by Ian Douglas
“I’m not sure I approve of you being the guinea pig, Admiral,” Koenig said. “I almost overrode your order.”
“Thank you for not doing so, sir. This is important.”
Originally, the medicAIs had told him that they were going to attempt the first treatment on one of the infected members of America’s crew. Chief Drummond had volunteered . . . and, in fact, his case was deemed more serious than Gray’s, with severe vertigo, numbness, and pins-and-needles sensations suggestive of severe neural complications. Gray had given orders, however, that he was to be the first test subject.
Partly, of course, he was feeling guilty about having had sex with Harriet McKennon and starting all of this. Rationally, he knew that it hadn’t just been his tryst that had started the plague spreading. Rational or not, the guilt was still there, however, vastly amplified by the knowledge that the men and women on board America and the other battlegroup warships all were his responsibility. And because Gray was convinced that a good commanding officer shared everything with those under his or her command, including the dangers—especially the dangers—he had stepped up. Chief Drummond would be next in line for the antimicrobial programming after Gray.
Assuming, of course, that Gray survived what was coming.
“We have initiated the program compile, Admiral,” the medicAI told him. “The antimicrobial search-and-destroy routine has been transmitted by radio to the nanotechnic hunter-killers resident within your system.”
“Will I feel anything?”
“Unlikely, Admiral,” the medicAI said in his thoughts.
“Would you like to watch?” one of the human doctors asked him.
“Huh?” He’d not realized that that would be an option. “Sure . . . yeah. Let me see.”
The animated graphics of his body were replaced by a view at extremely high magnification obviously transmitted from somewhere inside his body. Dull red doughnut shapes bobbed and jostled through a round tunnel made of what looked like large scales blurred by speed . . . the cells lining one of his blood vessels.
And . . . yes! The tiny spheres of the alien microbes glistened ahead like droplets of pale silver as they were swept along in the fierce, heart-driven currents of the blood plasma. He saw three of them, adrift in the somewhat golden liquid of his blood.
Bacteria, red cells, and the nanoptics picking up the image were relatively motionless with respect to one another, but the surrounding walls of the blood vessel alternately blurred, then came to a near rest in successive pulses of movement. It took Gray a moment to recognize that was exactly what he was seeing: his own pulse.
“This is a real-time image?” he asked. “Not computer generated?”
“The color is calculated and created by computers,” the medicAI replied. “At these scales, the wavelengths of visible light are too long to be visible to human optics. But the images are real, as humans seem to define the term, yes.”
A medical nanobot entered the scene, a flat-white capsule propelled by a molecular motor. Crowding ahead of the device that was transmitting the image, it shot forward, its leading edge opening like a flower as it homed in on a single paramycoplasmid. It was impossible to watch the scene without reading emotions into the actions of both robots and bacteria; the sphere seemed to be deliberately fleeing as the capsule pursued relentlessly before trapping it at last against the curving, slightly fuzzy side of a red cell. The open flower snapped shut, engulfing the bacterium.
“Are the bacteria . . . aware of what’s happening?”
“Of course not,” the medicAI said. “Individual bacteria react to molecular compounds within their environment, but they can’t feel. Or think.”
“But Dr. Hoffman said they were intelligent . . .” Gray still wasn’t sure he believed that.
“Their presumed intelligence, remember, is an emergent phenomenon arising from the intercellular communications among some hundreds of millions of bacteria acting in concert. A single microbe is no more aware of the entire bacterial mass than a single one of your cells is aware of you, while the bacterial mass is no more aware of what’s happening to its constituent cells than you are aware of . . . say . . . your white cells battling bacterial invaders. The scales are simply too extreme.
“Here is the feed from another monitor ’bot,” the AI told him. The image blurred and shifted, showing now a kind of alien landscape outside of the blood vessel. Here, among a jumble of translucent cells, a number of bacteria—fifty or sixty, perhaps, appeared to have wired themselves together with long strands or filaments of something like mucus, forming a glistening, transparent wall suspended within the interstitial fluid between and around the cells and a complex web of branching and rebranching capillaries. They’d trapped one of the nanobot capsules, partially closing on it like a net around a fish.
