Unpossible Read online

  She pulled open the door. Jürgo’s old-fashioned, rectangle-eyed welding helmet hung from a hook, staring at her. She thought of Grandmother Zita. What possesses a person to put a bucket on their head?

  The inside of the locker door was decorated with a column of faded photographs. In one of them a young Jürgo, naked from the waist up, stared into the camera with a concerned squint. His new wings were unfurled behind him. Elena’s mother and father, dressed in their red Gene Corps jackets, stood on either side of him. Elena unpeeled the yellowed tape and put the picture in her breast pocket, then unhooked the helmet and closed the door.

  She walked back to the old men, pulling the cart behind her. "Are we working today or what?" she asked.

  Guntis looked up from the chess board with amusement in his huge wet eyes. "So you are the boss now, eh, Elena?"

  Verner, however, said nothing. He seemed to recognize that she was not quite the person she had been. Damaged components had been stripped away, replaced by cruder, yet sturdier approximations. He was old enough to have seen the process repeated many times.

  Elena reached into the pockets of her coat and pulled on her leather work gloves. Then she wheeled the cart over to the toe of the boot and straightened the hoses with a flick of her arm.

  "Tell us your orders, Your Highness," Guntis said.

  "First we tear apart the weapons," she said. She thumbed the blast trigger and blue flame roared from the nozzle of the cutting torch. "Then we build better ones."

  She slid the helmet onto her head, flipped down the mask, and bent to work.

  Gardening at Night

  The minefield was a tidy two-hundred-foot square out on the salt flats, its border marked by a yellow ribbon staked to the sandy surface. Anti-personnel landmines were scattered in a pseudo-random pattern inside, buried an inch deep. All the mytes had to do was find all the mines without exploding them. All Reg had to do was act like he was in control.

  He sat on a Rubber-Maid trunk full of tools, cables, and robot parts, in an attitude of prayer: elbows on knees, bent over a paper coffee cup between his palms. One of the grad students wheeled the dolly to the edge of the field, crossed carefully over the ribbon, and stopped about ten feet inside the border. He levered his cargo—a glossy black slab the size of a gravestone—onto the ground. One of the other students ran an orange extension cord out to the slab; the other end was wired to a battery pack set up outside the border. Then the four students took up positions around the square, booted up laptops and video cameras, and one by one turned their attention to Dr. Reg Berentz.

  This should be Eli’s job, Reg thought. Eli was the project leader, the great man, the field marshal. Reg had been working on this project with him for over four years, but months into Eli’s hospitalization it still felt presumptuous to decant the mytes without him. The old man loved them like his children.

  Reg set his coffee on the ground and stood up, back creaking. He was only 33, an assistant professor and less than half Eli’s age, but he felt ancient compared to these twenty-something students. He’d been up most of the night debugging code, and he felt as keyed up and sleep deprived as the first weeks after his son was born.

  He walked slowly to the border, stepped over the tape, and squatted down next to the slab. Up close it looked like a stack of black Legos—rectangles stacked on rectangles—almost three feet high and four inches thick. 1152 shells. He traced a finger up the right edge of the block, got a fingernail under the top piece, and tapped it, tilting it up. The piece was shaped like a domino, two inches long and a little less than an inch wide, the back end still connected to the next piece in the chain. Two wires protruded from the front like long antennae; four other wires dangled from the bottom.

  Reg dipped into his pocket, found the special AC adapter, and fitted it to the antennae. The other end of the adapter was the standard three-prong pig face: two squinty eyes and a round snout in the middle. "This little piggy went to market," he said to himself. He reached down and picked up the female end of the extension cord.

  Dipti, one of the veteran students who’d been on the project almost as long as Reg, said, "Wait a minute, Dr. B. Aren’t you going to say it?"

  The students looked at Reg expectantly. Eli may be in the hospital, but there were traditions to maintain.

  Reg set his face into an Eli frown. "All right, people," he said, doing a practiced imitation of the man. "Let’s do this like my sister."

  Marshall Lin, a first-year student on his first trip to the minefield, looked to Dipti for an explanation, but she waved it off: tell you later.

  Reg kissed the pig face on its nose, braced himself, and connected the adapter to the extension cord.

  Nothing happened.

  Reg unplugged, plugged again. Stood up, hands on his hips, and looked toward the battery pack. "Can somebody ... ?"

  The electricity hit and the slab burst into a multitude of black shapes. Reg jumped back, laughing.

  Shells spattered onto the ground, tumbled in the dirt, righted themselves, and fled on churning wire legs.

  Reg stepped back over the tape on tiptoe, careful to avoid crushing them. Some of the creatures scurried toward him, then stopped short a few inches from the tape and reversed course. The rest flowed outward, toward the center of the field. It looked for a moment as if they were scattering, each individual fleeing for shelter, and Reg sucked in his breath. They’d all die, triggering the landmines blindly.

