A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “My test indicate he is.”

  “That’s probably the bits of data floating around in his blood, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen, I’d like you to come down to the lab after Vergil is settled in. Your expertise might be useful to us.”

  Us. He was working with Genetron hand in glove. Could he be objective? “How will you benefit from all this?”

  “Edward, I have always been at the forefront of my profession. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be helping here. With my knowledge of brain and nerve functions, and the research I’ve been conducting in neurophysiology—”

  “You could help Genetron hold off an investigation by the government,” I said.

  “That’s being very blunt. Too blunt, and unfair.”

  “Perhaps. Anyway, yes: I’d like to visit the lab when Vergil’s settled in. If I’m still welcome, bluntness and all.”

  He looked at me sharply. I wouldn’t be playing on his team; for a moment, his thoughts were almost nakedly apparent.

  “Of course,” Bernard said, rising with me. He reached out to shake my hand. His palm was damp. He was as nervous us I was, even if he didn’t look it.

  I returned to my apartment and stayed there until noon, reading, trying to sort things out. Reach a decision. What was real, what I needed to protect.

  There is only so much change anyone can stand: innovation, yes, but slow application. Don’t force. Everyone has the right to stay the same until they decide otherwise.

  The greatest thing in science since . . .

  And Bernard would force it. Genetron would force it. I couldn’t handle the thought. “Neo-Luddite,” I said to myself. A filthy accusation.

  When I pressed Vergil’s number on the building security panel, Vergil answered almost immediately. “Yeah,” he said. He sounded exhilarated. “Come on up. I’ll be in the bathroom. Door’s unlocked.”

  I entered his apartment and walked through the hallway to the bathroom. Vergil lay in the tub, up to his neck in pinkish water. He smiled vaguely and splashed his hands. “Looks like I slit my wrists, doesn’t it?” he said softly. “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine now. Genetron’s going to take me back. Bernard just called.” He pointed to the bathroom phone and intercom.

  I sat on the toilet and noticed the sunlamp fixture standing unplugged nest to the linen cabinets. The blubs sat in a row on the edge of the sink counter. “You’re sure that’s what you want,” I said, my shoulders slumping.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “They can take better care of me. I’m getting cleaned up, going over there this evening. Bernard’s picking me up in his limo. Style. From here on in, everything’s style.”

  The pinkish color in the water didn’t look like soap. “Is that bubble bath?” I asked. Some of it came to me in a rush then and I felt a little weaker; what had occurred to me was just one more obvious and necessary insanity.

  “No,” Vergil said. I knew that already.

  “No,” he repeated, “it’s coming from my skin. They’re not telling me everything, but I think they’re sending out scouts. Astronauts.” He looked at me with an expression that didn’t quite equal concern; more like curiosity as to how I’d take it.

  The confirmation made my stomach muscles tighten as if waiting for a punch. I had never even considered the possibility until now, perhaps because I had been concentrating on other aspects. “Is this the first time?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He laughed. “I’ve half a mind to let the little buggers down the drain. Let them find out what the world’s really about.”

  “They’d go everywhere,” I said.

  “Sure enough.”

  “How . . . how are you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling pretty good now. Must be billions of them.” More splashing with his hands. “What do you think? Should I let the buggers out?”

  Quickly, hardly thinking, I knelt down beside the tub. My fingers went for the cord on the sunlamp and I plugged it in. He had hot-wired doorknobs, turned my piss blue, played a thousand dumb practical jokes and never grown up, never grown mature enough to understand that he was sufficiently brilliant to transform the world; he would never learn caution.

  He reached for the drain knob. “You know, Edward, I—”

  He never finished. I picked up the fixture and dropped it into the tub, jumping back at the flash of steam and sparks. Vergil screamed and thrashed and jerked and then everything was still, except for the low, steady sizzle and the smoke wafting from his hair.

  I lifted the toilet lid and vomited. Then I clenched my nose and went into the living room. My legs went out from under me and I sat abruptly on the couch.

  After an hour, I searched through Vergil’s kitchen and found bleach, ammonia, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I returned to the bathroom, keeping the center of my gaze away from Vergil. I poured first the booze, then the bleach, then the ammonia into the water. Chlorine started bubbling up and I left, closing the door behind me.

  The phone was ringing when I got home. I didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard. Or the police. I could envision having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable.

  I was exhausted, all my muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one can give to the feelings one has after—

  Committing genocide?

  That certainly didn’t seem real. I could not believe I had just murdered a hundred trillion intelligent beings. Snuffed a galaxy. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh.

  It was easy to believe that I had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp rods, the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord.

  Vergil.

  I had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil.

  I felt sick. Dreams, cities raping Gail (and what about his girlfriend, Candice?). Letting the water filled with them out. Galaxies sprinkling over us all. What horror. Then again, what potential beauty—a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformation.

  Had I been thorough enough to kill them all? I had a moment of panic. Tomorrow, I thought, I will sterilize his apartment. Somehow, I didn’t even think of Bernard.

  When Gail came in the door, I was asleep on the couch. I came to, groggy, and she looked down at me.

