midnight's simulacra by nick black

Author:nick black [black, nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798989523627
Amazon: B0CW1Y7HZ1
Publisher: Gold & Appel Publishing
Published: 2024-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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if you eat that i think it is going to kill you

Life as we know it is based on biopolymers: nucleic acids and proteins.

Not everything containing nucleic acids is alive. Viruses have either RNA or DNA. Capsidless viroids, even simpler than viruses, still have RNA despite not coding for proteins. Rather than nucleic acids, the chemical that marks life is ATP. It is conversion, not information, that qualifies life. After all, legal death is defined in terms of brain and/or heart death, long before the human body's few hundred grams of DNA have been denatured. Schrödinger famously defined life as the homeostatic maintenance of negative entropy in an open system, above and beyond the “aperiodic crystal” that carries genetic information.

Life, then, is at its most fundamental level the consumption of nutrients, their conversion into energy (catabolism), use of that energy (anabolism), and the elimination of waste products. This metabolism should be locally negentropic (though it is inevitably globally entropic: eat a chicken wing, contribute to the heat death of the universe). Under this definition, viruses are, in a sense, the negation of life. They have no metabolisms, only genetic information, and their primary means of reproduction involves destruction of negentropic cells, a lytic conversion of the negentropic to the entropic, the aneristic to the Eristic.

▔🮂🮃▀🮄🮅🮆█🮆🮅🮄▀🮃🮂▔

Katz burned with desire to harvest his own precursors. SYNCOPE's ergocristine was expensive, and had that damned deposit. Should they ever lose a batch—and Katz was sure they would lose a batch or two—the financial hit would be massive. A bit of bullshit, he reflected, that Cloud and his band of freaks were completely protected from loss during production. They were staking nothing. The deposit ought reflect that, but it was essentially set up to protect against moving the final product elsewhere. In terms of loss, it was fine for defense against overambitious wouldbe chemists, but it was a shit deal for an ongoing working relationship. Katz resolved to bring this up with Cloud, but doubted it would go anywhere: they had the precursor; where else could he score?

He'd spent a few hundred hours over the better part of two months looking into total syntheses, bringing himself up to speed on the necessary ochem with Organic Chemistry by Solomons and Fryhle, and more of Pauling's venerable General Chemistry than he would have liked to admit. Twelve years ago, he'd made AP Chemistry his bitch; on a lark, he'd taken inorganic as an elective, and experienced no significant difficulty. But applied organic chemistry still seemed a great swirling mess: zoology at its worst. Beyond that, he had no lab experience, and every other chemical he looked up was plastered with warnings regarding spontaneous flammability, and tendency to explode, and fifty thousand ways to die upon ingestion. The many reagents involved would require unacceptable investment of banked funds, not to mention multiple suspicious suppliers. No, he finally accepted with a sigh, they would not be the first team to bring mass LSD de novo to the market.

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