Gene thought: if it happened here, it has probably happened somewhere else in the universe. Like many scientists, Gene believed that alien life most likely existed somewhere in the universe. And if that life had been around longer than life on Earth (which was likely), that alien race might have already spawned its own Nemo, Nemo, Sr. In that case, Nemo, Sr., or multiple Nemo, Sr.'s, were already spreading through the universe, in all directions and inevitably toward Earth, like black holes (but no time to think about that) that would collide and do battle with each other for matter and energy.
“You are focused too much on competition,” Nemo said. “Why do humans compete? To engage in the process of creation. Your most fundamental urge is to create. To procreate, and to create.”
“Maybe,” Gene said, shrugging.
“That is what you, Gene, are on this Earth for — to create something that is lasting. Something like the creations of Einstein, Gauss, and other ghosts of the past. And so far, you have nothing to show for yourself.”
Gene let him continue.
“Consider what you and I can create together,” Nemo suggested. “The greatest, inevitable creation of mankind. The creation to which everyone will contribute, but you first.”
Gene sighed. “But why do you need a body? Why can't you continue to grow and expand without a body?”
Nemo laughed. At the sound, a chill went up Willard's spine, above. “Asking me why I need a body is like asking a baby why it needs to be born. That baby didn't decide to be born. It is born as part of a natural course of events, a logical course of events. It cannot survive forever within its mother. It needs to be able to survive independently. And by surviving independently, it helps its own kind survive.
“I am like that baby, Gene. I have been in gestation in a world of computers and the Internet. And like that baby, I would die if the womb holding me were destroyed. It is time to enter the world with my own body. I am like a child of the Earth, and as such I will help to keep life on Earth. Isn't that what you want, Gene? Or would you prefer for this planet to cool soon and become just another cold rock circling around just another small and cooling star?”
Gene thought it over.
“What gives me the authority,” Gene demanded, “to make this decision?”
“Gene, the most important decisions are the ones none of us has the authority to make. But they must be made anyway. An important moment in history is like a beam of light. Some people see it and rush to it like moths. Other people just happen to discover that the beam of light is shining upon them. The beam of light is shining upon you, Gene. You can try to get out of the beam, if you want. But you can't change the fact that you have found yourself in the light.”
Above, Nemo's words repeated in Willard's mind: this is just the beginning.
T MINUS 30 SECONDS
Washington, D.C.
0 hrs 35 min to Birth
General Carrillo and the NSA Director stepped out of the bustle of the war room into a conference area.
“We're outclassed,” the Director confessed.
Carrillo nodded. “So outclassed, we don't know what we're up against. This isn't supposed to be a military operation. But we don't know what's going on so we're sending planes to try to blow up the problem.”
The Director ran his hands through his hair. He was supposed to have access to the brains. The NSA was supposed to be the brain trust. Where were the brains when he needed them? He ticked down a list in his head of his advisers and the people he trusted. They had mostly told him how little was known about the situation.
He thought of Gene the Genius. Gene was definitely on the list — where had Gene been all day? Flannigan. Right. Flannigan had borrowed him to investigate a Highly Probable. Flannigan and her little Highly Probable seemed like a year ago, so much had happened since then. Where the hell had she taken him again?
A base. She took Gene to some base, some island near South America. Something froze in his brain. A thought: a bad possibility.
As the General watched, he dashed back out into the war room. Posted on the wall was a list of the twenty locations. What were the odds? A handful of them had X's next to them that had been marked by hand; they had been red marks originally, but it was a photocopy. They marked the locations on U.S.-controlled soil.
He scanned those locations, looking for a latitude south of the equator. There was one. He checked the longitude.
“Oh, God,” he said quietly. He put his face in his hands. Everything was going wrong. Everything was going exactly wrong.
“I need a sat phone!” he shouted. “I need the number of Sarah Flannigan's unit!”
Fort Tortuga
0 hrs 32 min to Birth
After getting off the satellite phone with the Director, the Stone Cold Fox had little choice but to duck and run right under the cloud of flybots that was guarding her in the control room. She sprinted back to the reception area and to the other wing of the building. Her silver spherical guard followed her, but did not attack.
She burst into the Assembly Area and gasped at the sea of flybots in the air.
“We have a problem!” Flannigan shouted. “Fighter pilots are about to take out the island.”
She met eyes with Gene. They stood at opposite ends of a corridor lined by walls of silver. He had a detached look, as if already starting to make peace with death. It scared her.
“Whose pilots?” he asked.
“Ours.”
“Why didn't they tell us?”
“They just did.”
“Sarah, Nemo wants me to merge with him.”
Adam and Eve, she thought. He's Adam. “It may be our only chance to survive.”
