Page 10 of Colliding Galaxies

  ***

  “God does not play dice with the Universe.”

  Albert Einstein

  1.

  Dr. Richard Mullinex studied the image closely. The Quantum Flux Imager filled three rooms on the fourth floor of the Sheffield Center. Three rooms crammed with gear, to focus on things so small…insubstantial things, wisps of reality, winking in and out of existence.

  “Anything yet?” Dr. Angela Kunz tapped out a few keys, tightening up the beam a hundredfold.

  “A few specks…there…see? Right on schedule.”

  Kunz ran fingers through short red hair, fiddled with her glasses. “Vivions…” she muttered. “Sounds like somebody’s secretary.”

  “Couldn’t think of a better name,” Mullinex told her. “Vivo…that means life, doesn’t it? Quanta of life force.”

  “Yeah, right…I’m sure the Physics Journal will buy that.”

  Grad student Huang Li was making screen captures of the images as the particles speckled across the screen, dragging the captured images to a growing file on his laptop. “Seems like the buggers are more active tonight, Dr. Mullinex.”

  Mullinex was tall, lanky, steel gray hair. He scribbled written notes on a smartpad. “Sample’s more advanced…I got it from Oncology this morning. This one’s Level Four, late-stage melanoma. Cancer’s just about strangled the last of the living cells.”

  Kunz hmmpphhed. “That’s why we’re seeing more—“

  “—exactly…stress on the cells. Vivionic flux increases with increasing stress on a living system. This sample’s almost ninety percent cancerous cells.”

  “Huang…I hope you’re getting all this. Nobody else will believe it if we don’t document the hell out of it.”

  Huang finished storing images. “I’ve got spectrograms going, deflection angle, color charge fraction, everything. We’re measuring something…data’s coming in now.”

  Kunz watched the imager screen crackle with fleeting points of light. “Picometer scale…in my wildest dreams, I never would have believed it. Sub-quark scale. Standard theory always maintained that quarks were the most fundamental particles of all. Now…this—“

  Mullinex tweaked the imager controls, trying to focus on a smaller patch of the tissue. In the back of his mind, the opening paragraph of the journal piece he and Angela were co-writing floated like a nagging mother.

  Vivions are sub-quark particles or entities with quantum properties that are theorized to be emergent phenomena associated with living matter and how it associates with the environment at a quantum level. Vivions are thought by some to be actual quanta of life force itself. (“Not by me,” Angela Kunz always retorted, when that phrase came up).

  Vivions were first observed in images produced by the Quantum Flux Imager at Emory University’s Sheffield Center for Nanomedicine. Co-discoverers were Dr. Richard Mullinex, Dr. Angela Kunz and Huang Li. Informally, they have been called ‘Mullinex particles’ as Dr. Mullinex was the first to correctly interpret the images and characterize the phenomena.

  The first instance of vivionic charge or flux was seen in QFI images of subnuclear “clouding” in biological cell samples from Emory University Hospital—

  Mullinex snapped back to the here and now. “Huang…is the vivion pump ready yet?”

  Huang checked a side panel of instruments, mounted on a cart they had wheeled into the control room an hour earlier. “On line, Dr. Mullinex. Power, charge, and focus all in the green.”

  Kunz snorted. “If there’s anything in there. What makes you think you’ve got anything more than a wad of dead tissue?”

  “Data, my dear Angela. Measurements. I irradiated that sample less than an hour ago. You saw the results. Radiation caused a spike in vivion flow—we’ve got it all captured and stored. All I have to do now is pulse the sample in that ‘pump’ with gamma rays and grab the vivions it puts out.”

  “And you really expect to collimate that flow into a beam and inject it into the sample?”

  Mullinex shrugged. “It’s called an experiment, Angela.”

  Kunz shook her head, pulled her jersey a little tighter. It was always cool around the QFI…the detector core was nearly at absolute zero. “Waste of time, if you ask me. We don’t even know if this crap’s real—hell, is anything real at the quantum level? These things are just probability functions. It’s not like you can herd them around like cows. And you want me to co-author a paper on how we used these vivions to reverse cell death?”

  “No, I just want you to help Huang keep track of what happens. If I’m right, we’ll see a brief spike in vivion flux in the target sample, then it should decline. And if we can measure that inflection, we’ll have one data point.”

  “Exactly. But the paper you’re writing claims cancer is cured.”

  “You have a better explanation for what we’re dealing with?”

  “I have an open mind, Richard. Temporary spikes and fluxes in something so immaterial as these—vivions…whatever the hell they are—don’t prove anything. Like you said, it’s a data point. And it’s a pretty damn big leap from one data point to saying vivions are quantized forms of life force, for God’s sake. That’s nothing but voodoo. Witch doctor talk. The Journal peers will eat us alive.”

  “And what if I can demonstrate remission of the melanoma? What if I can grab vivions from one bio-sample and inject them into this diseased tissue? What if vivions are some kind of property of living matter, something we’ve never seen before, and I can increase the quantity of them in diseased tissue? What if the melanoma disappears? Is that black magic?”

  Kunz smirked. “Academic, my nutty professor. It’s all hypothetical…because you can’t.”

  “Not yet,” Mullinex said. He ran up the resolution on the imager to maximum. “That’s the difference between you and me, Angela. Remember the guy who said doing science was like building a cathedral?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “You’re into decorating the cathedral, prettying it up by putting nice finishing touches on the walls. Me…I want to blow the whole thing down and rebuild.”

  Kunz frowned as she watched the QFI image shift. Speckles of light quickened, becoming a flashing strobe effect. “Where I come from…that’s not called science.”

  The three of them had been at the experiment for most of the evening. It had been Mullinex’s idea, hatched in the back corner booth of Everybody’s Pizza a few nights ago. Mullinex wanted to manipulate the newly discovered particles, or entities, or doodads…they still hadn’t settled on a name yet.

  If I’m right, he told them with pepperoni and cheese dribbling down his lips, we can take living tissue that’s stressed the right way and pump it for vivion flow. Then all we have to do is capture that flow and re-direct it into a different cell sample. Say a cancerous lump of tissue. I want to watch what happens. If I’ve got this process figured out—if I’m right—we can effect vivionic flux in the cancerous tissue, like giving it a jolt and put the tumor in remission, just by affecting things at this subquark level.

