A short distance later they turned onto a steep footpath. It obviously took a more direct route down the mountainside than the road, and the effort of running was mainly spent on slowing down.
"When I got back to the house last night," Gray said without warning, "there was no light under your door."
"I was pretty tired," Laura mumbled. In fact, she was curled up in bed crying half the night. Crying over her twin losses — the death of her friend Gina and the death of her image of Joseph Gray.
"Aren't you going to ask what happened?"
"Okay," Laura said, "what happened?"
The roar from the engines of another jet caused Gray to delay his reply.
"Did you really think I 'pulled the plug' on the computer?" he asked.
"You were doing all those things! You removed the 'locks'—the copy protection — so the phase-three could take over all of Gina's connections. And you opened those big… 'data bus' things, whatever they are."
"That was all so Gina could copy her connections to the annex. The program that made up Gina's personality — her self — was resident entirely in the main pool. I copied Gina's connections lock, stock, and barrel over to the virus-free side of the partition. The trick was to do that without taking all the ordinary viruses across with her and without crashing the Other. It took several hours, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but Gina was a real trouper — brave as she could be. When we were done, the antiviral programs were deactivated, the partition was removed, and she was healthier than she's ever been."
Laura laughed. "She did seem pretty chipper." Laura was grinning broadly.
The sun-streaked foliage of the verdant jungle flew by. It was a perfectly glorious morning, and Laura waited patiently for Gray to continue. She was too busy to talk. Too focused on the feelings she'd dared not allow herself before. Laura looked up at Gray. At his serene expression, his dark hair, his unwrinkled brow. The feelings she'd fought back for so long now bloomed, and although the emotional risk to her was still there, she let them. When she glanced back at Gray, he looked down at her through brilliant blue eyes. Laura felt so exposed that she grew guarded again.
"What you said," Gray continued, but in a low and different tone, "in the control room last night… you were right. I've been fighting so long and hard that I was losing track of what I was fighting for. There was a part of me, inside, that I hadn't felt in a long, long time. I couldn't just stand there and let that happen to Gina."
"So where does that leave her now?" Laura asked. She was preoccupied — trying to rein in the emotions that left her so vulnerable to a totally unpredictable and mysterious man. "I mean… she's still trapped inside that computer. A 'ghost in a machine.'"
"You're forgetting your big lesson in mobility," he said, looking at her with a smile. "As snobbish as Gina is about robots, she seemed fairly pleased by my plan to download her into a new Model Nine." Laura's head shot up, and she grinned with sudden delight.
"It'll use DNA, which is the most amazing computer ever built. Every strand stores all the instructions used to construct…"
Laura tuned him out for the remainder of his lecture. "Gina will like being out in the world," she said when he'd finished.
"It's what she wants more than anything else in the world. It's been terrible for her — the disembodiment. She has had to watch the Model Eights running around the island while she was stuck in that underground pool."
Their feet were flying down the hill, and Laura thought just then that she had never felt more wonderful in her life. The air was growing thicker, and after a short jaunt back on the main road, they took another paved footpath through the jungle. The downhill slope made the run seem effortless.
But there still loomed the question that threatened an abrupt end to all Laura's happiness. She felt sickened by the prospect of asking it, but she couldn't hold back for long the feelings that demanded her attention. She had to know if she could let them consume her completely. "So… you were going to tell me something?" Laura managed — her voice an octave too high.
"You're still not ready."
She swallowed. "What is that? An access-restricted message?"
Gray chuckled. "I hope those didn't aggravate you too much."
"What?" Laura asked.
"Those access-restricted messages."
She looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
"I mean I hope you understand why they were necessary. Gina was beginning to seriously malfunction. I didn't know how bad it would get, and I couldn't just have her blabbing the whole thing to people who couldn't possibly understand."
"Wait a minute! Are you saying you programmed the computer to give those messages?"
"Sure," he said as if surprised that it wasn't obvious to her. "As it turned out, it was a good measure of your preparedness. It marked the milestones of your progress."
"My progress toward what?"
"Toward understanding."
The day was growing warmer with every splash of sunlight that bathed the path.
"And Gina didn't know what those messages were?"
"Not at first. When she figured it out she was hurt. She thought I didn't trust her anymore… and I didn't."
"But… now you're going to tell me what your little access-restricted program kept me from learning, right?"
"Yes, but you're going to think I'm crazy again. You're going to think I'm some weird eccentric."
"I already think that, so go ahead."
He laughed at her joke, and Laura smiled. The footpath again rejoined the road, and Laura was surprised at how far they had run.
It was the road that ran between the airport and the Village, and they had to get out of the roadbed to allow a busload of new arrivals to pass. The faces of all the passengers were jammed into the windows like tourists, and they seemed excited to catch a glimpse of Joseph Gray. He was completely oblivious to the adoration and the hurriedly snapped photographs. The bus was headed toward the Village up ahead, which Laura could see was teeming with life.
Human life and, to her great shock, robotic.
