4.
 Lemma B, my hope, is that she survives in fragments that float about us every day in random places. If I can find the right snippets, and send messenger RNA up and down the helices to fix and repair, then maybe she can be reborn where we left off our love life before cancer took her.
The carrier song and its precious cargo were to be stored upon a great cylinder made of hypersensitive plastics, reminiscent of Edison's early recordings on wax cylinders. Then, over a period of hours, the reconstitution was to take place. The song was to spin itself away into nothing, leaving a raw pattern which was then to be electronically commutated into the controlling memory of a computer which regulated the building of DNA into raw protoplasm which in turn would multiply into the skin cells, muscles, and other tissues of a complete human being. Within hours, a completely healed Petra was to be back with us, smiling and eager for warm embraces, whispered words, lifelong companionship.
As an added safety feature, Meudon meant to make a taped intermediary recording. He bought fine magnetic tape. He fed the carrier tune and its embedded cargo of RNA/DNA messages upon this medium, and then re-recorded the medium onto the perishable plastic cylinder. He meant to have the medium (1,000 track industrial tape) as a backup in case something went wrong with the cylinder, so we could start over.
The cylinder failed. It was wiped out in a power outage.
And the medium was stolen.
The cylinder was wiped out totally, containing only a few garbled index structures for the reconstitution of hands and feet.
And the tune on the medium? Someone in the industry had stolen it and traded it to someone else. Maybe it was the Russians or the East Germans, or the Red Chinese. Who knows. It's no longer important.
We searched feverishly and identified the initial thief , a slim and invisible little Korean biochemist at the institute with Meudon. Kim had a Robin Hood complex and an apologetic smile devoid of scruples. He had sold it to the North Koreans to put his eldest son through senior year at Stanfod.
His younger son, he explained, had first made a copy on DVD and had given it to a friend of his, a disk jockey on a minor New York City university radio station. We traced the DVD to New York City. There, we discovered that it had traded hands again, this time to a young entrepreneur maker of that piped music we hear in airports and hospitals and shopping centers.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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