  So when, Angela wondered, are you not right?

  With visions of Nobel Prizes in his head, Richard Mullinex had set to work two days ago, building his vivionic pump. “I don’t care what we call it—life force, bio-aura, chi, prana, spirit, breath of life—whatever, vivions mediate it, just like photons mediate electromagnetic energy. They’re as real as the cut on Huang’s finger.” Grad student Huang Li had nicked his finger shaping a run of ductwork for the pump a few hours before. “With this experiment, I’ll show I can create net vivionic flow and I can control where that flow goes. And once I show that, I’ll prove I can use that flow to affect living cells.”

  “You’re going at this all wrong, Richard,” Angela had insisted on the way back across the quadrangle to the Center. “You’re cutting too many corners. We don’t know enough about vivions to make your pump work. Suppose it does? Can you do it again? We don
’t even know yet what it means for an object to have a net vivionic charge.”

  But there was no stopping a speeding train. Building the pump and testing it over the next few days gave Angela time to think. Richard Mullinex wasn’t a scientist at all. He was a tornado in the shape of a man, speeding out of control, wrecking everything in his path. Science didn’t advance by smashing the bejeezus out of everything in its path. You studied hard to understand what had been done before, contributed an original idea or two, got the acceptance of your work from peers and generally behaved and tried not to knock over too much furniture in the cathedral.

  Except sometimes, she reflected, it didn’t work that way at all.

  Going on near midnight in the shadowy corner of the Imaging Lab, Angela Kunz polished off a snack of peanut butter crackers and a soft drink and stared at the notes Richard and the others had scribbled on a whiteboard in the back, a sort of running dialogue with themselves about vivions and how to understand them:

  Vivionic charge seems to be conserved in a closed system. Vivionic charge seems to be a basic property of matter, heretofore unobserved.

  All living matter possesses some measurable quantity of vivionic charge. This charge is at a maximum (at the biological cellular level) when cells are dividing (DNA replication and transcription). Vivionic charge is at a minimum (though still detectable) when cells are biologically inert and dead. Vivionic charge seems to have a positive correlation with increases in the basic properties of life: replication, digestion, movement, excretion, etc.

  One theory (Huang) as to why vivions exist is that they are a sort of bookkeeping entry, in effect, the Universe’s way of keeping straight what is living and what is not.

  The theory (Richard) that vivions are quantized life force is controversial and unproven, though attractive.

  Angela snorted. That was an understatement.

  “We’re just about ready here,” Richard announced. He was up to his armpits in flexible tubing, trying to precisely position the last of the particle traps. It had been Huang’s idea to use strips of living tissue as guides and traps for the vivion flow. The damn things seemed to have an affinity for living tissue. So they had lined tubing with bio-matter taken from the bio-waste bins. “Pretty it isn’t,” Mullinex added. “But it seems to work.”

  “All we need,” Huang added, “is some way to deflect the flow into the traps and toward the injectors.” He tweaked the particle injectors, sizing up the lens array he had cobbled together in the machine shop that afternoon. With any luck, the array would receive a blizzard of vivions from the source and focus them into a tight beam to douse the target sample.

  And at the focal plane of the Quantum Flux Imager was a small semi-spherical container of late-stage melanoma-infested tissue.

  “Power up the imager,” Mullinex ordered. In minutes, the instrument was humming. Huang monitored parameters on the display, tweaking here, priming the quark source and letting the color charge settle down to a steady state. “How’s our source doing?”

  Angela hovered over the tank. Inside, a lump of tissue was prepped to be irradiated by a strong gamma-ray beam, shredding cells inside, ripping DNA chains apart. If Richard was right, stressing the source tissue would produce a storm of vivions that they hoped to port off and focus on the target.

  “Source is ready. Emitter’s on line and targeted in.”

  Richard Mullinex took a deep breath and checked the QFI targeting. Right on the button, quivering ever so slightly with blurry waves of indeterminacy.

  “Let ‘er rip!”

  The entire experiment lasted less than ten seconds. In that interval, according to Mullinex, the target was hosed with a massive vivionic flux, more than enough, according to calculations, to create a measurable effect.

  The QFI display dazzled the darkened room with a sleet storm of light, a meteor shower of flickering, strobing pulses as the sample chamber was flooded with vivions from the source. It was over just as their eyes were adjusting to the luminescent fireworks.

  “I’m shutting QFI down,” Mullinex announced. He powered down the equipment. “Make sure the source is isolated. I don’t want the results contaminated with leakage.”

  “Gamma’s dead.” Angela toggled some valves closed and the source chamber was sealed. “Good containment…I’m not registering any flux at all.”

  “Same here,” Huang spoke up. He was monitoring the tangle of tubing and particle traps. “No detectable flux.”

  “That’s it then. It’s a wrap.” Mullinex finished the powerdown, then carefully extracted the target sample container with the waldoes and placed it in a Sharps bin on a dolly. “Let’s get this over to Oncology and see what we’ve got.”

  Analysis took the rest of the night and the better part of the next day. When it was over, Richard Mullinex was all smiles, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep. He sprinted through a gray, blustery fall, through swirling leaves and a raw, stiff wind, sprinted from Oncology across the quadrangle back to the Sheffield Center, his attaché case crammed with printouts and disks slapping against his hips.

  Huang was dozing in an office converted from a utility closet at the end of the hall. Angela was at a workstation, running statistical routines on some of the data. She heard Richard clumping down the hall the moment he banged in through the main doors.

  “Pizza at Everybody’s!” he announced. His hair was disheveled, his eyes dark and intense, his jacket half off his shoulders. “My treat…I just got the final data from Mizener…his crew worked all day on it. Here--!” He thrust a handful of disks onto Angela’s workstation. “No detectable cancer cells. It’s all right there. No detectable HE-1 proteins. No metastatic melanoma cells. Antigens normal, melanocytes normal, evidence of ligand repair in the cells…it’s a beautiful day, Angela. A beautiful day for all of us.”

