A Science Fiction Omnibus

by Brian Aldiss

  Three seconds of that – my jaw gaping – and it switched to his thoracic organs, then his musculature, and finally, vascular system and skin.

  ‘How long since the accident?’ I asked, trying to take the quiver out of my voice.

  ‘I haven’t been in an accident,’ he said. ‘It was deliberate.’

  ‘Jesus, they beat you, to keep secrets?’

  ‘You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. I’m not damaged.’

  ‘Look, there’s thickening here,’ I indicated the ankles, ‘and your ribs – that crazy zigzag pattern of interlocks. Broken sometime, obviously. And –’

  ‘Look at my spine,’ he said. I rotated the image in the video frame.

  Buckminster Fuller, I thought. It was fantastic. A cage of triangular projections, all interlocking in ways I couldn’t begin to follow, much less understand. I reached around and tried to feel his spine with my fingers. He lifted his arms and looked off at the ceilling.

  ‘I can’t find it,’ I said. ‘It’s all smooth back there.’ I let go of him and looked at his chest, then prodded his ribs. They were sheathed in something rough and flexible. The harder I pressed, the tougher it became. Then I noticed another change.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You don’t have any nipples.’ There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations at all.

  ‘See?’ Vergil asked, shrugging on the white robe. ‘I’m being rebuilt from the inside out.’

  In my reconstruction of those hours, I fancy myself saying, ‘So tell me about it.’ Perhaps mercifully, I don’t remember what I actually said.

  He explained with his characteristic circumlocutions. Listening was like trying to get to the meat of a newspaper article through a forest of sidebars and graphic embellishments.

  I simplify and condense.

  Genetron had assigned him to manufacturing prototype biochips, tiny circuits made out of protein molecules. Some were hooked up to silicon chips little more than a micrometer in size, then sent through rat arteries to chemically keyed locations, to make connections with the rat tissue and attempt to monitor and even control lab-induced pathologies.

  ‘That was something,’ he said. ‘We recovered the most complex microchip by sacrificing the rat, then debriefed it – hooked the silicon portion up to an imaging system. The computer gave us bar graphs, then a diagram of the chemical characteristics of about eleven centimeters of blood vessel… then put it all together to make a picture. We zoomed down eleven centimeters of rat artery. You never saw so many scientists jumping up and down, hugging each other, drinking buckets of bug juice.’ Bug juice was lab ethanol mixed with Dr Pepper.

  Eventually, the silicon elements were eliminated completely in favor of nucleoproteins. He seemed reluctant to explain in detail, but I gathered they found ways to make huge molecules – as large as DNA, and even more complex – into electrochemical computers, using ribosome-like structures as ‘encoders’ and ‘readers,’ and RNA as ‘tape.’ Vergil was able to mimic reproductive separation and reassembly in his nucleoproteins, incorporating program changes at key points by switching nucleotide pairs. ‘Genetron wanted me to switch over to supergene engineering, since that was the coming thing everywhere else. Make all kinds of critters, some out of our imagination. But I had different ideas.’ He twiddled his finger around his ear and made theremin sounds. ‘Mad scientist time, right?’ He laughed, then sobered. ‘I injected my best nucleoproteins into bacteria to make duplication and compounding easier. Then I started to leave them inside, so the circuits could interact with the cells. They were heuristically programmed; they taught themselves more than I programmed them. The cells fed chemically coded information to the computers, the computers processed it and made decisions, the cells became smart. I mean, smart as planaria, for starters. Imagine an E. coli as smart as a planarian worm!’

  I nodded. ‘I’m imagining.’

  ‘Then I really went off on my own. We had the equipment, the techniques; and I knew the molecular language. I could make really dense, really complicated biochips by compounding the nucleoproteins, making them into little brains. I did some research into how far I could go, theoretically. Sticking with bacteria, I could make them a biochip with the computing capacity of a sparrow’s brain. Imagine how jazzed I was! Then I saw a way to increase the complexity a thousandfold, by using something we regarded as a nuisance – quantum chitchat between the fixed elements of the circuits. Down that small, even the slightest change could bomb a biochip. But I developed a program that actually predicted and took advantage of electron tunneling. Emphasized the heuristic aspects of the computer, used the chitchat as a method of increasing complexity.’

  ‘You’re losing me,’ I said.

  ‘I took advantage of randomness. The circuits could repair themselves, compare memories, and correct faulty elements. The whole schmeer. I gave them basic instructions: Go forth and multiply. Improve. By God, you should have seen some of the cultures a week later! It was amazing. They were evolving all on their own, like little cities. I destroyed them all. I think one of the petri dishes would have grown legs and walked out of the incubator if I’d kept feeding it.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ I looked at him. ‘You’re not kidding.’

