Sparky
| Sparky | |
|---|---|
 The Sparky poster, one of nine class posters in the header of the company's member software | |
| First appearance | "How to Play Epic Quest Bio" (2025) |
| Created by | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| In-universe information | |
| Occupation | "electrical engineering" |
| Affiliation | Molecular Streaming Corps |
| Color | Amber (RGB 255, 191, 63) |
Sparky is the electronics class among the nine character classes of Epic Quest Bio, the role-playing game through which Molecular Reality Corporation organizes its work. The help file of the company's member software defines it as "electrical engineering".[1] Its name is the British, Australian and New Zealand slang word for an electrician.[2] It is one of three classes that kept their names when the others were renamed in 2026, and a Player Scientist may take it as a major or a minor class.
Origins
The founder's essay "How to Play Epic Quest Bio", the landing text of epicquest.bio in 2025, gives the Sparky its most elaborate paragraph. The Sparky commands "the logic of lightning trapped in arcane patterns by the spellbooks of Faraday, Maxwell, Nyquist, Shannon, [...] Widlar, Carver Mead, Neher & Sakmann, and Horowitz & Hill",[a] and is not put off by the job: "When we tell you we'll need to measure femtoamp currents through nanometer holes while swimming in a sea of 60 Hz hum and switching noise, you don't flinch, you start sketching guard rings and calculating how many dB of shielding we'll need."[3]
In the company's database Sparky is the sixth of the eight original classes, with the color 255, 191, 63 in RGB, an amber, and the placeholder description "The Sparky class is vital to the mission. [Edit this description in the Command Deck]". Its flat icon is a yellow lightning bolt ending in a pair of pincers.[4] A design draft of May 2025 called it "Sparky (Electrical Engineer)", "The Conductor of Currents, The Oracle of Ohms, The Electron Whisperer", put "Electronics design (AFE, PCB layouts)" first among its duties, and assigned it a mentor, Doctor Volty McSparkface.[4]
Poster
At 1,254 pixels square, the Sparky poster is one of the two smallest of the nine. A dark hooded figure with a single glowing red eye looms over a red and purple plain under an orange sky, with purple light at its sides and a red starburst of sparks at its center, and lilac letters outlined in red spell the name along the bottom.[4] A member who clicks it opens the company's chat, LabChat, with "Sparky question:" already typed.
Work of the class
A quest worth 1,000 experience points, since switched off, asked members to "Lend your eyeballs and real experience to reviewing our current PCB designs."[4]
Most of the class's work concerns the analog front end, the circuit that turns the current through a pore, picoamperes to nanoamperes, into a voltage that can be digitized. The company's open desktop design, the MR1 Nanopore Reader, draws a transimpedance amplifier around an LMP7721, whose input bias current is specified at 3 femtoamperes typical and 20 at most,[5] about 19,000 electrons a second. Its input is surrounded by driven guard traces, the essay's guard rings, "to achieve sub-picoampere sensitivity while neutralizing the effects of stray capacitance and dielectric surface leakage". The design has not been built.[6]
Its other instrument is the zapper. The company's console design of 2022 had a "zapper stick" with a red handle that "applies a brief spike of maximum voltage", for uses that included "clearing clogged smaller pores" and "electrically etching new pores".[7] Those two uses lie close together. In a 2014 study, pores were made in silicon nitride membranes 10 and 30 nm thick with fields of 0.4 to 1 V/nm and then widened with square pulses of 0.2 to 0.3 V/nm.[8] By default the MR1 firmware's pulse "for pore wetting / unclogging" is 800 mV for 250 ms, a field of 0.08 V/nm across a 10 nm membrane.[6] In The Disclosure Crawl the MCP4822 converter of the older handheld MR1 Molecular Streaming Device "delivers up to 9V 'zapping' pulses";[9] the converter's full scale is 4.096 V, so a 9 V pulse would need another stage after it.[10]
Related classes
The help file divides the company's engineering between Sparky and MechE, for "hardware/fluidics".[1] In the Disclosure Crawl the electronics class is the Signal Sorcerer, an "Electronics & data wizard" with 95 hit points.[11]
See also
Notes
- ^ Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell for electromagnetism; Harry Nyquist for sampling and thermal noise; Claude Shannon for information theory; Bob Widlar for early integrated operational amplifiers; Carver Mead for chip design; Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann for the patch clamp; Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill for the textbook The Art of Electronics (1980). One name in the list is omitted here.
References
- ^ a b "EQBio-OS help: Gamification & Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
- ^ "sparky". Wiktionary. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ Kemmishtree (2025). "How to Play Epic Quest Bio". epicquest.bio.
- ^ a b c d "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "LMP7721 3-fA Input Bias Current Precision Amplifier". Texas Instruments. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ a b "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
- ^ "Nanopore fabrication by controlled dielectric breakdown". PLoS ONE 9 (3): e92880. 2014. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092880.
- ^ "Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl, Level 3: The Armory". Molecular Reality Corporation. April 2026.
- ^ "MCP4822". Microchip Technology. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl, The Entrance Hall". Molecular Reality Corporation. April 2026.