It’s just an algorithm.
When you design a new drug - or a new biochemical weapon - you start by thinking about how your molecule will attach itself to its target, and you run simulations of the various molecules, computing the quantum mechanical orbitals and how they rearrange themselves.
Next, you enlarge the simulation by including some local environment, the intracellular medium for example. You turn all that again into ones and zeros, and you run the algorithm. With today’s computing power you can increase the environment again, and simulate an organ, or bone material, or tissue, all down to the molecular level.
You can see where this is going, right?
I mean, we’ve now scanned millions of people who volunteered for it, we have them backed up including their infomorph. Somewhere a copy of them is in a fresh clone as workforce in a Metenox moon mining drill. But another disembodied copy of them, down the the molecular level, turned into ones and zeros, is running on my computation cluster in our corporation’s research facility.
The .mdat output file reveals collective oscillations of the air molecules surrounding the body in the simulation box. It’s a tight box, no need to waste computational resources. The oscillations in the air are screams. That could mean success, if we test a weaponized neurotoxin, or failure, if it is a medicine. Modify the drug, restart at time minus one minute. Of course, there are many other ways besides the screams to infer the effect of the drug, but those air pressure and density waves somehow bother me.
Once I have even considered also simulating a loudspeaker in the box, and talking to the simulated person.
But that’s just silly. I’m just running ones and zeroes through an algorithm on a computer, that’s all.