BZRK

He smiled and looked down in an unsuccessful effort to hide the smile from her. “I think that’s maybe not a bad thing when you’re with this crowd. In this situation.”

“Listen to me,” she said. She looked straight at him until he returned the gaze. Their lips were inches apart. “I don’t fall in love. So don’t expect that.”

“I guess I do. I have that inside me, I mean, falling in love. I’ve never been. But I feel it inside me. So I guess you’d better expect that from me.”

She remembered his lips on hers, and they were not tea-stained wax paper. That memory was somewhere else, still there, but this was a new memory and even more real.

He moved closer and she let him. He surprised her then, because his kiss was not the urgent, charged kiss of before. It was tender and infinitely gentle. He pulled away before she was ready for him to do so.

Keats stood up. “The idea is not to hope. They want us to be focused. Under control. Maybe Jin and Vincent and the rest are good people. Maybe they’re trying to do what’s right. But they aren’t me, and they aren’t you. And maybe they can press us into this war of theirs, but they can’t tell us how to feel.”

She locked eyes with him. And as if they were making a sacred pact, they nodded, and smiled sheepishly, and Keats left.

(ARTIFACT)

Just hacked Swedish intel. Expected data on blondes in saunas, hah. Mostly looks like unencrypted junk. But there was something weird. I saw a posting by TinyTIMPO2 last week on nanotech and thought this might be interesting.

So it’s this fragment. It was saved unencrypted, then they must have noticed and encrypted it and wiped the original. This fragment survived. Ran it through a Swedish-English translation program. The source is definitely MUST Militära underrättelse-och säkerhetstjänsten, and it’s def an internal memo.

… scenario first advanced by Eric Dexler, a nanotech pioneer. Nanobots capable of self-replication could, due to a simple error in programming, in theory obliterate all life on Earth.

Nanotech creatures could be programmed to clean up a chemical spill, perhaps an organic compound like benzene. But benzene contains carbon. All living things likewise contain carbon. An error in programming, even a slight one, could cause nanobots to begin consuming any and all carbon.

The problem becomes acute if nanobots are built to self-replicate. If you began with your Adam and Eve nanobot reproducing themselves in one minute, and their progeny doing the same in another minute, and so on, the population of nanobots would increase geometrically at an astounding rate. In a matter of hours there would be billions. In days, trillions, enough nanobots to consume all carbon within Sweden, killing every living thing.

Within a week the nanobots could obliterate all life on Earth.

Dexler calls this phenomenon “the gray goo.” It is no more elegant a phrase in English than in Swedish. Obviously this is an unlikely scenario, but given our recent—

Anyone interested?

ArmandtheGimp

TWENTY

There followed days of training for Plath and Keats. Days in which they did not kiss, but thought about it, and did not make love, but thought about that, too.

To no one’s great surprise Keats was the quicker study with biots. With his two uninjured biots Vincent took him down in the meat to stage mock battles. Vincent taught him how meaningless gravity could be, how to avoid immune responses, how to think in three dimensions not two, how to leap, stab, cut, carry weapons, and when all else failed, run away.

And when Vincent was done with Keats, Ophelia took over and showed him the patient job of hauling Teflon fibers into place and weaving them into the basketwork around Plath’s pulsing aneurysm.

Plath was not a prodigy, but Nijinsky allowed that she was really not bad, not bad at all. And in one area she beat Keats hands down. She was a born spinner. She easily learned to read the 3D holographic brain maps, to stab the probe and light up the far-flung connections of memory. To make sense of what she saw there.

Those memories played as video loops, or still photos in Plath’s mind. Sometimes both more and less than that: not an image of anything real but a monster or a saint, glowing figures built by the mind itself to represent feelings.

There was a core template of the brain that was a sort of overview, showing in general terms which parts had certain functions. She quickly became familiar with the centers of vision, hearing, smell, touch. She knew where to find the controls for hands and feet, fingers and toes, the centers of speech. Those were roughly the same in any human brain.

But the essential job of a spinner was to rig connections between parts of the brain not normally connected. A spinner had to know how to find a visual image, or a scent, or a sound, a face, and wire it to a memory that would evoke a certain emotion.

Pleasure. Pain. Fear. Hatred. They all had their locations. Wire—actually a filament much more complex than simple wire—oozed, spiderlike from the biot’s pseudo-proboscis. Electronic signals that might have found their way slowly from point A to point B along neurons, jumping synapses, now zoomed along the superhighway of the wire.

“How much difference does it make if every time I see a face I also feel angry?” she asked Nijinsky.

“The first time? Not much. But brains adapt and add new layers. So if you draw a connection between a face and, let’s say, desire, the brain begins to absorb that. The first connection is by wire, and the next hundred, maybe. But soon the brain builds reinforcing structures. Backup pathways. So soon, you can’t see that face without also feeling desire.”