Damn, the nanobot was struggling. . . .
Again, it was impossible not to ascribe both awareness and cunning to the microbes, which certainly looked as though they were fighting back against the nanotechnic assault. And Gray found himself feeling concern and a touch of emotional pain at the nanobot’s plight, even though he knew the thing was a tiny machine, and not alive at all. After a moment, however, other capsules arrived on the scene, perhaps summoned by the trapped ’bot, and began devouring the spheres at a breakneck pace.
“They’re physically eating the bacteria!” Gray said, surprised. He’d expected something more high-tech. Miniature laser beams, perhaps, or injected chemicals, or—
“Very much as your white blood cells engulf invading bacteria or foreign matter that has triggered your immune system,” the medicAI told him. “A process called phagocytosis. The nanobots will consume as many of the paramycoplasmids as possible, then redirect themselves, traveling through your circulatory stream either to your kidneys or to your colon for elimination.”
“I’m just going to . . . excrete them? Why?”
“It was thought safest to dispose of the dead microbes in this fashion, rather than risk systemic toxic shock in response to vast numbers of bacteria being destroyed all at once.”
“I can appreciate that.”
More and more nanobots were arriving on the scene. The numbers of bacteria dwindled. . . .
Gray had the feeling he was watching a savage and freewheeling space battle fought across a bizarre, extraterrestrial landscape . . . and had to remind himself that what he was seeing was not taking place within the vastness of space—outer space—but that it was confined to the ultramicroscopic vistas of inner space, an entirely different realm sundered from the reality he knew by the jarring difference in scale.
He tried to imagine the scope of the battle being waged within him—with bacteria and nanobots numbering in the hundreds of billions, locked in a desperate, no-quarter fight to the end. . . .
He failed.
Again, the vista shifted. The camera viewpoint was drifting above a vast, rounded surface, covered, it seemed, with blue scales. The scales, he thought, were cells—they were faintly translucent, and he could see the dark mass of nuclei inside—but they were far more tightly packed here than those he’d seen elsewhere. Above and around the surface, which was tinted a dark blue, were other cells, loosely packed, and bundles of capillaries running through the cell mass like the roots of a tree. He could actually see through the capillary walls and watch the flattened-doughnut shapes of red blood cells stacked up spoon-fashion as they pulsed along through the circulatory conduits.
There were a lot more of the spherical Paramycoplasma subtilis bacteria visible here, most of them burrowed down among the densely packed blue cells below. The nanobots were swarming above that surface, winkling the cocci out, actually nosing in between the cellular scales to get at them.
Gray was not medically trained and had only a vague idea of what he was looking at. The computer program showing the scene had identifiers appearing here and there, however, like labels in an anatomical docuinteractive. The blue layer of close-packed cells, he saw, was the mye
lin sheath of a nerve, with lots of blood vessels bundled close alongside—that matched up with what he’d been told.
And the fleet was going in to get them.
*Stop!*
The command was . . . wordless, a feeling rather than a spoken concept, but the meaning was clear. At the same moment, the headache returned with pounding savagery.
“Watch out!” one of the human physicians nearby said. “Blood pressure is spiking . . . one eighty-five over one twenty. Pulse one forty . . .”
Gray felt a crushing, numbing, suffocating pressure over his entire body. He tried to call out, but it was as though every muscle had been paralyzed. The dizziness was back, too . . . and, most terrifying of all, he was having trouble breathing.
He was aware of two conversations now . . . the humans communicating by spoken voice outside, and both AIs and humans talking on-line, over an electronic channel. The one thing he heard a human say clearly was, “The medulla has been compromised.”
The medulla? That was a part of the brain, wasn’t it? Gray wasn’t sure.
