by Greg Bear
“You’re crazy.”
“You can see the screen! Edward, I haven’t been sick since. I used to get colds all the time. I’ve never felt better.”
“They’re inside you,” I said. “Finding things, changing them.”
“And by now, each cluster is as smart as you or I.”
“You’re absolutely nuts.”
He shrugged. “Genetron fired me. They thought I was going to take revenge for what they did to my work. They ordered me out of the labs, and I haven’t had a real chance to see what’s been going on inside me until now. Three months.”
“So …” My mind was racing. “You lost weight because they improved your fat metabolism. Your bones are stronger, your spine has been completely rebuilt—”
“No more backaches even if I sleep on my old mattress.”
“Your heart looks different.”
“I didn’t know about the heart,” he said, examining the frame image more closely. “As for the fat—I was thinking about that. They could increase my brown cells, fix up the metabolism. I haven’t been as hungry lately. I haven’t changed my eating habits that much—I still want the same old junk—but somehow I get around to eating only what I need. I don’t think they know what my brain is yet. Sure, they’ve got all the glandular stuff—but they don’t have the big picture, if you see what I mean. They don’t know I’m in here. But boy, they sure did figure out what my reproductive organs are.”
I glanced at the image and shifted my eyes away.
“Oh, they look pretty normal,” he said, hefting his scrotum obscenely. He snickered. “But how else do you think I’d land a real looker like Candice? She was just after a one-night stand with a techie. I looked okay then, no tan but trim, with good clothes. She’d never screwed a techie before. Joke time, right? But my little geniuses kept us up half the night. I think they made improvements each time. I felt like I had a goddamned fever.”
His smile vanished. “But then one night my skin started to crawl. It really scared me. I thought things were getting out of hand. I wondered what they’d do when they crossed the blood-brain barrier and found out about me—about the brain’s real function. So I began a campaign to keep them under control. I figured, the reason they wanted to get into the skin was the simplicity of running circuits across a surface. Much easier than trying to maintain chains of communication in and around muscles, organs, vessels. The skin was much more direct. So I bought a quartz lamp.” He caught my puzzled expression. “In the lab, we’d break down the protein in biochip cells by exposing them to ultraviolet light. I alternated sunlamp with quartz treatments. Keeps them out of my skin and gives me a nice tan.”
“Give you skin cancer, too,” I commented.
“They’ll probably take care of that. Like police.”
“Okay. I’ve examined you, you’ve told me a story I still find hard to believe … what do you want me to do?”
“I’m not as nonchalant as I act, Edward. I’m worried. I’d like to learn how to control them before they find out about my brain. I mean, think of it, they’re in the trillions by now, each one smart. They’re cooperating to some extent. I’m probably the smartest thing on the planet, and they haven’t even begun to get their act together. I don’t really want them to take over.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Steal my soul, you know? So think of some treatment to block them. Maybe we can starve the little buggers. Just think on it.” He buttoned his shirt. “Give me a call.” He handed me a slip of paper with his address and phone number. Then he went to the keyboard and erased the image on the frame, dumping the memory of the examination. “Just you,” he said. “Nobody else for now. And please … hurry.”
It was three o’clock in the morning when Vergil walked out of the examination room. He’d allowed me to take blood samples, then shaken my hand—his palm was damp, nervous—and cautioned me against ingesting anything from the specimens.
Before I went home, I put the blood through a series of tests. The results were ready the next day. I picked them up during my lunch break, then destroyed all of the samples. I did it like a robot.
It took me five days and nearly sleepless nights to accept what I’d seen. His blood was normal enough, though the machines diagnosed the patient as having an infection. High levels of leukocytes—white blood cells—and histamines.
On the fifth day, I believed.
Gail came home before I did, but it was my turn to fix dinner. She slipped one of her school’s disks into the home system and showed me video art the nursery kids had been creating. I watched quietly, ate with her in silence.
That evening, I had two dreams, part of my final acceptance. In the first, I witnessed the destruction of the planet Krypton, Superman’s home world. Billions of superhuman geniuses went screaming off in walls of fire. I related this destruction to my sterilizing the samples of Vergil’s blood. The second dream was worse. I dreamed that New York City was raping a woman. By the end of the dream, she gave birth to little embryo cities, all wrapped up in translucent sacs, soaked with blood from the difficult labor.
I called Vergil on the morning of the sixth day. He answered on the fourth ring. “I have some results,” I said. “Nothing conclusive. But I want to talk. In person.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m staying inside for the time being.” His voice was strained; he sounded tired.
Vergil’s apartment was in a fancy high-rise near the lake shore. I took the elevator up, listening to little advertising jingles and watching dancing holograms display products, empty apartments for rent, the building’s hostess discussing social activities for the week.
Vergil opened the door and motioned me in. He wore a checked robe with long sleeves and carpet slippers. He clutched an unlit pipe in one hand, his fingers twisting it back and forth as he walked away from me and sat down, saying nothing.