  That night, Richard sprung for the Mega-Supreme Special, 16-inch and three pitchers of beer.

  “It doesn’t prove your theory,” Angela was saying. “It proves the Quantum Flux Imager had some detectable effect on the sample…that’s all. Did that effect come from vivion flow? It’s way too early to tell.”

  “You’re wrong,” Richard said. “You just don’t want to admit it. Somehow, there’s a causal connection between these particles and cell death. Cessation of life is the key. There’s a causal connection at the most fundamental, quark-scale, quantum scale of life. Every scrap of imagery from QFI has shown an increased outflux of particles at cell death. An influx at cell division. Somehow, the activity of these vivions is related to life itself.”

  “You’re confusing cause with effect. We’ve got to do more experiments, Richard. If we put out a paper now, we’ll be laughed out of Science for good. Where are the controls, the measurement analysis, the error bars on the chart? We haven’t got any. You’re in such a damned rush to get this published, you’re ignoring basic scientific procedure.”

  Richard was listening, but he wasn’t hearing. “The trouble with you, Angela, is you wouldn’t know a paradigm shift if it ran over you in the middle of the street. That’s what we’ve got here. We have to think in new ways about what the Universe is telling us.”

  Angela finished off her beer and stood up to pull on her jacket. “I think the Universe has a whole lot more sense that any of us. Tell you what—“ she leaned over and patted Mullinex sweetly on the cheek. “Be a good boy , won’t you, and take a shower and get some sleep? You stink. We’ll go over the data in detail tomorrow and see if Science As We Know It is safe.”

  Mullinex chewed on a slice of pizza with a disgusted shake of his head. Angela disappeared out the door. Huang nursed a beer, smiling sympathetically.

  “She’s tired, Dr. Mullinex. That’s all. It’s been a frazzle for all of us. What do you say…call it a night?”

  “I suppose.” Mullinex was staring off into space, his glasses having slid down to the end of his nose. ?
??Huang, I’m sure I’m right about this. Vivions are big. Nature’s given us a peek at something extraordinary here. What do you think about all this?”

  The grad student shut his eyes and let the beer gurgle in his stomach. A faint smile creased his face. “My ancestors came from Guangzhou. It’s a big city in southeast China, near Hong Kong. My aunt was a spiritual healer. She often talked about chi, the life force we all have. How to manipulate it, how to add or subtract it, how to break the body’s natural blockages, so chi flows freely.” Huang shrugged. “Maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here. The same invisible bio-energy that keeps the body alive and maintains health.”

  Mullinex sniffed. “Pranic healing. I’ve seen the Sanskrit texts. Did some myself, when I was in grad school. Interesting stuff. But I don’t buy it. Vivionic charge is something different, something real. We can measure it, increase or decrease it, direct it. Did your aunt have any way to measure this chi?”

  “She was her own instrument. It was all traditional stuff. She wouldn’t have needed a quantum flux imager.”

  Mullinex stretched and yawned. “Late night metaphysics. Maybe Angela’s right. I’ve got to clear my head.”

  “Me too.” Huang got up, offered to help with the bill, but Mullinex waved him off.

  “Get out of here.”

  “What about you?”

  Mullinex slapped a fistful of bills on the table. They left and walked back up a low hill to the quadrangle, now moonlit and littered with blowing leaves. “I’ve got another duty to perform.”

  Huang Li climbed into his car. “Not back to the Lab.”

  “No.” Mullinex shrugged his parka tighter against the raw wind. “A visit. Mother’s back at the hospital. It’s just a short walk. Cold air’ll do me good. I didn’t drop by today anyway. It’s after visiting hours, but what the hell. I’ll peek in on her. If I’m lucky, she’ll be asleep.”

  2.

  No experimental evidence exists of any living object (whether cell or larger organism) having a state of zero vivionic charge. There is experimental evidence (not yet corroborated) of minimal levels of vivionic charge even in inanimate objects such a soil samples, rock, etc. There appears to be a threshold value of vivionic charge, above which we would consider an entity to exhibit lifelike characteristics. A lump of dirt would normally be below this threshold value. A virus might be right at or around the threshold value. A dog or a human might be well above….

  Richard Mullinex was barely listening. The oncologist ticked off progressive symptoms on her fingers.

  “It’s adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. The surgeon found the tumor well involved with the pancreas. It’s not operable. In most cases, by the time we can detect pancreatic cancer, it’s already spread to other areas, metastasized to other tissues. Already, there’s MRI evidence of involvement with the liver and gall bladder.” Dr. Jean Remple had short dark hair, black-framed glasses. She took off her glasses and wiped the lenses down. “I’m sorry….”

  “Is she comfortable?”

  “Sedated. Morphine drip. Plus glucose and a few other things. She’s drifted in and out of consciousness all day. I didn’t know if you were coming.”

  Mullinex shrugged. “Work. You know how it is.” He went into the room. Remple hung back at the door.

  “Mother--?” He bent over, stroked her black hair, matted to her forehead, which was pale and dry. Incredibly, she still had jet black hair. “It’s Richard. It’s me…I came to see you—“ He looked questioningly up at Dr. Remple. The oncologist had an owl’s face, large glasses and a long nose. She smiled faintly, nodding then gently shut the door behind her.

  “Mother…sorry I couldn’t come earlier—“What was there to say? The experiment was at a critical point. He’d only been allotted twenty hours on the Quantum Flux Imager this month. “—I just talked with Dr. Remple. Are you comfortable…need anything?”

  Peggy Mullinex’s crystalline lips moved and she mumbled. Her throat was dry.

  “Here…” he lifted a small cup of crushed ice to her cracked lips. She let the ice run into her throat and melt. Presently, her eyes fluttered half open.

  “It’s…cancer….”

  “I know, Mother. I know.”

  Peggy moistened her lips again, shifted around. Her IV tubes clanked. “That paper…you did that paper?”

  Richard sat down in the seat beside the bed. The bed whirred. Motors stirring the patient, massaging her body to prevent bedsores. “I’m working on it. Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “Mmm-hmmm. You get yourself…published. Like we talked about. I didn’t raise a nobody. Your Dad was a nobody.”

