I am humbled.

[elfs]

I don't read a lot of alt.sex.stories these days; even the stuff that gets past the moderators tends to be overwhelmingly cruddy. But I do look out for the SF/scfi/scifi/sci-fi tag. Nobody seems to know which one to use. Although the official tag is scfi, the moderators let just about anything through.

ASSM regular Dr. Unlucky posted The Long Run, a story of dubious morals and questionable content, to the newsgroup. The premise is about a spacer who falls in love with a rich girl, and she leaves him but leaves him a gift as well: enough cash that he can buy himself sex toys. He wants the girl, but he can't have her; he can't even have a copy because

Really and truly they weren't copies of her. Rich girls from Earth have nano security kissing every cell in their bodies, encrypting their DNA. They were just as close to her physically as a medium grade clone tech could get from the holos I took of Kate on my ship.

Damn, that's one of the finest shiny sweet ideas I've ever seen and it gets tossed out in a short story blessing a free newsgroup in an obscure corner of the Internet. It's hard to believe but, with sufficient infrastructure, our civilization has such talent to burn.

Comments

[sagittaria.livejournal.com]

FYI, he posted it first in his LJ - drunlucky. He's posted some other stories and drafts since then.

Error Correction in DNA

[(Anonymous)]

DNA damage and change over time is (I believe) thought to be one of the root causes of aging. Telomeres shortening, damage due to environmental factors and disease... those kinds of things.

When I learned about the structure of the double helix, I remember thinking "that isn't enough to error correct." If damage happens to both halves, what's going to allow the cell to put things back in order? (Nothing.)

Then I read the Pern books by Anne McCaffrey. She supplied her little dragonettes with a triple helix; something never really explained but a feature I immediately locked onto as an enhanced error-correction mechanism. A biological CRC, if you will.

Similar? Not really, not in this case... but perhaps you'll find it interesting.

Bryan.

Re: Error Correction in DNA

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

A double-helix would be enough to handle most errors if every so many pairs were parity bits, an ECC for DNA as it were.

Re: Error Correction in DNA

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Obviously, the Intelligent Designer™ didn't have his copy of Numerical Recipies in DNA handy when he put us all together, ne? (OhMiGods, that title is totally appearing in a Journal Entry soon!)

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

That is neat. Sounds like something Neal Stephenson would do.