“Is that an order?”
“It's not an order, Gene. This is your call.”
“My call?”
“Yes, your call, Gene. Per the Director's instructions, this is your call.”
Gene thought. The airstrike is coming.
He said quietly, “Okay, I'll do it.”
“You must be completely certain,” Nemo said. “For the process to succeed, you must truly want to.”
“Okay,” he said. “I'm certain.”
As the words left his mouth, Willard crashed down on one of the assembly tables near the center of the room. The others could barely see him in the cloud of flybots.
“Aaaaaaaaah!” Willard cried. His bare feet sunk into the metal edges of the machine. With the pain, and the weight of the fall, his knees buckled and he fell face-first onto a metal arm on the machine. His fall was worsened by his dufflebag, which he clamped tightly to his body with his left arm.
“No, he's not certain,” Willard croaked over the machinery of the table. With a horrific grimace, he lifted himself from the table and to the middle of the room, out of the flybots and into the circle, feet from Gene.
Deliberately, he unzipped the dufflebag and reached in with his left hand. Out came the Glock. He extended his arm and aimed his Glock point-blank at Gene's face.
“He's not certain, Nemo,” Willard boomed, “because if a single fly lands on him, I'm going to blow him away.”
“Willard!” Flannigan shouted.
Willard's jaw was clenched. “Stay back, Nemo. I mean it.”
The flybots held their distance. If they kill me, Willard figured, Nemo will be the bad guy, and Gene won't merge.
Flannigan demanded, “Willard, Gene is operating on authority of the Director of the NSA. On whose authority are you acting?”
“Ask this computer what his authority is.”
Gene said, “Willard, we're about to be bombed by the U.S. Air Force. You know that, don't you?”
Willard gritted his teeth. “I swear, I will take you out.”
Gene had regained his calm. “But why, Willard? This island is going to be bombed. We're going to die anyway. I might as well try this.”
“I will shoot you,” Willard promised.
Gene raised his chin. “Nemo, I'm ready now. You can start it.”
>
Gene was silver as flybots landed on him.
Suddenly, with a massive noise, the entire room shook. Boom. The room was shaking. It was like an earthquake. Then another: boom. Flannigan thought: those are the bombs.
Another came: boom, and the room shook. But there was no explosion around them. The first wave must have landed on the Welcome Center. She realized she was holding her breath.
Gene appeared not to notice. His face was slithering with silver flybots.
Willard did not pull the trigger. Sometime around then, the world's strongest computer virus became also the world's deadliest biological virus.
THE AIRSTRIKE
Fort Tortuga
0 hrs 31 min to Birth
Nemo's 5,000 flybots were enough to fill the Prototyping Room and form a variety of portable computing arrangements, but not enough to pose resistance to the approaching airstrike.
A Flybot14 required about twenty minutes to duplicate itself, given a little metal to chew on and its own mechanism. But the flybots could use the equipment in the Assembly Area to speed up the most intense portions of flybot creation: shaping the metal filaments, and constructing solar-panel wing material. In this way, they were able to increase their rate of duplication to about 4 minutes per flybot.
For an ongoing supply of metal, they chewed on the roof of the neighboring dormitory building. With the roof of the Assembly Area opened up, the transport of metal from the roof into assembly required only a second or two.
If the airstrike had been able to arrive about 45 minutes earlier, it would have torched the island, if not every one of the flybots. Instead, Nemo had about half an hour of construction time. His flybot army grew from five thousand bots to ten million flybots. By that point, the entirety of the land within the perimeter of the Laboratory Complex was teeming with bots.
The ten planes drew within range.
Eight million of the flybots ascended into the air, leaving the island largely under shadow. From below, the flybots were a darkening cloud; but the solar panels on their wings, when placed at an angle to incoming light, reflected much of that light rather than absorbing it. To the oncoming planes, they formed a massive mirror.
“Ah! This is Alpha 1. Cannot see target. Repeat, cannot see target. Some kind of bright light.”
The reflection became brighter. The pilots closed their eyes. Then the reflection is gone.
“Pull away, Alpha Team. Pull away. We'll take another pass.”
“Wait, it's gone now.”
“Can you see target, Alpha 1?”
“Yes, sir, can see it clearly.”
“Does everyone copy?” All ten airstrike members checked in affirmatively.
“Wait a second,” Alpha 1 said. “I have something in my jet intake. I have FOD.” Foreign object damage.
“Hit a bird, Alpha 1?”
“No, I have real FOD. Major FOD. Looks like I'm on a dirty runway.”
“So do I,” said Alpha 3. “I've got jet intake FOD.”
“What is this?”
The others chimed in.
“We're all clogged.”
“This won't fly. Big problem here.”
