Society of the Mind

how far they had run.

It was the road that ran between the airport and the Village, and they had to get out of the roadbed to allow a busload of new arrivals to pass. The faces of all the passengers were jammed into the windows like tourists, and they seemed excited to catch a glimpse of Joseph Gray. He was completely oblivious to the adoration and the hurriedly snapped photographs. The bus was headed toward the Village up ahead, which Laura could see was teeming with life.

Human life and, to her great shock, robotic.

A crowd of people followed a Model Eight as it walked down the central boulevard. Cameras flashed and mothers held their children to keep them from getting too close to its legs. Laura wondered if the day would come when such sights would cease to be remarkable. Not if, Laura realized, but when.

She looked up at Gray, who ran along in silence. 'Okay, Joseph, you're stalling.'

He took a deep breath and said, 'I've never told anybody this in my entire life — only Gina. I was afraid to tell other people.'

'Afraid of what?'

'Of the virus.' They ran on, and Laura waited.

'I realized what was happening when I was a child. When I was eight years old, as a matter of fact. I was reading Mein Kampf, and—'

'Hitler's Mein Kampf?' she interrupted. 'You were eight, and you were reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf?'

'Would you let me finish this, please?' Laura fell silent. He had grown serious, and she let him find the words in his own time. They approached the outskirts of the Village, and another bus of oglers rambled by. Gray's legions of true believers were back in force. The new phase had begun in earnest.

'You've noted my preoccupation with evolution,' he finally continued. 'The genetic engineering effected by biological evolution over millions of years of life on earth has done more to change the face of this planet than wind, fire, rain, and water. Darwinian evolution is incredibly powerful, but it's also glacial in its rate of change. It requires thousands of generations to test even the most minuscule of mutations in the population. Then, after competition has determined the fittest, it takes thousands of generations for the superior organism to dominate the species and, by dominating, spread its superior traits. For major architectural changes to an organism, the change takes tens of thousands of years.'

'Major architectural changes like what, for instance?'

'Like expanding the size of the human brain and the cranium that houses it. Because that's what's necessary, ultimately, to improve our performance.' They entered the Village streets and turned left at the central boulevard. Smiling people waved on Gray's path. Laura marveled that he seemed not to notice. 'Oh, we can tweak the system. We can use tricks to learn and improve our mental processing speed.'

'And what about your 'tools'—the computer, for instance?'

'But those tools are alive themselves. They're living organisms whose evolutionary histories are only beginning. Relying on them for assistance is all we can do for now, but it's not a long-term solution. In the long term we would be placing the continued existence of our species in the hands of another species. That's a foolish course.'

They ran to the end of the boulevard, and Gray stopped at the base of the statue. He sat, and Laura settled onto the cool stone base beside him. Sounds of life filled the Village, but from Gray there was silence. Just when Laura thought she was going to have to prod him into continuing, however, he began.

'About ten thousand years ago, humans were infected with a virus that rendered genetic evolution irrelevant. The speed with which that new virus reproduces is phenomenal, and its rate of reproduction is growing a millionfold every human generation. Within the next century it could extinguish all human life on earth.'

Gray gazed down the bustling street without returning Laura's stare. For the first time she got the feeling she truly may not be ready for what he was saying.

'The patterns are so difficult to see that only a few thinkers have dared touch upon what's happening. And the virus took care of those that did. In the old days they would be killed. Today the virus prevents the spread of their ideas by subjecting them to ridicule and reducing them to obscurity.'

'What… virus, Joseph?'

'It's a parasite. It has to inhabit a host to survive. It very much like the bacteria that inhabit human stomachs or the benign viruses in the computer in that sense. In order to aid in its own survival as a species, this virus aids in the survival of its host. If its host flourishes, after all, so does the virus, so a symbiosis develops. And we humans have flourished in the last ten-thousand-odd years, wouldn't you agree?'

'Well, sure I'm healthy, and have my teeth and all, but… but there's crime, and war, and nuclear weapons, and the ecology, and racism, and AIDS.'

Gray smiled, then looked toward the assembly building and launch pads which were visible over the jungle from the top of the boulevard. 'When a parasitic life-form — the bacteria in your stomach, for instance — determines that there is some imminent threat to the continued survival of its host, what does it do?'

Laura remembered that part of her lesson. 'If the bacteria sense a perforation of the stomach walls, they begin to reproduce massively,' she replied, answering Gray's question like the star pupil she'd been all her life. 'That probably kills the host, but it improves the odds that the bacteria will perpetuate its species.' Gray nodded.

'Are you really talking about a virus that inhabits humans like the bacteria in our stomachs?' she asked. Gray nodded again.

Laura was growing agitated by the turn in the conversation.

'And exactly which organ does this virus infect?'

'Our brains.'

Laura stared at him intently. 'Our brains?' she practically whispered, and he nodded. A long silence ensued. 'Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not ready for this.'

'Ridicule by one's colleagues, Laura, is highly effective in forcing conformity. You of all people should know that.' He was looking at her. She realized he was talking about her paper at the Artificial Intelligence Symposium. 'Existing knowledge defends itself against new ideas by persecuting its proponents. Gina hacked her way into the FBI's computer, and I read the two agents' report of your meeting.' She glanced up at him. 'Did you notice where that meeting took place?'

'On campus,' Laura replied. 'It was… at a statue.'

'Of Galileo,' Gray completed for her. 'Do you know why Galileo was forced to recant?'

His ideas, Laura thought, and she nodded. She put her elbows on her knees and laid her chin on cupped hands.

'What I am telling you now is being actively suppressed by the virus. Your reluctance to believe me is the result of an extremely powerful defense mechanism that's immediately triggered when you encounter radically new ideas. When the computer develops a program, that program competes with all other programs doing the same task. The shortest, most efficient, most error-free is the one that ultimately wins out, but not without some extended period of testing. Those two programs do battle for their lives, and the fighting is therefore vicious.'

'Survival of the fittest,' Laura mumbled, her jaws held shut by the weight of her head on her chin. She sat up. 'Okay. But wait a minute. Are we talking about viruses that live inside brains or viruses in the computer?'

'They're one and the same,' Gray said, and Laura looked him in the eye. 'When man created computers, we infected them with the virus. It's highly communicable. It passes surprisingly easily from human to human, from human to computer, from computer back to human. In fact, Laura, the sole purpose of the computer is to hold the virus. It's a petri dish. Just like the computer is a tool which expands the power of the human brain, the computer is the perfect environment for the virus to thrive. Inside the computer, the virus replicates far more rapidly and efficiently than it possibly could in the human brain. The virus has built a new and better host for itself.'

Laura swallowed, wetting her dry throat. 'Maybe we ought to talk about this virus for a second. Joseph, microbiologists have done a pretty thorough survey of the human body for microorganisms, and they haven't found any—'

'You're talking biology,' Gray interrupted. 'I'm not.'

'Well, what are we talking about here?' Laura practically shouted, rocking forward to again rest her elbows on her knees. She rubbed her pounding temples with her fingertips. The jumble of disassociated ideas and growing fears about Joseph's sanity formed a disturbing brew.