“When I arrived back home I felt as if I had miraculously escaped from a horror movie,” Judith continued, “and tried to forget the whole weird escapade. But years later I couldn’t get what had happened out of my mind. I founded the Association for Responsible Biotechnology to guard against nightmarish visions like Monty’s.”
“That’s why Monty took so much interest in the Neuro Group,” Nick said. “If his ultimate goal is to use nanomachines to rearrange the living brains of each person on earth, the Neuro Group’s software simulation of the brain is exactly what he needs to perfect his plan.”
“Precisely,” Judith said. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I lost track of Pavel when he moved to Switzerland. For six years I had no news of him, until Paul Aubrey approached my company last December on behalf of Hoff-Zeigy. Paul told me that Dieter Steffen and Pavel Isaacs had invented a rudimentary nanomachine that could rearrange DNA into any arbitrary sequence programmed into it.
“I went to Basel to speak with Dieter Steffen, and at my urging he built a weakness into the Feynman machines. Dieter sent me e-mail—which he encrypted—to tell me how he had weakened the machines: they cannot withstand carbon dioxide. Exposed to air, they disintegrate. I got his messages and decrypted them. Nobody besides Dieter and myself knew about this vulnerability.
“Pavel tried the nanomachines in an experiment on mice, and they worked—after a fashion. That is to say, the devices changed lots of DNA. The mice grew all out of kilter, developed tumors and died within a few hours. Dieter Steffen, a technician named Kurt Alder and Paul Aubrey witnessed the experiment. All three are now dead.”
“So now we know the secret of the Kali, anyway,” Nick said. “It holds genetic information, which is transferred into nanomachines that cut and splice DNA according to the Kali pattern.”
“Yes,” Judith said. “There must be a way to make different versions of the chip with different DNA sequences. Some might be programmed with the gene to turn mice into dwarfs, others with the gene to turn off human volition.”
“‘The gene to turn off human volition,’” Nick repeated. “In other words, the gene that acts like a skeleton key to give Monty access to your mind.”
“To your soul,” Judith corrected. “Over time, you would certainly lose it to him. Even if your mind—that is, your ability to think independently— remained intact.”
“That’s some fancy footwork—making a cache-controller do doubleduty as a PROM,” Casey said. “No wonder Pavel couldn’t quite pull it off.”
“But Pavel and Dieter are dead,” Nick said. “And they were the only two people who knew how their machine worked. Doesn’t that put a monkey wrench in the plans?”
“There’s no shortage of brilliant people who would die for the chance to complete them,” Judith said. “This is the most intellectually intoxicating work in the history of mankind. All over the world, in every multinational drug company, in every graduate school, in every bio-warfare group of every army, ambitious scientists are working on technology to manipulate the human genome.”
“Meanwhile,” Nick said, “every computer company is working on chemical computers that work like living cells. Overmind is simply the biodigital convergence that Rachel Tryson and Wall Street are masturbating over. But when you put Monty in charge, however, it becomes an Obedient Remote Servo-Organic Network: ORSON.”
“But it sounds so silly,” Jake Carelli said. “The people of the world responding to this guy Monty’s whim? What are we going to do, walk around like zombies with our arms outstretched in front of us? How could anyone believe it’s the next stage in human evolution?”
“When you think of the Overmind, don’t think of zombies,” Judith said. “Think of a swarm of bees, instantly communicating, sharing the same thought. Think of the best of the Guarneri String Quartet, when four musicians magically become one. Think of the person who knows what you’re thinking without asking, whose thoughts you share. In other words, think of love. From the dawn of time, holy people have sought Holy Union. And the Overmind is union—real, physical, chemical, electrical union. All it will cost you is your soul.”
Soul, schmole. Nick didn’t want to talk about metaphysics. He wanted first to completely understand the ORSON jigsaw puzzle—he still had some pieces in his hand, and he needed to make them fit. After that, the only thing he wanted to discuss was what to do with Monty: should they throw him off a cliff, or should they push him in front of a Basel trolley?
“Let me see if I have it,” Nick said. “The Kali chip contains the genome; the genome is transferred from the chip into Dieter’s nanomachines; the nanomachines rearrange DNA in our brains, which mutate until we’re all linked in Monty’s Overmind.”
“That’s it,” Judith said. “You’ve got it.”
“Well what the hell does any of this have to do with the Gulf War Syndrome? These machines didn’t even exist in 1989, or 1990, when Saddam was building his stockpile. There can’t be any nanomachines floating around in Gulf War veterans.”
“You’re right,” Judith said, “There are no nanomachines in Gulf War veterans.”
“Then what the hell was Barlow talking about? What evidence did the Garbougians find?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “What’s turning my cheeks so red?”
“The abstract from Pavel’s 1990 MIT dissertation described building a prototype pseudo-nanomachine based on T4 bacteriophage,” Judith said. “I obtained the abstract from the MIT library. The dissertation itself is missing.”
“You think that Saddam used Pavel’s prototype during the Gulf War?” Casey asked.
