Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn

Author:Edward St. Aubyn [Edward St. Aubyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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John MacDonald had been invited by Saul Prokosh to fly down from Edinburgh to the South of France for a weekend at Plein Soleil, the home of the legendary Hunter Sterling. John was hoping that he would finally get the investment he needed. He had called his company Not As We Know It. It was a Star Trek allusion – ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’ – which Saul was encouraging him to leave behind. He was fond of the old name, but if the price was right, they could call it Fifty Shades of Grey for all he cared. John had a dream: the creation of inorganic life with no carbon in the mix. Instead of a digital computer that reduced the world to binary information and brought it under the imperium of mathematics, he would make an analogue computer, using matter rather than numbers to inform its simulations. Its rhythms and processes would imitate biology, while freeing the concept of life from the tyranny of carbon. He would synthesise compounds from any of the non-carbon elements to model all the features of life jealously guarded by biology: cellular containment, movement, growth and reproduction. If chemistry could not yet explain life, then the definition of life must be expanded to include the processes that chemistry could describe and demonstrate experimentally.

‘Passeport, s’il vous plaît, monsieur.’

‘Ah, excusez-moi,’ said John, handing over his passport to the policeman in the glass cubicle.

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