Terminal Run

Unit One Oh Seven, Wang thought, was the one thing in the world that came closest to being his child, his creation. DynaCorp had thrown him out in the street without even letting him say goodbye to the lab researchers or the sentient carbon processors. He missed One Oh Seven more than any of the rest. He tortured himself, remembering all his encounters with the unit, remembering how it was sometimes playful, sometimes vexed, the computer’s emotions stirring something inside him, a feeling that he wanted to protect and nurture the unit. It was strange to think of it this way, but he was a father to One Oh Seven in every sense of the word. And when he was fired from DynaCorp, it was as if he’d had a child torn from him, with no possibility of seeing it again. When he was able to sleep, in his dreams he was talking to One Oh Seven or playing chess with it or teaching it the classics. When he woke, the worst part of the day was remembering that One Oh Seven had been brutally cut out of his life.

But these men in Thailand had offered him the opportunity to revisit his creation. Once more he might be able to talk to One Oh Seven, perhaps even ask it how it was doing, perhaps even be recognized by it. He hoped that all of this was for real.

Wang stuttered that he agreed, and Sergio and Krivak smiled and shook his hand. Over champagne, and at Krivak’s prompting, Wang talked about the history of the development of machine cognizance while Krivak and Sergio listened attentively.

“Superconductors reached their limits of miniaturization ten years ago,” Wang explained, spreading his hands wide. “We got to the point where a single dust particle could wipe out a processor, and to where the heat generated within the circuits became capable of melting the silicon. Twenty years earlier, the organic chemists came to the party, bringing with them their theories of molecular circuits. In the DynaCorp lab we had the largest funding in North America, and the scientists I managed solved the initial problems quickly, the ability to determine the behavior of a single molecule holding up progress until we got the scanning tunneling microscopes, which opened the window to the atomic-scale world. The initial organic molecular devices we fabricated were able to conduct electrons by passing them from one atom’s electron orbital to the next, but the issue was, could they do this under command and only when an outside signal told them to, turning on or off at the orders of the controlling signal? If they could, we would have ourselves an electrically controllable switch, which would form a molecular transistor, and we would be computing digitally at the molecular scale. If we failed, the whole concept would crash. But nothing seemed to work. Finally we constructed a molecular string that could rotate to remove one conducting electron orbital from proximity to the next, effectively turning the molecule off, and then could rotate back to make the orbitals come close together again to turn the molecule back on. The rotation was keyed by light photons hitting the molecular string, an awkward, impractical way to control the switching action. So we went to work on a more complex molecule that could switch on and off from an electrical impulse instead of light. That took the better part of a year, but when we finished we had made the first true molecular transistor. The next year we were able to fabricate single-molecule diodes, amplifying transistors, AND-gates, OR-gates, and amplifiers. I remember how we thought we’d cracked the safe.

Now we just had to tackle the problem of how to arrange these basic devices into a circuit so that they would perform a desired function.