“BP one ninety-eight over one thirty.”
“Damn it, he’s going to blow a vessel!”
“Breathing in arrest!”
“Heart rate one eighty . . . pounding!”
Yeah, he could feel the pounding. His whole body was pounding, and there was blood in his mask, in his mouth, clogging his nose . . .
*Stop! Kill!*
Again . . . that inward scream, more raw emotion than words. The bacterial mass, Gray now thought, was trying to communicate. But was it a plea for mercy—“stop, before you kill me”—or a threat—“stop, or I will kill you”?
He’d lost the inner image of the internal battle, and all he could see now was the dark of the insides of his eyelids. He couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t move a single muscle, couldn’t breathe . . .
He tried to use the electronic channel to talk to the doctors, but found that even that was beyond him. He was seized in the grip of an overwhelming inertia; even thought was too difficult, too draining. . . .
The pain in his head and in his joints was worse, now. He was having trouble remembering anything. . . .
*Stop! Kill! Feel!*
Again, that damnable ambiguity. Did the superorganism want him, Gray, to feel something specific? To feel some new communication, perhaps? Or was it telling him that it felt as though it was being killed?
Desperate to understand, Gray opened himself to whatever the entity was trying to say, tried to relax despite the pain, tried to relax through the pain . . . accepting . . . opening . . . feeling. . . .
I am here, Admiral Gray, a voice said in his mind. Was that . . . America’s medicAI? It didn’t sound the same, and it took Gray a moment to recognize the mental voice of Konstantin. Koenig had said the supercomputer was present. Yes, he remembered speaking with it just now. His memory was fuzzy, but not completely gone yet. . . .
He felt like he was falling. He fell through utter darkness . . . and then he began to see . . . stars? Yes, stars! Stars surrounded him, flickering past on every side, and he could feel swarms of worlds circling suns without number . . . inhabited world teeming with life, with intelligence, with Mind. . . .
He could feel the connecting strands of communication between the worlds . . . sense sapient beings of every imaginable shape and form and description occupying worlds of every type, an incredibly rich diversity of life and of Mind filling the galaxy and spilling out into the Void beyond.
How were bacteria aware of the infinite vistas of space? He didn’t know . . . but he sensed that he was somehow seeing a kind of composite picture drawn from trillions of microbes inhabiting billions of hosts. The microbes had a wordless conception of themselves. Gray supplied the name: the Organism.
He also sensed a wordless question inherent in that scene. What did one life—his—matter compared with billions upon billions of host beings scattered throughout the galaxy, all inhabited—ridden—by the Organism?
A threat, perhaps? A declaration that they didn’t need him?
Space, for the Organism, was an infinite series of . . . the closest Gray could come to attaching a word to the idea was worlds. Each world, he sensed, was a host body to some trillions of cells, all of which together comprised the Organism. He began glimpsing weirdly nightmarish caricatures of alien beings. A few he recognized. Sjhlurrr: ponderous, eight-meter slugs; Baondyeddi: flat, pancake-like beings with hundreds of legs and sky-blue eyes around their rims; Agletsch: oval-bodied sixteen-legged arthropods with four weirdly stalked eyes . . .
There were many others Gray did not recognize.
Even the ones to which he could attach names were so distorted Gray could scarcely recognize them. Each appeared to be transparent . . . but filled to bursting with interwoven threads or branches like the interwoven roots of plants. It took Gray a long moment to finally get it.
Nervous systems! He was seeing the alien beings by means of three-dimensional maps of their central nervous systems! Networks of nerves . . . or perhaps alien nerve analogues in some of the stranger beings. In most he could recognize the large, governing mass of a brain. Some had several brains, or strings of brainlike nodes, or clusters of nervous tissue distributed throughout the body. The Baondyeddi, for instance, were packed with neural tissue around their rims behind those eyes and legs, with relatively fewer nerves in toward the center. Five swollen nodes around the being’s periphery appeared to be where it did its thinking.
