Steve looks at Mike, who has pushed Kelly behind him, blocking her from the barrel of Allgäuer’s gun. “I’m sorry,” he says to them. “I’m sorry for dragging you guys into this.”
“But what do you want with him now?” Kelly asks Allgäuer. “Why are you here with a gun?”
“You installed neuron transistors in his brain,” Mike says. “And now you’re here to see if Steve and the super collider can be used as some kind of weapon. Right?”
Allgäuer laughs.
“It’s not neuron transistors,” Steve says.
And he can feel them, can detect their interaction with his own mind, with neurons and glial cells, can sense their emerging sentience. He realizes for the first time that his episodes of detached reality, his newfound extrasensory perception, have been caused by a cascade release of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that facilitate communication between nerve cells. His brain’s biological structure has been compromised by microscopic machines. Hijacked by them.
“They’re nanomachines,” he declares.
“Nanomachines?” Mike asks.
“Mother of God,” Dobbelfeld says in German, awestruck. “He can sense them. Karsten, I do not think it wise to—”
“Shut up,” Allgäuer snaps.
“Karsten,” Donovan says. “What’s going on?”
“It’s like the neuron transistor,” Steve says to Mike. “But much smaller. There are millions of them. They’ve . . . they interact with my brain cells. Introduce new configurations into the neural network. It’s how I’ve seen these fields. It’s like I’m unlearning patterns, redefining consciousness to accommodate the larger scope of—”
“That is enough,” Allgäuer says. “We have not come all the way from Switzerland to listen to this navel gazing. Donovan, the beam should be reaching full energy by now, yes?”
And even as he listens to Allgäuer’s orders, Steve can see behind them, can tune into the man as if he were a radio station. He knows now that Svetlana and the bouncer were paid to watch for lonely guys like him. Knows that Svetlana changed her mind after it was too late, and that she and the bouncer were murdered when their attempt to abduct Steve failed. He knows that Allgäuer pays contacts like them all over Switzerland. He sees how desperately the man wants this experiment to work, and he understands why, because he can sense the memory of Jonas Kornherr, the autistic teen who Allgäuer believes felt the intelligence of the universe.
“The beam is already at full energy,” Steve says. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re mistaken, Karsten. It’s not alive.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Allgäuer turns to Dobbelfeld, speaks lower, in German again. “This is amazing, these things he knows. Do you have contact with the machines?”
Dobbelfeld nods. “As far as I can tell, all the machines are functioning properly. He must be decoding electromagnetic signals from your brain. These are dramatically better results than I anticipated.”
Steve looks at Mike and Kelly. “He’s been experimenting on innocent people for years. He stumbled across a variant of LSD that altered perception enough for people to sense vector fields. But the drug killed every test subject. Every one of them. Including the autistic boy,” he accuses Allgäuer. “After you pumped him full of it for almost two years.”
And now Steve sees a terrible truth, something he wants to turn away from, but where is there to go?
“I’m not the only one?” he cries. “You’ve injected these machines into three other people? Who all died because of them?”
Allgäuer’s face reddens. The hand holding the gun quivers. “If the machines are working so well, why is he standing there like nothing is happening?” he yells at Dobbelfeld.
But something
is
happening. Steve can sense the beam, the billions of protons circling the main ring at nearly the speed of light, can sense the occasional collisions that occur when these bunches of protons cross paths. Even from here he sees them shattering into their constituent pieces, sees the shrapnel from the collisions being deflected in every direction, sees them lodge in the detector. He sees these things because they disturb nearby fields of matter and energy, because every particle interaction in the universe disturbs every other in some small way, and the closer you are to those interactions or the more powerful they are, the more easily the effects are detected.
What he doesn’t see is the universe reacting with purpose. It seems to be a machine with no intelligence. And so he thinks the presence must have been an illusion. That since his pattern-loving mind was not powerful or experienced enough to handle the new stimuli, it was forced to translate them into apparitions like Svetlana.