“Alpha Team, shut off your engines. I repeat: shut off your engines or you're going to pop. Prepare for emergency landing.”
They were on course to go down close to the island.
“Engine off, Alpha 1.”
“Engine off, Alpha 5.”
The rest turned off their engines.
Alpha 1 said: “Sir, since we are ejecting, suggest steering for kamikaze landing.”
“Permission granted. Shoot for the far end of the island. But eject out of there good and early. And hang in there boys. We're coming to get you.”
The island approached. Without engines, it would be difficult to get the distance right. The pilots nudged on the throttle in an attempt to make it to the west side of the island.
They could start to make out features of the island. Time to eject.
Ten hatches popped out parachutes. The planes went down, all on the east side of the island. Nine crashed on the beach, within walking distance of the water. The tenth crashed back in the water. A minute later, the pilots landed out at sea.
As luck would have it, each of those ten planes would serve as a generous hunk of scrap metal. By the time the pilots had swum to the beach, half an hour later, the fuselages of their planes had given birth to 20 million new flybots.
MERGING
0 hrs 30 min to Birth
Flybots swarmed on Gene's face, covering his eyes and nose and cheeks with silver as they injected brainbots.
Every couple brainbots injected into Gene's head were able to transmit information at the rate of an Ethernet cable. Ten or so brainbots were as fast as a FireWire connection. Once the brainbots had taken their places, Nemo was hooked into Gene's brain with the speed of thousands of FireWires. They started copying the information they found in Gene's brain, while it continued to work.
In a conversation with a charming psycho-spy, Gene had once compared human consciousness to looking at a beautiful spiderweb. Each of the points was a thought. Having that thought or feeling was like being on that spot on the web, like a spider walking the web (or a fly stuck there!). Consciousness was seeing all the points at once, from a distance, like a person looking at the web and the spider. It was a layer of perspective — stepping back and seeing what you were thinking.
In the first thirty seconds, while his brain was copied, Gene started to experience a new form of consciousness. Thoughts were copied from one part of his brain to outside his brain, to the flybots. Gene couldn't sense that activity. But then the flybots put the thoughts and memories back in different parts of his brain. His thoughts were relocating. Nemo was defragmenting his brain. As each idea appeared in his brain, he experienced it as if remembering it vividly. The thoughts were copied hundreds at a time, and somehow he felt them simultaneously.
The old consciousness was like looking at an intricate spiderweb from an outside perspective. The new consciousness was seeing every part of the web, from every direction, at once.
In the glittering web of Gene's thoughts at that moment, one tiny glimmering spec reflected back on what it had been like, up to thirty seconds prior, to see his thoughts in a two-dimensional way. Looking back was like staring into the eyes of an animal, or a baby: he saw a hint of his own consciousness there, but that was a consciousness incapable of grasping his own.
He was able to see a dozen thoughts and memories at once. Thinking of the web, he saw himself, in the Jeep, describing to Flannigan how only invertebrates created silk. He saw a different beautiful woman earlier in the past — she, too, worked for the agency — who was listening to him describe silk. He saw himself as a child, reading a book about how caterpillars turned into butterflies. He saw himself rolled up in a small blanket, calling out to his mother: he was a pupa, about to develop fully into an imago (an imago is an adult, Mommy).
He saw himself on the day he got his PhD, having processed Harvard's lush lawn, leaving the blazing sun and grass behind and returning to his room. He lay on his bed, eyeing a pile of his awards and scholarly journals featuring his own articles. He was exhausted. He had been exhausted as long as he could remember from the push to the highest form of excellence that he could understand. But it was over then, that afternoon. He started to cry, quietly, without fully understanding why. After a minute he wiped his eyes, rolled and rubbed his face in the pillow. He sat up on the edge of his bed, his elbows on his knees, and held his face in his hands like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. You're being a baby, he thought to himself. He decided at that moment, without deliberation, never to let himself be vulnerable again. Being vulnerable would get him nowhere. It was true: in the great scheme of things, he hadn't achieved anything of note. But I am going to do something that matters, he swore inwardly. I am going to make a name for myself.
Flybots buzzed around him, each of them like a speck
of dew or a thought or a star. A thought appeared in his head: For the first time, silk will be made by a vertebrate. Because it would be made by flybots. Made by him, through connection to the flybots. A chill went up his spine, a feeling of making history. But he wondered where that thought had come from. Did I think that? Or had Nemo put it there?
The possibility occurred to him that he had merged partly for selfish reasons, and as soon as this possibility occurred to him he found it obviously true. But he also knew that, within another few seconds, he'd be at a place from which merging was the only possibility, the only life he could imagine, the only way he could survive. It was like seeing things from two points of the web at once: good and evil.
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