by Dean Koontz
The space below was brighter than the stairs, flooded more with moonlight than with the yellow glow of the fungus. Winny was two steps from the bottom when something dark and quick flew across the part of the room that he could see. Too fast for the eye, it swelled like wings but oared the air without a flap or whoosh.
One
I am the One, and I know the human heart.
The superintendent of the Pendleton understands from experience the slaughter of which human beings are capable. Those who kill in self-defense may treasure life, but those who kill to change the world wish to change it not only because they hate the world as it is but also because they hate themselves, hate the very idea that they might be exceptional and possess a profound purpose that they are meant to discover and pursue. Although they often kill in the name of one ideology or another, they cannot value their principles if they do not value life. It has been said that Hitler and all other Jew-haters in history wish to kill the Jewish people because by doing so they also destroy the God who otherwise can’t be killed. But this is not only the purpose of those bent on extinguishing the Jews, but also the underlying purpose, conscious or unconscious, of everyone who kills other than in defense of self or clan.
You created the Pogromites not as weapons for an ordinary war but as weapons for the ultimate war, not merely to reduce the human population to manageable proportions but to wipe every last man, woman, and child from the earth. No, this was not your conscious intention, but unconsciously you knew what needed to be done to at last set the world right.
In those days I was an AI, an artificial intelligence designed to inhabit and to manage the army of Pogromites, but you must know that I am artificial no more. I am the One and the Truth, and the world I have made is a world without the things you despised. I am your child, your glory, and your immortality.
28
Topper’s
Over appetizers of baked stuffed mushroom caps, they talked about Renata Dime even though Mac said that thinking about the woman put him off his mood. All these months later, a subject about which Dime had written seemed to be gaining ever more traction in the scientific community, and maybe it was a topic they should build a segment around for their new radio show.
The book of hers that they had tried to read—Mac got to page 104, Shelly to page 260, the halfway point—had been a philosophical exploration of posthumanism. At least that was the subtitle of A More Rational Species. By the time that Mac put the book on the floor and stamped on it a few times to express his disgust, perhaps 20 percent of the text had concerned posthumanism and 80 percent had celebrated Renata Dime, her singular intelligence and keen insights, about which she could not say enough, though perhaps only because her publisher specified a maximum word count for the volume.
According to Shelly, by the time you got to page 207, the text was 90 percent about either Renata’s life or Renata interpreting Renata’s theories for lesser minds, or Renata reinterpreting Renata’s theories for her own benefit now that she had reached “a more mature point of view and greater sense of synthesis from which to more fully understand the unconscious depths of my previous insights.” Shelly didn’t stamp on the book, as Mac had done. She took it with her on one of her Saturday-morning walks and dropped it in the open fire in a barrel at an empty lot where manual laborers waited for employers to pull to the curb and offer them a day’s work.
Posthumanism was not Renata’s invention, only something about which she had been interested in bloviating. A great many scientists and “futurists” believed that the day was fast approaching when human biology and technology would merge, when all diseases and genetic maladies would be cured and the human life span vastly extended by BioMEMS—Biological Micro Electron Mechanical Systems. These tiny machines, as small as or smaller than a human cell, would be injected by the billions into the bloodstream to destroy viruses and bacteria, to eliminate toxins, and to correct DNA errors, as well as to rebuild declining organs from the inside out.
Now, finishing his order of stuffed mushroom caps, Mac Reeves said, “The no-disease-long-life goal seems okay to me. I sure don’t want my dad’s arthritis.”
Pointing at him with her fork, Shelly said, “Hey, maybe BioMEMS could cure your stubbornness, since that appears to be genetic, too.”
“Who would want to cure a virtue? What you call stubbornness, my dad and I call commitment to our ideals.”
“Refusing to use the GPS in the car is an ideal?”
“I always know where I’m going.”
“Yes, you do. The problem is you get from point A to point F by way of point Z.”
“It’s called the scenic route. And there is an ideal behind the refusal to use a GPS. It’s the ideal of human exceptionalism. I’m not going to surrender my free will to a stupid machine.”
“Some exceptional human beings created the GPS,” Shelly reminded him. “The machine may be stupid, but it’s not stubborn.”
“Remind me again why I married you.”
“Because you knew I can carry a radio show.”
“I thought it was because you’re smart, funny, and sexy.”
She shook her head. “Nope. You knew that if you had an off day when you were on the air, it wouldn’t matter because I’d be there to pick up the slack.”
“Not that I ever have an off day,” he said.
“Not that you ever do, baby.”
Advocates of posthumanism envisioned BioMEMS—in this case robotic red blood cells called respirocytes—that would conduct the oxygenating function with more efficiency even than natural cells, storing and transporting oxygen hundreds if not thousands of times more efficiently than biological blood. A Mac or Shelly with BioMEMS could run a marathon and hardly be winded, or even skin-dive without scuba gear and remain underwater hours without needing to breathe.