  It was an old exchange. Richard screwed his eyes shut. Keep that box closed, old boy. Keep the lid on that one. The truth was he’d always had a hard time talking with Peggy Mullinex. Only after she’d complained about her belly aching and nearly died from gastroenteritis had he arranged for her to move back to Atlanta. Natalie didn’t make things any easier, always nagging him to treat his Mother better. Spend time with her, Richard. Talk with her. That’s what she wants. She’d lived in Jupiter, Florida for ten years after Dad died, proud and independent-minded, ornery as an old cat.

  Now the end was near and Richard had important decisions to make. Natalie was putting pressure on him to make up his mind: long-term care, more chemo, or a hospice.

  Nobody had ever made decisions for Peggy Mullinex before. It was uncharted territory and Richard was a reluctant explorer. He wanted to do what was right. Natalie was insistent: spend time with her. Stop being so insensitive. Don’t treat your Mother like you treat me.

  “We got a lot of data from the experiment last night,” he told her. “Learned some new things.”

  “You’re…a great…scientist, Richard.” Her breath was labored, weak. “Always said so. Jonas Salk…now, he was a great one too. Don’t let them stop you.”

  “No one’s stopping me, Mother. Science takes time. We’re still—“ but he stopped in mid-sentence. Peggy Mullinex had closed her eyes. Was that a snore? She’d drifted off to sleep. “Codeine and a few other things,” Dr. Remple had warned him. “She drifts in and out—“

  He was determined that now, despite all of the tension between them, the long silences on the phone, the awkward looks on the seaside veranda of her condo, that he would treat her with the dignity she never gave him. She deserved at least that. Natalie was right. Natalie was always right.

  “—remember when it was so sunny, so hot—that day--?”

  Her voice startled him, abruptly clear and strong, as if she were no longer seventy one and wracked with cancer. It was a popular memory she replayed, like a favorite song, over and over again: graduation day at Baton Rouge. “My son has a PhD. Microbiology, you know. He’s going to be a great scientist, like Salk or that Watson fellow, maybe even Einstein.”

  “I remember, Mother. How could I ever forget?” You won’t let me.

  “This paper…it’s done?”

  “No, not yet. I’ve still got more work to do. More experiments.” Maybe Huang Li was right. He was a devout Buddhist, wasn’t he? For days, he’d been insisting that vivions (he hated the term Mullinex particles) might be some kind of detectable manifestation of soul, or God, or life force. Angela Kunz threw up her hand when that came up. Mullinex wasn’t sure whether he could buy that idea or not. But increasingly, Huang’s philosophical approach intrigued him.

  “I used to make peanut butter sandwiches for you, Richard--”

  “I know, with tomato soup…after school. When it rained.” Mullinex hadn’t thought about that in decades. “You always liked to experiment, didn’t you…try different things out on me….”

  A faint smile. “Ex…per…i…ments….? Peggy Mullinex tried the word out, drawing each syllable out, tasting it. “Are they…giving you a… hard time, Richard?”

  “No, Moth
er, nobody’s giving me a hard time. Science just takes time, that’s all.”

  Peggy Mullinex attempted another smile. “Richard, I don’t have much time.”

  “I know that. That’s why I’m here.”

  The next step, he knew, and Huang and Angela Kunz were in agreement, was to induce vivionic flow and see whether the flow could be channeled, directed and controlled. Quantum effects would be tricky, but there were ways to make Nature work for you. The QFI could detect phenomena at quark scales. If they could move and re-position and clump and de-clump vivions and cause the particles to remain stable long enough to be characterized, that would be science anybody could agree on. ‘Fixing’ vivions in a measurable state, even for a few picoseconds, would be a victory they could finish the paper with.

  “Mother, I just stopped by to see how you’re doing.”

  Peggy Mullinex had closed her eyes again, but a bemused smile hung on her lips, as if she knew a great secret. “I’m doing.”

  “I’m leaving now. I’ll be back tomorrow, during the day. Rest up. We’ll have another nice talk.”

  He left the hospital worn out, confused about what to do with his mother. For nearly ten minutes, he couldn’t even find the car. It was right where he had left it that morning. And a cold rain had set in.

  Driving home, Richard Mullinex forced himself to concentrate on the road. Rain pelted down in sheets, making crazy reflection off the asphalt. Light beams made him dizzy and he had to slow down.

  It was crazy. He nearly had an accident, thinking. Somehow, he had to get Natalie off his back. You need to make a decision, Richard. Now…tonight. Make a decision….

  Turning up the winding gravel drive to their hilltop bungalow, Richard realized the full import of what was gnawing at the back of his mind. A crazy idea. Ridiculous. But that’s how Science worked. He waited impatiently as the garage door rolled up, running through the details in his mind. A variation on their next experiment. It just might work.

  If he was right, and Huang Li and Angela Kunz agreed, a little variation on their next experiment could give them the kind of data no one could refute.

  Maybe there was something he could do for Mother after all. But he’d need her permission. And Dr. Remple’s too.

  3.

  Do computers, robots, agents and other artificially intelligent entities possess vivionic charge? Experimental evidence to date indicates that such devices do possess residual vivionic charge inherent in the structural materials of which they are composed. No increased value of vivionic charge has yet been detected above this residual value. The philosophical implications of this are still being debated. Does this that mean Life and Intelligence are separate phenomena?

  Richard got home late, after midnight. He wanted to fix a quick Scotch in the kitchen but Natalie was still up, clad in her snuggies and robe, curled up on the sofa with the lights down low. Her eyes followed him as he sank into the recliner, fiddled with the paper.

  “You saw your Mother?”

  “Just came from the hospital. She’s resting now.”

  “You talked?”

  “A little.”

  Natalie stirred. “Richard, you’ve got to make a decision soon. Tonight. Your mother needs your help. Chemo, hospice, whatever…did you talk with her about this?”

  Richard swirled the Scotch in the glass. “Actually, no. We talked about other things.”

