The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF Page 3

  I squinted in concentration. “Uh.”

  “Look closer.”

  “I’m not sure. Well, yes, you’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”

  “No. I don’t need them anymore.”

  “And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”

  “Candice isn’t – wasn’t responsible for the improvement in my clothes,” he said. “I just got a better job, more money to throw around. My taste in clothes is better than my taste in food, as it happens.” He grinned the old Vergil self-deprecating grin, but ended it with a peculiar leer. “At any rate, she’s left me, I’ve been fired from my job, I’m living on savings.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”

  “Genetron Corp.,” he said. “Sixteen months ago.”

  “I haven’t heard of them.”

  “You will. They’re putting out common stock in the next month. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs. Medical – ”

  “I know what MABs are,” I interrupted. “At least in theory. Medically Applicable Biochips.”

  “They have some that work.”

  “What?” It was my turn to lift my brows.

  “Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”

  That was quite impressive. Bernard’s reputation was spotless. Not only was he associated with the genetic engineering biggies, but he had made news at least once a year in his practice as a neurosurgeon before retiring. Covers on Time, Mega, Rolling Stone.

  “That’s supposed to be secret – stock, breakthrough, Bernard, everything.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”

  I whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”

  “If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time with me before rushing off to your broker.”

  “Of course.” He hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “So tell me more.”

  “Well, in med school I was training for lab work. Biochemical research. I’ve always had a bent for computers, too. So I put myself through my last two years – ”

  “By selling software packages to Westinghouse,” I said.

  “It’s good my friends remember. That’s how I got involved with Genetron, just when they were starting out. They had big money backers, all the lab facilities I thought anyone would ever need. They hired me, and I advanced rapidly.

  “Four months and I was doing my own work. I made some breakthroughs” – he tossed his hand nonchalantly – “then I went off on tangents they thought were premature. I persisted and they took away my lab, handed it over to a certifiable flatworm. I managed to save part of the experiment before they fired me. But I haven’t exactly been cautious . . . or judicious. So now it’s going on outside the lab.”

  I’d always regarded Vergil as ambitious, a trifle cracked, and not terribly sensitive. His relations with authority figures had never been smooth. Science, for him, was like the woman you couldn’t possibly have, who suddenly opens her arms to you, long before you’re ready for mature love – leaving you afraid you’ll forever blow the chance, lose the prize. Apparently, he did. “Outside the lab? I don’t get you.”

  “Edward, I want you to examine me. Give me a thorough physical. Maybe a cancer diagnostic. Then I’ll explain more.”

  “You want a five-thousand-dollar exam?”

  “Whatever you can do. Ultrasound, NMR, thermogram, everything.”

  “I don’t know if I can get access to all that equipment. NMR full-scan has only been here a month or two. Hell, you couldn’t pick a more expensive way – ”

  “Then ultrasound. That’s all you’ll need.”

  “Vergil, I’m an obstetrician, not a glamour-boy lab-tech. OB-GYN, butt of all jokes. If you’re turning into a woman, maybe I can help you.”

  He leaned forward, almost putting his elbow into the pie, but swinging wide at the last instant by scant millimeters. The old Vergil would have hit it square. “Examine me closely and you’ll . . .” He narrowed his eyes. “Just examine me.”

  “So I make an appointment for ultrasound. Who’s going to pay?”

  “I’m on Blue Shield.” He smiled and held up a medical credit card. “I messed with the personnel files at Genetron. Anything up to a hundred thousand dollars medical, they’ll never check, never suspect.”

  He wanted secrecy, so I made arrangements. I filled out his forms myself. As long as everything was billed properly, most of the examination could take place without official notice. I didn’t charge for my services. After all, Vergil had turned my piss blue. We were friends.

  He came in late at night. I wasn’t normally on duty then, but I stayed late, waiting for him on the third floor of what the nurses called the Frankenstein wing. I sat on an orange plastic chair. He arrived, looking olive-colored under the fluorescent lights.

  He stripped, and I arranged him on the table. I noticed, first off, that his ankles looked swollen. But they weren’t puffy. I felt them several times. They seemed healthy but looked odd. “Hm,” I said.

  I ran the paddles over him, picking up areas difficult for the big unit to hit, and programmed the data into the imaging system. Then I swung the table around and inserted it into the enameled orifice of the ultrasound diagnostic unit, the hum-hole, so-called by the nurses.

  I integrated the data from the hum-hole with that from the paddle sweeps and rolled Vergil out, then set up a video frame. The image took a second to integrate, then flowed into a pattern showing Vergil’s skeleton. My jaw fell.

  Three seconds of that 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 ceiling.

  “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 tough 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 went 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.”