Unpossible (20 page)

Cora raised an eyebrow. Reg said, "Oh yeah?" Casual.

Eli did this all the time: they’d be having a perfectly normal conversation—well, at least a coherent one—and then Eli would take a left turn, leaving everyone else to catch up. Over the past year, a lot of these left turns seemed theological in nature, and Reg had wondered if the life-threatening disease was making Eli get religion—or rather, making him get it again. Eli had been raised Mormon, and though he hadn’t gone to temple in decades, church was a virus that could lay dormant, waiting for a weakened immune system. The atheist-foxhole moment.

"I’ve been wondering," Eli said. "Why would God place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right there in the garden, and then tell them not to eat it? If he wanted perfectly obedient creations, there’s no point in creating humans, he already had the angels.

"No, God wanted us to be independent of him. You wouldn’t be happy if Theo never disobeyed you, never made his own decisions. Of course we eat of the tree—that’s the whole point. That’s our job. "

Cora leaned in, interested. "So when they finally bit that apple, why did God kick them out of the garden, then? That’s not much of a reward."

"It wasn’t punishment," Eli said. "It was graduation."

Cora laughed. "I was raised Catholic. I never heard that interpretation before."

Eli smiled, shrugged.

Holy cow, Reg thought. They like each other.

Theo made a move to get up, and Reg stopped him. "Not so fast, you’ve hardly eaten a thing. At least finish your asparagus, Mom made them just for you."

"But I’m full!"

"Theo ... "

Eli suddenly pushed away from the table. He stomped out of the dining room, into the living room.

Cora frowned. Reg jumped up and followed. "Eli?"

He was bent over, one hand braced against the piano, the mask raised to his mouth. The first cough was little more than a huff. The next was a rattling, percussive bark. As was the next. And the next.

Eli was asleep in the bed. He wore an oxygen mask, but they still asked Reg to wear a paper breather, and to stay behind the forced-air curtain.

Reg stood at the window, peeking through a bent slat in the blinds at the afternoon. University Hospital was high in the foothills, and he could see the spread of the valley, all the way into downtown Salt Lake. Cars stretched down the streets in long chains like unseparated mytes, filling the gaps between the buildings and houses. So many people. He couldn’t imagine where they’d come from, where they were going, or how they could possibly have a unique thought in their heads. He could believe in crowds, but he couldn’t believe in that many individuals. How could his best friend be sick and all those people still carry on, oblivious?

Eli made a noise, and Reg turned. "The test," Eli said, more clearly. "How did it go."

"Hey, look who’s awake!" Reg said, forcing enthusiasm into his voice. He went to the bed, sat next to him.

Eli regarded him, eyes half lidded. His skin around the mask was blotched red by burst blood vessels. But his bare arms, resting on the blankets, were gray and dark-speckled, like pulp paper.

There weren’t any drugs left to give him. Cecrolysin, with its beautiful design, should have worked. Maybe the peptides didn’t form barrels in enough numbers, or the configurations didn’t hold together long enough to penetrate. Maybe the TB evolved again, developing a thicker shell.

"I wish you could have seen it," Reg said. "Absolutely amazing."

The mytes burst out of the block, assembled beautifully, and started the search for mines—exactly as they’d done thousands of times in the Logosphere, and dozens of times in previous field tests. "They found every mine. Every damn one of them, in record time. None of them triggered." Eli nodded. "And then they went for the fence."

The old man’s eyes widened.

"We were ready to send the signal to stop the test when they rushed the tape on the east side of the field. The first ones hit the wire and stopped cold, but they kept piling into each other. Dipti started to send the all-stop signal, but I stopped her, I wanted to see what happened next. And you know what happened next?"

A slight smile became visible under the mask.

"One of them went over the top. Jumped the wire like Steve McQueen on a motorcycle, completely ignored the Death signal. Hit the ground on the other side and kept going."

"What did you do?" Eli said hoarsely.

Reg threw up his hands, laughing. "We chased it! It was flying, Eli. I’d never seen one move that fast. Luckily we were out in the open and we saw when it headed under a bush. Dipti was practically whacking the thing with the antenna but it wouldn’t turn off. I finally picked it up, and together we pried enough shells from it that it stopped moving."

Eli was laughing now, but then the laugh turned to a cough. He pulled off the mask and bent forward. Blood spattered on the blanket.

"Oh shit," Reg said. "Let me get the nurse."

Eli waved him off. He hacked ferociously a few more times and fell back against the pillows. His eyes closed, but he was still smiling.

After awhile, Reg said, "I’ve been thinking of Adam and Eve. And the serpent."

Eli grunted.

"Why would omniscient Yahweh let the devil into the garden? You’d almost think he wanted his children to be tempted. The tree wasn’t enough—the poor, dumb humans weren’t getting the idea themselves—so finally he has to let the devil in and let him plant the idea. A little nudge in the right direction."

Eli opened one eye, raised an eyebrow that said: And you have a point?

"Marshall Lin found your code, Eli. The stuff you added last spring."

Eli closed his eyes. The smile crept back. "Ah."

"No wonder you always wanted me to concentrate on the environmentals. But even after the myte went AWOL, I didn’t put it together. I didn’t figure it out until we came back and walked into the Garden."

"Heh," Eli said. A percolating chuckle that was almost a cough. "Heh."