“If you were to inspect an Iraqi missile warhead,” Judith said. “I’ll bet you would find that it contained a Kali-chip and a ‘monster-cell’ full of T4 bacteriophage somehow reprogrammed with snippets of the human genome, probably Monty’s genotype.”
“I give up,” Casey said. “Why would Saddam be interested in throwing T4 bacteriophage altered with Monty’s genotype at soldiers on a battlefield? It doesn’t kill them, but five years later they get headaches and skin rashes. That’s hardly a weapon to strike fear in the hearts of his foes.”
“Remember Irangate?” Jake said. “The CIA acting like a loose conglomeration of individuals, corporations, and crime rings? Maybe some Ollie North figure was willing to trade prototype weapons for cash and some test results. He might have thought it was a ‘neat idea.’”
“Don’t forget Monty’s Naval connections from SCRI,” Judith said.
“Are you trying to tell me,” asked Nick, “that at the behest of Montaigne Meekman, the Gulf War was engineered by the CIA to test DNA-active weapons on American soldiers?”
“As Barlow proved,” Judith said, “it wouldn’t be the first time that American soldiers were used as guinea pigs for the benefit of a third party. I doubt that anyone but Monty knew the truth about his ‘weapon.’ My guess is that Monty himself swindled the CIA, and they in turn duped Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law—the one who ran the Iraqi biological weapons program. Kamel probably told Saddam that his SCUDs would turn American soldiers into the kind of obedient zombies that Jake asked about. Saddam may have attacked Kuwait in the hope of getting the 82nd Airborne under his telepathic command.”
“Subedai,” Nick said. “What would you do if you had a biological weapon that would put America’s armies under your control? I’ll bet Saddam was pissed when it didn’t work.”
“No wonder Kamel defected to Jordan,” Casey said.
“No wonder Saddam killed him when he went back to Iraq,” Jake added.
With this comment they all fell silent for a moment, as if exhausted. The wind whistling in the eaves sounded like a freight train passing. Casey was the first to resume speaking.
“So Monty is building nanomachines right now at Hoff-Zeigy?” she asked.
“Actually the machines are built at Digital MicroSystems Laboratories in Basel,” Judith said. “Kurt Alder sent the Association for Responsible Biotechnology a note to that effect, posthumously. The machines are used at Hoff-Zeigy.” Then she added, distractedly, “Corporations. Hitler never could have built his ovens so efficiently without them.”
“But your company works on the Human Genome Project too,” Casey said. “Aren’t you taking part, in a way, in the same undertaking?”
Judith answered slowly.
“Human Potential will develop very specific drugs, tools that can used for one purpose only, not a general-purpose tool like Dieter built. They’re working on a set of box wrenches, not an adjustable wrench. But this is hairsplitting, as I’ve come too late to understand. Accordingly, I have resigned from Human Potential, Incorporated.”
Jake had been pacing for the last few minutes, and now he exploded.
“That’s it?” he shouted at Judith. “You’ve resigned? You stand by and do nothing as this madman and his group of madmen infect millions of us; you sit there and tell us how the whole human race is under assault, and that’s all you’re going to do? Resign your job? Well Thank You. That’s very big of you.”
He walked over and leaned, with his face near hers, a boot-camp sergeant dressing down a green recruit, and raised his voice another few decibels.
“Let’s get for real, Judith: You’re smart. You’re the smartest one here. Hell, if I had half your brains I wouldn’t be an airport cop, I’d be the president of a fucking airline.”
“Jake!” Nick said, jumping up and pushing Carelli back. “Give her a break. She’s done all anybody could have done.”
“No,” Judith said. “Jake is right; I should have done more. But I never said I wouldn’t be part of the counterattack.”
This seemed to mollify Jake. He walked a few steps closer to the fire.
“Counter attack?” Casey said. “What’s the point? Even if we stop
Meekman, what kind of lives can we ever hope to have in this world they are making? How are we supposed to go on living, knowing what we know?” There was a long silence.
“Sorry I blew up,” Jake said, finally. “Us good guys better stick together. There ain’t many of us.”
Jake now walked to the door and opened it. The wind nearly took it off its hinges as he stepped into the night. Nick stepped outside too, closing the door behind him. He walked alongside Jake into the meadow, where they stopped, standing in water up to their ankles. The rain was coming down as hard as Nick had ever seen rain come down; almost instantly he was soaked to the bone. The only light came from the window behind them; all around them was darkness.
Jake spoke without looking at Nick.
“Where’s the Seventh Cavalry when you really need them?” he said.
“Gary Owen, motherfucker,” Nick answered.
Five minutes later Nick restarted the conversation as the steam rose from his clothes. Somebody had attended to the fire, and it was roaring now. “If Monty needed a computer chip to contain his genetic pattern,” Nick asked, “why didn’t he just build his own chip from scratch? Why bury the design in Kali?”
Casey had the answer.
