'I know that.'
Norma stared at him for a minute. “Okay. Explain it to me.'
Ben pulled some more papers from his briefcase. “In my business, mites, tiny machines about the size of a cell, do all the work. We got a bad shipment of mites. Somehow they went ahead and did all the work the normal mites did and left some clusters in the tobacco that got through all of the quality control mechanisms, the heating, the cutting and packaging, the irradiation, until the finished cigarettes reached you. Then, they suddenly started working inside of you, not in some random destructive manner but in a controlled construction. I can guess what might have happened but, in point of fact, it's impossible.'
Norma spoke slowly. “I have tiny machines in my lungs? Machines you built?'
'Close. I don't know what they're encoded to do. Nobody knows.'
'How many… clusters got out?'
'From what I can tell, only one.'
'How do you know that?'
Ben spread his hands. “So far, you, and only you, have shown anything.” He pointed at Norma.
'Pretty long odds.'
'Not as long as some.'
'So what are your mites doing to me?'
'I'm not sure. My mites were contaminated with other mites with different natures. Mites are built to cooperate so I'm not sure what they are doing.'
'What were they supposed to do?” asked Norma.
'All different things. One set built musical instruments,” said Ben, leaning on the table. “Oboes. Flutes. Tubas. Or, since they came from India, sitars or something. Some were designed to implement a communication system designed in Germany. There were banana preparation mites ordered from Malaysia. Others.'
Norma remembered the singing of the fleshy bit.
'I have tiny machines making music in my lungs. Your tiny machines.'
'As I said, they're not my mites. My mites died properly.'
'Are you sure you're not a lawyer?'
'If I was a lawyer, I wouldn't be here.'
'Why are you here?'
He stared at his hands and didn't speak for a few seconds. “To be present at the creation.'
'What does that mean?'
Ben leaned toward her. “By any stretch of the imagination, the mites should have just consumed you, made you into some intermediate random product. My mites, acting out of my programming, would try to make you into tobacco product. Something that, to you, would be invariably gruesome and fatal. But that's not what the mites inside of you are doing. They're building something inside you. Something integrated -which I can see from the pictures, as well as noticing that you're still walking around.'
'Walking right down to the clinic so Dr. Peabody can cut them out.'
'That's why I'm here. To try to persuade you not to.'
Norma stared at him. “Are you nuts?'
Ben smiled. “Maybe. Mites and humans are made up of much the same things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, some metals. If we come from the dust of the earth, then so do they. But we created them. Now, something unexpected and impossible has happened. A miracle.'
'A miracle? '
'Yes.'
'That's like saying cancer is a miracle.'
Ben shook his head. “Not at all. Cancer is the emergent property of the accumulated errors in an ordered system. It's the consequences of random events.'
Norma shook her head. The way he talked made her dizzy. “How's this any different?'
'Cancer in a system makes the system untenable. It doesn't do anything to make the system any better. It's not creative. This is going to make you something better.'
'It's going to kill me. That's what it's going to do.'
Ben shrugged. “There's a risk to everything. But we come from the earth. So do these mites. The earth speaks through us. They speak through the mites, too.” He pointed to the radiographs. “That low pass filter looks a lot like filters used to integrate circuits into nerve cells. I didn't design it. None of the programming in any of the contaminant mites had anything like it. They developed this on their own. This is no cancer.'
'But like cancer it's going to kill me.'
'You were going to let the cancer do that anyway, or you wouldn't have walked out of Peabody's office.'
'That was different.” Norma thought for a moment. “The cancer was mine. It was my own body telling me it was time to go. These things are… invading me.'
'A cluster is made up of a few hundred mites. It's about the size of a mustard seed. It took root in you-not just anybody. It's making something in you-nobody else.'
'You're saying these things chose me?'
'No. They can't choose anything. They're just little automatons. Like chromosomes or sperm. A baby is the emergent property of the genes but the genes didn't have any choice in the matter. Out of such automata comes you and me. The mites didn't choose you. The earth itself chose you.'
'You are nuts. These things are still going to kill me.'
'We can stack the odds.” He brought out an inhaler from his briefcase. “This is FTV. All mites are designed so they stop operation when FTV is present. FTV saturates the air in mite factories as a safety precaution. If you inhale this, it might at least slow down their progress.'
'That goes against your plan, doesn't it?'
'No. Think of it as prenatal care. It gives the mites an opportunity to more thoroughly understand their environment.'
Norma thought of the singing again.
'What if they escape? I don't want to destroy the world or something.'
Ben brought a square instrument out of his briefcase. “This has been sampling the air for the whole time I've been here. Look for yourself. No mites.'
'They could be waiting. Like fungus spores.'
'Now who's nuts?'
She considered. “Could Peabody cut them out?'
Ben shook his head. “I don't think so. The mites are cooperating. If you cut out a chunk of the network, they'll just try to rebuild it and they'll have to relearn what they lost plus figure out the new topology resulting from the surgery. I think it would just make things worse.'
'That's what you would say regardless, isn't it?'
Ben shrugged again and said nothing.
She had been ready to just die and be gone. At least, this way would make it more of an adventure.
She drew a ragged breath. She had no difficulty breathing yet. No more than usual.
'Okay,” she said. “I'm in.'
Life seemed to settle back to normal. She didn't cough anything up anymore. Her voice cracked and quavered as she spoke. Which, she supposed, was a small price to pay for robots living in her lungs.
Reginald Cigarettes suddenly disappeared from the market. Ben had given Norma prior warning. She had a dozen cases packed carefully in the basement.
About a month after she'd first spoken with Ben, she woke up from a deep sleep jumpy and irritated. When Lenny came by for his morning visit she told him to go away. Her voice was breaking like a fifteen-year-old boy.
'Ma,” called Lenny. “Let me in.'
She opened the door a crack. “What do you want?'
'Come on, Ma. Don't get crazy on me. Let me in. I'm your son, remember?'
'I know who you are.” She stood back to let him in.
'That was a pretty nice station you had on,” he said as he stepped in. “Who was singing?'
