ArchivedLogs:Compatibility

Compatibility
Dramatis Personae Bruce, Regan
In Absentia	2015-10-22 "I am sure I suffer from severe myopia in this respect."
Location <NYC> Bruce's Lab - Stark Tower - Midtown East
This capacious room contains gleaming expanses of lab bench framed with a backdrop of work stations, fume hoods, spectrometers, centrifuges, and other, more arcane research equipment. Also, an extremely advanced coffee machine that the unobservant might easily mistake for research equipment. Holographic interfaces hover over some of the computer terminals, displaying charts and spreadsheets and diagrams. A reinforced isolation chamber occupies one corner, its softly lit interior--visible through a window that stretches across one entire wall--contains folding cot. The rich aroma of coffee fills the lab. Bruce sits at one of the live terminals, which currently shows a colorful line graph with various datapoints numbered. He wears a dark purple dress shirt and light gray slacks under a long white lab coat. His wavy black hair looks a mess, and he holds his forehead up with one hand, his glasses dangling from the other. Regan is casually dressed, jeans and tall black boots, a short black canvas jacket over a bold red blouse. /Her/ hair looks impeccable, pulled neatly back into a French braid; she has a black purse draped over one shoulder. For a brief moment she pauses at the entrance to the lab, brows pulling together, but then continues on straight towards Bruce, the heels of her boots clicking in sharp report against the floor. "Oh, thank God. Coffee." Bruce straightens up, donning his glasses and then rising. "Welcome, Doctor Wyngarde! You have my gratitude for rescuing me from from--" He waves one hand vaguely at the holographic display before him, then shuts it off. "--that particular dead end." He ducks his head slightly, his smile just a little embarrassed. "How do you take your coffee?" This as he walks over toward the ridiculous coffee machine, opening the cabinet beside it to extract two elegant glass mugs. "Doctor Banner." Regan's head inclines, her eyes sweeping the display before it shuts off. "Just black is perfectly fine, thank you." She sheds her jacket, draping it over the back of an empty chair at a terminal. "Stumped?" Her hand turns outward towards where the display had been. "I'm glad to help, anyway. B has spoken highly of your work. I can't really say I'm upset for a break from the hospital floor, either." The graph showed deviations in nucleobase counts of a dozen cell cultures--nonsensical in isolation, but it seems probable that it came from a study on DNA transcription or replication. Bruce sets both mugs down in an alcove of the coffee machine. "Two black coffees," he says; then, over his shoulder at Regan, "I probably enjoy this part a little bit too much." A soft white glow illuminates the mugs from below as the machine dispenses two streams of rich brown liquid to fill them. "Stumped? Am I ever!" He nods his head at the (now dark) terminal. "It's a researcher's lot, and I have a particular penchant for blundering down paths where respectable scientists...well, /fear/ is maybe the wrong word. Where respectable scientists don't get paid enough to tread." Now his smile is crooked, self-deprecating. "I wouldn't want to drag you down that particular rabbit hole." The machine cuts off the flow of coffee half an inch below the brim of each cup, and he brings them over, setting one down on the glossy counter beside Regan. "So, B wasn't too specific--are you that young man's physician? The fellow who's too fast for his prostheses?" Regan's brows lift, duly impressed as the coffee machine works its magic. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that theres even high-tech /coffee/ here, and yet --" And /yet/. There's amusement in her tone, that only increases with the follow-up: "Are you claiming you aren't respectable? I doubt they give the untested scientists the labs up here. But trust me, I've had -- some experience with wandering down /pretty/ tortuous avenues of research." She curls her fingers around the handle of the mug, lifting it with a small smile. "Me? No. Just a friend. My specialty is neuroprosthetics, so B thought my input might be of use." "The coffee machines are networked, they ah, learn each user's preferences." Bruce looks down at his mug, lifts it for a deep inhale. "It might literally knows what I like better than I do." He does not sound particularly impressed or displeased by this. "Well, I suppose it depends on who you ask. I've got a reputation for being quixotic even in transhumanist circles, but Tony doesn't care. I do solid work when I'm not tilting at windmills." He sits down catty-corner from Regan. "I've been working on implant biocompatibility--specifically, on what happens at the molecular level where wetware meets hardware. Now..." He waves his hand above the surface of the lab bench, and a holodisplay springs to life. A couple of swipes into a directory tree brings up an old-fashioned checklist. "...I'm not a medical doctor, but these are the basic tests /I'd/ need to build a