A crowd of people followed a Model Eight as it walked down the central boulevard. Cameras flashed and mothers held their children to keep them from getting too close to its legs. Laura wondered if the day would come when such sights would cease to be remarkable. Not if, Laura realized, but when.
She looked up at Gray, who ran along in silence. "Okay, Joseph, you're stalling."
He took a deep breath and said, "I've never told anybody this in my entire life — only Gina. I was afraid to tell other people."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of the virus." They ran on, and Laura waited.
"I realized what was happening when I was a child. When I was eight years old, as a matter of fact. I was reading Mein Kampf, and—"
"Hitler's Mein Kampf?" she interrupted. "You were eight, and you were reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf?"
"Would you let me finish this, please?" Laura fell silent. He had grown serious, and she let him find the words in his own time. They approached the outskirts of the Village, and another bus of oglers rambled by. Gray's legions of true believers were back in force. The new phase had begun in earnest.
"You've noted my preoccupation with evolution," he finally continued. "The genetic engineering effected by biological evolution over millions of years of life on earth has done more to change the face of this planet than wind, fire, rain, and water. Darwinian evolution is incredibly powerful, but it's also glacial in its rate of change. It requires thousands of generations to test even the most minuscule of mutations in the population. Then, after competition has determined the fittest, it takes thousands of generations for the superior organism to dominate the species and, by dominating, spread its superior traits. For major architectural changes to an organism, the change takes tens of thousands of years."
"Major architectural changes like what, for instance?"
"Like expanding the size of the human brain and the cran
ium that houses it. Because that's what's necessary, ultimately, to improve our performance." They entered the Village streets and turned left at the central boulevard. Smiling people waved on Gray's path. Laura marveled that he seemed not to notice. "Oh, we can tweak the system. We can use tricks to learn and improve our mental processing speed."
"And what about your 'tools'—the computer, for instance?"
"But those tools are alive themselves. They're living organisms whose evolutionary histories are only beginning. Relying on them for assistance is all we can do for now, but it's not a long-term solution. In the long term we would be placing the continued existence of our species in the hands of another species. That's a foolish course."
They ran to the end of the boulevard, and Gray stopped at the base of the statue. He sat, and Laura settled onto the cool stone base beside him. Sounds of life filled the Village, but from Gray there was silence. Just when Laura thought she was going to have to prod him into continuing, however, he began.
"About ten thousand years ago, humans were infected with a virus that rendered genetic evolution irrelevant. The speed with which that new virus reproduces is phenomenal, and its rate of reproduction is growing a millionfold every human generation. Within the next century it could extinguish all human life on earth."
Gray gazed down the bustling street without returning Laura's stare. For the first time she got the feeling she truly may not be ready for what he was saying.
"The patterns are so difficult to see that only a few thinkers have dared touch upon what's happening. And the virus took care of those that did. In the old days they would be killed. Today the virus prevents the spread of their ideas by subjecting them to ridicule and reducing them to obscurity."
"What… virus, Joseph?"
"It's a parasite. It has to inhabit a host to survive. It very much like the bacteria that inhabit human stomachs or the benign viruses in the computer in that sense. In order to aid in its own survival as a species, this virus aids in the survival of its host. If its host flourishes, after all, so does the virus, so a symbiosis develops. And we humans have flourished in the last ten-thousand-odd years, wouldn't you agree?"
"Well, sure I'm healthy, and have my teeth and all, but… but there's crime, and war, and nuclear weapons, and the ecology, and racism, and AIDS."
Gray smiled, then looked toward the assembly building and launch pads which were visible over the jungle from the top of the boulevard. "When a parasitic life-form — the bacteria in your stomach, for instance — determines that there is some imminent threat to the continued survival of its host, what does it do?"
Laura remembered that part of her lesson. "If the bacteria sense a perforation of the stomach walls, they begin to reproduce massively," she replied, answering Gray's question like the star pupil she'd been all her life. "That probably kills the host, but it improves the odds that the bacteria will perpetuate its species." Gray nodded.
"Are you really talking about a virus that inhabits humans like the bacteria in our stomachs?" she asked. Gray nodded again.
Laura was growing agitated by the turn in the conversation.
"And exactly which organ does this virus infect?"
"Our brains."
Laura stared at him intently. "Our brains?" she practically whispered, and he nodded. A long silence ensued. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not ready for this."
"Ridicule by one's colleagues, Laura, is highly effective in forcing conformity. You of all people should know that." He was looking at her. She realized he was talking about her paper at the Artificial Intelligence Symposium. "Existing knowledge defends itself against new ideas by persecuting its proponents. Gina hacked her way into the FBI's computer, and I read the two agents' report of your meeting." She glanced up at him. "Did you notice where that meeting took place?"
"On campus," Laura replied. "It was… at a statue."
"Of Galileo," Gray completed for her. "Do you know why Galileo was forced to recant?"
His ideas, Laura thought, and she nodded. She put her elbows on her knees and laid her chin on cupped hands.