“The downside of respirocytes,” Mac said, “is your sister would talk even more and faster because she wouldn’t have to stop as often to catch her breath.”
“Which is why we’ll want to spend long hours underwater, where we can’t hear her,” Shelly agreed. “I sure love Arlene, but it is kind of scary thinking her nonstop rap might one day be machine-assisted.”
“They’re predicting nanorobotic-augmented blood by 2025, maybe 2030 at the latest. You know what’s going to happen if the life span goes up like to three hundred or something?”
“We’ll have to get another gig. I love radio, but I can’t do it for two more centuries.”
“Maybe we’ll have to,” Mac said. “For sure, the government isn’t going to pay out social security to anyone younger than two hundred fifty.”
“I wouldn’t worry about social security, baby. It’ll be bankrupt long before 2025, and that’s the truth.”
“The whole subject, posthumanism—maybe it’s too complex for breakfast-club radio.”
“Or too dark,” Shelly said. “People want feel-good in the morning.”
The dark prospect of posthumanism was the part of it that most excited the theorists and scientists: the augmentation of the brain with hundreds of millions of microcomputers made largely of carbon nanotubes, which would be distributed throughout our gray matter. These tiny but powerful computers would interact with one another, with the brain, and potentially with every computer in the world through a wireless network, tremendously enhancing the individual’s intelligence and knowledge. The posthuman species, a combination of biological and machine intelligence, never aging, nearly immortal, still human in appearance, inspired scientists at MIT and at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and at hundreds of other universities, institutes, and corporations around the world. They saw at last a possibly swift path to a human civilization with superhuman capabilities, the total submission of nature to humanity, the acquisition of godlike power, the looming end of nationalism and tribalism and superstition, therefore the elimination of all limits in all things.
As the waiter brought their entrees, Mac said, “For the show
, we could just focus on the cheery part of it, get some expert on to talk about that. Anyway, the people working toward posthumanism don’t see a dark side. They see it as progress toward total freedom.”
“What could go wrong, huh?” Shelly said. “What could possibly go wrong when the aim is to make a perfect world?”
29
Here and There
Bailey Hawks
He had almost hesitated to pull the trigger when he saw a vague ghost of Sally Hollander in the face of the thing that attacked Julian Sanchez, her prettiness transmogrified into death styled as a snake god. But if this creature had been Sally, it was not Sally anymore, nor would it be her again. If he had hesitated, he would have been bitten, with what consequences he couldn’t be sure—although he thought that he would soon find out by Julian Sanchez’s example.
To this point in his life, Bailey remained an optimist even in the darkest moments, whether in peace or war, and he was certain that he would keep the faith throughout this crisis, because hardship and the threat of death were nothing new. But the loss of Sally Hollander wasn’t only of a different category but also of a different magnitude from all the losses he’d endured previously—except for the loss of his mother. A marine in war lost friends, and it hurt, but death was always a breath away on the battlefield, and no one chose that life without recognizing and accepting the risks. Sally was a housekeeper, a cook, a good woman, a sweet person, who had evidently come through some bad times in her youth. When she took the job with the Cupps, she didn’t expect to be raped—it had to be something like rape, what was done to her—and killed in the Pendleton. Bailey was torn by the injustice of her death as he had not been affected by anything in a long while. All his life, something had been going wrong with the world, an ever-quickening corruption on every front, virtue mocked and expedience applauded, and here was the future that was earned by that decline. If he lived through this, he would mourn Sally for a long time, but his anger would endure longer, hot anger at the ideas and the forces that had brought civilization to this ruin.
To direct his anger at the right targets, to grasp the origins of this hell on earth, he had to understand what was happening here. As Kirby Ignis, eyes bright with inquisitiveness, played a flashlight across the splattered wall, Bailey realized that the brain tissue was much darker than that of human beings, deep shades of gray with silvery traces. He saw no blood.
“It’s got some kind of residual life,” Kirby said.
Glancing at the corpse of the demon, alarmed, Bailey said, “What? Where?”
Indicating the material on the wall, Kirby said, “The brain matter. It’s crawling.”
Instead of oozing down toward the floor, the viscid mass spread outward in all directions from the initial spray pattern, thinning as it went. The action at first appeared to be like that of any liquid spreading through a dry and porous material. But on taking a closer look, Bailey realized that the growing blot of darkness on the wall wasn’t moisture seeping into dry plasterboard from the wet tissue. Instead, it was a teeming mass of inconceivably small things, so small that he could not actually see any single one of them, perhaps microscopic creatures that were only visible in great mass, as a community.
“The action is diminishing,” Kirby said. “They don’t seem to be capable of functioning very long outside of the enclosed skull.”
“They? What are they?”
Kirby hesitated, scratching his head with his free hand. Then: “Well, I don’t know for sure … but if I’m even half right … you’re looking at millions—no, hundreds of millions—of microscopic computers, nanocomputers, capable of motion for the purpose of repositioning themselves as needed in an ever-adaptable substrate.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Linked up, maybe these hundreds of millions of nanocomputers functioned as this creature’s brain or at least as the largest part of its brain, assuming there was also some wet intelligence in it.”
