I blamed Bobby for the trip. I didn't want to go, but I knew if I didn't he'd get in trouble. That was my first mistake; Thinking I could actually help Bobby out of this jam. I had to try. Best friends were hard to come by, and Bobby was unique. He was the only best friend I had ever made.
Six years ago, Static Life Corporation began their campaign of promoting the health benefits of their new patented stasis technology. "Suspend yourself for a week long rest", they said. "You'll be right as rain." Their R&D team discovered the secret to capturing and suspending life. Instead of cooling the body or slowing the metabolism, their innovative team of brains used OCMs, organic chemical markers, to tag and break down the organism's molecules into stream of analog data. The end effect was life could be transformed into a pool of gelatinous goo.
I was one of the scientists behind this technology. We thought we had made a big mistake the first time one of us got into the vat. Visually it was a revolting sight. Watching a human melt right before your eyes. You could easily loose your lunch if you watched it, and we all watched. After the first meltdown we redesigned the vat with a smaller window.
Reconstituting the body was a simple matter of arranging the OCMs into their original configuration. They were designed to always fall into a chain when activated. Like a self solving jigsaw puzzle, everything would fit into place. After we corrected a few unforeseen errors, we pretty much had life by the strings. The process of breakdown and reconstitution was so quick, a person hardly knew they're in stasis for any period of time.
As a side project I developed a way to read the markers and put them into a digital data stream. On a small scale this was easy, though, in the end, costly. Once I had a digital representation, I had all the information I needed to piece an organism together. Coupled with the marker's ease of replication, I discovered that once set, the OCMs would only bond in a particular pattern and only bond to the specific molecular chains. My assumptions in this were utterly misdirected. It further turned out that OCMs were not simply holding the molecules in place for later reconstruction. They actively saught out the structures they were designed to house and would use raw material when available to build the molecules needed.
Dumping my first recorded markers into a pool of what was organic waste, I successfully grew a lab rat from sewage slop.
It was so strange how Static Life marketed to the public, when providing the government with this technology would have been much more profitable.
