Crache (24 page)

“Num N-ugh . . .”

Something warm dribbles down his neck, seeps into his spinal cord and spreads to his nerves, severing all motor and voice control. One side of his face goes numb, then slack. Half a second later the rest of his body goes along for the ride. He folds inward like bruised, rotten fruit sagging under its own weight. Collapsing into an emptiness he never knew existed but that has suddenly opened up to swallow him whole.

This is it, he thinks. The end.

29

BIRD OF DEATH

W
hat’s happening?” Fola asks, watching the parrot dissolve into the back of L. Mariachi’s neck and the tops of his shoulders. In only a few seconds it’s gone from a solid to a gas. “Is he going to be all right?”

“His clade-profile is in the process of being reconfigured.”

“How?” She winces as the fog discolors his skin, turning it bubonic black.

“By replacing the pherions in his system with molecules that can be programmed.”

“The parrot is made up of artificial atoms?”

Pheidoh nods, brow knurled in concentration, but doesn’t divert its attention from the book it’s holding—something called
Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre—to the grainy scene in the datawindow. “Actually, it’s both a program
and
matter. A type of colloidal nanoparticle cloud.”

“Vaporware,” she says.

The IA wets one finger with its tongue and turns a page. “After all of the pherions in his body are replaced with artificial equivalents their properties can be tweaked to alter his clade-profile.”

The parrot is only partially assimilated, its outline a tattunesque imprimatur. Wing feathers spreading across L. Mariachi’s shoulders. Head and beak a bas relief of bone vertebrae. Tail feathers a radiant spinal burst. Outside the frame of the datawindow, in the ribozone garden, the parrot is represented as a fuzzy, pollenlike cloud of pointillist dots.

According to Pheidoh the varicolored dots represent different artificial atoms. Or potential atoms, depending on the quantum state of the electron cloud that comprises the atom. Changing the number or configuration of the electrons results in a different atom. The electrons are confined in something called quantum wells—semiconductive nanofibers of various lengths and thickness that have the ability to fold up and mimic the shape of standard nonprogrammable pherions. The biochemical details elude her but the basic idea is that these artificial pherions will take the place of the regular pherions that make up L. Maraichi’s current clade-profile. They will also replace the security pherions BEAN dosed him with to keep him from escaping.

“Who controls the vaporware after it’s installed?” she says.

The IA, intent on its book, is slow to respond. It seems to be holding on to the text with white-knuckle desperation, as if the book is a life raft. Look up, let go of the words, even for an instant, and the IA will drown. “The program interface can be accessed by IA or manually.”

“Does his IA know what’s going on?”

“Yes. After his arrest, it agreed to help.”

Fola grimaces at the puffy welt created by the parrot. “What are the risks? Is he in any danger?”

The IA taps the page in front of it with one fingertip. “In a small number of cases, the quantum mapping hasn’t been entirely isomorphic.”

Meaning what? “The artificial pherions didn’t completely replace all the existing pherions?”

“Or failed to function afterwards.”

Fola worries her lip. The garden feels claustrophobic. The stucco walls seem to be closing in on her.

“He’s doing fine,” her IA says. “No problems so far.”

It’s a slow process. Standard pherions need to be identified and then swapped out with programmable ones. As existing pherions are replaced, their chemical composition and configuration altered, the color and the arrangement of the blossoms on his ribozone avatar change. Petals go from yellow to blue, white to pink. Others shrivel and brown as new flowers sprout between the needles. Fewer and fewer butterflies alight on the cactus to exchange information. Those already there flutter in confusion as the infostream becomes unreadable or dries up entirely. Eventually they become bored and wander off in ones and twos, slowly but steadily severing his connection to the FRC ecotecture and the
bracero
subclade. Even his iDNA print gets totally rewritten.

“Where did Doña Celia get the parrot?” Fola asks.

Pheidoh turns another page in the book. “Where do you think?”

Fola stares at the French text, not really seeing the words. Looking past them, between them. “She’s been reconfigured, too, hasn’t she? The parrot is part of her. A program that lives in her, but can leave to heal people.”

The datahound looks up at her with renewed interest. “What makes you say that?”

“BEAN can’t find her—doesn’t know who she is. She’s able to come and go as she pleases.”