  But then their instincts kicked in and they turned in toward each other. Shells called out on the universal myte frequency, skittered toward each other, and butted heads, antennae waving. They crawled over each others’ backs, thrust wires into receiving ports, tumbled like puppies.

  Sometimes when they touched they remained in contact. Bodies began to assemble.

  Reg watched the mass of shells closest to him. Ten of the shells had already daisy-chained into a rough circle. Another strand formed at the other side of the circle, writhing frantically like skaters in a game of crack the whip. In a moment the segment slapped across the center of the circle; when it rapped against the other strand, the two chains curled inward and joined at an angle. The two strands worked like a divining rod, swinging into other shells. Clusters formed at the intersection of the strands. The pace accelerated, a flurry of attachment and reattachment as the group struggled to implement the shared blueprint in their memory.

  In ten seconds, assembly was complete. He knew from studying it in the Logosphere, the simulation environment they used, that the myte’s body was composed of thirty-seven shells. It was shaped like a squat "Y"—two long limbs, one short—connected at the middle by a cluster of shells. The short limb, capped by a cube of six shells, swiveled and swayed like a elephant’s trunk. It was a new design, lighter than the 60-shell mytes in the last generation they’d tested on the flats, less likely to set off mines with its weight. He shook his head with delight. By his own definition the creature in front of him was no more real or alive than a creature instantiated in the Logosphere—but it didn’t feel that way. There was something about seeing it born in front of his eyes, out here in the sand and sun. It seemed to demand a name.

  All around the new myte, its sisters were assembling, thirty or forty of them already up and mobile. The remaining shells, spread out over a twenty yard area, would take longer to find partners, if they found them at all.

  The assembled mytes went to work, crawling delicately over the sand and rock like crabs. Every six inches or so, the myte would stop, balance on its two rear legs, and wave its trunk over the ground in front of it like a divining rod, using simple beat frequency oscillation to sniff for metal. And not just any metal: the myte had evolved to concentrate on certain magnetic signatures and ignore the noise of shrapnel, bullet casings, and mundane garbage.

  "Score one," Dipti called. She was on the east side of the square, eyeing the screen of her laptop. "C5, and no detonation," she said. Reg was standing near C hash mark on the yellow ribbon, and
looked up to where 5 ought to be on the Y axis. A live-action game of Battleship.

  The myte in question squatted over a section of dirt, trembling with an excellent imitation of excitement. Its foreleg scratched a circle around the found mine.

  "Okay," Reg said, uselessly. He started pacing. "Okay."

  Over the next thirty minutes, the mytes found another dozen mines without setting them off—ten minutes ahead of their best real-world record. He began to fantasize about clearing the field in less than an hour. Eli would be happy, and more importantly, they’d have something solid to write about in the next grant application. The whole project was on soft money, and Reg and Eli had been shaped by evolutionary pressures to pursue grants with the single-mindedness of anteaters. Or mytes.

  Reg grew more nervous as each mine was uncovered, and finally his pessimism was rewarded: mytes started piling up in the northwest quadrant, something they’d never done in the Logosphere. They crowded into each other, hemmed in by the yellow corner. They seemed to have forgotten about the mines—only the tape kept them from heading to Alaska.

  The tape in and of itself was no barrier, but the wire inside it emitted a low-power radio broadcast. The frequency and the message were hard-wired into every myte—the only preset commands in the chipset. God whispered, and the message was Death. Any myte who crossed the wire would shut itself off automatically.

  Already, the crowding had pushed some of the mytes into the tape, and they’d become dead weight. The rest of the mytes piled on, and died in turn.

  "Jesus Christ, it’s a frickin’ Who concert!" Reg said. He didn’t think any of the students were old enough to get a classical reference, but Dipti laughed. Marshall Lin looked as confused as before.

  A few more minutes and every myte on the field had converged on the northwest corner, and Reg called the test to a halt. Dipti stalked into the field, waving an antenna wired to a radio and battery pack—the same frequency and message as the tape, but with more power. One by one the mytes went dead.

  "Round ’em up," Reg said. "Let’s set up another block." He walked back to the truck and poured himself another cup of coffee.

  "The same thing every time?" Eli said, ignoring the nurse walking into the room.

  Reg shrugged. "Three different quadrants, but yeah—they were running for the fence. Looks like it’s time to take your medicine."

  The nurse, a big white guy, set the tray on the side table. Like Eli and Reg, he wore a paper breather over his mouth and nose, which made him even more intimidating. Eli still hadn’t looked at him.

  "It’s got to be in the environment code," Eli said. He always thought it was in the environment code, never in the myte processing software. Reg’s grad assistants had written the environmental library.

  "Dr. Karchner ... " the nurse said. His surprisingly soft voice was almost lost in the hum and hiss of the air scrubbers. Vents in the ceiling sucked air out the room, blasted it with UV, forced it through microfilters, and jetted it back.