A month after the last field test, Reg drove Theo out to the Great Salt Lake. They walked from the parking lot, the November wind tugging at their jackets, down to the pylons. Out in the water, the Salt Aire II lay half sunk into the marshy water. The abandoned amusement hall was a mass of bleached white cement, its gold-painted domes blotched with bird shit, listing like a grounded ship.

"It stinks here," Theo said.

The kid was right. A fishy miasma hung over everything.

"That’s the salt, and I guess the brine shrimp. You want to go for a swim? You could float without even trying."

Theo made a sour face, looked at him like he was crazy.

"Okay, I guess it’s a little cold. Besides, your mom wouldn’t like you to come back sopping wet." They walked around the edge of the lake, Reg swinging his knapsack, Theo making experimental lunges at the water, crouching to sniff and poke. Seagulls wheeled and screeched overhead. Reg kept warning Theo to be careful, but eventually the boy stumbled and fell into the slushy water, wetting his side from ankle to armpit.

Reg took off his own jacket, got out of his sweatshirt, and used it dry Theo off. He told him about how when the Mormons first came to the valley, a plague of crickets overran all their farms, and flocks of seagulls flew down and swallowed up the crickets. "Then the seagulls flew over the lake and spit out the crickets—ptuee! And you know what they did next? They flew right back to the fields to eat more, eating and spitting them out, until all the crickets were gone."

Theo accepted this matter-of-factly. Six-year-olds evidently knew all about mass avian bulimia.

"Mom says you’re not playing with the mytes any more," he said.

"That’s right." Reg draped his jacket around Theo’s shoulders. "We’re going to try other types of robots. We had trouble with the mytes."

Reg and the students had driven back to the Garden after the field test. Reg had unlocked the door, but the security system was offline. Everything was offline—the servers, the lights, the tree—all dark. Some light from the streetlamps made it through the small windows high on the wall. He stumbled his way to the back of the room, toward the black wall of mytes, where the breaker box was located. He was almost all the way across the room when he realized that the reason he couldn’t make out the wall of mytes wasn’t because they were black, but because they were gone.

All of them.

A long minute of confusion, exclamations. He thought they’d been stolen. He went to the rear fire exit, pushed it open, trying to get more light into the room. Something brushed past his leg. No, two somethings.

They ran past him, into the parking lot. Multi-celled mytes, maybe fifty or sixty shells apiece, big as dogs. They ran for the shadows at the edge of the lot and disappeared. Dipti found another one high up on the tree. A dozen more at the edge of the room. But scores more had disappeared, through the ventilation grates.

"What was wrong with them?" Theo asked. Shivering slightly.

"Well, they could’ve been good at lots of things, but they weren’t great at anything. And it took years just to get them even sort of good." Theo stared at him. "Actually," Reg said, "the one thing they were really great at was misbehaving. Like you."

"Hey!"

They started walking back to the car. Theo said, "Are you going to move back home now?"

"I don’t know, Theo. It’s ... well ... "

"Complex."

Reg laughed. "Yeah, it’s very complex." He touched his son’s shoulder, ran his hand to the back of Theo’s neck, so warm. "But listen, just because we’re not all together in the same house, that doesn’t mean we’re not a family. We’re still connected."

Reg set the knapsack on the ground, unlocked the car door. "Hey," Theo said. "What about your friend?"

The urn was in the knapsack. Reg had told him about the ashes, about his friend’s wishes. Eli didn’t believe in an afterlife, but he did believe in returning the atoms he’d borrowed.

At first Reg couldn’t understand why Eli had done it. Years of work, undone by a seed planted deep in the code, a few lines that would let them bypass the kill command. It was crazy to build a tool without an off switch.

Only later, as Reg and the students discreetly hunted for the mytes across campus—finding a few, but not nearly enough to account for all the missing shells—did he realize that Eli had stopped thinking of them as tools a long time ago.

Theo said, "Aren’t you going to, you know, spread him around?"

"Scatter the ashes," Reg corrected. "Maybe later, Captain. I’ve had enough scattering for awhile." Eli, quiet as a Schrödinger cat, didn’t object. "Besides, we’ve got to get you home and cleaned up before Mom sees you."

Petit Mal #1: Glass

I
t’s one of the crybabies," the guard told her. "He’s trying to kill one of the psychos."

Dr. Alycia Liddell swore under her breath and grabbed her keys. Only two weeks into the drug trial and the prisoners were changing too fast, starting to crack.

In the hospital wing, a dozen guards crowded around an open cell door. They were strapping on pads, pulling on helmets, slapping billy clubs in their palms. It was standard procedure to go through this ritual in full view of the prisoners; more often than not they decided to walk out before the extraction team went in.

The shift lieutenant waved her to the front of the group. "One of your babies wants to talk to you," he said.

She leaned around the door frame. In the far corner of the cell, wedged between the toilet and the wall, two white men sat on the floor, one behind the other, like bobsledders. Lyle Carpenter crouched behind, his thin arms around Franz Lutwidge’s broad chest. Lyle was pale and sweating. In one hand he gripped a screwdriver; the sharpened tip trembled just under Franz’s walrus-fat chin.

Franz’s eyes were open, but he looked bored, almost sleepy. The front of his orange jumpsuit was stained dark.

Both men saw her. Franz smiled and, without moving, somehow suggested a shrug: Look at this fine mess. Lyle, though, almost dropped the weapon. "Doc. Thank God you’re here." He looked ready to burst into tears.

The doctor stepped back from the door. "Franz is bleeding," she said to the lieutenant.