In several instances the beings appeared to be completely lacking a central brain; any thinking they did must be somehow handled by the nervous system as a whole, like living distributed computer networks. The Sjhlurrr were such a species; apparently their entire nervous system worked like a brain.
Each individual was, he realized, a kind of composite image of the outside of the being as imagined by tiny, sightless observers guessing at the shape from the inside, and building it up from maps of the being’s CNS. Gray was immediately reminded of the cautionary tale of the three blind men with the elephant . . . but the Organism had done a surprisingly good job compiling unified images.
The alien bacteria, he remembered Hoffman saying, had been concentrating along his nerves, in the myelin sheaths. The cellular makeup of those sheaths was so dense that the relatively large medical nanobots were having trouble tunneling in between them. The bacteria didn’t appear to be trying to get away—how could they?—but they were very hard to get at.
He was having trouble holding on to consciousness.
“Damn! We’re losing him. . . .”
And Gray slipped into darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
10 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS Lexington
Thrymheim/Ace Orbit
0925 hours, TFT
“Commander,” Bigelow said slowly, as though choosing his words with extreme care, “this is strictly a volunteer assignment. And some would argue that it’s a job for a helm officer, not a ship’s exec.”
“I want the mission, Captain,” Laurie Taggart told him. “And I’m certainly not going to let someone else go when I could go instead.”
Bigelow grunted, then glanced at the Marine officer standing beside her. “Colonel? It’s your mission. Are you happy with Commander Taggart in charge of the Navy side of things?”
“I’ve already downloaded Ms. Taggart’s records and reviewed them, Captain,” Colonel Jamison replied. “An excellent and experienced officer. She’ll do just fine.”
Two of them were in Bigelow’s office on board the Lexington—Bigelow at his desk and Taggart standing at ease in front of him. Colonel Joseph Jamison was present virtually, his image projected into their retinas by the software mediating the conference. In fact, Jamison was in his office on board the Marine transport Marne, drifting a couple of kilometers off Lexington’s port beam.
Other officers were present as well, but only as voices within the heads of the people and AIs attending the meeting. “Sir!” one voic
e said. “Commander Taggart is too senior for this assignment. With respect . . . I ask you to reconsider. Sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Morris. Your objection is duly noted.”
“Sir—”
“Lieutenant,” Bigelow said with a tone of exaggerated patience, “we’re going to be engaged in a tricky bit of maneuvering when we pull out of the Ace, okay? I want my best pilot-qualified officer at the helm.”
“But—”
“That’s an order, son.”
“Sit down, Ben,” Taggart added, smiling. “You’ve been outranked.”
Plenty of other officers had volunteered for this op, Taggart thought . . . and it was a more junior officer’s billet. The heavy stealth-lander Lucas had been under the command of Janice Zhou . . . but Lieutenant Zhou was on the sick list, incapacitated by what looked like influenza . . . except that it wasn’t responding to influenza drugs or programmed nano. Bigelow wanted an experienced officer over there, but not his best helmsman.
She’d managed to convince Bigelow that she was the best choice. In any case, the actual piloting would be carried out by Lucas’s AI. They just needed a human in the loop, as demanded by fleet regs.
And it wasn’t as if they’d miss her on the Lady Lex. Pardoe could handle her duties as Lexington’s XO for the short run back to Earth, no problem, and the op on Heimdall shouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks, tops.
At least, that was what she kept telling Bigelow . . . and herself.
“Very well, Laurie,” Bigelow said. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure, sir. Just don’t forget us out here, right?”
Bigelow smiled, though there was a worried edge to the expression. “Don’t you worry about that. We’ll be back . . . and with half of the fleet if we can manage it. You just keep the Marines in line, okay?”
“I beg your pardon, Captain,” Jamison said, raising an eyebrow. “Since when does the Navy run the Marine Corps?”
