Small Miracles Read online

  wednesday, november 23, 2016

  Vision was a curious mechanism, and One’s study of vision never ended.

  The host’s eyes were seldom still. Even in sleep the eyes continued to move. At such times the eyes saw nothing, but still they moved. Their activity in sleep loosely correlated with the seemingly random information retrievals of dreams.

  Awake, eyes were in constant use. Wakeful eyes were the primary means of collecting data from the world beyond the host. Then the eyes darted about, attracted to any hint of out-of-body activity. Motion was somehow central to the vision process. When nothing in the field of vision moved for a long time, the eyes twitched to simulate external motion.

  One’s most recent analysis dealt with these near-constant waking tics and twitches of the eyes. It concluded these motions were instinctive, outside the host’s conscious control.

  And because those visual tics were beyond the host’s conscious control, One’s manipulation of those twitches caused neither panic nor resistance.

  With flicks and blinks One could, with care, summon data from that vast, mysterious, all-important, out-of-body, everywhere-and-nowhere source of data that Brent called the Internet. With the skill One had mastered to hide things within the host’s field of vision—and sufficiently small display windows—it could also hide from the host what it had retrieved from the Internet.

  But only while the host remained connected to this still but vaguely perceived Internet.

  Endorphin rewards while the host wore specs. Endorphins withheld when the host did not. Those should teach the host to keep One connected.

  thursday, november 24, 2016

  To the background roar of football, Kim tried to bring order to a kitchen that had thrown up on itself. The kitchen was laid out for righties, mutter mutter, and that made the task twice as hard. Someday, when her ship came in, she’d build a house and put its dishwasher to the left of the sink.

  The dishwasher was crammed. The sink was full. The dish drainer was heaped. Dirty pots and pans still covered the cooktop. Could any apartment kitchen properly handle Thanksgiving dinner?

  Nick, of course, had offered to help, but she told the guys to watch the game. It wasn’t as though she ever watched football. And it was better that she be on her feet and moving. She wasn’t ever going to eat again … not until pie, anyway.

  Kim wondered how it was going in the living room. She didn’t hear much talking. Brent had been moodier than usual—which was already pretty irritable these past few weeks—throughout dinner. Miffed at having his solitary plans found out? Or at being greeted at the door with an ultimatum. “VR specs or dinner. Pick one.”

  “Can I give you a hand?” Brent asked, through a kitchen door suddenly ajar. The TV was off or muted. “Drying falls within my skill set.”

  She handed him a dish towel. “Bad game? What’s the score?”

  “Nick is sawing wood out there. ODed on tryptophan, I’m thinking. Since the game is TiVoed, I’ll go back when Nick wakes up.” Brent dried for a while. “Thanks for having me.”

  “Thank your sister.”

  Jeanine had called a couple days earlier to thank Kim for having Brent to Thanksgiving dinner, since he didn’t feel up to the trip home. Only Kim had stopped inviting Brent years ago. He had flown home to Chicago for Thanksgiving for as long as she had known him. She would offer good odds it had been at least every year since the divorce.

  It was the damn VR glasses, Kim guessed, and the lousy bandwidth available on planes. Brent hadn’t lied to her—not exactly—just not bothered to correct her when she had commented on him seeing his folks soon.

  He had the decency not to reply.

  “So what were your holiday plans if Jeanine hadn’t tipped me off?” Kim pictured corned beef and cranberries at the Irish bar where he had taken to hanging out.

  He shrugged. After a while he changed the subject. “I’m starting to remember more about that day. The docs said I might. Better late than never, I suppose.”

  Wasn’t that good news? Perhaps some things are best forgotten. “Go on, Brent.”

  More silence. “I finally remember getting out of the police cruiser. There were people up the embankment, all around the gas pipeline. Teens, mostly. Tapping the pipeline. I wanted to chase them away before anything happened. I tried. That’s why I got out of the car.”

  “You tried to save them. You should feel proud about that. I’m proud of you.”

  “That makes one of us.” Brent swallowed hard. “Funny thing, Kim. Probably the only person I saved was me. If that.”

