Lots of independent little machines was one thing. How about lots of little machines that worked together? All designed for particular functions, but co-ordinated by a neural relationship with each other, possessed of a power and intelligence that was greater than the sum of its parts. Imagine what that could do.
When I heard the idea I whistled. I tried to, anyway. My lips had gone all rubbery from too much beer and instead the sound came out as a sort of parping noise. But they understood what I meant.
‘And no-one else is working on this?’
‘Oh, probably,’ David smirked, and I had to smile. We’d always both nurtured plans for world domination. ‘But with the three of us together, no-one else stands a chance.’
And so it was decided, and ratified, and discussed, over just about all the beer the bar had left. At the end of the evening we crawled back to David and Rebecca’s room on our hands and knees, and I passed out on the sofa. The next day, trembling under the weight of a hangover that passed all understanding, I found a place to stay in town and went to talk someone in the faculty of Medical Science. By the end of the week it was confirmed.
On the day I was officially enrolled in the next year’s intake the three of us went out to dinner. We went to a nice restaurant, and we ate and drank, and then at the end of the meal we placed our hands on top of each other’s in the centre of the table. David’s went down first, then Rebecca’s, and then mine on top. With our other hands we raised our glasses.
‘To us,’ I said. It wasn’t very original, I know, but it’s what I meant. I bet all three of us wished there was a photographer present to immortalise the moment. We drank, and then the three of us clasped each other’s hands until our knuckles were white.
Ten years later Rebecca was dead.
The Coast Road was deserted, as I had expected. The one thing nobody is doing these days is heading off down to the beach to hang out and play volleyball. I passed a few vehicles abandoned by the side of the road, but took care not to drive too close. Often people will hide inside or behind and then leap out at anyone who passes, regardless of whether that person is in a moving vehicle or not.
I kept my eyes on the sea for the most part, concentrating on what was the same, rather than what was different. The ocean looked exactly as it always had, though I suppose usually there would have been ships to see, out on the horizon. There probably still are a few, floating aimlessly wherever the tide takes them, their decks echoing and empty. But I didn’t see any.
When I reached Sarasota I slowed still further, driving out onto Lido Key until I pulled to a halt in the centre of St Armand’s Circle. It’s not an especially big place, but it has a certain class. Though the stores around the Circle were more than full enough of the usual kind of junk the restaurants were good, and some of the old, small hotels were attractive, in a dated kind of way. Not as flashy as the deco strips on Old Miami Beach, but pleasant enough.
Last night the Circle was littered with burnt-out cars, and the up-scale pizzeria where we used to eat was still smoldering, the embers glowing in the fading light.
We worked through our degrees and out into post-graduate years. At first I had a lot to catch up on. Sometimes Rebecca snuck me into classes, but most of the time I just pored over their notes and books, and we talked long into the night. Catching up wasn’t so hard, but keeping up with both of them was a struggle. I never understood the nanotech side as well as Rebecca, or the computing as deeply as David, but that was probably an advantage. I stood between the two of them, and it was in my mind where the two disciplines most equally met. Without me there, it’s probable none of it would ever had come to fruition. So maybe if you come right down to it, and it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.
David’s goal was designing a system which would take the input and imperatives of a number of small component parts, and synthesize them into a greater whole—catering for the fact that the concerns of biological organisms are seldom clear-cut. The fuzzy logic wasn’t difficult—God knows we were familiar enough with it, most noticeably in our ability to reason that we needed another beer when we couldn’t even remember where the fridge was. More difficult was designing and implementing the means by which the different machines, or ‘beckies’, as we elected to call them, interfaced with each other.
Rebecca concentrated on the physical side of the problem, synthesizing beckies with intelligence coded into artificial DNA in a manner which enabled the ‘brain’ of each type to link up with and transfer information to the others. And remember, when I say ‘machines’ I’m not talking about large metal objects which sit in the corner of the room making unattractive noises and drinking a lot of oil. I’m talking about strings of molecules hardwired together, invisible to the naked eye.
I helped them both with their specific areas, and did most of the development work in the middle, designing the overall system. It was me who came up with the first product to aim for, ‘ImmunityWorks’.
The problem of diagnosing malfunction in the human body has always been the number of variables, many of which are difficult to monitor effectively from the outside. If someone sneezes, they could just have a cold. On the other hand, they could have flu, or the bubonic plague—or some dust up their nose. Unless you can test all the relevant parameters you’re not going to know what the real problem is—or the best way of treating it. We were aiming for an integrated set of beckies which could examine all the pertinent conditions, share their findings, and then determine the best way of tackling the problem—all at the molecular level, without human intervention of any kind. The system had to be robust—to withstand interaction with the body’s own immune system—and intelligent. We weren’t intending to merely tackle things which made you sneeze, either: we were never knowingly under-ambitious. Even for ImmunityWorks 1.0 we were aiming for a system which could cope with a wide range of viruses, bacteria and general senescence: a first aid kit which lived in the body, anticipating problems and solving them before they got started. A kind of guardian angel, which would co-exist with the human system and protect it from harm.
