Chameleons

Chameleons

A collection of short stories

by

Barnaby Wilde

Copyright 2014 by Barnaby Wilde

Barnaby Wilde asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Barnaby Wilde at Smashwords

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover picture: Based on an original image from the NASA Goddard Space Centre

Other published works by the author.

Humorous Novels (The Tom Fletcher Stories)

I Keep Thinking It's Tuesday

A Question of Alignment

Every Which Way but East

Quirky Verse

Animalia

Life…

The Blind Philospher and the God of Small Things

Not at all Rhinocerus

A Little Bit Elephant

Tunnel Vision

The Well Boiled Icycle

Short Story Collections

Barnaby's Shorts (volumes 1 to 8)

Detective Fiction (The Mercedes Drew Mysteries)

Flowers for Mercedes

Free Running

Flandra

Smile for the Camera

Visit www.barnaby-wilde.co.uk for the author's blog and more information about the world of Barnaby Wilde. Twitter @barnaby_wilde

Chameleons

Table of Contents

The Simulated Man …………… A computer generated man, complete in every detail.

Q-bits …………………………... The first confirmed signal from an alien intelligence.

An Indefinite Period …………... A man in an orange jumpsuit, marooned on a featureless plain.

Cube Roots …………………….. A chance find at a car boot sale, with a mind of its own.

Tiny Aliens ……………………... What if aliens were very small?

A Short History of Loneliness …. In the beginning, there was no beginning.

Chameleons …………………….. A woman has recurrent dreams about chameleons.

Red Rubber ……………………. Jensen is bored, very bored.

And then there were none …….. Who will be the last man standing?

Time for Thought ……………… Time travel, the long way round.

Bonus story:--

Dr Kemp's Card ……………….. If ATMs dispensed more than money.

Other works by Barnaby Wilde

The Simulated Man

Gentlemen, he began. And lady, he continued, looking round the table and noting the mostly middle aged, grey suited men and the one skirt suited lady. My name is Stephen Fisher. I am the C.E.O. of Novo Corpus Software. I would like to thank you all for coming here today. I hope you will find it interesting and worth your while.

So do we, muttered one of the grey suits, glancing at his watch.

The casually dressed speaker at the head of the conference table gave a small smile at the interjection, before continuing.

Most of you know each other, of course, so it will come as no surprise to learn that, between you, you represent over ninety eight percent of the UK pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.

The comment was met with knowing indifference by his audience. He was undeterred. He'd always known that this would be a difficult sell.

"Let me cut straight to the chase. We are all well aware of the increasing difficulty of bringing new medicines to the market place. The timescales are getting longer, the hurdles are getting higher and the cost is becoming almost prohibitive due to the ever rising necessity to prove the safety of new introductions, even more than the need to prove efficacy. It's little wonder that the rate of introduction of novel medicines is slowing to a virtual crawl. The increased need for testing, of course, is being confounded by the near impossibility of using animal experiments and the moral difficulties in using human test subjects.

It is well known, needless to say, that all your companies continue to develop in house testing models, including test tube experiments and computer modelling. Naturally, these models are proprietary and maintained as closely guarded secrets within each organisation. At best, this approach is expensive and at worst it leads to duplication of effort and inefficiency. What is required, gentlemen – and lady - , is a more cooperative approach, to pool the best knowledge and share the benefits of the inevitable cost and time savings that would result.

The faces of the people gathered around the conference room table were either impassive or downright sceptical. It would be difficult to get these people to cooperate and even more difficult to persuade them to share some of their best kept secrets.

"What we need, lady and gentlemen, is a standard test subject that could be experimented upon with no risk of running foul of the civil libertarians, the animal rightists, the courts or any of the other bodies that profess to have an interest in the way we, I should say 'you', conduct your business. A standard test subject that was reproducible, cost effective, and combined all the best information that we, that is 'you', have available.

Ah. It's Alice in Wonderland time, muttered one of the delegates.

Stephen smiled, patiently. We propose that it is possible to create such a standard test object, but only if there is cooperation between the potential users and, may I say, 'winners' if such cooperation is achieved.

So, have you created a race of cybermen for us? asked Chris Wheeler, from C.W.Chemicals.

Hardly, Chris, replied Stephen. What we are proposing is altogether more user friendly than a cyberman. If I remember correctly, Cybermen were part man, part machine, intent on the destruction of the earth and achieving galactic dominance. Our proposal is altogether more benign. I'd like to show you a short video, if I may.