  If that? Before she could think of an appropriate follow-up, the TV audio came back on. It wasn’t football. “Whoa,” Nick called. “Guys. You gotta see this.”

  She dried her hands and went into the living room. Brent followed.

  Nick sat on the sofa with remote in hand. He had switched to CNN, a worse habit for him than ESPN. He speed-reversed a bit. “Read the crawler. It’s horrible.”

  “That it is,” Kim said. The crawler reduced things to the bare essentials: “Bizarre medical attacks on Utica homeless leave two paralyzed.”

  Local TV news had covered little else for the past few days, but the story was news to Nick. He had just that morning taken a puddle-jumper flight from LaGuardia. Utica hardly needed this kind of national visibility. The City That God Forgot bumper stickers were already all too common around town.

  Kim subscribed to the Observer-Dispatch—what Nick called the Observer Fish Wrap—only for ads and coupons, but the O-D had surely covered this story. She retrieved that day’s issue from the recycling bin. “It’s sick,” she said.

  Nick skimmed. “Five incidents. The indigents unaware they had even been assaulted, the evidence discovered in the ER. Umm, what’s a lumbar puncture?”

  “Spinal tap,” she answered, still reading over his shoulder. She had had to ask Aaron the same question.

  “On-the-street spinal taps? On unconscious vagrants? What type of sicko does that?”

  She had no answer. How many more than five, she wondered, too afraid or unbalanced or confused to contact the police?

  “Mind if I turn the page?” Nick asked. At her nod, he flipped to the continuation. “This is appalling. Nicked nerves. Bleeding. Infections going into meningitis. Appalling.”

  “Brent. You know some local cops. What do they …” Kim’s voice trailed off as she looked up.

  Brent was intent on the game, watching with the sound muted. It took him almost a minute to notice her staring. He managed a world-weary one-handed gesture that seemed contrived. “Bad stuff happens,” he said, as though that explained anything, and turned back to the game.

  She and Nick exchanged bewildered looks. When had Brent become so callous?

  * * *

  Brent thrashed, trapped between alertness and sleep. His thoughts/dreams/memories were a muddle, as though a thief randomly ransacked the cubbyholes of his mind.

  The images were odd. Warped. Dreamlike? Dalí-like?

  He hung in a wall in a drugged haze, much of his body numb, as cars exploded and bodies burned. He careened through traffic—at the same time recognizing Genesee Street with its traffic lights at almost every corner, keeping pace with the other cars, certain he could not be going faster than thirty. He drove—crept—through a seedy neighborhood, unfamiliar, but somewhere in Utica judging by details of the street signs and lampposts. He wandered about Garner Nanotech, VR specs flashing, studying, learning … sometimes with that odd-yet-familiar sense of displacement. Of watching through another’s eyes.

  He tossed and turned in the bed.

  Thoughts/dreams/memories—and feelings. Delight at new knowledge. Confusion with—almost everything. Wild emotional swings, and once more that strange sense of someone (some One?) rifling through his mind. Pity and dismay on Kim’s face, as though he were somehow less than human.

  Brent’s eyes flew open. He sat up, heart pounding, the situation suddenly clear. He was not less than huma
n.

  He was much more.

  BREEDING

  friday, december 9, 2016

  A tabletop centrifuge spun, emitting a high-pitched whine. In a corner, the compressor of a refrigerator (for samples?) kicked on with a gurgle and a tinny clatter. Screen-saver images drifted around the LCD displays of digital PC microscopes. Two autoclaves hummed. Anatomical models and posters, and a pole-mounted human skeleton wearing a Santa hat, decorated the room.

  Most of the gear was unfamiliar to Kim. Bio labs—and more so, biohazard signs—gave her the creeps. Aaron, though, sauntered around nodding approval. This lab stuff must all be familiar to him, Kim thought, from med school if not something more recent.

  “Thanks for guiding me through the labyrinth,” Aaron said. His office happened to be as far as possible from the R & D area, and he lacked any sense of direction. His first, solo trip back here had reportedly involved twenty minutes and lots of backtracking.

