Sheri was originally Canadian, although she had studied in the USA, as well as a short spell in Switzerland and was now into her second year at Biotree’s facility in Norway.
The Bodo environment was surprisingly familiar, a mix of her childhood’s Vancouver waters and the nearby ski areas, where she had spent winters ski-ing as well as getting something of a reputation for her freestyle snowboarding.
The cold end of the Pacific had first raised her love of nature. She would still think of times spent with her Grandfather out to look for whales with their tail splash, fishy snorts and the rippling radiation of the water as they would dive near to the boat.
The Pacific had also stimulated her study of marine biology and the organisms that maintained the ecology. Then her time at Harvard where the study of very small things had eventually led her to Biotree. Harvard had taught her how the organisms worked and then CERN in Switzerland had taught her how to build them, ironically by first showing how to smash things apart.
Now she was working with mechanosynthesis, construction an atom at a time. It was beyond a watchmaker’s precision, to know how to bolt the atoms together to make the tiny machines that formed the basis of the Biotree business model.
She’d learned how to build these tiny structures, how to make them operate, which parts would simply refuse to work together because of the still only partly understood and apparently tiny forces between them. Forces she knew were big enough to destroy the machines to which they were attached if they were not coupled properly.
She sometimes thought of it as being inside God’s head. If a God existed, the God would need to know this stuff really well.
This time I had to slip whales, snowboarding and radiation into the writing. It also gives me an excuse to post a picture of a whale I snapped whilst boating around Vancouver - mouseover for the caption.