  “The experiment, I suppose.” Like it was a dirty subject. Richard shrugged. “I’m at a critical stage now. We’ve finally been able to prove the vivionic pump works. Yesterday, Oncology gave us the results. I actually took living tissue, dosed it with a burst of gamma radiation and captured a flow of vivions. Huang’s ‘lens’ worked like a charm, Natalie…it was a thing of beauty. You should have seen it. Pulled vivions out of blastocyst cells from a rat embryo and focused them on a lump of melanoma tumor cells.”

  “Richard—“

  “No, really, the target cells displayed detectable increases in vivionic charge. We got measurable increases in positive vivionic flow. You know what that means?”

  “It means you didn’t tell your mother the truth.”

  “Truth? Natalie…don’t be ridiculous. Nature’s waving neon signs right in front of our eyes. For God’s sake, I’m on the verge of a tremendous discovery…this is big, like the major leagues. A few more experiments and I’ll be able to show we can control this effect—generate and control vivion flow. Natalie, don’t you see? Don’t you realize what this means? We’ve got the ability to regulate cell life and death, right here—“ he held out the palm of his hands. “No one’s ever done that before. Vivions are how Nature animates matter with life force. Oh, Angela doesn’t buy that…but even she’s not sure. I am. Huang Li even thinks we’re seeing some sort of vital essence. Who knows…maybe vivions are the first detectable manifestation of soul.”

  Natalie got up and made herself some coffee in the kitchen, padding back to the den in her slippers. “Very poetic. Richard, the experiment can wait. Your own mother’s dying right in front of your eyes. What the hell’s the matter with you? She needs help, she needs you, Richard. You’re the only family she’s got left. She’s not a lab rat. She’s not an experiment. Can you forget this damned experiment for a few minutes? Focus on what’s important. Life and death, Richard…that’s what you’ve got to decide here. What kind of life is your mother going to have?”

  Richard stared down at Missy, the black and white tabby, purring and rubbing her ears on the side of his leg. “It’s hard…hard to decide what’s right. Mother doesn’t exactly help, you know.”

  “How about Dr. Remple?”

  Richard shrugged, scratched Missy behind the ears. The cat leaped into his lap and dug herself a warm nest, settling down with a contented sigh. “It’s advanced adenocarcinoma. Inoperable.”

  “Chemo can help.” Natalie picked up a handful of pamphlets from the coffee table. “Have you read any of these? There’s something called Gemzar. It’s had good clinical results…patients are living.”

  “—a few more months,” Richard closed his eyes. “I already know about it. Mizener in Oncology told me about it.”

  “Well…it’s something…it’s life. What does your mother say?”

  “She wants me to get this paper published.”

  “Oh, Richard, don’t bullshit me. You’re not even very good at it. If you don’t think chemo’s the answer, then ask the hospital about their hospice program. Ask your mother.”

  “Natalie, I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “For God’s sake…for your mother’s sake, we have to talk about it.” Natalie sat up and glared at him. “Can’t you stop playing scientist even for a minute and think about real life? What do I have to do to shake some sense into you?”

  “I need time.” He swung his feet around, inadvertently knocking Missy off, with a loud meeorrk. The tabby skulked off, glaring back at him suspiciously. “I just need to think.”

  Natalie was in tears. She sank back in the corner of the sofa, her arms firmly crossed. “Richard, you’re not even human anymore. You’re just a robot. Maybe you can get away with treating me like some kind of lab rat, but to ignore your own Mother, in her dying days…” she shook her head. “It’s criminal. I hope you can live with this…I can’t.”

  Richard grabbed a raincoat from the hall closet and stalked out of the house. Outside, the wind was cutting, a raw, bone-chilling westerly that slung stinging sheets across the street. Leaves and wind, rain and cold air, slapped him in the face. He barged out to the street and jammed his hands in his pockets, began heading up the twisting hilltop road toward the summit a mile away. Through bare trees, the night’s fog had thickened and the lights of the city were lost in the gloom.

  There it was, staring him in the face. In the last week, he was sure that Nature had allowed them an extraordinary peek at one of her mos
t closely held secrets. Vivions were as real as anything, despite Angela’s misgivings. The measurements were there, the data were there, the analysis was there. Sure, there were differences in interpretation. That was to be expected.

  The paper was what mattered now. Getting unimpeachable data, with ironclad reasoning and getting it published and peer-reviewed…before somebody else staked a claim to their turf. Science at this level was a gold rush and the prospectors with the best claim got the glory.

  I didn’t raise a nobody. Your Dad was a nobody.

  It was all quite clear to him now. The next experiment would be the one. The breakthrough.

  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The author of that little missive was lost to him but the truth of it wasn’t.

  For the next hour, as a cold fog settled around the hill and worked its way into his bones, Richard Mullinex trudged upward along the side of the street, shuffling through puddles of rain and piles of wet leaves, working out the design of the next experiment.

  Dealing with Natalie was at times very tiresome. Richard loved her very much but when she was particularly emotional, he tried to treat her like a sensitive experiment. Don’t disturb things…let nature take its course…let things settle back down. Really, she was worse than the vivions that speckled the screens of the Quantum Flux Imager. His own wife was a perfect example of quantum effects in action: able to assume multiple states at the same time, indeterminate in nature, action at a distance.

  Vivionic flux increases when stress is placed on a living system. Maximum vivionic flux occurs in the days, hours and minutes before cell death.

  Natalie was right, only not in the way she thought. Seeing his mother in the hospital had re-opened a lot of old wounds. Of course, he loved Peggy Mullinex. He wanted to do the right thing. He didn’t wish her dead, like Natalie had shouted at him that very morning. But Peggy had been a smothering influence on him all his life and he needed the distance that time and maturity had given him, needed the perspective that could only come with age and achieving things for himself. It had taken Peggy a hell of a long time to see that.

  Now she was dying. Peggy Mullinex had given life itself to her son Richard fifty two years ago last month. Richard both needed her and resented needing her.

  Natalie, you just don’t see it, do you? It had taken fifty-two years and a lifetime’s struggle just to become Dr. Richard Mullinex, director of the Sheffield Center for Nanomedicine. He’d always tried to keep some emotional distance between himself and Peggy Mullinex. To Natalie, that was indifference, but it wasn’t that at all. It was life itself.