  Kim wanted to believe they were about to learn something. Optimism came hard. She told herself it was only the dreary December weather. The days were short, the skies leaden, and it seemed every dawn revealed another couple inches of snow. At least Utica knew how to cope with snow. One such snowfall back home was a weather emergency and would have shut things down for days.

  But far more preyed on her spirits than the weather.

  Glimpsed motion brought Kim’s thoughts back to the lab, as Aaron reached out to pluck a quarter from behind her ear. “For your trouble.”

  Juggling and childish magic tricks. Her hopes for Brent were pinned on this … yes, “clown” was the right word. “I’ll be getting along, Aaron. My being here would probably just annoy Charles.”

  Aaron winked, and Kim knew Charles must be standing behind her. She turned. There was Charles, straightening his red-and-gold silk tie. Harvard, though once upon a time Brent liked to “forget” and ask about Yale. Back when Brent had had a sense of humor.

  “Kim. Doctor,” Charles said, with a trace of condescension in the latter word. “If you think your meddling is annoying, Kim, there is an easy remedy.”

  Her face got warm.

  Aaron cleared his throat. “Doctor, I understand the little experiment I suggested has been completed.”

  Charles pulled out a lab stool and sat. “Unnecessary as it was. Familiarizing yourself with what we do was fine. I didn’t mind helping you with that as a professional courtesy. Had I known Ms. O’Donnell’s uninformed qualms were the reason for your interest—”

  “I’m glad you finally got to it,” Aaron interrupted, conceding no ground, suddenly all business.

  Kim sidled backward a step, watching. She just didn’t get Aaron. How much of his joking around was an act?

  Aaron’s “little experiment” had seemed relevant to her. It was surely worth studying whether nanobots could possibly affect behavior. Aaron had confirmed that scans like MRIs couldn’t detect any surviving bots in Brent—even if Brent would agree, which he wouldn’t, to more tests.

  So Aaron’s suggestion to Charles had been: Culture neurons, with some nanobots mixed in, in a petri dish. See what happened.

  Apparently every cell type imaginable could be ordered from medical research labs. Mail-order brain tissue had seemed ghoulish to her.

  A few years ago, before she met Nick, dying to see the Broadway revival of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, she had drafted Brent into a weekend in Manhattan. One of the play’s funniest bits involved Igor stealing an abnormal brain from the “brain depository.” She remembered Brent cackling. They had had such fun that trip. They always did, until …

  She missed Brent—the old Brent. Never mind the weather. No wonder she felt sad.

  Reminiscing helped no one, and she dragged her attention back to the present. Charles was removing petri dishes from a lab incubator. The covers bore long batch numbers. “All yours, Doctor.”

  “Thanks,” Aaron said. He stared at the tray of petri dishes. “And the bot sample you seeded these dishes with? I’ll confirm the batch number just to be thorough.”

  Long-suffering sigh. Charles retrieved a vial from a locked cabinet. “Three two six—”

  Aaron put out his hand. “May I?”

  Charles handed over the vial, muttering under his breath about Podunk State. Kim’s spirits sank further, as she became certain Charles had agreed to this experiment strictly to humiliate and discredit Aaron for his effrontery.

  Aaron matched the numbers on the vial against the label on a petri-dish cover and handed back the vial. “Thanks.” He began preparing samples for viewing. Soon enough, he had an image displayed on one of the digital microscope screens.

  The conglomeration of blobs told Kim nothing. Some of the imagery reminded her vaguely of plant roots. The rootlike things clustered from place to place. There were no nanobots to be seen.

  “That’s more synaptic formation than I would have expected.” Aaron panned slowly across the sample. “What do you think, Charles?”

  Charles had lost none of his smug self-assurance. “We expect random synapse formation in neural cultures. ‘Random’ doesn’t mean none.”

  “Understood, Charles.” Aaron switched samples. “Here, too.” A third sample. “Also more here than I would naïvely have expected.”

  Without understanding what Aaron might be getting at, Kim grinned inwardly. That “naïvely” was a bit of nuanced payback for Charles’s earlier condescension.

  Looking puzzled, Charles picked up one of the petri dishes. “Let’s prepare this for a look under the STM.”