We were right on the edge of knowledge, and we knew it. The roots of disease in the human body still weren’t properly understood, never mind the best ways to deal with them. An individual trying to do what we were doing would have needed about 300 years and a research grant bigger than God’s. But we weren’t just one person. We weren’t even just three. Like the system we were trying to design, we were a perfect symbiosis, three minds whose joint product was incomparably greater than the sum of its parts. Also, we worked like maniacs. After we’d received our Doctorates we rented an old house away from the campus, and turned the top floor into a private lab. Obviously there were arguments for putting it in the basement, historical ‘mad scientist’ precedents for example, but the top floor had a better view and as that’s where we spent most of our time, that kind of thing was an issue. We got up in the mornings, did enough to maintain our tenure at the University, and worked on our own project in secret.
David and Rebecca had each other. I had an intermittent string of short liaisons with fellow lecturers, students or waitresses, each of which felt I was being unfaithful to something, or to someone. It wasn’t Rebecca I was thinking of. God knows she was beautiful enough, and lovely enough, to pine after, but I didn’t. Lusting after Rebecca would have felt like one of our beckies deciding only to work with some, not all, of the others in its system. The whole system would have imploded.
Unfaithful to us, I suppose is what I felt. To the three of us.
It took us four years just to fully appreciate what we were getting into, and to establish how much work was involved. The years after that were a process of slow, grinding progress. David and I modeled an artificial body on the computer, creating an environment in which we could test virtual versions of the beckies Rebecca and I were busy trying to synthesize. Occasionally we’d enlist the assistance of someone from the medical faculty, when we needed more of an insight into a part
icular disease; but this was always done covertly, and without letting on what we were doing. This was our project, and we weren’t going to share it with anyone.
By July of 2016 the software side of ImmunityWorks was in beta, and holding up well. We’d created code equivalents of all of the major virus and bacteria, and built creeping failures into the code of the virtual body itself—to represent the random processes of physical malfunction. An initial set of 137 different virtual beckies was doing a sterling job of keeping an eye out for problems, then charging in and sorting them out whenever they occurred.
The physical side was proceeding a little more slowly. Creating miniature biomachines is a difficult process, and when they didn’t do what they were supposed to you couldn’t exactly lift up the hood and poke around inside. The key problem, and the one which took the most time to solve, was that of imparting a sufficient degree of ‘consciousness’ to the system as a whole—the aptitude for the component parts to work together, exchanging information and determining the most profitable course of action in any given circumstance. We probably built in a lot more intelligence than was necessary, in fact I know we did; but it was simpler than trying to hone down the necessary conditions right away. We could always streamline in ImmunityWorks 1.1, we felt, when the system had proved itself and we had patents nobody could crack. We also gave the beckies the ability to perform simple manipulations of the matter around them. It was an essential part of their role that they be able to take action on affected tissue once they’d determined what the problem was. Otherwise it would only have been a diagnostic tool, and we were aiming higher than that.
By October we were closing in, and ready to run a test on a monkey which we’d infected with a copy of the Marburg strain of the Ebola virus. We’d pumped a whole lot of other shit into it as well, but it was the filovirus we were most interested in. If ImmunityWorks would handle that, we reckoned, we were really getting somewhere.
Yes of course it was a stupid thing to do. We had a monkey jacked full of one of the most communicable virus known to mankind in our house. The lab was heavily secured by then, but it was still an insane risk. In retrospect I realise we were so caught up in what we were doing, in our own joint mind, that normal considerations had ceased to really register. We didn’t even need to do the Ebola test. That’s the tragic thing. It was unnecessary. It was pure arrogance, and also wildly illegal. We could have just tested ImmunityWorks on plain vanilla viruses, or artificially-induced cancers. If it had worked we could have contacted the media and owned our own Caribbean islands within two years.
But no. We had to go the whole way.
The monkey sat in its cage, looking really very ill, with any number of sensors and electrodes taped and wired on and into its skull and body. Drips connected to bioanalysers gave a second-by-second readout of the muck floating around in the poor animal’s bloodstream. About two hours before the animal was due to start throwing clots, David threw the switch which would inject a solution of ImmunityWorks 0.9b7 into its body.
The time was 16:23, October 14th, 2016, and for the next 24 hours we watched.
At first the monkey continued to get worse. Arteries started clotting, and the heartbeat grew ragged and fitful. The artificial cancer which we’d induced in the animal’s pancreas also appeared to be holding strong. We sat, and smoked, and drank coffee, our hearts sinking. Maybe, we began to think, we weren’t so damned clever after all.
Then…that moment.
Even now, as I sit here in an abandoned hotel and listen for sounds of movement outside, I can remember the moment when the read-outs started to turn around.
The clots started to break up. The cancerous cells began to lose vitality. The breed of simian flu which we’d acquired illicitly from the University’s labs went into remission.
The monkey started getting better.
