Unpossible (18 page)

The house they’d shared was a big Victorian. Reg had always worked late, but once he joined Eli’s myte project he started staying until ten or eleven, and when he came home he’d first patrol the downstairs of the old house, then go up to his son’s room, where Theo would be in his usual position on the bed: face down, body draped precariously over the edge. He’d lift Theo’s arms back onto the bed and tuck the blankets over him. Theo sometimes mumbled something, but never woke completely. Then Reg would go to the bedroom, undress in the dark, and slip under the covers. He’d spoon against Cora, shivering, and nudge his icy feet against hers. "Oh my God," she’d say. He’d laugh and slip his arm over her hip to cup her belly and fall asleep breathing into her neck.

Reg flicked off the light, shut the door to save the air conditioning.

In the kitchen he poured himself a bowl of Raisin Bran—one good thing about living alone, he always knew exactly how much cereal he had left—and set it down next to the laptop he kept set up on the bar counter. He opened a search engine and typed "cecrolysin."

They called it the Garden. Former National Guard garage, former warehouse, former abandoned building, then annexed by the University of Utah and converted to a computer lab. A dim, hollowed space, filled with monitors glowing like jack o’ lanterns.

The building was a barrel cut in half, its ridged roof forty feet above the floor at its highest point. Industrial-sized ductwork for the climate control ran along the tops of the walls. The cement floor was crowded with dozens of metal racks loaded with shiny new pizza box servers, dozens more folding tables loaded with old PCs and dusty routers, and rivers of cable: black power, blue Ethernet, snake-striped fiber optics. Every new thing they could afford side by side with every second-hand piece they could scavenge, and all connected. The room generated a steady roar.

Eli stayed in the hospital all that summer, and so Reg was first in the building every morning. After disarming the security system, he took time moving through the maze, checking equipment. His hands roved intimately over the pronged and portholed backsides of the computers, plucking at wires and tugging at connections. The machines hummed accompaniment. This fiddling with the network was his nervous ritual, half superstition, half technical professionalism: you can never be too careful.

The monitors displayed simple line plots and bar graphs that shifted in real time to reflect the status of the ’sphere. He rarely studied the screens directly, but took note of them in passing, like a farmer mindful of clouds. Jobs usually ran all night—virtual resources churning, niches filling and emptying—and by morning entire species had played musical chairs.

Sometimes he reached behind a CPU or router and found a loose jack. As he jiggled it into place he wondered how many creatures he’d just saved. If the connection failed during the download, whole segments of the population might be lost—an entire generation or species—wiped out as efficiently as a meteor strike because two strands of fiber failed to kiss and bump electrons.

Midway across the jungle, he stopped to turn on the tree. A gigantic inverted metal Christmas tree, smuggled into the Garden years ago over holiday break, an MIT-quality prank. The skinny steel trunk rose nearly to the ceiling. Aluminum rods, bumpy with techno-junk decorations and dozens of halogen strip lights, spiked from the trunk in starburst rings. The topmost rods extended fifteen feet from the trunk, drooping slightly at the ends. Each succeeding ring cast shorter and shorter lengths, tapering to base spokes only six inches long. When he flipped the switch, everything in the room grew bright and hard edged. The tree was such an odd artifact, and its light so needed in the cavernous room, that no one had taken it down after that first Christmas, and now no one could imagine the room without it.

At the far end of the lab was a row of new workstations, a spill of fiber optic cable, and a wall of black plastic. The wall was six foot high and ten feet long, a contiguous block of nearly 140,000 mytes. Bodies stacked on bodies on bodies, alive but unmoving, paralyzed like REMming sleepers. Sometimes he ran his hand along the warm side of the block, and it seemed to hum and pulse.

It was usually a couple hours until the first of the students arrived. He’d sit down at his workstation, turn on his monitor. For a moment he’d gaze at his own face, but then the brightening shapes wiped it away, and he’d gaze down at the Logosphere.

In the fall Theo started first grade, and Reg and Cora worked out a plan to make their son’s life as regular and normal as possible. Reg would pick him from the bus on Tuesdays and take him back to school on Wednesday. On Thursdays he’d take Theo to soccer practice and return him after dinner. On Saturdays everyone went to the games. On Sundays they all ate dinner together at the house on the avenues.

It was a civilized separation. They were good parents.

At the first Thursday soccer practice it was clear most of the six-year-olds on Theo’s team had grown taller but no more skilled since last season. They still played mob ball, surging in a clump from one end of the field to another. Classic swarming behavior.

Reg sat on the sidelines with the other parents, sunk into a nylon camp chair, and while he waited he fiddled with an amputee myte shell they’d rescued from the minefield. It was a normal shell, black and efficient-looking. The skin was coated with a thin layer of VESEC—a lacquer of light-sensitive flakes from 3M that not only collected solar energy, but reported light intensities to a chip, giving the myte a crude grayscale vision system.

Shells usually had eight limbs, two to a side, but this one had lost the right front leg. Reg tested each of the remaining seven limbs, tugging lightly with the tweezers, waggling it back and forth to test the connection.

