The Father and the Son

"Hmmm"
"What?"
"These floating pods you have,"
"The Teovukian drones?"
"Nono, in the water, the, uh, Provarletuian."
"Ok"
"They're essentially full of nucleic material , correct?"
"Yes."
"Before they the switch to optical, there was a lot of experimentation with other computation substrates to overcome the limitations of silicon. They got some usable designs using strings of DNA. It's terribly slow of course, but it's Turing complete."
"I'm going to need your help."
And from there the whole design came together. We really diverged a lot from those old systems, but that was our proof of concept.