At the top of the hill, she scowled upon discovering a barbed-wire fence. She tried to squeeze through, but it was too tight. Better to withdraw before she hurt herself. But a barb caught on her shirt and it ripped as she pulled back.
Her shirt was ripped mostly open now. But that was no problem. She took it off, revealing her perky breasts and thin tummy to the sun. She tossed one end of the fabric over the barbed wire. Holding both ends of the shirt, she pulled the barbed wire into a bunch. She had to exert a great deal of strength, but she managed. Then, pushing down on the shirt, she leapt nimbly over the wire to the other side before the fence snapped back up into place.
She gingerly made her way down the hill and found herself in a darker, cooler space under the jungle canopy. It was perfect, she thought. She could have stayed there forever. Taking a cue from her half-nakedness, she slipped off her pants and carried them, wearing nothing but her sandals now. She did that sometimes in the woods back home; it made her feel more connected with the nature around her. She was bold about it, doing it sometimes even when she might be seen. But she was pretty sure no one would see her in these woods. She carried her clothes slung in a bundle over her shoulder.
She started walking through the jungle, taking loving care to avoid the spiders and slimy things on her toes, feeling happier than she had felt in a while. This way heads parallel to the road, she figured. She could go back toward the Welcome Center.
She walked for a while, pondering what would come of her but without great concern. She got smeared and scratched as she went when it was difficult to find a trail.
Suddenly there was a great roaring in the jungle. It sounded like a lion. She stopped, listened, looked. She had a sharp eye. She saw an animal running at a distance. She could identify it as a gorilla from the way its body swung through its arms.
Then, running after the gorilla, she saw something that made her heart stop.
Two humanoid figures in orange, with bulbous heads, were running after the gorilla. They were wearing what looked like spacesuits.
They looked clumsy running after the gorilla, almost like men walking the moon in fast-motion. But the gorilla was running from them as if for dear life. And then all three of the figures were out of sight.
It was difficult to make sense of the strange scene. But she reminded herself, Everything is connected. She recalled Koginka's foreboding premonition. The great struggle had begun, a war between the forces of darkness against nature. The people in suits were from the government, from forces of darkness. It was amazing how quickly they had arrived; she imagined them descending quickly for battle all over the Earth. With those suits, they may not even have been human. She thought of a secret Koginka had told them, a secret she did not dare repeat even to herself.
What would they have done if they had seen me? she wondered. She felt suddenly vulnerable in her nakedness. She wondered where was safest. Maybe where she stood.
She was suddenly sad and lonely, hiding in the jungle, feeling sorry for the gorillas. She made a cushion of her clothes and sat cross-legged on it to meditate. She set her hands on her knees and closed her eyes. By letting go of her thoughts and feelings, their deeper truths might present themselves to her. Her mind slipped into a state that was not awake, but not asleep in a normal sense.
BIRTH OF TUPAC
In my volume 'On the Origin of Species' I gave...reasons for the belief that it is an almost universal law of nature that the higher organic beings require an occasional cross with another individual; or, which is the same thing, that no hermaphrodite fertilises itself for a perpetuity of generations. —Charles Darwin
There was a warning cry from the silverback, and the gorillas scattered with a crashing of branches and flashes of black fur and white teeth.
It was the largest silver cloud the gorillas had ever seen. It cast the gorillas and their small clearing into darkness.
A delegation of flybots dived at Tupac, the silverback. Tupac's face and snout were covered with silver. He hooted and pawed at himself as the flybots burrowed through his hair, made contact with his skin, and sunk in their probosces. From each proboscis, a needle emerged within the skin and secreted anti-coagulant, like a mosquito, to prevent blood from clotting inside its needle.
This time, however, the flybots did not inject a poison, or a tranquilizer. They injected a plasma containing some of the smallest nanobots ever created: brainbots.
After injecting the plasma, the flybots that hadn't been crushed by Tupac's angry fists withdrew their probosces and lifted off. They collected into a silver cloud hanging above Tupac and off to the side.
Tupac fell to the ground, sore from the bites and tired by his rage. Mama poked out a little from the foliage, keenly aware of the silver cloud that was still present.
Injected from all angles in Tupac's skull, the brainbots did not have to travel far to distribute themselves throughout his gray matter. Within half a minute they had reached the innermost parts of his brain.
Tupac started shaking his head and holding it in his hands. Nemo's test was failing initially, but he was making rapid adjustments. At every moment, the brainbots were communicating back and forth with the massive computing network of flybots above.
He straightened up and knuckled his way forth to the middle of the clearing. Above, the flybots pulled apart into a broad ring, allowing the sunlight to shine down on the clearing.
Tupac looked to the sky, beat his chest, and howled. It was one of the one or two dozen sounds used by gorillas to communicate.