  “You feeling okay?” she asked, perching on the edge of the couch. I nodded.

  “What are you planning for dinner?” My mouth didn’t work properly. The words were mushy. She felt my forehead.

  “Edward, you have a fever,” she said. “A very high fever.”

  I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gail was close behind me. “What is it?” she asked.

  There were lines under my collar, around my neck. White lines, like freeways. They had already been in me a long time, days.

  “Damp palms,” I said. So obvious.

  I think we nearly died. I struggled at first, but in minutes I was too weak to move. Gail was just as sick within an hour.

  I lay on the carpet in the living room, drenched in sweat. Gail lay on the couch, her face the color of talcum, eyes closed, like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time I thought she was dead. Sick as I was, I raged—hated, felt tremendous guilt at my weakness, my slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then I no longer cared. I was too weak to blink, so I closed my eyes and waited.

  There was a rhythm in my arms, my legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within me, like an orchestra thousands strong, but not playing in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sound became harsher, but more coordinated, wave-trains finally canceling into silence, then separating into harmonic beats.

  The beats seemed to melt into me, into the sound of my own heart.

  First, they subdued our immune responses. The war—and it was a war, on a scale never before known on Earth, with trillions of combatants—lasted perhaps two days.

>   By the time I regained enough strength to get to the kitchen faucet, I could feel them working on my brain, trying to crack the code and find the god within the protoplasm. I drank until I was sick, then drank more moderately and took a glass to Gail. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with yellowish crumbs. There was some color in her skin. Minutes later, we were eating feebly in the kitchen.

  “What in the hell is happening?” was the first thing she asked. I didn’t have the strength to explain. I peeled an orange and shared it with her. “We should call a doctor,” she said. But I knew we wouldn’t. I was already receiving messages; it was becoming apparent that any sensation of freedom we experienced was illusory.

  The messages were simple at first. Memories of commands, rather than the commands themselves, manifested themselves in my thoughts. We were not to leave the apartment—a concept which seemed quite abstract to those in control, even if undesirable—and we were not to have contact with others. We would be allowed to eat certain foods and drink tap water for the time being.

  With the subsidence of the fevers, the transformations were quick and drastic. Almost simultaneously, Gail and I were immobilized. She was sitting at the table, I was kneeling on floor. I was able barely to see her in the corner of my eye.

  Her arm developed pronounced ridges.

  They had learned inside Vergil; their tactics within the two of us were very different. I itched all over for about two hours—two hours in hell—before they made the breakthrough and found me. The effort of ages on their timescale paid off and they communicated smoothly and directly with this great, clumsy intelligence who had once controlled their universe.

  They were not cruel. When the concept of discomfort and its undesirability was made clear, they worked to alleviate it. They worked too effectively. For another hour, I was in a sea of bliss, out of all contact with them.

  With dawn the next day, they gave us freedom to move again; specifically, to go to the bathroom. There were certain waste products they could not deal with. I voided those—my urine was purple—and Gail followed suit. We looked at each other vacantly in the bathroom. Then she managed a slight smile. “Are they talking to you?” she asked. I nodded. “Then I’m not crazy.”

  For the next twelve hours, control seemed to loosen on some levels. I suspect there was another kind of war going on in me. Gail was capable of limited motion, but no more.

  When full control resumed, we were instructed to hold each other. We did not hesitate.

  “Eddie . . .” she whispered. My name was the last sound I ever heard from outside.

  Standing, we grew together. In hours, our legs expanded and spread out. Then extensions grew to the windows to take sunlight, and to the kitchen to take water from the sink. Filaments soon reached to all corners of the room, stripping paint and plaster from the walls, fabric and stuffing from the furniture.

  By the next dawn, the transformation was complete.

  I no longer have any clear view of what we look like. I suspect we resemble cells—large, flat, and filamented cells, draped purposefully across most of the apartment. The great shall mimic the small.

  Our intelligence fluctuates daily as we are absorbed into the minds within. Each day, out individuality declines. We are, indeed, great clumsy dinosaurs. Our memories have been taken over by billions of them, and our personalities have been spread through the transformed blood.

  Soon there will be no need for centralization.

  Already the plumbing has been invaded. People throughout the building are undergoing transformation.

  Within the old time frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force.

  I can barely begin to guess the results. Every square inch of the planet will teem with thought. Years from now, perhaps much sooner, they will subdue their own individuality—what there is of it.

  New creatures will come, then. The immensity of their capacity for thought will be inconceivable.

  All my hatred and fear is gone now.

  I leave them—us—with only one question.

  How many times has this happened, elsewhere? Travelers never came through space to visit the Earth. They had no need.

  They had found universes in grains of sand.

  CYBERPUNK

  Bruce Bethke

  The snoozer went off at seven and I was out of my sleepsack, powered up, and on-line in nanos. That’s as far as I got. Soon’s I booted and got CRACKERS BUDDY BOO 8ER on the tube I shut down fast. Damn! Rayno had been on line before me, like always, and that message meant somebody else had gotten into our Net—and that meant trouble by the busload! I couldn’t do anything more on term, so I zipped into my jumper, combed my hair, and went downstairs.

