Inversion - 9

Chapter 9

The synthesizer looked like the bastard offspring of a microwave and a particle accelerator. Maya had spent weeks cannibalizing parts from the teleportation equipment, repurposing quantum field generators and matter rematerialization matrices to create something that had never existed before: a device that could invert the molecular handedness of food.

“It’s not pretty,” she admitted, wiping adhesive from her hands with a shop towel. “But it should work. We take normal food, break it down to its constituent molecules using a modified transmission field, then reconstruct it with right-handed chirality.”

Laurel examined the jury-rigged device, noting the exposed wiring and hastily welded joints. “And will it work?”

“In theory. The energy requirements are manageable for small quantities – maybe a meal’s worth at a time. And since we’re not dealing with living tissue, there’s no risk of long-term damage from quantum decoherence.”

She’d placed an apple inside the synthesis chamber, its red skin bright against the metal walls. The machine rumbled to life with a sharp crack, electromagnetic fields surrounding the fruit. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then the apple began to shimmer, its outline growing uncertain, as if it were out of focus.

It took seventeen minutes. When the chamber opened, the apple looked identical to what it was before – same color, same shape, same small blemish near the stem. But now, every molecule had been inverted, transformed into something Laurel’s body could hopefully process.

“The moment of truth,” Maya said, handing him the apple.

Laurel stared at it for a long moment, feeling its weight and texture. To his inverted physiology, this should be normal food, the first genuinely edible thing he’d encountered since the experiment. He bit into it with relish.

The taste exploded across his palate: sweet, tart, crisp, alive. Full of hope, he waited. Ten minutes, twenty, and then thirty. His stomach didn’t clench in violent rejection. The feared wave of nausea did not follow. For the first time in weeks, he ate something and felt nourished and not poisoned.

“It works,” he said, his voice thick with relief.

Maya smiled with palpable relief, and Laurel realized it was the first time he’d seen her happy since his diagnosis. “Plant matter processes cleanly. Fruits, vegetables, grains – all of it can be inverted successfully.”

“And animal proteins?”

Her smile faltered slightly. “More complicated. The fat molecules have been especially difficult. I’ve had maybe a sixty percent success rate.”

They worked on refining the device over the following days, through trial and error. Simple carbohydrates processed perfectly. Complex plant proteins took longer but remained stable. Animal fats, as Maya had warned, were unreliable – sometimes the bacon emerged perfectly edible, other times it came out as an indigestible gray paste that smelled like burnt plastic.

“I guess I’ll have to become a vegetarian,” Laurel said after a particularly unpleasant experiment with synthesized chicken. It looked perfectly edible, but his digestive system had rejected it with violence, leaving him weak and shaking.

“Could be worse,” Maya replied. “At least vegetables are cheap.”

They established a routine. Each morning, Maya would arrive early to prepare his meals for the day, loading fruits and grains into the synthesizer and carefully monitoring the quantum field stability. The process was time-consuming and energy-intensive, but it worked. Laurel began to regain some of the weight he’d lost, though he remained very gaunt and pale. More importantly, the fear of starvation was now behind him. He could eat, which meant he could live. Not like everybody else, perhaps, but he could survive.

“I’ve been thinking about scaling up,” Maya said one afternoon as they watched the synthesizer process a batch of rice. “The current design can handle a couple of meals a day, but if we built a larger version…“

“For what purpose?”

“Other people. You won’t be the only one, Laurel. Teleportation technology will spread. There will be accidents, experiments, people who make the same choice you did.” She paused. “We could help them.”

Laurel hadn’t thought about it. To him, his condition was unique, a singular consequence of a singular hubristic moment. But Maya was right – the technology was too promising to remain confined to his small lab. Eventually, others would face the same impossible choice between reversing their molecular handedness and certain death.

“How many others?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Could be dozens, could be thousands. Depends on how quickly the technology gets adopted and how well the risks are understood.”

The thought was strangely comforting. He wouldn’t be alone in his inversion – there would be others who understood the peculiar isolation of being biochemically incompatible with the world. A community of the molecularly reversed, bound together by their shared transformation. But then again…

“No, I don’t think so. Live organism teleportation is a failure. I have no doubt that lots of uses for inert objects will be found, but there is no organization that would let this happen to a human being. I know I wouldn’t want it to.”

“The military might.” Worried that isolation might send Laurel into depression, Maya was reluctant to let the idea go.

“They might, but then they have all the resources for any scaling. I don’t really want to be a part of it,” he was adamant.

Weeks passed. As Maya had feared, Laurel began to feel more and more isolated. Never a social creature, he became a recluse. Eating, once a pleasure, had become an onerous procedure. He could never eat at restaurants or accept dinner invitations. Grocery shopping required careful label reading and mental calculations about which items could be successfully processed.

More troubling was his growing alienation. Conversations with colleagues became ever more stilted and uncomfortable. They looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and pity that made his skin crawl. He was a freak show, a cautionary tale, a poster child of scientific hubris.

Even Maya, despite all her efforts on his behalf, sometimes looked at him with something like fear. He caught her staring at him when she thought he wasn’t looking, her expression troubled and uncertain. He understood why – he was no longer entirely human, no longer someone she could fully relate to or understand.

“I think I should take a leave of absence,” he told her one evening as they cleaned up the lab.

“Why?”

“Because I’m becoming a distraction. Because people whisper when I walk down the hall. Because I’m not sure I belong here anymore.”

Maya stopped wiping down the synthesis chamber and turned to face him. “You belong wherever you choose to belong, Laurel. This place doesn’t define you.”

“Doesn’t it? I’ve spent most of my life in labs. The work was everything to me – the only thing I was good at, the only thing I cared about.” He gestured around the room. “Now I can barely concentrate on basic calculations. My brain is aging faster than it should, remember? Every day I feel a little less sharp, a little more disconnected.”

“That’s temporary. Once we optimize your nutrition – “

“Is it temporary? We don’t know. We don’t know anything about the long-term effects of chirality inversion on cognition.” Laurel sat heavily in his desk chair. “What if this is as good as it gets? What if I’m slowly losing myself, one synapse at a time?”

Maya was quiet for a long moment, her hands still holding the cleaning cloth. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Travel, maybe. See places I always meant to visit but never had time for.” He tried to smile. “I’ve got a portable synthesizer now, thanks to you. I can go anywhere.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll see.”

That night, Laurel lay awake in his apartment, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of life around him – neighbors watching television, cars passing on the street, the distant song of air conditioning. It all felt more and more distant, as if he were listening from the bottom of a well.

He thought about Maya’s question: And then what? The honest answer was that he didn’t know. For the first time in his life, he had no plan, no clear objective, no research project driving him forward. He was adrift in a world that no longer quite made sense, sustained by a machine that reminded him daily of his alienation from everything natural and normal.

Tomorrow, he would begin making arrangements. He would request medical leave, pack the essentials, and load the portable synthesizer into his car. He would drive until he found somewhere quiet and remote, somewhere he could think without the constant reminder of what he had lost and what he had become.

Outside his window, the first light of dawn was beginning to edge the horizon. Soon, the normal world would wake up, eat normal food, and go about the business of living in a universe where amino acid handedness was not a matter of life and death.

Laurel closed his eyes and tried to imagine what that world might feel like to inhabit, but found he could not. The memory of that life was fading.