  But was it? What was life anyway? Net positive vivionic charge? Fifty two years of trying to be yourself, a separate individual with separate wants, needs and desires? The biologists said life was simply locomotion, digestion, reproduction. Anything that did those things, self-directed as it were, was life by definition.

  Richard was getting colder as he approached the dead end of the winding street, the top of the hill. Trees were shorter, limbs scrawnier. The fog was thinner and through the mists, he caught fleeting glimpses of the city beyond. Rivers of light coursed through darkened continents. Highways and other neighborhoods.

  The truth was that life without Peggy Mullinex was a frightening thing. A lifetime’s emotional gap would become an emotional void, with no counterpoint or resistance for Richard to push against. Could a quark be a quark inside the nucleus of an atom without other quarks? Physics said no. Solitary quarks weren’t possible….

  Richard paused at the end of the street, at the fence surrounding the thicket that ringed the summit of the hill. He sucked in cold air and watched the tendrils of steamy breath float away.

  Because of the very real possibility that Peggy Mullinex would soon cease to exist in any physical form, he was all the more obsessed with learning the true nature of vivions. Natalie couldn’t see that. If they were true quanta of life force, as he and Huang Li suspected, and if they were somehow conserved in Nature, perhaps there was something like an essence of a living system, an essence that was never lost. Perhaps, even the vital essence of Peggy Mullinex would also be conserved, through this seemed to fly in the face of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

  It was time now to get to work, setting up the next experiment. Whether this was cheating death by altering the accounting books was a thought that Richard felt was best left to the philosophers.

  He hurried back down the winding road to the house.

  4.

  There appear to be no detectable upper limits on the maximum value of vivionic charge. The value appears to correlate positively with system complexity.

  Back at Emory University the next morning, Richard Mullinex hunted down Dr. Jean Remple. He found the oncologist in her tiny closet of an office, drowning in paperwork.

  Remple squinted up at Mullinex. “You’re Mom’s resting comfortably this morning. Overnight, we adjusted the medicine, tweaked the glucose levels a little.” She reached over to clear some textbooks off the side chair. “Sit. I’ll get us some coffee…there’s a fresh pot in the staff lounge…only be a sec…we’ve got a lot to discuss, you and me.”

  “Dr. Remple…listen—“ Mullinex cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking—“

  “That’s good.” Her face was expressionless. “You know we’re dealing with a terminal situation here, with your mother?”

  Mullinex nodded. He changed the subject abruptly, briefly describing the work he had been doing at the Sheffield center, what they had learned about vivionic effects. And the paper he was trying to write.

  Remple’s expression never changed.

  “There’s another experiment we need to do.”

  Remple cleared her throat, sipped coffee and regarded Mullinex with suspicious eyes beneath a wreath of steam from her cup. “An experiment. I’m not sure I see the connection with your mother—“

  Richard looked down at his hands, like they were alien appendages, unsure what to do with them. Finally, he sat on them. “Look, I’ll be direct. We’re both researchers, in our fields. I want to take a biopsy sample. A sample of Mother’s pancreatic tumor cells. See if I can induce vivion clusters to form. This experiment will demonstrate fixation and control of multi-dimensional clusters of vivions for the first time. I—“

  Remple pursed her lips. “Yes, Dr. Mullinex—“

  “I want to see if, by injecting vivions from a separate source, I can reverse cellular deterioration, even reverse cell death. Put the tumor into remission. Or if not complete remission, maybe control or stabilize it. Already we’ve got data showing improved cellular function in melanoma tumor cells…there’s evidence of ligand repair, normal protein fabrication, fewer errors in transcription from cell DNA, all kinds of measurable changes…just from increasing net positive vivionic flow into the tissue. It’s really quite remarkable.”

  Remple was dubious. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Now let me ask you a question, Dr. Mullinex. Based on what you’ve seen, do you truly believe you can have any lasting effect on tumor cell morphology with these…what are they called--?”

  “Vivions…and the answer is yes. In recent experiments, we’ve seen evidence that vivions are associated with living systems—biomatter—in some fundamental way.”

  Remple was skeptical, to say the least. “I’m no physicist, Dr. Mullinex, but that seems a long way from being able to put a tumor into remission. In chemotherapy, we’re just helping the body’s own immune system, by making it harder for the tumor cells to replicate, or harder to absorb nutrients from the blood. Depends on the agent we use. But what you’re saying is—“

  “Admittedly hard to swallow. But we’ve got imagery files that can’t be easily explained any other way.” Mullinex described the Quantum Flux Imager and how it worked. “Every time we stress a sample of living cells, we get the same result. A big spike in vivion flux. Two days ago, I tried
to capture these—particles, entities—whatever they are and focus them into a beam, to inject them into a separate target of cells. A vivionic pump, if you will. It worked…you can check with Mizener on the results.”

  Remple finished her coffee and shook her head, re-arranging papers on the desk. “So what are these things—these vivions—anyway?”

  Mullinex snorted. “We have three researchers on the team and at least ten theories every day. Basically, my feeling is that vivions are some kind of emergent property of matter, a basic property that is particularly strong in living matter. Vivionic charge determines how ‘alive’ a lump of matter is. In fact, from what we’ve seen, there’s evidence that vivionic flow has an extraordinary effect: somehow, in some way we haven’t yet worked out, vivions exercise some kind of control over a cell’s transition from non-living to living and back to nonliving…that is, from life to death. All the things we were taught about living systems…their characteristics of movement and reproduction and so forth are in fact controlled by the presence or absence of vivions. By a thing’s ‘net vivionic charge.’”

  “What causes vivions to flow then?”

  Mullinex shrugged. “Unknown. My grad student thinks vivions should be treated the same way physicists used to treat quarks, as a kind of bookkeeping entry. Somehow, the particles are Nature’s way of keeping straight on what’s living and what’s not.”

  “If that’s all true,” Remple surmised, “then maybe you’ve got a hold of some kind of elementary ‘fountain of youth.’”

  Mullinex forced a wry smile. “Hardly. We’re just beginning to understand basic properties.”

  “But you said you could control this vivion flow.”

  “To a degree.”

  Remple was thoughtful. “You really think you can stimulate a lump of cancerous tissue into repairing itself? Just by pumping it full of vivions?”