But he does see how the universe could be
made
to be smart. How particles could be made to convey information. He sees a future where man becomes more and more adept at manipulating his environment, at sharing information, he sees a Grid like the one here at the NTSSC becoming a global network, more and more processing power generating better and better technology, until man is capable of anything. Perfectly repairing his own body. Stopping the aging process. Combining his biological brain with man-made processors to become a truly ascendant being. The ultimate creation of a collective intelligence that might truly turn out to be a new type of existence, one of pure thought and exploration, man no longer restrained by the ancient need to satisfy his bodily instincts. A collective entity like this might be considered a kind of god, a god unburdened by guilt and pain and religious dogma.
He sees all of this in a moment of vision, the pure transcendent magic of it, and in the same moment he sees what Allgäuer means to do with the super collider, what destruction he might cause in a desperate bid to derive meaning from the universe.
In his predictable bid for immortality.
4
Mike reels at the unreality of a gun being pointed at him. An actual handgun.
The unreality of this entire evening, in fact, first the glass dissolving in his hand and now this implausible exchange between Allgäuer and Steve. Donovan just standing there with Allgäuer, silent, the billionaire brazenness stripped away somehow.
Mike tries to make logical deductions from these preposterous events, determined to find a reasonable way out of this quandary. Because nothing good can come from these German-speaking men and their experiment on Steve. Nothing good can come from the gun. Mike must protect Kelly, find a way to get her out of this room alive, and hopefully defuse the situation enough to keep Steve and Landon and all of them out of harm’s way.
But how to do this, exactly?
And still, the idea of nanomachines in Steve’s head, altering his brain chemistry in a way that has somehow affected his sensory perception, this is something he almost cannot comprehend. Yes, the technology to do such a thing has been in development for years, and yes, he has seen the truth of Steve’s ability with his own eyes, but how can there be technology so much farther advanced than anything he has ever read or heard about?
“Mr. Allgäuer,” he says. “This is out of control. There is no reason for Kelly to be here. We can work this out without her.”
“I’m not going anywhere!” Kelly hisses from behind him. “I’m not leaving Steve behind when I’m the one who brought him here.”
“No one is leaving,” Allgäuer says. “Until Keeley and I complete our transaction.”
“It won’t work,” Steve says.
“What transaction?” Mike and Donovan both ask.
“He thinks the universe is alive,” Steve continues. “He thinks that someone with my ability should be able to communicate with it somehow. That being in close proximity to the collisions at a high-energy physics laboratory will open some kind of communication channel between our world and his world of particle intelligence.”
“But if that were right,” Mike says, “it would be a miracle beyond words. Why force the issue with a gun?”
Allgäuer says nothing.
“It doesn’t matter,” Steve says. “There is no intelligence. There—”
Allgäuer nods, and Dobbelfeld enters a command into his electronic device, and Steve falls to the floor.
“Steve!” Kelly says, and rushes to him. “Steve, what’s wrong?”
“They may be inside his head,” Allgäuer says, “but the machines are under my control.”
“What are you doing to him?” Donovan asks.
“What did you do?” Kelly screams as she leans near Steve’s face, apparently to check his breathing.
“He’s just unconscious,” Dobbelfeld says. “A kind of artificial coma.”
Allgäuer watches the doctor as he continues to work on the electronic device. “I was curious,” he says, “to find out if Keeley could sense the intelligence as Kornherr did. He cannot. But that does not mean we cannot harness his brain to do it for us. The machines in his mind receive and transmit information via high-frequency radio signals. We will connect him to the Grid, and we will instruct the machines to send a signal into the heart of the detector, and we will wait for a response.”
But this is no good, Mike thinks. Just a nudge to some physical constant, such as the speed of light or charge to mass ratio on an electron, and there could be a lot of rearrangements on a subnuclear level that would have dramatic consequences on a macroscopic scale. Like a runaway chain reaction, for instance, that could destroy the entire universe.
“Stop,” he says to Allgäuer. “You have to stop this.”
“How much longer?” Allgäuer asks Dobbelfeld, staring at Mike, still pointing the gun.
“I need a minute, maybe two.” But the doctor’s hands are shaking, and his fingers aren’t rushing to enter instructions into his PDA-like device.