The legs were nifty pieces of engineering. Each limb was a polymer sheath around a twisted bundle of two fiber-optic wires and two copper wires. The sheath was an organic plastic that acted like memory wire—a slight charge to one of the root cells inside the body of the myte, and the polymer would expand or contract one of thirty-six "muscle regions" along its length. Each leg had an impressive degree of flexibility: the thin gap between each of the interior muscle regions was a flex point, giving each leg in effect five joints that could bend in any direction. In actuality, most species of myte kept it simple; they developed a few efficient movement algorithms that used one or two joints per leg, and left it at that. The bigger mytes, of course, composed locomotion limbs from multiple shells. If the Logosphere were tweaked to reward pure speed, he wondered, how fast could they go?

That was the beauty of the myte design. They weren’t built just for detecting mines. Eli envisioned them as general purpose machines you could evolve into a variety of shapes and behaviors, for any number of tasks: inspecting buildings for infrastructure flaws, searching for survivors in rubble, exploring other planets. The only problem with that all-purpose design is that they weren’t optimized for any particular task. Reg had finally convinced Eli to concentrate on the landmine problem, and even that had taken years. The project was expensive, and they had very little to show for it.

All the remaining limbs seemed secure, so Reg ran a finger along the shell, feeling for the slightly raised band of the radio antenna. A centimeter to one side of the antenna he pressed down, and a panel tilted open.

"Ah," Reg said. He tucked the panel under his leg and began to tilt the myte to get light into the cramped guts of the shell. Beneath the vision chip, he could just make out the edges of the other two main chips: one for behavior processing and one for storage. The tail of the shell was stuffed with four cheap lithium-based batteries. Along the sides were eight tiny bumps: ports for the legs/antennae. The remaining space was filled with the spaghetti of fiber-optic and metal wires that connected limbs to chips to batteries.

None of the components were cutting edge. The technology behind each piece was a decade old or more; most of the hardware could be bought off the shelf. Only the organization of the materials, and the uses they were put to, made them interesting.

He pushed aside the wires crowding the empty limb port, squinting. A few stray wires stretched toward the missing leg. He could use more light.

"You playing with your mytes again, Dad?"

Reg looked up and laughed. "Yep." Theo was sweating, his bangs plastered to his forehead. "You thirsty?"

"Did you see me play goal? I stopped a lot of them."

"You did great, Captain." Reg had missed the stint in goal, but the important thing was to be encouraging. He fished through the gym bag Cora had packed, found the water bottle, and twisted it open for him. "Keep hustling."

Afterward they went to McDonald’s. Reg hated the place, but Theo loved the toys. Reg showed Theo the myte, the leg he’d reattached. "And here’s where it can link up to other shells."

"You get to put them all together?" Theo said enviously.

Reg laughed. He was probably picturing a room full of Legos. "They put themselves together. They self-assemble."

"But how do they know what shape to do? Do you tell them?"

"We grow them in the computer first, and then they learn how to assemble. They’re like plants, and we, uh, pick the kinds of seeds we want in the garden, and then they ... just grow."

Theo shook his head. "But who tells the seed what to do?"

"That’s a very good question," Reg said. "We have software that, well ... " He laughed. "It’s complex," he said, giving up.

"Oh." This seemed perfectly acceptable to Theo. "Okay."

When they got back to the house on the avenues, the lights were on and Cora was ferrying bags of groceries from the trunk of the Accord to the house. She still wore her work clothes, a short skirt over black nylons. He’d always liked her in black nylons.

He grabbed a couple bags and followed her into the house. She looked good. She’d started working out since Reg moved out, and had dropped weight. Something else had dropped, too. Some tension. It’d been Reg’s idea for him to move out, but Cora seemed to be thriving.

"Good practice, Theo?" she said as Theo ran past.

"He was great in goal," Reg said.

"Really! Good job, Captain." She set the bags on the counter. "How’s Eli? Is the new drug working?"

"The Cecrolysin. It’s amazing stuff." He put down the bags, sat down at one of the stools in the kitchen island. "See, old-style antibiotics, like streptomycin, were cultivated from microbes that lived in the soil, but Cecrolysin’s part of a whole new family of antibiotics, based on stuff that’s part of animals’ own defense systems."

He told her how peptides coated the skin and throats and lungs of frogs, sharks, and insects— Cecrolysin came from a silk moth—killing off bacteria better even than some antibodies, though nobody’d been able to get peptides to work specifically on TB because the peptides were too small to penetrate TB’s waxy shell—until (and this was the cool part) they figured out how to make clusters of peptides link into a barrel shape; because the barrel was positively charged and TB’s membrane was negatively charged, when the barrel found the bacterium it stuck like a magnet.

"But the inside of TB, see, is even more negatively charged than its outside, so the barrel gets sucked through the membrane, punching through the shell," Reg said. "And if the wound doesn’t kill the bacterium outright, it still leaves a gaping hole for other drugs to get through. Isn’t that the most amazing design?"

She shook her head, laughed. All the groceries had been put away, and she’d started to rinse the dishes in the sink and load them into the dishwasher. "Reg, all I asked was if Eli was feeling better."

Reg blinked. "Well, he’s doing great. He’s at home now—I’m going to go see him tonight. He’s not supposed to come to work yet, but I thought I’d bring him some food."

She dried her hands on the dish towel. "Why don’t you ask him for dinner sometime? I mean here, on a Sunday." Sunday was their family dinner.

"You’d do that?"

"He’s not contagious, is he?" she said. Reg shook his head. Eli’s last two sputum tests came back negative, and a couple more weeks he’d be cleared. "Then why not? He’s my friend too."