A longer version of
as it wouldn't all fit on a gif.
Apologies for this one getting rather wordy. It's a rather silly take on TF technology as taught to a class studying its development.
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Good morning, students. Welcome back to Transformation Class 101. Good to see some returning faces - I didn’t bore you too much with the first lesson? If you could quickly find your seats, we have a lot to get through today.
Today we’ll be learning about the Schafer Filter - what it does, how it works and, most importantly, why we have it installed on all modern mind-exchange devices utilizing a ray or beam configuration, such as your everyday Swap Gun.
In particular we’ll be looking at the life and times of Professor William Schafer, an unsung pioneer of TF technology and its tragic first victim. A brilliant, visionary man and MIT alumnus, he designed and built the first ever mind-exchange ray in his laboratory only a few hundred metres from here. The technology was then unproven and he used himself and his lab assistant as subjects in its first ever test.
Things would not go to plan on that summer day in 1972. The exchange apparatus fired its beat between the two men. While his assistant was unharmed and certainly unswitched, Professor Schafer collapsed into a vegetative state from which he never recovered. His research was quietly shelved.
Fastforward 50 years and biologists in an adjoining pathology laboratory are starting to notice their samples of the bacteria micrococcus luteus behaving strangely. Strange in that bacteria aren’t meant to have behavior at all. These bacteria were abnormally motile, moving away from harmful stimuli like heat and radiation as if in pain, and furthermore they seemed capable of organization, forming themselves into complex multicellular chains to pull themselves and others of their kind out of harm's way, and even grouping together to defend against larger bacteria. Their motility was especially odd - they would flex their bodies rhythmically to propel themselves, but by all accounts micrococcus luteus was non-motile.
As well as teamwork, they could plan and remember. When heat-generating electrodes were placed into the agar, nearby cells would squirm away from them even before the device had become active. The strain were even said to remember the daily schedule of the laboratory. Between the hours of 1pm and 3pm, when destructive testing of samples took place, the cells would enter an active, agitated state. On Saturdays and Sundays, when the lab was closed, they relaxed.
A microscopic maze was constructed and a single bacterium placed in it. Not only could it navigate, it could recall the layout on subsequent tests. Furthermore, any bacteria spawned from this individual retained this information.
They gave the bacteria puzzles to solve, math equations. After exhaustive testing, it was ascertained that each individual cell had an IQ of 136. It could even answer general knowledge questions! Assuming the questions related to matters prior to 1972.
As you’re no doubt guessing, Professor Shafer never switched with his assistant on that fateful day back in 1972. Tragically, his mind had been beamed directly into a single cell of the bacterium micrococcus luteus, likely located on his assistant's nose. He had become a nondescript mote of microscopic skin flora.
Within an hour or so, his bacterial body would have divided, each subsequent cell holding within it an identical copy of his mind. Two separate, independent Professor Shafers. Then four. Eight. Sixteen. By the end of that first day, there may have been millions of him. By the end of the week, he likely outnumbered all the humans who have ever lived.
Today the sentient bacterial strain WiScha-72 is endemic within the MIT campus. No longer confined to a petri dish, he covers every surface, is on the skins of every professor and pupil that passes through these halls. Certainly one way to get tenure!
*uneasy laughter*
He’s in the food, in the water. When you take a breath, you’re inhaling him. You’re each likely sitting on millions of him right now, crawling over the surface of your rears - I know what some of the young men in the audience are thinking - ‘lucky Dr Schafer!’
*laughter*
As one of the first cases of TF technology gone awry, one of the infamous ‘bad ends’, the situation raised tricky questions. Legally, is he still classifiably human? While his human body is long dead, all tests indicate his intellect is undegraded, except for in the ways one might expect after decades in an inhuman environment. Should WiScha-72 be held accountable for the deaths of immunocompromised patients that he infects and, conversely, are we all guilty for the thousands of WiScha-72 we snuff out whenever we wash our hands, or every time one of our white blood cells engulfs and dissolves him alive? Is he to be afforded voting rights? Keep in mind he outnumbers the electorate a billion-to-one.
These are matters that are covered extensively in my classes on TF Ethics and TF Law, so I’ll not linger on them here, though it’s notable that this is where those schools of thought first originated. In any event, those were academic matters, and it was decided, rather than philosophizing, the simplest, most humane course of action was to eradicate WiScha-72. The grounds were fumigated with industrial antimicrobials, which proved utterly inadequate and forty years too late. You could just as well level the campus with a nuclear bomb and still have a cell or two of Mr Scafer deep in the earth, waiting to repopulate.
Beyond that, decades of international students have carried and dispersed him to every corner of the world. Frozen samples of WiScha-72 have been extracted from Antarctic ice cores and demonstrate normal functioning upon being thawed. He’s been found in oxygen-starved soils of mount Everest, a mile deep in the ocean, and floating two miles up in the stratosphere. Even the Earth might not hold him soon - there’s talk of NASA launching samples of WiScha-79 into space. A bacterial astronaut a few microns long can be launched at (and indeed maybe colonize) Mars or the oceans of Europa using a tiny fraction of the rocket fuel needed to send a human. One very, very small step for man indeed.
So poor Mr Schafer is here to stay. In a million of years, when humanity is long gone, he’ll still be around, compelled by his bacterial impulse to endlessly multiply until a billion years from now when the sun swallows the planets.
So that is why we have Schafer Filters. They ensure the ray cannot be intercepted before it hits its target. It ensures you swap with the person you intend and not, say, their jacket, or their nose hair, or their liver or an oxygen atom.
So whenever you think my lectures are dragging on, just spare a thought for all the poor Mr Schafers trapped down there as protoplasms in the microscopic world. You only have to sit through them once. He has to listen to me a trillion times!
Now, onto the next subject - ‘Utilizing WiScha-72 For Fun And Profit’.