  Mom and Dad were at breakfast when I slid into the kitchen. “Good Morning, Mikey!” said Mom with a smile. “You were up so late last night I thought I wouldn’t see you before you caught your bus.”

  “Had a tough program to crack,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “now you can sit down and have a decent breakfast.” She turned around to pull some Sara Lees out of the microwave and plunk them down on the table.

  “If you’d do your schoolwork when you’re supposed to you wouldn’t have to stay up all night,” growled Dad from behind his caffix and faxsheet. I sloshed some juice in a glass and poured it down, stuffed a Sara Lee into my mouth, and stood to go.

  “What?” asked Mom. “That’s all the breakfast you’re going to have?”

  “Haven’t got time,” I said. “I gotta get to school early to see if the program checks.” Dad growled something more and Mom spoke to quiet him, but I didn’t hear much ’cause I was out the door.

  I caught the transys for school, just in case they were watching. Two blocks down the line I got off and transferred going back the other way, and a coupla transfers later I wound up whipping into Buddy’s All-Night Burgers. Rayno was in our booth, glaring into his caffix. It was 7:55 and I’d beat Georgie and Lisa there.

  “What’s on line?” I asked as I dropped into my seat, across from Rayno. He just looked up at me through his eyebrows and I knew better than to ask again.

  At eight Lisa came in. Lisa is Rayno’s girl, or at least she hopes she is. I can see why: Rayno’s seventeen—two years older than the rest of us—he wears flash plastic and his hair in The Wedge (Dad blew a chip when I said I wanted my hair cut like that) and he’s so cool he won’t even touch her, even when she’s begging for it. She plunked down in her seat next to Rayno and he didn’t blink.

  Georgie still wasn’t there at 8:05. Rayno checked his watch again, then finally looked up from his caffix. “The compiler’s been cracked,” he said. Lisa and I both swore. We’d worked up our own little code to keep our Net private. I mean, our Olders would just blow boards if they ever found out what we were really up to. And now somebody’d broken our code.

  “Georgie’s old man?” I asked.

  “Looks that way.” I swore again. Georgie and I started the Net by linking our smartterms with some stuff we stored in his old man’s home business system. Now my Dad wouldn’t know an opsys if he crashed on one, but Georgie’s old man—he’s a greentooth. A tech-type. He’d found one of ours once before and tried to take it apart to see what it did. We’d just skinned out that time.

  “Any idea how far in he got?” Lisa asked. Rayno looked through her, at the front door. Georgie’d just come in.

  “We’re gonna find out,” Rayno said.

  Georgie was coming in smiling, but when he saw Rayno’s eyes he sat down next to me like the seat was booby-trapped.

  “Good Morning Georgie,” said Rayno, smiling like a shark.

  “I didn’t glitch!” Georgie whined. “I didn’t tell him a thing!”

  “Then how the Hell did he do it?”

  “You know how he is, he’s weird! He likes puzzles!” Georgie looked to me for backup. “That’s how come I was late. He was trying to weasel me, but I didn’t tell him a thing
! I think he only got it partway open. He didn’t ask about the Net!”

  Rayno actually sat back, pointed at us all, and smiled. “You kids just don’t know how lucky you are. I was in the Net last night and flagged somebody who didn’t know the secures was poking Georgie’s compiler. I made some changes. By the time your old man figures them out, well . . .”

  I sighed relief. See what I mean about being cool? Rayno had us outlooped all the time!

  Rayno slammed his fist down on the table. “But Dammit Georgie, you gotta keep a closer watch on him!”

  Then Rayno smiled and bought us all drinks and pie all the way around. Lisa had a cherry Coke, and Georgie and I had caffix just like Rayno. God, that stuff tastes awful! The cups were cleared away, and Rayno unzipped his jumper and reached inside.

  “Now kids,” he said quietly, “it’s time for some serious fun.” He whipped out his microterm. “School’s off!”

  I still drop a bit when I see the microterm—Geez, it’s a beauty! It’s a Zeilemann Nova 300, but we’ve spent so much time reworking it, it’s practically custom from the motherboard up. Hi-baud, rammed, rommed, ported, with the wafer display folds down to about the size of a vid-cassette; I’d give an ear to have one like it. We’d used Georgie’s old man’s chipburner to tuck some special tricks in ROM and there wasn’t a system in CityNet it couldn’t talk to.

  Rayno ordered up a smartcab and we piled out of Buddy’s. No more riding the transys for us, we were going in style! We charged the smartcab off to some law company and cruised all over Eastside.

  Riding the boulevards got stale after awhile, so we rerouted to the library. We do a lot of our fun at the library, ’cause nobody ever bothers us there. Nobody ever goes there. We sent the smartcab, still on the law company account, off to Westside. Getting past the guards and the librarians was just a matter of flashing some ID and then we zipped off into the stacks.

  Now, you’ve got to ID away your life to get on the libsys terms—which isn’t worth half a scare when your ID is all fudged like our is—and they watch real careful. But they move their terms around a lot, so they’ve got ports on line all over the building. We found an unused port, and me and Georgie kept watch while Rayno plugged in his microterm and got on line.