  “Already demonstrated,” Mullinex said. “But we’re not sure of the long-range effects. The melanoma sample was just a few cells. Larger quantities—“ he shrugged, spread his hands—“who knows?”

  Remple looked Mullinex squarely in the face. “Richard, your mother deserves her dignity. You really want to make her an experiment, in her last days? Why don’t you let her go in peace? Be with her. Comfort her.”

  “You don’t believe a word of what I’ve been telling you.”

  “Let’s just say I need more proof. As to your mother’s condition, well, that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion. I’m just saying, Richard…” Remple stood up and faced out through a corner of her window, through stacks of papers at the lead gray skies of a fall afternoon—“that death and life are intertwined. We all know that. Whatever the purpose of these vivions of yours, I’m sure of one thing. To live means to die, to be mortal. It’s been part of evolution for billions of years. If you’re right, and you’ve somehow learned how to affect that process at the most fundamental level, then how do you decide what lives and what dies? Are you God? Are you nature or three billion years of evolutionary wisdom? What if this pump of yours malfunctions or goes berserk and doses everything in sight with excess particles? Does everything come alive…cars and roads and buildings as well as trees and dogs and houseflies? Is that good? Does anybody know?”

  Mullinex was growing impatient. “Dr. Remple, all I’m asking is your support and assistance. To help Mother. I want to do what’s right—God knows, I haven’t done that very well the last thirty years. The vivion pump may just be able to arrest the cancer in her pancreas. Even if it can’t—and I realize this is an experiment—maybe I can do enough to ease her suffering in her final days. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”

  “There’s always morphine, Richard. She doesn’t have to be a guinea pig.”

  “Suppose we just ask her.”

  “I agree we need to discuss this, fully, with your family. I’m sorry, Richard—“ the oncologist went back to her paperwork. “I just can’t sanction what you’re asking. I can’t approve experimenting on a dying woman. But I won’t oppose it, as long as your family is in favor. And the hospital Surgical Board.”

  Mullinex stood for a minute, hands clasped behind his back, staring at the diminutive doctor. Remple busied herself with the computer, not returning his stare. He turned and left her office, stalking off down the hall.

  He didn’t need the hospital’s permission anyway.

  5.

  As subquark phenomena, vivions exhibit a wealth of observable effects: indeterminacy of position and momentum, superposition, effects at a distance, instantaneous and simultaneous manifestation in multiple locations, wave-particle duality and others….

  In Room 418, Richard Mullinex and Jean Remple found that Peggy Mullinex was too far gone to be fully conscious.

  The CCU nurse had already changed out her IV bags when Mullinex arrived. The nurse ticked off the changes to Remple. “I bumped up glucose five points and added more saline.”

  “Morphine?”

  “The same. Should I bump that up too?”

  Remple glanced over at Richard Mullinex, who was bent close to his mother’s face, smoothing back her black hair. She nodded. “Three units per hour.”

  The nurse adjusted a control knob and recorded the change on the touchscreen.

  “Mother…it’s me, Richard.” Mullinex listened intently, pressing his face and ear close to her mouth, but Peggy Mullinex was asleep. Natalie stood in one corner, dressed in a severe black pantsuit. Dr. Remple was next to her.

  “Mother…I want to tell you something.” Richard went on anyway. “We’re going to try a new procedure. It’s a bit experimental, but we’ve seen good success with it recently, on different types of cancers. Mother, it’s related to what we talked about last night. The paper…the research.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes. “Richard, she can’t hear you.”

  “She knows what I’m saying. Mother, they’re going to take another biopsy. You’ve already got the surgical incision. We’re going to try this treatment on the biopsy sample. If it works like we expect, we’ll start you on controlled doses.”

  Remple knew Mrs. Mullinex was semi-comatose. But she couldn’t let Richard’s words go unchallenged. Even comatose patients maintained residual hearing.

  “Mrs. Mullinex…Peggy…there is a downside to this procedure. It’s highly—“ she refused to look at Richard’s accusing face—“er, highly experimental. There’s not a lot of data. We don’t know what affect it’ll have…maybe very little. What Richard’s not saying is—“

  “Dr. Remple—“ Mullinex was sharp. “Please…let me do this.”

  Natalie couldn’t keep quiet. “Richard…you can’t be serious about this.”

  “Mother…don’t listen to them. We had an understanding—you and me—yesterday. Remember? About the paper. About the research. I’m just trying to help.”

  The arguments flared for a few more minutes. The upside, the downside. The risks, the potential. The data. The lack of data.

  Nora Gutierrez, the CCU nurse, was by turns appalled and amused at the whole episode. The spectacle of the Mullinex family and their oncologist arguing over treatment protocols in front of a dying old woman who probably couldn’t even hear them left her feeling uneasy, even violated. Why couldn’t they just respect the old woman’s privacy? Give her the dignity she deserved?

  An hour later, the section supervisor gave her the order to prep Mrs. Mullinex for the procedure.

  6.

  Vivionic charge seems to be conserved (in a closed system). Vivionic charge seems to be a basic property of matter in the universe, like electric charge or nuclear spin, heretofore unobserved. Factors that cause vivionic flow are presently undetermined. Whether the Universe operates to make vivionic charge locally in equilibrium or whether some other principle inducing vivionic flow is operating is also undetermined.

  The biopsy was taken the next morning and the sample place
d inside the Quantum Flux Imager later the same day.

  The tissue sample was crawling with swollen adenocarcinoma cells, mostly malignant exocrine tissue cells like beta and alpha cells. The tumor infesting Peggy Mullinex’s pancreas and surrounding tissues was extraordinarily active and aggressive.

  “Power up,” Richard Mullinex ordered. He tweaked the gain on the imager, and watched as the instrument’s resolution sharpened from an early image of microvesicles and connective tissue filling the screen with a throbbing grid of dark red. Stage by stage, he adjusted the QFI to deeper and deeper resolution, passing through individual islet cells to their striated and swollen nuclei, through the twisted helices of deoxyribonucleic acids, through the polygons of individual atoms of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus, on into the blurry pulsations of atomic nuclei, then finally, through the looking glass into the interstices of the nuclei themselves, where ghostly glimmers of shadowy quarks flitted like moths in the glare of the flux beam.