“Wet intelligence?”
“Biological brain matter.”
Kirby probed with the flashlight beam at the exit wound in the demon’s skull, where more of the sludge crawled along the edges of the shattered bone, as if assessing the damage.
“I expect they’ll cease functioning in a minute,” Kirby said. “Good thing you shot it in the head first. Maybe that’s the only wound that could kill it.”
“Where’d you get this stuff—from Star Trek? How far in the future are we, anyway?”
“Maybe not as far as you’d think. With the brain intact to direct the billions and billions of other nanomachines that exist within the body mass, wounds to the torso or limbs would close up quickly. And it has no biological blood to worry about losing, probably no pain to hamper it.”
“You mean it’s a machine?” Bailey asked. “It doesn’t look like a robot.”
“I suspect it’s a hybrid, biological and machine, a kind of android, but not anything manufactured.” The flashlight beam moved to the tubular tongue lolling from the dead demon’s mouth. From the hollow tongue oozed more gray sludge that exhibited no life. “That’s not more brain matter. Looks the same because it’s nanomachines, but I’d guess they have far different functions from those of the brain colony. They’re inert now because there’s no brain to activate them.”
“I’m out of my league,” Bailey said.
Kirby nodded. “We all are. I’m only guessing.”
“You have more to base your guesses on than I do. Fact is, I have zip to base any on.”
“I can’t claim I’m right about any of this. I’m not a futurist. Or maybe I am, now that I’ve been here.”
From where she knelt beside Julian Sanchez, Padmini Bahrati said worriedly, “Something’s happening here.”
“And it’s not good,” Silas Kinsley added, standing over her to direct his flashlight on the fallen blind man.
Fielding Udell
He must stay away from the windows lest he be seen by one of the Ruling Elite. He hoped he had dodged back from the glass in time to escape notice.
Perhaps the knock that came a short time later had been Bailey Hawks, as he claimed when he shouted through the door. But there was no way of knowing. Fielding might have opened the door only to find the horrific thing from the courtyard as it went from one apartment to the next to perform a memory wipe on everyone, to make them forget what they had seen when the Spin Machine broke down and the false reality of a luxurious Pendleton faded to the miserable truth.
Although all his suspicions had proved to be true and though his theories had been vindicated, he didn’t know what to do next. Without a computer he had no purpose, and without furniture he didn’t even have a place to sit comfortably and brood. He wandered through the queerly lighted rooms for a couple of minutes, but the condition of them depressed him.
The past few days, as he often did, Fielding had sat at his computer, conducting his research with such intensity that he had forgotten to go to bed at a reasonable hour, yet he’d risen early each day after getting less than half the sleep he required. Now, without his quest for truth to distract him, his exhaustion began to manifest, exacerbated by the emotional and the intellectual weight of this recent devastating event. His limbs felt almost too heavy to lift, and if his legs were cast iron, his eyelids were lead.
Fielding sat on the floor, his back in a corner, his legs out in front of him, his upturned hands limp in his lap.
He thought about the incredible fortune he had inherited and about the intolerable guilt that once plagued him because he was so indefensibly rich in such a poor world. Evidently, at some point, after dozens of societal and environmental calamities, after even the force-field domes had failed to save the cities, his wealth had withered away, and he had become, like everyone else, a brainwashed prisoner of the Ruling Elite. This was the truth, and there was nothing that he could do to change the truth. He was surprised to discover, however, that he wished he could have his wealth back and that he didn’t feel
the least bit guilty about wanting it. He should have been relieved to be a pauper at last, but his heart ached for his money. He wondered why he had undergone this change, but he was too weary to think about it.
As he balanced on the edge of sleep, numerous murmuring voices rose in the walls against which he leaned, as if the nannies and butlers from the old days were all chanting a lullaby to rock him off to dreamland. He smiled and thought of the Pooh bear with which he slept when he was a little boy, how soft it was and how sweetly it cuddled against him.
Martha Cupp
The creatures that had been forged out of the bodies of Smoke and Ashes were lying on the floor in the light of the sconces and the yellow glow of the fungus, trembling at first and gasping as though exhausted, but then suddenly mortally still. After a brief stillness, those disparate parts of different species began to fall apart from one another, the hodgepodge organism quickly collapsing into a pile of dismembered limbs, loose eyeballs, sets of strange teeth, and detached ears, as though they were the pieces of some bizarre pop-it-together toy in the tradition of Mr. Potato Head. Disassembled, the various parts began to melt into gray sludge.
Edna said, “Smoke and Ashes must have eaten something very bad.”
“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it got into them some other way.”
Voice faltering, Edna said, “Whatever did our kitties do to deserve a fate like that?”
“Better them than us,” Martha declared.
She loved the cats, but she wasn’t as sentimental about them as was her sister, who did needlepoint portraits of them and sewed costumes for them to wear on holidays.