And we felt like gods, and stayed that way even when the monkey suddenly died of shock a day later. We knew by then there was a lot more work to do in buffering the stress effects the beckies had on the body. That wasn’t important. It was just a detail. We had screeds of data from the experiment, and David’s AI systems were already integrating it into the next version of the ImmunityWorks software. Becky and I made the tweaks to the beckies, stamping the revised software into the biomachines and refining the way they interfaced with the body’s own immune system.
We only really came down to earth the next day, when we realised that Rebecca had contracted Marburg.
Eventually the sight of the St Armand’s dying heart palled, and I started the car up again. I drove a little further along the coast to the Lido Beach Inn, which stands where the strip starts to diffuse into a line of beach motels. I turned into the driveway and cruised slowly up to the entrance arch, peering into the lobby. There was nobody there, or if there was, they were crouching in darkness. I let the car roll down the slope until I was inside the hotel court proper, and then pulled into a space.
I climbed out, pulled my bag from the passenger seat, and locked the car. Then I went to the trunk and took out the bag of groceries that I’d carefully culled from the stock back at the facility. I stood by the car for a moment, hearing nothing but the sound of waves over the wall at the end, and looked around. I saw no-one, and no signs of violence, and so I headed for the stairs to go up to the second floor, and toward room 211. I had an old copy of the key, ‘accidentally’ not returned many years ago, which was just as well. The hotel lobby was a pool of utter blackness in an evening which was already dark, and I had no intention of going anywhere near it.
For a moment, as I stood outside the door to the room, I thought I heard a girl’s laughter, quiet and far away. I stood still for a moment, mouth slightly open to aid hearing, but heard nothing else.
Probably it was nothing no more than a memory.
Rebecca died two days later in an isolation chamber. She bled and crashed out in the small hours of the morning, as David and I watched through glass. My head hurt so much from crying I thought it was going to split, and David’s throat was so hoarse he could barely speak. David wanted to be in there with her, but I dissuaded him. To be frank, I punched him out until he was too groggy to fight any more. There was nothing he could do, and Rebecca didn’t want him to die. She told me so through the intercom, and as that was her last comprehensible wish, I decided it would be so.
We knew enough about Marburg that we could almost feel her body cavities filling up with blood, smell the blackness as it coagulated in her. When she started bleeding from her eyes I turned away, but David watched every moment. We talked to her until there was nothing left to speak to, and then watched powerless as she drifted away, retreating into some upper and hidden hall while her body collapsed around her.
Of course we tried ImmunityWorks. Again, it nearly worked. Nearly, but not quite. When Rebecca’s vital signs finally stopped, her body was as clean as a whistle. But it was still dead.
David and I stayed in the lab for three days, waiting. Neither of us contracted the disease.
Lucky old us.
We dressed in biohazard suits and sprayed the entire house with a solution of ImmunityWorks, top to bottom. Then we put the remains of Rebecca’s body into a sealed casket, drove upstate, and buried it in a forest. She would have liked that. Her parents were dead, and she had no family to miss her, except us.
David left the day after the burial. We had barely spoken in the intervening period. I was sitting numbly in the kitchen on that morning and he walked in with an overnight bag. He looked at me, nodded, and left. I didn’t see him again for two years.
I stayed in the house, and once I’d determined that the lab was clean, I carried on. What else was there to do?
Working on the project by myself was like trying to play chess with two thirds of my mind burned out: the intuitive leaps which had been commonplace when the three of us were together simply didn’t come, and were replaced by hours of painstaking, agonizingly slow experiment. On the other hand, I
didn’t kill anyone.
I worked. I ate. I drove most weekends to the forest where Rebecca lay, and became familiar with the paths and light beneath the trees which sheltered her.
I refined the beckies, eventually understanding the nature of the shock reaction which had killed our two subjects. I pumped more and more intelligence into the system, amping the ability of the component parts to interact with each other and make their own decisions. In a year I had the system to a point where it was faultless on common viruses, like flu. Little did the world know it, but while they were out there sniffing and coughing I had stuff sitting in ampoules which could have sorted them out forever. But that wasn’t the point. ImmunityWorks had to work on everything. That had always been our goal, and if I was going to carry on, I was going to do it our way. I was doing it for us, or for the memory of how we’d been. The two best friends I’d ever had were gone, and if the only way I could hang onto some memory of them was through working on the project, that was what I would do.
Then one day one of them reappeared.
I was in the lab, tinkering with the subset of the beckies whose job it was to synthesize new materials out of damaged body cells. The newest strain of biomachines were capable of far, far more than the originals had been. Not only could they fight the organisms and processes that caused disease in the first place, but also they could then directly repair essential cells and organs within the body to ensure that it made a healthy recovery.
‘Can you do anything about colds yet?’ asked a voice, and I turned to see David, standing in the doorway to the lab. He’d lost about two stone in weight, and looked exhausted beyond words. There were lines around his eyes that had nothing to do with laughter, and he looked older in other ways too. As I stared at him he coughed raggedly.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 8