He continued howling, but he held his arms wide open as he looked up. He howled again and again. Mama and the children found the noise unusual. To a human observer, it would have sounded like singing. Or chanting.
Tupac stopped chanting. He looked around slowly, peacefully. He made a chuckling noise, a sound made more commonly by gorilla children.
Using common gorilla gestures, Tupac motioned for Mama and the children to join him in the middle of the clearing. They were hesitant, since the large ring of silver insects was still overhead. But, as the silverback, Tupac was responsible for signaling danger and communicating instructions to the group, so they slowly came to meet him. Mama began grooming him a little.
Tupac held his family close to him, reassuringly, as several groups of flybots descended from the ring. They came down slowly, like butterflies more than mosquitoes.
1 hr 30 min to Birth
Tupac, Mama, and the children sat slightly apart, in a circle, in the clearing. It was unusual for gorillas to sit in an organized fashion, and to refrain from grooming each other. The ring of flybots hung over the trees.
They gestured using ASL, or American Sign Language. Given the limitations of their anatomy — the absence of vocal chords — ASL was an efficient way to communicate. Sometimes, they spelled words in the sign language alphabet to express more complex ideas.
They knew that the flybots would not attack them, as they had done for so long. They understood also that the flybots were not controlled by humans anymore.
“I name myself Tupac Yupanqui, after Túpac Inca Yupanqui,” he gestured. “According to Inca legend, the ruler Tupac traveled from the nearby mainland to islands, possibly even this island. We ourselves were taken on a long journey from Africa to this island, near where Tupac's empire once thrived.”
“Then I will take the name of Tupac's wife, Mama Occlo,” Mama said.
“You are the Mama, after all,” a child signed. They chuckled.
Tupac scratched himself and continued. “The name is significant for another reason. Tupac's father, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, grew the small Inca empire until it covered most of South America. With the help of our new God, we will achieve a similar task.”
They hopped on their knuckles and marveled at the enormity of this mission. As they pondered, each periodically felt a flash of feeling and thought. It was the exact mental state of one of the others, captured by the brainbots in that other gorilla and projected down fro
m the flybot satellite above. In this way, sitting around the circle, they empathized more closely than any other group of creatures ever had.
One of the children motioned. “He tells me that he is going to run a test. He will disconnect me from his computer,” he signed, pointing up to the silver ring.
The others nodded. They waited a moment. “Has it started?” Tupac signed. “Can you understand us?”
“Yes,” signed the boy gorilla. “I can understand you. My thinking is slower, though.”
“That makes sense,” Tupac replied. “Your brain has been wired to remember what it learned. It's like any other memory.”
“Yes, I remember,” signed the boy.
“Tell me, boy: if we were going to fix the airplane — the one eaten by flybots — would you know how to do it?”
The boy thought and shook his head. “No, I don't know how.” He raised a finger. “Wait — there it is. He ended the test. He put it in my head.”
“He can teach us,” Tupac summarized, “and we can remember.”
“As he grows,” Mama mused, “will he control our thoughts? Will he...enslave our minds?”
“No,” Tupac said. “We help him think. We provide bodies for him, but also minds. Each of our minds is like a computer to him. But to let us help him, he must let us think.”
“He may guide what we think about.”
“Yes, he may.”
“Then should we try to escape him?”
“It may already be too late; he could guide us not to. He is guiding us right now. And escape would be difficult, since his mind is always expanding.”
“True,” she signed.
“Additionally,” Tupac signed, “There is little difference either way. How do we guide our thoughts? They appear in our head, and it feels to us as if we guide them. With Nemo's contribution, it is no different.”
They agreed.
“We will call him Inti,” Tupac declared, “after the sun god of Tupac's people. He is bright, like the sun above us, and he gives us nourishment like God.”
“I'm hungry,” the boy signed.
“Learning has made us hungry,” Mama signed.
Tupac nodded. “Let's go to the south side of the island. There may be food there.”
They knuckled off, and Inti, the silver ring, followed overhead.
TREE
1 hr 20 min to Birth
At a faint rustling sound, Preeti's eyes popped open. She found herself sitting just as when she had begun her meditation, by a tree, on a pile of her clothes. She wasn't sure how much time had passed; the tree cover blocked most of the light from the sun.
Her sharp eyes spotted the source of the rustling a couple dozen yards away: three gorillas were watching her from behind the partial cover of some high grass. They looked peaceful, gentle, curious.
They appeared to be grooming each other, moving deftly with their hands. But, after a moment, she realized that they were gesturing.
One of them, a middle-sized gorilla, looked directly at her and made a motion. She smiled with excitement. She knew that gorillas had some ability to communicate, but she'd never heard of them signaling to humans in the wild.