“Monty needs to accomplish things by deception, to prove to himself that he’s the most clever. It’s what keeps him going. Besides,” she said, “Kali was a cache controller, designed to hold large amounts of regular information that it flushed very quickly. It’s the perfect chip to hide DNA in. Todd’s goal was to load, unload, and rearrange patterns as quickly as possible, like one of those puzzles that you slide the letters around. He didn’t care what the patterns were, only that he could move them fast. Whenever the Kali was done doing its real job, it reset itself to the Monty pattern. The only problem was, Pavel’s reset logic kept messing up Todd’s shuffle logic. That’s how Todd discovered the trick.”
“But Todd’s chip was canceled. They never built it,” Nick said.
“It was canceled after they had built the prototypes,” Casey said. “Probably about five hundred of them. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the design, which they now have. They can give a tape to any silicon foundry and have a chip in their hands four days later.”
Nick’s skin was chafing against his wet clothes, and his face felt absolutely on fire. As he moved back from the heat he noticed that the redness in Jake’s cheeks had grown brighter, too.
“What would happen,” Nick asked, “if you had these machines inside you? Is there any antidote for someone who’s been infected?”
“I suppose that the body would destroy the machines eventually,” Judith said. “After all, there’s CO2 in blood. These are only first-generation machines; fragile, unreliable. But I can’t think of any way to undo the damage.”
“I can,” Casey said.
The other three looked at her, and waited. Over in a back corner, there was a tap tap tap from a leak in the roof.
“First we would have to know how an original DNA sequence was packed into the chip,” she said. “DNA has four nucleotides: cytosine, adenine, somethingelseiforgetanine, guanine. CATG. Let’s say you’re tiling the floor of your house with DNA. C is a red tile, A is blue, T is green, G is white. When you know the sequence, it’s like you have a stack of tiles in the exact right order. A Kali chip is like a house already tiled. If you can figure out how your stack of tiles was laid out to create the pattern in your house, then you know the packing algorithm. Once you know that, you can substitute any stack for the original one, and make a new chip. With that new chip you program new nanomachines. Voila, antidote.
“Let’s say Judith has been infected with nanomachines that are changing her DNA to Overmind DNA. We just reinfect her with machines that change that DNA back to Judith DNA. End of problem. Of course,” she added, “once we’ve all been infected, we’ll have to repeat this procedure six billion times, with six billion individually-customized antidote chips. Assuming everyone’s not dead already, like those mice.”
“As you say, hardly practical,” Judith said. “To get back to my story: I did a foolish thing when I got back from visiting Dieter. We had agreed upon a certain password to encrypt our correspondence. Dieter wrote that password on one of his business cards, and I left it in my daily missal, the book I take to mass to follow the liturgy. The day after Dieter died, my office was rifled and the card was taken. So I assume that all my messages to and from Dieter have been decoded.”
Over in the back corner, the tap tap tap from the leak in the roof echoed, resounded, reverberated, thundered…
It was like a nagging mosquito: irritating all out of proportion to its size.
Funny, wasn’t it, how such a little thing could have such large consequences? A little thing, like a little moisture in the air? A little moisture, falling from sky to earth?
Nick said, “They’ve already made machines programmed with human genes, haven’t they?”
The rain seemed to have grown suddenly quieter. The leak tapped, but more slowly.
“Yes,” Judith said, finally, looking right at Nick.
“They have made human-acting machines.”
“And released them,” he said. “Yes.”
“In an oily matrix,” Nick said, “to protect the machines from carbon dioxide.”
“Yes. Protected by an oily fog, nanomachines programmed with human genes were released by the Corporate Fellows at the Biodigital Forum.”
In the firelight Nick considered in turn the faces of the other three members of the Prospect Hill Christian Fellowship. Casey looked stunned, punchy from this latest blow. Jake looked angry and confused, ready to beat the snot out of a phantom he couldn’t see. But Judith looked sad, infinitely sad.
“My mother was right,” she said. “My bitter, hate-filled mother was right. This scientific curiosity that we celebrate, this ‘noble quest to understand our universe.’ . . It’s a lie. It’s just a fancy name for lust. And for pride. There is no limit to the depravity that mankind will commit in the name of ‘progress.’ And why? Because we feel like it. That’s it. No other reason. Because we feel like it. It amuses us.”
“I’ve been wondering,” Nick said. “How is the Church of Monty structured? Clearly there’s some kind of ecclesiastical hierarchy. You’ve got your Corporate Fellows, you’ve got those kids you met up on the mountaintop; Barlow mentioned the EMVERK alumni society. Are these all different names for the same thing? And where will I fit in?”
“I don’t know,” Judith said.
“Are there different orders, like Jesuits and Franciscans? Different ranks, like Cardinals and Monsignors?”
“I don’t know.”
“Different essences, like cherubim and seraphim, thrones and dominations?”
“I don’t know, Nick,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got some Sunday school to catch up on before my first communion,” he said.
“And so we reach the climax of this ghost story,” Judith said quietly. “This tale of a lost soul. A soul not lost yet, but doomed to be lost. Here is the Frankenstein I promised. It’s Nick.”
She reached over and placed a loving hand on his.
“Nick is the monster, is becoming the monster.”
“How can you be so sure?” Jake said. “How do you know that Nick’s been infected? You weren’t even there!”
“Because,” Judith said. “Monty proved it to me.”