“Dobbelfeld,” Mike says. “Steve can do things I wouldn’t have believed possible. Tonight I saw him rearrange the molecular composition of a drinking glass. If you enter this ability into a high-energy particle collision, the effects could be unpredictable. You could kill us all.”
Dobbelfeld looks up.
“Do not stop!” Allgäuer says.
“Dobbelfeld,” Mike pleads. “This is lunacy.”
“Shut up!” Allgäuer yells. “Or I will shoot you. And then I will shoot your girlfriend.”
Mike weighs his options. There is no way to know what will happen if they tune Steve into the detector. Probably nothing. Should he risk his own life on a hunch?
He makes eye contact with Donovan, trying to convince him without saying so to grab the gun. Donovan ignores him.
But even if nothing happens during their experiment with Steve, what about afterward? At the very least Allgäuer will take his test subject back to Switzerland with him. Can Mike stand by and just let that happen? He doesn’t understand how Donovan can just stand there himself, when he is just feet away from Allgäuer. He could reach over there and grab the gun. He could do something.
“Hurry,” Allgäuer says.
Mike doesn’t understand what the rush is. The beam run will go on for hours. But perhaps he
does
understand, perhaps he can even comprehend why Donovan is standing there, doing nothing.
Because they want answers. They want to be led out of the darkness. They want a drug to wipe out their existential despair.
Mike understands this.
The instinct to survive is not original to humans, but the knowledge of eventual death might be.
Even if death could be delayed or avoided, even if man eventually commands his entire universe, does it really matter? Because what comes next?
This is why Allgäuer risks unimaginable destruction looking for something else. Why humans cling desperately to routine and tradition and custom. To hide the essential truth of life. To hide the doom.
Because the genetic survival instinct is incompatible with high intelligence.
Mike’s reptilian brain says
stay
while his human mind says
go.
An inner battle:
live another moment at all costs
versus
risk death to secure a life worth living.
Mike ignores his trembling hands. He looks down at Kelly, still with Steve.
He rushes Allgäuer.
5
In less than five seconds, these thoughts of Kelly’s, skipping through her mind as if across the glacial surface of a frozen pond:
Surprise as she sees Mike’s blurry form rush past her.
The reality of her own cowardice. The selfish, arctic terror of her own impending death. She should be helping him.
A gunshot. Mike stumbling, collapsing into Allgäuer. Another gunshot. Ceiling tiles raining dust.
Steve moving.
“Dobbelfeld!” screams Allgäuer as he struggles with Mike on the floor.
She must help Mike. Scrambles to her feet.
A groan from Steve. She looks back.
“Run,” he says.
She scrambles to Mike, screaming.
Donovan runs past them, out the door. Dobbelfeld follows.
Another gunshot. Allgäuer rolls off Mike, a starburst of blood spreading across Mike’s white shirt.
Run,
Steve says again. Except she is not hearing it. It comes from everywhere and nowhere, this command, assaulting her senses as if broadcast by a million-watt loudspeaker.
Run!
“Get up, Mike,” she cries. “I know you’re hurt, but I can’t carry you. You’ve got to get up.”
“Run,” he answers. His voice is liquid, gurgling. “Kelly, go.”
“No!”
Memories flash rapidly: Mike’s cologne as he shuffled past her on the plane, the e-mails, chocolate martini on his shirt.
She looks back at Steve, hoping he has somehow risen, hoping he can help her carry Mike. But something is not right with him. His wide eyes point straight at her, but they aren’t seeing, they’re crawling with electricity, alive with yellow vessels of energy.
Steve can’t help her. He’s going nowhere. He is, in fact, the source of the distress.
An escalating hum, energy building, swelling around him. He’s glowing. Blue and yellow and somehow translucent, and the colors are crawling toward her, and—
6
Larry stands outside the door, looking in. It’s the story of his life. He and Samantha have watched most of this exchange, hesitant to enter the room with a gun present, and now even she is gone, having followed Dobbelfeld when he fled, demanding to know what happened.