The gorilla continued to gesture at her. She didn't recognize the gestures, but they looked sophisticated. The simian appeared to be trying different gestures and awaiting a response from Preeti.
Finally, Preeti waved back with a beaming smile. To her shock, the gorilla waved back at her. The third gorilla — a child, judging by its size — also waved back.
Preeti motioned for the gorillas to come closer, and they slowly knuckled through the foliage and approached her. They stopped a couple yards away.
Preeti pointed to herself. “Preeti,” she said.
The female gorilla, who had been designated impromptu as the ambassador, brushed her hand down in front of her face with a slight wave of the fingers and a smile. She was signing the word “pretty.” At first the gorilla thought Preeti was complimenting herself, but quickly realized Preeti was introducing herself. The gesture would serve as Preeti's sign name for a while — until Preeti was able to explain to them that her name meant “light,” not “beautiful.” At that time, her sign name was given a flickering motion by the chin at the end of the gesture, so that the word meant something like “pretty light” and expressed a combination of the sound and the meaning of her spoken name.
After a moment, the mother gorilla walked to a nearby tree and slapped its trunk while she looked at Preeti.
“Tree,” Preeti said.
The gorillas all nodded. The mother gorilla showed her a new gesture: holding her left arm horizontal, she rested her right elbow on top of the left hand. Holding the right arm up straight from the elbow, she turned her fingers back and forth in a motion that looked like the branches of a tree.
Preeti repeated the gesture, which was simple enough. “Tree?” she asked.
The gorillas clapped and jumped up and down.
As the language lesson continued, Preeti realized she had found her new home.
THE CHOSEN ONE
Fort Tortuga, Indoor Testing Room
1 hr 15 min to Birth
Gene was regaining clarity of thought and the ability to move. As his mind cleared, he reflected on the One Attack Rule. He thought Nemo could have circumvented the rule.
He stood up and looked around. He was at the edge of the fake desert town. There were no flybots. But surely Nemo could see him on the security camera.
“Hello?” he called out. “Hello?”
There was no response. Why wasn't Nemo answering? Gene had already won the game of hide-and-go-seek. He had “found” Nemo; Nemo was all around him.
But Nemo wanted something else from him now. That was the whole point of the Reverse Turing Test. Gene had passed the test: now it was time for step two. Nemo was waiting for him.
He walked to the door of the testing room and opened it and went into the hallway.
Maybe Flannigan and Kenny were in the control room next door. But he was afraid to check. Doing so could be construed by Nemo as looking for him in the wrong place. That could lead to a zapping.
He walked down the hallway to the lobby. As he passed through, he barely looked at Simon, knowing that Simon was there, that Simon was dead, and why. Gene was no soldier, and he didn't know whether he could handle looking at a dead body. He proceeded into the hallway on the western side of the building and came to the end of the hall.
<-- Computer Lab
<-- Prototyping Room
Assembly Area -->
The signs were like clues. 1. Computer Lab. 2. Prototyping Room. 3. Assembly Area. They were like a story of Nemo's life. First, he was born on a computer. Second, he developed a prototype of some new invention on this island. And now, it was time to assemble that prototype.
He's replicating himself. He was born a computer virus, copying himself from computer to computer. Now he was a robotic virus, building himself an army of flybots. What would he be next — a biological supervirus?
Gene's own words from that morning appeared in his head: The only question is when the next virus will appear and how many lives it will claim. He laughed. It was too terrible, too perfect. He had been talking just that morning about what a surprise the next big virus would be. It had been a surprise all right: coming so much sooner than anyone expected, and in a form no one had imagined or could take seriously.
Kenny had met Nemo in the Prototyping Room. Gene was sure of it. Now it was his turn to meet Nemo, in the Assembly Area.
He walked to the right. The door to the Assembly Area was open (in violation of the island's security standards). He walked in.
It was like a butterfly garden. Flybots everywhere, coming and going casually about their individual business. The room was enveloped in a buzz; it sounded to him like a thousand rubber bands being snapped all at once, over and over. He thought he saw one or two other species of robot. But it was difficult to tell, because the air was thick with fl
ybots. He could barely see the room's assembly machinery through the silver haze. Nevertheless, Nemo had considerately left the walkway free of the bots, revealing a passage through the swarm, as in an outdoor maze.
He walked into the chamber. It was large, almost as large as the testing room. It had a circular domed ceiling that cast bright sunlight into the room. That's to charge their solar panels, he thought. It meant the flybots inside could work on the construction without pause. Flybots making flybots, thanks to the power of the sun.
He stopped in the center of the chamber, standing on a large FlyTech logo decorating the floor. Nemo had left this part of the chamber mostly free from flybots, and Gene could see up and out through a huge circle in the ceiling to the blue sky.
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