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.
"What's this virus that infects our minds and is evolving and growing?"
Just as it had on her first trip with Gray into virtual reality, time seemed to stand still.
"Knowledge," he said.
Laura raised her head and slowly looked at Joseph. He sat impassively at her side. "That's it? All this buildup, all this mystery, and that's the big secret?"
When he spoke, he sounded confident. "Ideas like beauty, evil, kindness, and racism are strands of the 'DNA' of our culture. They reproduce by being passed from parent to child, book to reader, screen to viewer… brain to brain. Every time anybody learns anything, a unit of knowledge is passed. The more believable or attractive the idea, the more effective it is at reproduction and therefore survival. Once popular ideas like leeching patients of their sick blood were quite effective replicators in their day. Then along came modern medicine, and the older ideas no longer proved to be the fittest. The rules of genetic evolution, Laura, apply to cultural evolution as well."
Laura's mind was reeling, and she was highly agitated.
"I told you you'd think I was crazy," Gray said.
"Well?" she shot back, holding up her hands, then slapping them down on her thighs. "What would you think if you were me?" He smiled.
"Do you want me to go on, or are you comfortable with your diagnosis?"
"There's more? What, does this get really weird or something?"
Gray laughed. "Indulge me for a moment with my analogy. Because that's all this is — an analogy. There are no words or concepts or theories to draw on when talking about this. I have to start from scratch, define terms, take it one step at a time. You've come this far; you should hear me out."
Laura rolled her head back and looked up at the statue. Its white marble was framed darkly against the bright blue sky. She heaved a deep sigh and said, "Okay, knowledge is like a parasitic virus. First humans, and now computers, are its host. It reproduces by communication from one brain to another, and evolves through [garbled] like the survival-of-the-fittest idea."
"Good," he said lightly. "A little sarcastic, but you seem to have that part down. Now, what has happened in the last ten thousand years since first contamination? Humans have developed ever better skills at communicating, processing, and storing the virus. First spoken language, which allows us to apply names to things and organize our thoughts. Then written language, which allows us to pass our thoughts not only from Rome to Constantinople, but from Aristotle to you or me. They could now leap through time as well as through space. The result is that the store of human knowledge exploded."
"The virus began to grow," Laura said, trying but failing to keep the skepticism from her voice.
"As knowledge flourished, we flourished. The parasite allowed us to develop sciences that extended our lives and arts that made life worth living. And we humans developed ever more advanced means of fostering the growth of knowledge. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we humans became a risk to ourselves and to the parasite. General wars threatened the wholesale destruction of civilizations and the knowledge reposited in them. And, what was it you said parasites do when their host is threatened by destruction?"