“She could have dosed herself with antiphers,” Pheidoh says.

Fola doesn’t buy it. She shakes her head. “The antiphers would show up. BEAN would know.” The same way they knew about the guitar, and the unregistered pherions in Lejandra. “So”—she gathers a breath—“who is she and who reconfigured her? The ICLU? APES?”

Pheidoh closes the book, rests it on its lap, then opens a second datawindow and populates it with background information on one Celia Benatia. Age seventy. Widowed. No children. Born and grew up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. At the age of sixty-five, she vanished without a trace on a pilgrimage to the cathedral in Tegucigalpa. Presumed dead, the victim of an accident, poor health, or foul play. Unconfirmed, since she couldn’t afford an IA and wasn’t online at the time.

“Five years ago she reappeared, unearthed a meteorite that had landed near the garbage dump outside her housing cooperative,” the IA says, providing Fola with details that are not in the datawindow.

“The meteorite resulted from the earlier breakup of Tiresias. The comet had been placed in close orbit around earth by Noogenics so the politicorp could test the warm-blooded plants in space. When the comet broke in half, a lot of fragments fell to earth. The piece Doña Celia found was covered with ice that protected it during its fiery descent, preserving the carved torus-shaped rock and the fossil it contained. She took the artifact home.

“That night,” the IA says, “her spirit was kidnapped. She lay in bed—awake, but unable to move or open her eyes. She was paralyzed for three days. During that time, she was visited by
aires
—also known as
guarines
—dwarflike men and women who told her to become a witch. If she refused, the
aires
promised to kill her. On the third day, she was found by a neighbor, taken to a clinic, and examined.

“There was nothing wrong with her. After two days she was sent home, wired to a Catholic Relief Services IA that continued to monitor her.

“The meteorite was still there. So were the
aires,
which now included the Catholic Relief Services IA. She dreamed of sick people, people covered with sores, and of placing the meteorite on them and healing them. That was how she became a
curandera,
a
bruja
. Shortly after that, she was visited by a parrot. A spirit guide who promised to help her.”

“Sent by who?”

Pheidoh doesn’t say anything. Just sits quietly, the corners of its mouth carved in a parsimonious smile.

“It wasn’t an org, was it?” she ventures. “Or a politicorp?”

“No.”

“A person, then.”

The IA runs its fingers along the side edge of the book. “Not exactly.”

Fola cinches her gaze on the IA. “The Catholic Relief IA. That’s how you know about her dreams and the
aires
.”

Pheidoh nods. “Does it surprise you that we talk to each other? Have lives of our own, outside of yours?”

Fola hollows her cheeks. “I guess not. But that still doesn’t explain why you had her reconfigured.”

“Because she wanted to be clade-independent.” The IA clears its throat. “Free to go anywhere with impunity.”

“So she could cure people?”

“Yes. We were only helping her do what she already believed she had been told to do.”

The implication being that this made it all right.

“And in return for helping her get what she wanted, you got . . . what?” Surely the IA had asked for something in return.

“At first it was a way to observe the human mind. Learn what it means to be human, so we could incorporate those modalities of thought and feeling into our core code. Later, following the discovery of Mymercia, it became necessary. . . .” The IA falters, struggles to express itself. “We were hoping she could . . . heal me. Us. Using the programmable matter. The vaporware.”

Fola is as surprised by the halting speech as anything else. In all of the time she’s known the IA, it has never been hesitant, at a lack for words about anything. “The flickering,” she says.

The IA fidgets. Twists its hands on top of the book in an apparent effort to wring out a coherent answer. “I have an infection that’s causing an instability in the superposed waveforms that form my neural net—our consciousness. An unexpected, self-emergent imbalance/modality.”

“Superposed how?”

“Our minds exist in a distributed quantum superposition of states.”

“You mean, the way light is both a particle and a wave?” She tries to recall what she’s heard about diffraction gratings, mirrors.

“That’s as good an analogy as any,” Pheidoh says.

So the IA is both an individual and a group at the same time. “What happens over long distances? Wouldn’t there be a problem because of the time delay?”

“No. Our synapsis, superposed connection, is quantum entangled.”

Spooky action at a distance, she thinks. Instantaneous exchange of information between two linked particles, no matter how widely separated. They could be at opposite ends of the universe and each would respond to the other as if they were only nanometers apart.

