Daemon Fauna – Introduction

2102.4.7

Project: Daemon Fauna – Personal Notes

Alright, my project got GIRB approval today.  Well, partially.  Before they’ll allow me to actually synthesize a single nucleotide, I have to do extensive in silico simulations.  EXTENSIVE.  That’s fine by me, though.  It’ll allow me to simulate millions of generations of species before committing to a particular strain.  Probably would have done it anyways, and this way the Board is happy about being able to slow the progress of science.

What with Earth’s habitats and species devastated by the War, I kind of have a clean slate to work with.  It’s actually rather exhilarating.  Not only am I unconstrained by existing ecosystems, I’m under no real mandate to try to recreate any past species.  Yes, we have most of their genetic material preserved, but the world is a different place, with different pressures.  It’ll be much easier building up some new species to fill these vastly changed niches than heavily modifying past ones.

In fact, I’m starting my first Virtual Biome tonight, and putting in some bacterial species.  Give them a few million years to evolve to handle current conditions.  The high radiation counts of today in and of themselves are going to require some huge adaptations to basic molecular machinery.  And whatever modifications come out I can integrate into larger organisms.

This should be fun.

Dr. Havva Koçak

[Read first Daemon Fauna entry]

[art by Ethan Kocak of Black MudPuppy]