"What I am telling you now is being actively suppressed by the virus. Your reluctance to believe me is the result of an extremely powerful defense mechanism that's immediately triggered when you encounter radically new ideas. When the computer develops a program, that program competes with all other programs doing the same task. The shortest, most efficient, most error-free is the one that ultimately wins out, but not without some extended period of testing. Those two programs do battle for their lives, and the fighting is therefore vicious."
"Survival of the fittest," Laura mumbled, her jaws held shut by the weight of her head on her chin. She sat up. "Okay. But wait a minute. Are we talking about viruses that live inside brains or viruses in the computer?"
"They're one and the same," Gray said, and Laura looked him in the eye. "When man created computers, we infected them with the virus. It's highly communicable. It passes surprisingly easily from human to human, from human to computer, from computer back to human. In fact, Laura, the sole purpose of the computer is to hold the virus. It's a petri dish. Just like the computer is a tool which expands the power of the human brain, the computer is the perfect environment for the virus to thrive. Inside the computer, the virus replicates far more rapidly and efficiently than it possibly could in the human brain. The virus has built a new and better host for itself."
Laura swallowed, wetting her dry throat. "Maybe we ought to talk about this virus for a second. Joseph, microbiologists have done a pretty thorough survey of the human body for microorganisms, and they haven't found any—"
"You're talking biology," Gray interrupted. "I'm not."
"Well, what are we talking about here?" Laura practically shouted, rocking forward to again rest her elbows on her knees. She rubbed her pounding temples with her fingertips. The jumble of disassociated ideas and growing fears about Joseph's sanity formed a disturbing brew.
"What's this virus that infects our minds and is evolving and growing?"
Just as it had on her first trip with Gray into virtual reality, time seemed to stand still.
"Knowledge," he said.
Laura raised her head and slowly looked at Joseph. He sat impassively at her side. "That's it? All this buildup, all this mystery, and that's the big secret?"
When he spoke, he sounded confident. "Ideas like beauty, evil, kindness, and racism are strands of the 'DNA' of our culture. They reproduce by being passed from parent to child, book to reader, screen to viewer… brain to brain. Every time anybody learns anything, a unit of knowledge is passed. The more believable or attractive the idea, the more effective it is at reproduction and therefore survival. Once popular ideas like leeching patients of their sick blood were quite effective replicators in their day. Then along came modern medicine, and the older ideas no longer proved to be the fittest. The rules of genetic evolution, Laura, apply to cultural evolution as well."
Laura's mind was reeling, and she was highly agitated.
"I told you you'd think I was crazy," Gray said.
"Well?" she shot back, holding up her hands, then slapping them down on her thighs. "What would you think if you were me?" He smiled.
"Do you want me to go on, or are you comfortable with your diagnosis?"
"There's more? What, does this get really weird or something?"
Gray laughed. "Indulge me for a moment with my analogy. Because that's all this is — an analogy. There are no words or concepts or theories to draw on when talking about this. I have to start from scratch, define terms, take it one step at a time. You've come this far; you should hear me out."
Laura rolled her head back and looked up at the statue. Its white marble was framed darkly against the bright blue sky. She heaved a deep sigh and said, "Okay, knowledge is like a parasitic virus. First humans, and now computers, are its host. It reproduces by communication from one brain to another, and evolves through [garbled] like the survival-of-the-fitte
st idea."
"Good," he said lightly. "A little sarcastic, but you seem to have that part down. Now, what has happened in the last ten thousand years since first contamination? Humans have developed ever better skills at communicating, processing, and storing the virus. First spoken language, which allows us to apply names to things and organize our thoughts. Then written language, which allows us to pass our thoughts not only from Rome to Constantinople, but from Aristotle to you or me. They could now leap through time as well as through space. The result is that the store of human knowledge exploded."
"The virus began to grow," Laura said, trying but failing to keep the skepticism from her voice.
"As knowledge flourished, we flourished. The parasite allowed us to develop sciences that extended our lives and arts that made life worth living. And we humans developed ever more advanced means of fostering the growth of knowledge. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we humans became a risk to ourselves and to the parasite. General wars threatened the wholesale destruction of civilizations and the knowledge reposited in them. And, what was it you said parasites do when their host is threatened by destruction?"
Laura opened her mouth to reply, but the words caught in her throat. She was too jarred by the ramifications.
"They reproduce massively," Gray supplied. "Is it a coincidence that right after we develop weapons of mass destruction we enter the Information Age? First we develop nuclear weapons, and immediately after comes the mass storage and communication of knowledge. We build a global village in which any idea anywhere is instantly passed to everybody else via an information superhighway. The late 1980s was the watershed. It was then that the total store of knowledge reposited in computers exceeded the amount stored in human brains. Which makes that knowledge what? Human knowledge, or just knowledge? The virus perpetuates itself through its hosts. Why do we hold the geniuses of our species in such high regard and so revere the accumulation of knowledge? Those traits are themselves merely ideas, but they're the ideas that most effectively foster reproduction of the virus."
Laura's thoughts were in turmoil now. She wavered between finding every last word he spoke to be evidence of some massive delusion, and believing it to be pure genius — a revelation that, once heard, is undeniably true. Her skin tingled at the mental conflict that erupted.
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