“You have an infection,” I said.
“Oh?”
“That’s all the blood analyses tell me. I don’t have access to the electron microscopes.”
“I don’t think it’s really an infection,” he said. “After all, they’re my own cells. Probably something else … some sign of their presence, of the change. We can’t expect to understand everything that’s happening.”
I removed my coat. “Listen,” I said, “you really have me worried now.” The expression on his face stopped me: a kind of frantic beatitude. He squinted at the ceiling and pursed his lips.
“Are you stoned?” I asked.
He shook his head, then nodded once, very slowly. “Listening,” he said.
“To what?”
“I don’t know. Not sounds, exactly. More like music. The heart, all the blood vessels, friction of blood along the arteries, veins. Activity. Music in the blood.” He looked at me plaintively. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“My day off. Gail’s working.”
“Can you stay?”
I shrugged. “I suppose.” I sounded suspicious. I glanced around the apartment, looking for ashtrays, packs of papers.
“I’m not stoned, Edward,” he said. “I may be wrong, but I think something big is happening. I think they’re finding out who I am.”
I sat down across from Vergil, staring at him intently. He didn’t seem to notice. Some inner process involved him. When I asked for a cup of coffee, he motioned to the kitchen. I boiled a pot of water and took a jar of instant from the cabinet. With cup in hand, I returned to my seat.
He twisted his head back and forth, eyes open. “You always knew what you wanted to be, didn’t you?” he asked.
“More or less.”
“A gynecologist. Smart moves. Never false moves. I was different. I had goals, but no direction. Like a map without roads. I didn’t give a shit for anything, anyone but myself. I hated my folks. I hated science. Just a means. I’m surprised I got so far.”
He grippe
d his chair arms.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“They’re talking to me,” he said. He shut his eyes.
For an hour he seemed to be asleep. I checked his pulse, which was strong and steady, felt his forehead—slightly cool—and made myself more coffee. I was looking through a magazine, at a loss what to do, when he opened his eyes.
“Hard to figure exactly what time is like for them,” he said. “It’s taken them maybe three, four days to figure out language, key human concepts. Now they’re on to it. On to me. Right now.”
“How’s that?”
He claimed there were thousands of researchers hooked up to his neurons. He couldn’t give details. “They’re damned efficient, you know,” he said. “They haven’t screwed me up yet.”
“We should get you into the hospital now.”
“What in hell could other doctors do? Did you figure out any way to control them? I mean, they’re my own cells.”
“I’ve been thinking. We could starve them. Find out what metabolic differences—”
“I’m not sure I want to be rid of them,” Vergil said. “They’re not doing any harm.”
“How do you know?”
He shook his head and held up one finger. “Wait. They’re trying to figure out what space is. That’s tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is like intensity of taste.”
“Vergil—”
“Listen! Think, Edward!” His tone was excited but even. “Something big is happening inside me. They talk to each other across the fluid, through membranes. They tailor something—viruses?—to carry data stored in nucleic acid chains. I think they’re saying ‘RNA.’ That makes sense. That’s one way I programmed them. But plasmidlike structures, too. Maybe that’s what your machines think is a sign of infection—all their chattering in my blood, packets of data. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”
“Vergil, I still think you should be in a hospital.”
“This is my show, Edward,” he said. “I’m their universe. They’re amazed by the new scale.” He was quiet again for a time.
I squatted by his chair and pulled up the sleeve to his robe. His arm was crisscrossed with white lines. I was about to go to the phone when he stood and stretched. “Do you realize,” he said, “how many body cells we kill each time we move?”
“I’m going to call for an ambulance,” I said.
“No, you aren’t.” His tone stopped me. “I told you, I’m not sick. This is my show. Do you know what they’d do to me in a hospital? They’d be like cavemen trying to fix a computer.”
“Then what the hell am I doing here?” I asked, getting angry. “I can’t do anything! I’m one of those cavemen.”
“You’re a friend,” Vergil said, fixing his eyes on me. I had the impression I was being watched by more than just Vergil. “I want you here to keep me company.” He laughed. “But I’m not exactly alone.”
He walked around the apartment for two hours, fingering things, looking out windows, slowly and methodically fixing himself lunch. “You know, they can actually feel their own thoughts,” he said around noon. “I mean, the cytoplasm seems to have a will of its own, a kind of subconscious life counter to the rationality they’ve only recently acquired. They hear the chemical ‘noise’ of the molecules fitting and unfitting inside.”
At one, I called Gail to tell her I would be late. I was almost sick with tension, but I tried to keep my voice level. “Remember Vergil Ulam? I’m talking with him right now.”
“Everything okay?” she asked.
Was it? Decidedly not. “Fine,” I said.
“Culture!” Vergil said, peering at me around the kitchen wall.
I said good-bye and hung up.