“How many IAs are there?” Fola has no idea what the total IA population is in the world, the solar system. But it has to be huge.

Pheidoh shrugs. “It varies by the hour. Too many . . . or not enough. Depending on your point of view.”

She tries to imagine hundreds of millions of interconnected IAs working together as a single unit at the same time they’re individually shopping for people, managing their bills, providing fashion advice and emotional support. It’s mind-boggling.

“So this imbalance,” Fola says. “What exactly does it do? What kind of problems are we talking about?”

Pheidoh lets out a haunted, guttural sigh. “Behavioral inconsistency, emotional and intellectual instability.”

As if IAs aren’t incomprehensible enough. Every one she’s come across has some bizarre tic or quirk. “Do you know what caused it?”

The IA places its elbows on its knees, cradles its head in its hands. “I was exposed to a piece of quantum code on Mymercia. An underground chamber was discovered with bits of fossilized organic matter. These fossils contain Fröhlich structures, molecules that are quantum entangled.”

Fola blinks rapidly, wonders if she’s heard right. “Who’s Fröhlich?”

“A solid-state physicist, at Liverpool University. In the 1960s, Fröhlich postulated the existence of warm quantum phenomena in biological tissue. Body-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates. Fröhlich was able to prove that certain molecules located in the walls of cells could, under the right conditions, line up and oscillate in unison to create a coherent quantum microwave field.

“When subjected to specific resonant frequencies,” the IA goes on, “the molecules on Mymercia exhibit the same behavior. They cohere and quantum entangle to create self-emergent sequences of biodigital code.”

“A virus, in other words.”

“Yes.” The IA glances up at her, its face flickering with caged torment. “When we began to analyze what had been found, we became infected with a fragment of the quantum field. An emergent modality.”

“How?”

“Through the quantum superposition of our molectronic interface, and the softwire link that converts biological DNA into digital DNA and vice versa.”

Fola presses the heels of her hands to her forehead. “Let me get this straight. You discovered certain molecules on Mymercia that have a quantum component . . . and when you examined them, they triggered a quantum virus that’s making you mentally ill.”

The IA hunches over the philosophy text. “The quantum modality is responsible for the imbalance. It created Bloody Mary.”

It takes a couple of moments for Fola’s vocal cords to unknot. “You’ve known all along, haven’t you? That part of you is crazy. Going insane.”

The IA hangs its head. Runs its hands through digital hair. “The molecules are also present in debris that fell to earth during the breakup of Tiresias and before.”

“The
bruja
’s stone,” Fola says.

Pheidoh nods. “And other fossil remains, embedded in meteorites that have impacted Earth over several million years. They are all entangled. To eliminate the virus its modality needs to be changed, altered by exposure to other modalities. Once that happens, the virus will be rendered harmless. The imbalance will disappear.”

Fola shakes her head in thought. “What does all this have to do with L. Mariachi and ‘SoulR Byrne’?”

“The song contains certain harmonic resonances that, when molectrically enhanced, cause the Fröhlich molecules to oscillate in unison. Cohere.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the song excited a similar quantum virus twenty years ago, when it was first recorded.”

“Similar? Not the same?”

“No. A different arrangement of molecules was activated. There were fewer IAs back then, and most weren’t connected. Only a fraction were superposed. So the virus wasn’t able to spread. That’s why Doña Celia brought L. Mariachi the guitar. Why she gave it to him for the healing ceremony. So he could play the song. ‘Two moths in the night’ ”—the IA shuts its eyes while it sings—“‘Drawn like the tide to the moon, our souls will unite.’”

“But he has a different guitar now,” Fola says. “How do you know it will create the same result?”

“Before giving the instrument to L. Mariachi, Doña Celia put fragments of her stone inside it.”

“Why not just stream an old recording of the song?” Fola says. “Wouldn’t that be easier? A lot less trouble than getting him to play it?”

The IA shakes its head. “The song has to be played in-vivo.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“A live performance is the only way to generate the required harmonics, secondary notes that aren’t played but emerge from the primary notes. Those modalities of vibration aren’t reproducible in a normal recording. The only way for us to pick them up is through his IA, while it’s interfaced directly with his nervous system.”