At a nod from Steve, an unseen technician somewhere pressed the necessary button and the sixty inch TV screen behind him flashed into life.

The presentation lasted approximately three minutes and was watched carefully by the men and woman around the table. There was little sign of an awakening of interest or understanding. The film had consisted entirely of moving images of a young man of unremarkable appearance carrying out a range of relatively mundane tasks, such as climbing a flight of stairs, walking, running, riding a bicycle and lifting weights in a gym.

I had hoped for something more instructive, said Dan Pointing, C.E.O. of Xanthric Industries. Unless you have a distinct proposition for us Mr Fisher, I think my time might be better spent elsewhere.

Stephen smiled and nodded in acknowledgement of Dan's comments. I wonder if anyone noticed anything odd about the model in the video? he asked.

There was no immediate response and he nodded again to the unseen technician. The screen flashed into life once more and the young man from the previous film walked onto the screen. This time he was naked. The camera panned slowly down his body as he rotated gently on the spot. Again, there was nothing very remarkable about his appearance.

Stephen looked questioningly at his audience, but no one volunteered any comment. He nodded again to the technician. The man on the screen was joined by several more copies of himself. They all walked, crouched, climbed, shadow boxed independently.

O.K. said Dan Pointing. I think we've seen enough. Is there some purpose to this?

The images on the screen reverted to the single figure and the camera zoomed in towards his face and continued to home in on his right eye. There was an involuntary gasp from someone as the camera continued to zoom through the cornea and into the eye itself.

So, it's not a real man, observed Chris Wheeler. Computer Generated Image. Is that correct?

You are correct in that it is not an actual human being, but I think the term Computer Generated Image might be an understatement. Steve nodded to the technician again.

The camera continued to zoom into the eye, revealing the rod and cone structures on the retina. The image expanded relentlessly to show an individual cell and then continued through the cell wall to the interior before Steve nodded to the technician to end the show.

What you have just seen, gentlemen, - and lady-, is a journey into one of the cells that makes up this model of a human male. What you may not have appreciated fully, is that we could repeat that journey for every one of the one hundred million cells we have built into our model. What we have shown you is not simply a surface which approximates to a human shape, which can be manipulated to move in a similar fashion to a human, or a cartoon simulation of a working eye, but a complete model built up from individual cells, which has a skeleton, a muscle structure, internal organs, a circulatory system and more. He waved to the technician and the computer generated man walked back onto the screen in his naked state.

As they watched, his skin and subcutaneous fat was removed to show the underlying muscle structure. The muscles were then removed to show the pumping heart and the circulatory system. Steve waved to the technician to halt the demonstration again.

Gentlemen, we could also show you the digestive tract, the respiratory system, a functioning kidney, the lymph system, the make up of the inner ear. Whatever you want.

There was silence for a moment as the audience digested what they had just been told.

Are you telling us that your model functions like a living human? asked Dan Pointing.

Steve smiled and spread his arms. Not yet, he said. But with your help, it could.

You said that your model was composed of one hundred million cells, Mr Fisher, but the human body contains something closer to fifty trillion individual cells I believe. Is one hundred million the limit of your model?

A good question, and, please, call me Steve. We're a very informal company here. The answer to your question is 'how big is your budget?' There is no practical limit to the number of cells we can build into the model, it's simply a matter of adding more processing power. At this stage we have limited ourselves to what we considered would be sufficient to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

How have you modelled the inner working of the individual cells? asked Dan Pointing.

That, Dan, is the sixty four thousand dollar question. Quite simply, we haven't. That's where you come in.

So your model is essentially useless then? Nothing more than a moving picture.

"It's a lot more than a moving picture, Dan. We have built some functionality into the cells to mimic their real life cousins. Our bone cells operate in a similar fashion to normal bone cells. Our blood cells have the capacity to absorb oxygen, or at least to mimic the absorption of oxygen and so on throughout the body, but … we are software engineers, not biologists.

"We are aware that each of you has developed software that mimics the functions of living cells. Dan, your company has been modelling nerve cells amongst others. Chris, your company has specialised in modelling blood cells. There has been a lot of published and unpublished work on the modelling of epidermal cells, especially for the cosmetic industry, and so on. You all have specialist knowledge, some of it unique to your company and much which overlaps with independent modelling being done in rival companies. Plus, of course, a certain amount of public domain work being carried out by universities and the like.

"What we are offering you is the opportunity to place your cell level