“If that’s true, I hope its fears are fully justified.”
“And the people who died?”
“I didn’t kill them.”
“You’ve involved your own son in this.”
“I could hardly exempt him.”
“And Thomas and Cassie?”
“Please don’t misunderstand. I want them out of harm’s way as much as you do. Your niece and nephew are of no use to me.”
Ethan let Nerissa tell the story of the sim Winston Bayliss: what he had said, how he had died, and especially what they had discovered when they visited his home in Montmorency. “Mrs. Bayliss had had recent surgery, so she must have been human. But her son was a sim. How is that possible? Do you know anything about that?”
Beck was silent for so long a time that Ethan wondered whether he might refuse to answer. Then he said, “I can show you some recent research. You too, Ethan. This is work you haven’t seen. Come with me.”
They followed Beck to the small living room of this small house and waited as he sorted through the contents of a cardboard filing box stashed behind the sofa. He extracted a manila folder and put it on the low coffee table. Ethan and Nerissa sat down while Beck pulled up a chair. “I should warn you. Some of the photographs are graphic.”
The folder contained rec ords of the work of an English veterinarian named Wyndham. According to Beck, Wyndham had been culturing pseudochondritic cells to explore their interaction with living tissue. For that purpose he had equipped a laboratory with cages of white mice and a few larger animals.
He had begun by introducing the foreign cells to cultivars of yeasts, fungi and bacteria, without any useful result. Tissue samples from metazoans were slightly more responsive, but the cultures quickly became necrotic.
When Wyndham injected the pseudochondritic cells directly into living mice, the effect was quickly lethal—a simultaneous eruption of multiple aggressive tumors. (The file contained a photograph of a euthanized mouse on a dissection board: the tumors with which its body was riddled looked to Ethan like bloody raspberries.) But when Wyndham dosed the creatures with the same cells in an aerosol preparation—when he put the mice in a sealed chamber and allowed them to inhale dry, extracted spores—they showed no obvious ill effects over weeks and even months.
Not that they were unaffected. Wyndham’s dissections revealed that the foreign cells had migrated to the reproductive system of the mice. Gametes of both sexes were significantly altered. Under the microscope (and here was another, thankfully less visceral photo), haploid cells appeared fatter and included new and unusual organelles. “But the truly significant effect,” Beck said, “was on the next generation.”
Another photo of a dissection—a messy one. Nerissa made a disgusted sound and recoiled. Ethan was queasily reminded of what he had seen after the raid on his farm house.
Once again the dead mouse had been splayed on a dissection board. It possessed what appeared to be a complete set of internal organs, reduced in size and displaced to the borders of the abdomen. The bulk of the body cavity was occupied by a gelatinous green mass, some of which had already liquefied and begun to drain away as the photograph was taken. Tendril of this mass passed into and among the otherwise normal organs. A partial dissection of the skull revealed a hollow sphere of neural matter surrounding the same gelatinous green core.
“God, enough!” Nerissa said, grimacing.
Beck gathered up the photographs. “This would appear to be how sims are created. Pseudochondritic cells are shed by the orbital mass of the hypercolony. Some fraction of them survive entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Counting the enclosures in the ice cores lets us estimate the number of spores reaching the Earth’s surface in an average year. Inevitably, some small fraction of those spores will be inhaled by animals or human beings. Assuming even a single aspirated cell is able to alter all the gametes in a given individual, and given the density and distribution of fertile adult humans across the globe, there can’t be more than two or three hundred sims in all of North America—maybe four thousand altogether on the planet. Plus a population of altered animals, probably irrelevant but worth taking into consideration.”
Ethan said, “And the sims… are they fertile?”
“Do they breed more sims? No. Wyndham’s mice were sexually functional but genetically sterile. So were his dogs and other higher mammals. There are more photos—”
“No,” Nerissa said.
“Wyndham refused to work with primates, but we have every reason to believe the results would have been the same.”
“And these animals were otherwise normal?”
“Functionally and behaviorally. There was no way to tell a normal mouse from a sim, except with a scalpel.”
“Then Mrs. Bayliss wasn’t lying,” Nerissa said. “She really did give birth to that thing.”
Beck took two more photographs from his files. Ethan was relieved to see that they were micrographs, not images from a dissection table. “We’ve learned more about how the spores operate on the cellular level—this should interest you, Ethan.”
Whoever had produced these images must have had access to some very sophisticated equipment, maybe one of the new scanning electron microscopes, a technology that had only just become available when Ethan began to isolate ice-core specimens. “It’s a busy little factory,” Beck said. “But it would have to be, wouldn’t it, when you consider what these things are capable of. Some of its chemical constituents are familiar enough. The so-called genetic molecules: nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous. Purines, pyrimidines. Plus arsenic, some trace metals. But what stands out is the level of organization in the cell. These unfamiliar filamentous structures, you see them? Fractally folded threads of conductive carbon embedded in a sub-membrane, with dendritic extensions that seem to affect every part of the cell in some fashion—”
“Some of us aren’t biologists,” Nerissa said. “If you want me to understand this, you’ll have to dumb it down a little.”
“The details don’t matter as much as the function. Think about what these cells do. They travel immense distances through the vacuum of space. They duplicate themselves—at least so we surmise—by absorbing minerals and trace elements from the rocky or icy surface of asteroids, comets, planetesimals. They do this at temperatures far below the freezing point of water and with no driving force apart from faint sunlight and slow catalytic chemistry. They communicate with one another over enormous distances by generating microbursts of narrow-band radio-frequency energy. Which would be remarkable enough. But they do something that’s even more impressive. In our case, they tacked inward toward the sun and occupied a stable orbit around the Earth. Ethan’s research suggests they were present as much as forty thousand years ago, possibly longer. And once their numbers reached some critical threshold, they began to function as a coherent network. Do you understand what that means, Mrs. Iverson?”
“Only vaguely.”
“Their intercommunication became complex. The pseudochondritic cells interact with each other much the way brain cells do. And as soon as our species began to generate radio signals of its own, the so-called radiosphere started to function as a vast distributed transceiver, relaying radio waves around the globe but also analyzing those signals, making of itself an analytical computer more sophisticated than any such device we’ve ever dreamed of building.”
“So are they some form of life, or are they machines?”
“At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines. We have no evidence that anyone designed these objects, though it’s possible. The likeliest scenario is that they evolved over an immense span of time and gradually acquired the characteristics they now possess. On the cellular level they’re immensely sophisticated; more importantly, the network they form is itself a unitary entity. The hypercolony. The hive, to borrow Ethan’s description. It’s the hypercolony that has learned to comprehend and manipulate human society, and it’s the hypercolony we have to destroy.”