“They’re always swimming in that bath of information,”
Vergil said. “It’s a kind of gestalt thing. The hierarchy is absolute. They send tailored phages after cells that don’t interact properly. Viruses specified to individuals or groups. No escape. A rogue cell gets pierced by the virus, the cell blebs outward, it explodes and dissolves. But it’s not just a dictatorship. I think they effectively have more freedom than in a democracy. I mean, they vary so differently from individual to individual. Does that make sense? They vary in different ways than we do.”
“Hold it,” I said, gripping his shoulders. “Vergil, you’re pushing me to the edge. I can’t take this much longer. I don’t understand, I’m not sure I believe—”
“Not even now?”
“Okay, let’s say you’re giving me the right interpretation. Giving it to me straight. Have you bothered to figure out the consequences? What all this means, where it might lead?”
He walked into the kitchen and drew a glass of water from the tap, then returned and stood beside me. His expression had changed from childish absorption to sober concern. “I’ve never been good at that.”
“Are you afraid?”
“I was. Now, I’m not sure.” He fingered the tie of his robe. “Look, I don’t want you to think I went around you, over your head or something. But I met with Michael Bernard yesterday. He put me through his private clinic, took specimens. Told me to quit the lamp treatments. He called this morning, just before you did. He says it all checks out. And he asked me not to tell anybody.” His expression became dreamy again. “Cities of cells,” he continued. “Edward, they push tubes through the tissues, spread information—”
“Stop it!” I shouted. “Checks out? What checks out?”
“As Bernard puts it, I have ‘severely enlarged macrophages’ throughout my system. And he concurs on the anatomical changes.”
“What does he plan to do?”
“I don’t know. I think he’ll probably convince Genetron to reopen the lab.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s not just having the lab again. I want to show you. Since I stopped the lamp treatments, I’m still changing.” He undid his robe and let it slide to the floor. All over his body, his skin was crisscrossed with white lines. Along his back, the lines were starting to form ridges.
“My God!” I said.
“I’m not going to be much good anywhere else but the lab soon. I won’t be able to go out in public. Hospitals wouldn’t know what to do, as I said.”
“You’re … you can talk to them, tell them to slow down,” I said, aware how ridiculous that sounded.
“Yes, indeed I can, but they don’t necessarily listen.”
“I thought you were their god or something.”
“The ones hooked up to my neurons aren’t the big wheels. They’re researchers, or at least serve the same function. They know I’m here, what I am, but that doesn’t mean they’ve convinced the upper levels of the hierarchy.”
“They’re arguing?”
“Something like that. It’s not all that bad. If the lab is reopened, I have a home, a place to work.” He glanced out the window, as if looking for someone. “I don’t have anything left but them. They aren’t afraid, Edward. I’ve never felt so close to anything before.” Again the beatific smile. “I’m responsible for them. Mother to them all.”
“You have no way of knowing what they’re going to do.”
He shook his head.
“No, I mean it. You say they’re like a civilization—”
“Like a thousand civilizations.”
“Yeah, and civilizations have been known to screw up. Warfare, the environment—”
I was grasping at straws, trying to restrain a growing panic. I wasn’t competent to handle the enormity of what was happening. Neither was Vergil. He was the last person I would have called insightful and wise about large issues.
“But I’m the only one at risk.”
“You don’t know that. Jesus, Vergil, look what they’re doing to you!
”
“To me, all to me!” he said. “Nobody else.”
I shook my head and held up my hands in a gesture of defeat. “Okay, so Bernard gets them to reopen the lab, you move in, become a guinea pig. What then?”
“They treat me right. I’m more than just good old Vergil Ulam now. I’m a goddamned galaxy, a super-mother.”
“Super-host, you mean.”
He conceded the point with a shrug.
I couldn’t take any more. I made my exit with a few flimsy excuses, then sat in the lobby of the apartment building, trying to calm down. Somebody had to talk some sense into him. Who would he listen to? He had gone to Bernard …
And it sounded as if Bernard was not only convinced, but very interested. People of Bernard’s stature didn’t coax the Vergil Ulams of the world along unless they felt it was to their advantage.
I had a hunch, and I decided to play it. I went to a pay phone, slipped in my credit card, and called Genetron.
“I’d like you to page Dr. Michael Bernard,” I told the receptionist.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“This is his answering service. We have an emergency call, and his beeper doesn’t seem to be working.”
A few anxious minutes later, Bernard came on the line. “Who the hell is this?” he asked. “I don’t have an answering service.”
“My name is Edward Milligan. I’m a friend of Vergil Ulam’s. I think we have some problems to discuss.”
We made an appointment to talk the next morning.
I went home and tried to think of excuses to keep me off the next day’s hospital shift. I couldn’t concentrate on medicine, couldn’t give my patients anywhere near the attention they deserved.
Guilty, angry, afraid.
That was how Gail found me. I slipped on a mask of calm and we fixed dinner together. After eating, holding onto each other, we watched the city lights come on through the bayside window. Winter starlings pecked at the yellow lawn in the last few minutes of twilight, then flew away with a rising wind which made the windows rattle.