  Scanning tunneling microscope. “What more can the STM tell us?” Kim asked. For a moment, she envied Brent’s constant Internet access.

  Charles peered at the petri dish in his hand. “If there’s anything unexpected in the synaptic clefts between neurons.”

  Such as intact nanobots, Aaron mouthed.

  As, it turned out, there were.

  * * *

  Images became less surreal. Scenes transitioned more and more smoothly. Perspectives crept closer to those of the real world.

  As someone rummaged through Brent’s memories …

  He lay in bed, eyes closed, taking everything in. He had been here before, he knew. Some of these images were his dreams. Dreams, yes, but directed, examined, reinforced, with ever more of his lost—but apparently only misfiled—memories retrieved. And sometimes there were what seemed to be memories, only without any sense of having had the initial experience. Or perhaps he did, in a way—a strange, disembodied recollection.

  Displacement, Dr. Kelso would say. Or Samir. Only surely they would be mistaken.

  Parts of many images fluttered. Concentrating, one by one, on elements of such scenes sometimes made the fluttering stop. Brent came to believe the fluttering was an interrogatory. What is this?

  Though Brent had called in sick today, he had never felt better. What needed doing could be done right here.

  Behind his eyes, someone was learning what it meant to see.

  * * *

  Charles being as pedantic as ever, Kim now knew to call the rootlike things axons and dendrites. She learned that axons and dendrites were, respectively, the outputs from and inputs to individual neurons. Signaling from cell to cell, the stuff of learning and thought, took place across the gaps: synapses. Synapses in their gazillions formed the basic wiring of the brain.

  The atomic-resolution blowups from the STM were unambiguous. Wherever in the neural-tissue samples axons and dendrites most densely converged, there sat one or more nanobots—

  And those bots were intact.

  Charles had a pen in hand, with which he kept tapping a lab bench. “I don’t understand. Well, I understand the synapse formation. The bots communicate among themselves chemically, sending and receiving molecularly encoded digital messages. Like much of the bot design, the comm mechanism reuses a pattern from biology. With a few billion years of trial and error, even blind chance is pretty inventive.

  “The messenger mo
lecules all carry oddly shaped little hooks, like a neurotransmitter molecule. The bots carry receptors complementary to the hooks. Lock and key, if you will. Binding between lock and key is nice and weak, so Brownian motion bumps them apart to make room for the next messenger. Very elegant, if I say so myself.”

  As though it was ever hard to get Charles to flatter himself, Kim thought, in this case taking credit for recycling nature’s solution. By her side, Aaron was frowning. She asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “Maybe nothing. Charles, on which neurotransmitter is the bot messenger molecule based?”

  “Glutamate. It’s not present to any significant degree in blood.”

  Aaron nodded. “But glutamate is a common neurotransmitter in the brain. So bots sending and receiving ‘messenger molecules’ look to glutamate-receptive neurons like … other neurons. It follows that bot signaling could stimulate synapse formation. And the more active the bot, the stronger the new synapses become.

  “That’s how neural tissue encodes learning,” Aaron added in an aside to Kim, “in the strength—that is, the ease of firing—of synapses. Though I don’t see what neurons have to learn from bots.”

  “None of which should matter!” Charles said impatiently. “The antigen patches are all there, in plain view.”

  “Hence the big question,” Aaron countered. “Why hasn’t the film dissolved from over the antigen?”

  Tap tap. “Exactly.” Charles broke a long silence. “Here’s a thought. These cells are cultured in CSF.”

  “CSF?” Kim asked.

  Aaron nodded. “Cerebrospinal fluid, which bathes the central nervous system. CSF performs some immune-system functions, but in that regard it’s not quite the same as blood.”

  Charles sniffed. Apparently explanations were his exclusive province. “Aaron, it seems we overlooked something here. The protein in blood plasma that dissolves the antigen’s protective film may be absent from CSF. Or some protein in CSF but not in plasma may bind to the coating, shielding the film. Give me some time and I’ll figure it out. Still, keep this in mind. For your little experiment, we put the bots straight into a neuron culture. In practice, bots don’t get anywhere near the central nervous system. They’re injected into the bloodstream.”