“Or too dark,” Shelly said. “People want feel-good in the morning.”
The dark prospect of posthumanism was the part of it that most excited the theorists and scientists: the augmentation of the brain with hundreds of millions of microcomputers made largely of carbon nanotubes, which would be distributed throughout our gray matter. These tiny but powerful computers would interact with one another, with the brain, and potentially with every computer in the world through a wireless network, tremendously enhancing the individual’s intelligence and knowledge. The posthuman species, a combination of biological and machine intelligence, never aging, nearly immortal, still human in appearance, inspired scientists at MIT and at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and at hundreds of other universities, institutes, and corporations around the world. They saw at last a possibly swift path to a human civilization with superhuman capabilities, the total submission of nature to humanity, the acquisition of godlike power, the looming end of nationalism and tribalism and superstition, therefore the elimination of all limits in all things.
As the waiter brought their entrees, Mac said, “For the show, we could just focus on the cheery part of it, get some expert on to talk about that. Anyway, the people working toward posthumanism don’t see a dark side. They see it as progress toward total freedom.”
“What could go wrong, huh?” Shelly said. “What could possibly go wrong when the aim is to make a perfect world?”
He had almost hesitated to pull the trigger when he saw a vague ghost of Sally Hollander in the face of the thing that attacked Julian Sanchez, her prettiness transmogrified into death styled as a snake god. But if this creature had been Sally, it was not Sally anymore, nor would it be her again. If he had hesitated, he would have been bitten, with what consequences he couldn’t be sure—although he thought that he would soon find out by Julian Sanchez’s example.
To this point in his life, Bailey remained an optimist even in the darkest moments, whether in peace or war, and he was certain that he would keep the faith throughout this crisis, because hardship and the threat of death were nothing new. But the loss of Sally Hollander wasn’t only of a different category but also of a different magnitude from all the losses he’d endured previously—except for the loss of his mother. A marine in war lost friends, and it hurt, but death was always a breath away on the battlefield, and no one chose that life without recognizing and accepting the risks. Sally was a housekeeper, a cook, a good woman, a sweet person, who had evidently come through some bad times in her youth. When she took the job with the Cupps, she didn’t expect to be raped—it had to be something like rape, what was done to her—and killed in the Pendleton. Bailey was torn by the injustice of her death as he had not been affected by anything in a long while. All his life, something had been going wrong with the world, an ever-quickening corruption on every front, virtue mocked and expedience applauded, and here was the future that was earned by that decline. If he lived through this, he would mourn Sally for a long time, but his anger would endure longer, hot anger at the ideas and the forces that had brought civilization to this ruin.
To direct his anger at the right targets, to grasp the origins of this hell on earth, he had to understand what was happening here. As Kirby Ignis, eyes bright with inquisitiveness, played a flashlight across the splattered wall, Bailey realized that the brain tissue was much darker than that of human beings, deep shades of gray with silvery traces. He saw no blood.
“It’s got some kind of residual life,” Kirby said.
Glancing at the corpse of the demon, alarmed, Bailey said, “What? Where?”
Indicating the material on the wall, Kirby said, “The brain matter. It’s crawling.”
Instead of oozing down toward the floor, the viscid mass spread outward in all directions from the initial spray pattern, thinning as it went. The action at first appeared to be like that of any liquid spreading through a dry and porous material. But on taking a closer look, Bailey realized that the growing blot of darkness on the wall wasn’t moisture seeping into dry plasterboard from the wet tissue. Instead, it was a teeming mass of inconceivably small things, so small that he could not actually see any single one of them, perhaps microscopic creatures that were only visible in great mass, as a community.
“The action is diminishing,” Kirby said. “They don’t seem to be capable of functioning very long outside of the enclosed skull.”
“They? What are they?”
Kirby hesitated, scratching his head with his free hand. Then: “Well, I don’t know for sure … but if I’m even half right … you’re looking at millions—no, hundreds of millions—of microscopic computers, nanocomputers, capable of motion for the purpose of repositioning themselves as needed in an ever-adaptable substrate.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Linked up, maybe these hundreds of millions of nanocomputers functioned as this creature’s brain or at least as the largest part of its brain, assuming there was also some wet intelligence in it.”
“Wet intelligence?”
“Biological brain matter.”
Kirby probed with the flashlight beam at the exit wound in the demon’s skull, where more of the sludge crawled along the edges of the shattered bone, as if assessing the damage.
“I expect they’ll cease functioning in a minute,” Kirby said. “Good thing you shot it in the head first. Maybe that’s the only wound that could kill it.”
“Where’d you get this stuff—from
“Maybe not as far as you’d think. With the brain intact to direct the billions and billions of other nanomachines that exist within the body mass, wounds to the torso or limbs would close up quickly. And it has no biological blood to worry about losing, probably no pain to hamper it.”
“You mean it’s a machine?” Bailey asked. “It doesn’t look like a robot.”
