they are a social creature

ecology of the instant distribution and abundance predict the organism under study predict the future population there are only four changes birth and death immigration and emigration change in population can be represented as B-D+I-E in an empty niche resources are only temporarily unlimited but in those moments life can increase exponentially which distinguishes it from nonlife an infestation

population Vinmara 2,367 humans 23 qubes population Cleopatra 652,691 humans 124 qubes population Venus approximately two billion humans 289 qubes diffusion filling a niche contact in Cleopatra meet at train station there on the hunt enact the plan bring back the god

sudden rise in temperature the jays the marigold what if a niche is emptied

a propagule rain is a constant influx of organisms into an island population from mainland or seedbank thus Earth to the rest of the solar system Earth pours forth its propagule rain no reason to fear the heat of the sun some actions look like predation but are in fact symbiogenesis

population rebounds are common after a niche is emptied Wang’s algorithm

tram enters a lock air pressure rises 150 millibars louder faces bouncing at head level not that much like petals on a wet black bough an astigmatic metaphor light from the dome yellow and cyan

cleopatra rim walk for random sequences anything goes western tanagers yellow and black red heads scrabbling for spilled popcorn their movements take milliseconds followed by frozen moments two or three magnitudes longer sometimes four or five magnitudes thus a visual illusion of instantaneous motion between one stillness and another for each ecstatic instant we must an anguish pay