  ‘Man, they knew what it was like to improve! They knew where they had to go, but they were just so limited, being in bacteria bodies, with so few resources.’

  ‘How smart were they?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. They were associating in clusters of a hundred to two hundred cells, each cluster behaving like an autonomous unit. Each cluster might have been as smart as a rhesus monkey. They exchanged information through their pili, passed on bits of memory, and compared notes. Their organization was obviously different from a group of monkeys. Their world was so much simpler, for one thing. With their abilities, they were masters of the petri dishes. I put phages in with them; the phages didn’t have a chance. They used every option available to change and grow.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘What?’ He seemed surprised I wasn’t accepting everything at face value.

  ‘Cramming so much into so little. A rhesus monkey is not your simple little calculator, Vergil.’

  ‘I haven’t made myself clear,’ he said, obviously irritated. ‘I was using nucleoprotein computers. They’re like DNA, but all the information can interact. Do you know how many nucleotide pairs there are in the DNA of a single bacteria?’

  It had been a long time since my last biochemistry lesson. I shook my head.

  ‘About two million. Add in the modified ribosome structures – fifteen thousand of them, each with a molecular weight of about three million – and consider the combinations and permutations. The RNA is arranged like a continuous loop paper tape, surrounded by ribosomes ticking off instructions and manufacturing protein chains…’ His eyes were bright and slightly moist. ‘Besides, I’m not saying every cell was a distinct entity. They cooperated.’

  ‘How many bacteria in the dishes you destroyed?’

  ‘Billions. I don’t know.’ He smirked. ‘You got it, Edward. Whole planetsful of E. coli.’

  ‘But they didn’t fire you then?’

  ‘No. They didn’t know what was going on, for one thing. I kept compounding the molecules, increasing their size and complexity. When bacteria were too limited, I took blood from myself, separated out white cells, and injected them with the new biochips. I watched them, put them through mazes and little chemical problems. They were whizzes. Time is a lot faster at that level – so little distance for the messages to cross, and the environment is much simpler. Then I forgot to store a file under my secret code in the lab computers. Some managers found it and guessed what I was up to. Everybody panicked. They thought we’d have every social watchdog in the country on our backs because of what I’d done. They started to destroy my work and wipe my programs. Ordered me to sterilize my white cells. Christ.’ He pulled the white robe off and started to get dressed. ‘I on
ly had a day or two. I separated out the most complex cells –’

  ‘How complex?’

  ‘They were clustering in hundred-cell groups, like the bacteria. Each group as smart as a ten-year-old kid, maybe.’ He studied my face for a moment. ‘Still doubting? Want me to run through how many nucleotide pairs there are in a mammalian cell? I tailored my computers to take advantage of the white cells’ capacity. Ten billion nucleotide pairs, Edward. Ten E-f–ing ten. And they don’t have a huge body to worry about, taking up most of their thinking time.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m convinced. What did you do?’

  ‘I mixed the cells back into a cylinder of whole blood and injected myself with it.’ He buttoned the top of his shirt and smiled thinly at me. ‘I’d programmed them with every drive I could, talked as high a level as I could using just enzymes and such. After that, they were on their own.’

  ‘You programmed them to go forth and multiply, improve?’ I repeated.

  ‘I think they developed some characteristics picked up by the biochips in their E. coli phases. The white cells could talk to one another with extruded memories. They almost certainly found ways to ingest other types of cells and alter them without killing them.’

  ‘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, finding things, changing them.’

  ‘And by now, each cluster is as smart as you or I.’

  ‘You’re absolutely nuts.’

  He shrugged. ‘They fired me. They thought I was going to get 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 from a few inches. ‘About 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 there. 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 sun lamp with quartz treatments. Keeps them out of my skin, so far as I can tell, 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 find some way 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 yet. I don’t really want them to take over.’ He laughed very 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 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 in the afternoon, then destroyed all 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 was home before me, but it was my turn to fix dinner. She slipped one of the school’s disks into the home system and showed me video art her nursery kids had been creating. I watched quietly, ate with her in silence.

  I had two dreams, part of my final acceptance. The first that evening – which had me up thrashing in my sheets – 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 the 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 was giving birth to little embryo cities, all wrapped up in translucent sacs, soaked with blood from the difficult labor.

  I called him 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 with you. 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… 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 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. Like music. The heart, all the blood vessels, frict
ion 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 was glancing 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 was involving 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 was twisting his head back and forth, eyes open. ‘You always knew what you wanted to be, didn’t you?’ he asked me.

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘A gynecologist. Smart moves. Never false moves. I was different. I had goals, but no direction. Like a map without roads, just places to be. I didn’t give a shit for anything, anyone but myself. Even science. Just a means. I’m surprised I got so far. I even hated my folks.’

  He gripped 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 again. ‘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.’