picture of where the breakdown in communication is happening." He finally takes a sip of his coffee, and gives a faint nod. "It's always different, and it's always better than the last time." "That," Regan says enviously, glancing towards the coffee machine, "is what we need at Sinai." She sips at her coffee slowly as she listens to Bruce speak, brows lifting with a note of curiosity -- and a faint whisper of telepathy licking out to trace against the surface of his mind. "Transhumanist circles?" That same curiosity is reflected in her tone. "What exactly does it take to be considered a dreamer /there/?" Her lips purse slightly as she examines the list that Bruce pulls up, and she sets her coffee aside. "May I?" Her head tilts towards the display as she reaches to add a few notes of her own. "That would make a good start; these are a few I would add in, to get a more comprehensive picture of what we'll need to make this work for him." "I'm not even sure Stark is /marketing/ this yet," Bruce muses idly, glancing at the coffee machine. "Admittedly, not my speciality." The surface of his consciousness roils with multiple threads of thought, not processing /simultaneously/ but interspersing with one another in rapid sequence, braid-like. Rising to prominence now, a dizzying spiral of images, formulae, and inner narrative: a logo of a snake biting its own tail, a series of structural diagrams for immensely complex biomolecules, blurry mobile phone footage of a gigantic green man charging at two police officers, and his mental conception of his own voice, small and quiet: << Systematically restructuring DNA in somatic cells of adult organisms... >> "It's not the dreaming that gets you strange looks--I mean, what transhumanist /doesn't/ want to explore the latent potential in the human genome? It's actually doing it. Or ah, trying it." He chuckles self-consciously, pushing his glasses back up the ridge of his nose. "Please, do go ahead. I am sure I suffer from severe myopia in this respect." << In every respect. Never seeing the whole person for the neurotransmitters. >> "Oh, these days?" Regan chuckles, her head shaking slightly as she types. "I suspect quite a /few/ don't want to. Nature is already doing more than many people would like with exploring that potential. I think there's large swaths of the community that would very much prefer we stick to hardware upgrades rather than biological. The potential there --" Mind still skimming over Bruce's thoughts, she reaches for her coffee again. "Fascinating, for sure. But a rather significant ethical morass. You say this is more than just hypothetical?" "There are transhumanist thinkers on both sides of the X-gene issue, but ah...yeah, even those interested in how those novel phenotypes come to pass are not generally /doing/ much about it. For various reasons, philosophical and otherwise." Bruce sips his coffee--the taste of it cuts into the snippets of the last biohacking conference he attended. Models of caffeine molecules block adenosine receptors in short-lived 3D animation. << Too soon. Placebo effect acceptable. >> "My erstwhile team's approach to it skirted some of the more obvious ethical pitfalls by performing our studies exclusively in vitro." << Ethical implications of singular exception unclear. >> This with a brief, shaky mental image of a syringe and his own arm bared to the elbow. He sucks in a sharp breath, takes another sip of coffee. "Some, not all. And yes, the work was quite concrete--just not successful, despite early promise." His eyes focus on Regan's new additions to his diagnostic wish list. "The hardware route is fraught with its own ethical problems, not all of them obvious. Of course we must be conscientious about the broader implications of our work, yes, but..." << But I'm a monster. I've always been the monster. >> "...but if fear of the unknown paralyzes us, we're stuck with a social and ecological legacy that will destroy us just as surely if we do nothing at all." "No success?" Regan's brows lift, her tone, at least, sounding offhand. "Disappointing. I could imagine there's scope there to unlock all sorts of --" A small smile curls her lips, a quiet breath pushed out. "Well, if we're dreaming, I suppose I could /imagine/ any number of miracle strengths you might tap into." She swivels aside from the terminal, moving to pull her own tablet out of her bag. "B and her friend sent along all the records of what -- small -- progress they've made so far. It should be enough to help us figure out --" Her smile turns a little wry. "Where to start." << Not /complete/ abject failure, either, >> the snap response in his mind seems as much a matter of semantic fussiness as pride. But he holds his peace and only gives a rueful smile. "I hold out some hope yet that discovering the causes for that project's failure may further our deplorably incomplete understanding of human gene expression." << And give me some /control/ over my own life. >> "But either way, we /need/ to dream, and keep dreaming. Then bring that dream down to earth and..." His hand sweeps toward her tablet. "...make a start."