Skorbinka Mistelann felt like he was about to die, but he was also having the time of his life. He was no stranger to working long hours in the isolation of a laboratory, though the work-pace had never been as arduous as this. Then again, there had never been a need as great as the one for which he labored.
There were precisely two occasions on which Mistelann could recall feeling pride in being a mycologist. The first time was when he completed his research thesis, and won a prize for it, no less. The second time was now.
If you counted the fact that his choice of specialty was the reason why he’d gotten moved to the Cartin Center in Elpeck, there was even a third time of pride: the day he’d gotten to meet Nowston Brand.
The mycologist glanced over his shoulder, at one of the other workstations in 3Ba1. Behind him, the vapor diffusion module had nearly completed its latest cycle.
Mycology.
There was no excitement quite like scientific excitement. It was unparalleled. So many scientific disciplines abounded with drama and mystique: high energy physics, industrial engineering, nanotechnology, biotechnology.
But not mycology.
A mycologist spent much of his time bending over, looking through a microscope, or at dirt, or at things growing in dirt, or at things growing on things growing in the dirt. Every once in a while, something exciting would happen—antibiotics, bat-killing fungal plague, new psychotropic drug for chemists to chemist over, frog-killing fungal plague, etcetera—but, for the most part, much dirt was involved, and, alas, mycology was not even the most interesting science in which scientists looked at dirt.
That would be paleontology.
And yet, Mistelann had been fascinated by fungi. Fungus was the black sheep of biology, and you ignored it at your own risk. As had the people of Odensk.
The Great Blight.
By fouling potatoes across the land, a mere fungus toppled the Odenskaya Tsardom. Millions died—and that was before the Revolution even got into full swing.
And now, the Green Death.
For once, at least, he could say the work was very exciting. But it was also incredibly frustrating.
As a mycologist, Mistelann had adapted to working on mushroom time. Mushrooms were stoic and patient. There was never any rush.
But, as Brand might have said, the Green Death hadn’t gotten the memo. It was the highest of high achievers, and murderously speedy. It was a nightmare straight out of Hell—as was dealing with the Mark 3 matter printer’s computer interface. There was no GUI set up, which turned his progress into snails, and, despite his repeated calls to the IT office, no one had come to help.
“Please, ALICE,” Mistelann asked, “can you not set up useful GUI?”
“I’m sorry Dr. Skorbinka, but you do not have clearance to make GUI adjustments. Please talk to someone in the IT department.”
“ALICE, everyone in IT department is dead!”
“Well…” the computer said, after a pause, “there’s not much I can do about that. Apologies.”
Mistelann coughed as he grumbled.
At least she knew how to apologize.
Despite his frustrations, there was progress. The good news was that the hard part was done. The bad news was that the frustrating part had only just begun. Dr. Derric had been quite right to call Mistelann’s plan audacious. It was. Ordinarily, much like bacteriophages, one would grow mycophages by infecting a live culture of a suitable host organism. But Mistelann had no time for ordinariness, and so he had turned to biochemical acrobatics in order to circumvent the lytic cycle that naturally governed viral replication.
As he’d told the others, the idea was to use the crystallized mycophage samples as both a digital and physical reference material. The now-completed hard part involved uploading the virus’ chemical architecture and all of its complexities into the matter printer’s computer system. Thankfully, ALICE had helped with that. She’d helped spectacularly. And, in the near future, when Mistelann had finished the frustrating part, the matter printer would then use the physical mycophage samples in conjunction with the digital model to print fully formed viruses in crystal form.
The frustrating part was making sure the Mark 3 did not screw up the virion—the total viral particle, capsid and all.
Like fungi, crystals were modular. Once you understood their small-scale structure, growing a big crystal was just a matter of replicating that structure until you either got what you wanted, or you killed yourself to escape the monotony. For crystallized viruses, the small-scale structure was the individual virus particle, which itself had an even smaller structure of its own—primary protein structure level, secondary protein structure level, tertiary protein structure level.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Mistelann was all but certain that, if he managed to live long enough to sleep again and dream, he would dream of α-helices and β-pleated sheets.
Once the Mark 3 printer was properly calibrated, industrial scale production for therapeutic use could begin in earnest.
Again, assuming he lived long enough to be able to see it.
And if there was even the tiniest error, the final product would be kaka, and everyone would die.
So, no pressure, right? he thought.
NFP-20 was in a race against his sarcasm, to see which would kill him first.
Mistelann let out a long, quiet groan, and then closed his eyes and shook his head.
His hands trembled. His PPE was soaked with sweat. His throat and chest felt like they’d been coated with Capsicum powder. His skin itched. Blisters were starting to form under his joints. That was most likely the work of NFP-20 as it began to digest the outer layers of his epidermis.
He wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. But he could not, not until his job was done. He didn’t even take the time for a smoke break; that was part of the reason why his hands were trembling.
At least, he hoped it was.
Human physiology could be extraordinarily inconvenient at times, such as with drug dependency and withdrawal symptoms. Biology was a meat computer, flimsy and utterly absurd.
For a moment, Mistelann felt himself start to drift off, as if to sleep, but then he shook his head and pinched one of the ulcers developing in his armpit. It was an exquisite pain, and the shot of adrenaline it sent roaring through his blood vessels woke him better than even the darkest Odenskaya coffee grinds.
Mistelann took a deep breath, only to wince in agony. He tried to clear his throat.
Because his scheme was going to push the Mark 3 to the limit of its capabilities, not even perfection would cut it. It wasn’t enough for things to be perfect. They had to be perfecter than perfect.
With ALICE’s help and the physical samples to use as a reference, Mistelann was confident he’d properly inputted the virion’s structure into the computer. But that was only half of the battle. He was trying to do what only nature could do, and out of order, and outside of a cell, no less. Protein synthesis and macromolecular assembly was a mind-numbingly intricate process that depended as much as on order of assembly and spatial orientation as it did on having the right proteins to assemble in the first place. Arranging macromolecular units in the tertiary phase and then combining them together in the quaternary phase could end with the proteins improperly bonding or denaturing outright if even a single piece was out of place.
The worse part, though?
No chaperone proteins. Viral replication normally utilized the host cell’s chaperone proteins to ensure the proper formation of the virions, but Mistelann had to do without them.
If you didn’t already know, basically, chaperone proteins are these super-tiny thermos-shaped molecules (cup and hinged lid!) that carbon-based cellular life-forms use to provide their proteins with a safe, stable environment in which to take on their intended functional shape. Protein folding is so complicated, that the only way nature could get it done in a controlled manner was to make little thermoses in which it could happen.
Crazy, isn’t it?
Doing it without hands would have been easier.
He groaned again, coughing piteously.
The diffusion module quieted down, and then, with a soft chime, signaled it was finally done.
“The protein crystallization process is complete, Dr. Skorbinka,” ALICE said, in almost sultry-sounding Odenskaya.
The viral structural data Mistelann had entered into the Mark 3’s computer was the blueprint the matter printer would use to produce the mycophage treatment. But it wasn’t enough just to have the blueprint. Production of the mycophage could not proceed in earnest until Mistelann had verified that the blueprint worked, and would make the printer print the right thing. To check this, he’d used his latest blueprint to print a small test sample, which he’d then placed in the vapor diffusion module.
Taking a deep breath, and wincing in pain because of it, Mistelann opened the vapor diffusion module and pulled several vials out of its dock. Tiny, glistening crystals hung from the underside of the vials’ lids.
The test samples.
As macromolecules with amphipathic affinities, viruses could be arranged into protein crystals.
Amphipathic substances (“amphipathic” meaning “feeling both ways”) are chemical compounds that can interact with both electrically polarized substances (like ions of salts dissolved in water) and non-polarized substances (fats, oils, etc.).
The vapor diffusion module triggered this crystallization process using silicon oils. Much like how chaperone proteins protected proteins as they folded into shape, the vapor diffusion module protected the growing crystals from being contaminated by particles in the air.
The fact of virus crystallization was first discovered by an Odenskaya émigré living in exile in Mu, as part of his studies of the spotty turnip virus, aimed at modifying the virus so as to decimate the more hated of the two key agricultural staples of the Odensk Oligarchy.
Mistelann knew he should have known the scientist’s name, but, for the life of him, he could not recall it.
In practice, viral crystallization was little more than a neat trick, one which illustrated how close viruses were to the blurry line where life became mere chemistry. But Mistelann hadn’t just crystallized the test samples for show. Within a crystal, chemistry became physical. To know a crystal’s structure was to know its chemical properties, and vice-versa.
Stowing the vials in a carrying case alongside the Stovolsk samples, he carried them over to the work-station with the spectrograph. Standing by the counter, Mistelann got a view of the matter printer room through the window in the wall.
Because time was of the essence, Mistelann didn’t have the luxury to do a direct comparative chemical analysis of the test sample and the Stovolsk sample. That was where the spectrograph came in. The machine would shine different wavelengths of light at the samples, and then compare how the light behaved as it passed through the crystals. By quantifying which wavelengths passed through, which ones would be absorbed, and how the light was split or bent, the spectrograph would be able to determine how similar the two sets of crystals were, and if they matched, he could finally die happy.
If they matched…
This would be his third attempt.