Visions of the Future

by Brin, David

  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 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 chit-chat 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 chit-chat 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. 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 Genetron 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 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 only 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 four-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. Four billion nucleotide pairs, Edward. 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 each other with extruded memories. They 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. “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 improvement 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 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. 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 in the afternoon, 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 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. In the first, that evening, 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 gave 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… 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 stood 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, 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, pack 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, 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.”

  “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. It would be a farce.”

  “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, f
ixing 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 about 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 two o’clock, 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 around the kitchen wall at me. I said goodbye and hung up the phone. “They’re always swimming in that bath of information. Contributing to it. It’s kind of a 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 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 yet? What all this means, where it might lead?”