  "Maybe its heliotropism," Eli said. The mytes’ skin was light sensitive. "Increase the sunlight in the Logosphere, make sure it’s coming from the west. And make sure your sand is reflecting properly."

  Reg shook his head. "I don’t think that’s it," he said good-naturedly. "But I’ll—" Behind Eli, the nurse crossed his arms. Beefy Aaron Neville arms. "I’ll check it out," Reg said.

  "Dr. Karchner," the nurse said, louder.

  Eli sighed, pulled down his mask, and allowed the nurse to hand him, one at a time, three little plastic cups, which he downed like shots of harsh whisky.

  The last time Reg had talked to Eli’s doctor, the mix was INII, Cycloserine, and Ethioniamide, but he could very well be taking some new cocktail. Months into his treatment, he’d already gone through the first-line drugs, and was working his way down the bench. The sputum counts would dip with each new combination, then climb steadily back up.

  Any three TB-tested antibiotics, used consistently, should have been enough to wipe out the TB—unless the strain happened to evolve in a hyper-Darwinian environment like the University of Utah Hospital (Motto: Come for the gall bladder infection, but stay for the multi-drug resistant TB). Eli, more than anyone, understood the rule of large numbers, the arithmetic of natural selection. It became clear with each failed cocktail that the strain he’d picked up was something of an evolutionary veteran.

  Eli’s doctors were getting desperate. Most of his treatment had been self-administered at home, but as Eli deteriorated they’d brought him back to the scene of the crime, the same hospital where he’d been infected. It seemed ludicrous to Reg that a rich, fully-insured American could die of consumption in the second decade of the twenty-first century ... but there it was.

  The nurse left, and Eli leaned back into the pillows—the back of his bed was almost always raised—and blinked slowly. He was a wide-faced man with a monkish fringe of gray hair, only in his late-sixties, but he looked older. The energy he’d had five minutes ago seemed to have been knocked out of him. At least he wasn’t coughing. Reg couldn’t take the coughing.

  They called this phase L & C: Liquefaction and Cavitation. After years of macrophage-bacteria warfare, TB bacilli fled into the lung tissue where the cumbersome macrophages couldn’t follow. Smaller T-cells pursued like barracuda, chewing apart healthy tissue to deprive TB of breeding places. Cells turned liquid and were coughed out in shotgun blasts, leaving behind lungs pitted like exploded minefields.

  The coughing was awful, but worse was the way Eli dropped his head and submitted to it—and Eli submitted to nothing without a fight.

  Reg got up to leave. "I’ll let you rest. Tomorrow I’ll stop by with—"

  "I got in the study," Eli said.

  "What? When?"

  "Found out this morning." There’d been no new TB drugs for almost 50 years, but with TB raging across AIDS-weakened Africa, a few pharmaceutical companies decided there might be a market for expensive new drugs to replace the cheap generics. Cecrolysin was the first of the new peptide antibiotics okayed for human trials. Eli’s doctor had been trying to get him into the study for months.

  "Eli, that’s great news! When do you start?"

  He waved a hand. "A couple weeks." He didn’t look happy about it. But maybe that was just the fatigue.

  Reg was struck by the fact that Eli had no one else to give this news to. He’d divorced sometime in his thirties. He had no children, and besides Reg, no close friends in the department. Somewhere he must have old friends, ex-colleagues, relatives—maybe even a sister who was indeed "fast, cheap, and out of control"—but Reg had never met them.

  He reached for the older man’s shoulder, and hesitated. Did Eli dislike being touched? He wasn’t the huggy type. Reg finally patted him on the shoulder, dropped his hand to his side. "That’s ... amazing news. Really amazing."

  Perhaps half a minute passed, and Reg couldn’t think of anything to say. Eli remained silent and impassive.

  "Well," Reg said. "I’ll bring by the videos tomorrow, and the stats. You’ll be back with us in no time." Reg shouldered his bag. He reached the door and Eli said, "How are Cora and Theo?"

  Reg turned. Eli, asking about his family?

  "Fine," Reg said. "Everything’s going really well."

  When Reg got home he made a circuit of the echoing apartment, flicking on lights. First the living room, empty except for the entertainment center and the loveseat Cora didn’t want; the front bathroom, spare and clean; the back bedroom where he slept and the adjoining master bath. He did this out of habit, even though he lived alone six days of the week, even though the apartment was so small there was barely room for anyone to hide.

  Last he checked the guest bedroom. The bed was made and the toys were all put away, except for on the window sill, which had become a permanent parking lot of Hot Wheels cars watched over by second-favorite action figures. The first-stringers were two miles away, in Theo’s room at the house on the avenues, where he lived with his mother
. Where Reg lived too until a few months ago.

  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.