  And then, as before, he made one final adjustment, bringing the flux beam to its maximum resolution. As though a veil of murk had finally lifted, the dimly lit silhouettes of pinpricks of light flashed like distant galaxies at the edge of the universe, winking in and out of existence, there and not there, an enchanted loom of light, leaving only fading traces on the retinas of their human observers.

  “We’ve got ‘em!” exulted Huang Li, poring over Richard’s shoulder at the spectacle on the screen. “Vivions galore. Look at them!”

  Even Angela Kunz was impressed. “I’ve never seen such a level of activity. It’s like a cloud of fireflies at a feeding frenzy.”

  “You may be more right than you know,” Richard said. “Look closely, guys, and be humble before one of the greatest miracles of Nature. It’s a great big ledger of Life. A big accounting office, as Huang said, orchestrating all the cells of this sample, shuttling life force…chi…vital essence…whatever… back and forth, getting ready to transition this lump of matter from living to nonliving.”

  Kunz shook her head, curling her red hair behind her ears. “What does it mean?”

  Richard was more sure. “It’s record-keeping, at the most fundamental level of matter. Cellular, even atomic functions, are being recorded and then shut down in some kind of systematic way. Genetic patterns are being encoded and stored for safekeeping—somewhere. Incredible,” he mumbled. “The entire process of cell death is somehow being managed, right before our eyes.”

  Huang remembered something he had read recently. “I saw it in a journal on forensic neurophysiology, something like that. ‘Death as we know it, aims at disincarnation, dissolution of the body by enzymatic and microbial forces released from within the body.’ But this—“ he just shook his head sadly. “—this is so—“

  “Beautiful,” Richard completed the thought. “Death is dissolution of the body. Yet something lives on. Recorded in a matrix of vivionic charge.”

  “A self?” Angela asked. “A soul, maybe?”

  Richard shrugged. “Too early to tell. But that’s our next avenue of attack…learning how to read these patterns. Extract the information in that matrix.” He glanced at the clock. “This sample is nearly gone. We don’t have much time. Let’s get to work.”

  Huang brought the gamma ray emitter online while Mullinex finagled with the vivion pump. The vivion source for this run was another lump of rat embryo cells, a blastocyst clump rapidly dividing in its nutrient bath in a sealed container. “Thick as stew with vivions,” Mullinex exclaimed, when the Quantum Flux Imager was first registered and tuned. “Look at them—gives me goose bumps, just watching them. We’re like a gang of bank robbers and that’s the bank, just waiting to be hit.”

  Wonder what Mother would say if she knew her vivion supply was a baby lab rat.

  “Source is ready,” Mullinex told them. “Huang--?”

  “On line and targeted in.”

  Angela pressed a few buttons, opening particle traps and tweaking the injectors. “Lens looks good. Focusing now, dropping down to sub-picometer scale. Give me some flow, Richard.”

  Mullinex watched the imager screen, strobing with speckles and streaks of light. The bursts were artifacts of the quantum flux beam, part of the imaging process, there…yet not there, almost too quick for the eye to discern.

  “Hang on to your panties, it’s getting there.” He watched a counter register higher and higher numbers, slowly adjusting their bio-lens, a focusing element lined with living tissue that they got from the veterinary labs. The tissue strip helped channel the flow of vivions from the source chamber, so the theory went. The truth was rather simpler: in the press of time and experimenting, no one had any idea why it worked.

  “Here they come!” Mullinex dropped the lens into final position, and the QFI screen exploded with light. In picoseconds, the target container was flooded with a vivionic tidal wave.

  Data reduction dragged on for hours, as Mullinex and Angela Kunz and Huang Li hung around Ted Mizener’s Oncology Lab in the hospital’s south wing. Angela frowned a lot and slipped out onto a fire escape every few minutes—actually an old veranda from the hospital’s days as a turn-of-the-century mineral bath and health spa—to chain-smoke. Huang occupied himself with arcane math puzzles. Mullinex dozed.

  Mullinex found Angela nervously pacing the veranda. The rain had started again. A damp chill breeze swept up through bare tree limbs onto the landing.

  “The thing that bothers me, Richard, is this… what if all these vivions aren’t real? I mean actual physical things. What if vivions are just some side effect of the quantum flux imager? We haven’t done the studies right, you know. There’s no control for instrument effects. There are no persistence studies…how do we know the changes Mizener saw in the last sample—all the cellular and nuclear changes…the DNA repairs, the protein synthesis, all that, will last? That it’s a real effect and that these vivions cause them.”

  Mullinex leaned over the ornate iron railing and watched leaves swirl in a tiny tornado in the grassy quadrangle below them. “Schrodinger’s cat, huh?”

  Angela drew her jersey and overcoat collar up tighter. “Heisenberg says we can’t measure the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. One affects the other. The observer affects the observation. Vivions could be the same. They might be nothing more than artifacts of the quantum flux imager. Take your sample out of the imager and poof!...no vivions. And Schrodinger’s cat’s even worse. Is the thing alive or dead? Or is it in some intermediate state until we try to observe it? Are vivions there or not? If your theory is right, and these buggers mediate something we call ‘life force,’ then being alive—Life itself—is just a matter of degree. That tree over there is no more or less alive than this railing.”

  “Actually it’s a matter of net vivionic charge.”

  Angela shivered. “It’s too squishy for me. Too nebulous—“ she waggled her hands. “Too imprecise…undefined…too…I don’t know what.” Mullinex didn’t allow himself the same misgivings. “Mizener’s team is the key to making all this real. If the cellular changes are real, then the effect is there. Something’s causing them.”

  Huang Li stuck his head out of the doorway. “They’re ready for us, Dr. Mullinex. Data’s done and plotted. Mizener’s office.”

  The Oncology Lab was two floors up and on another wing. Ted Mizener looked like an aging Santa Claus, with a gray white beard, ruddy cheeks and a barrel for a body.

  “Pretty impressive, Richard,” he told them. A computer projector threw microsections of the biopsied tissue on a screen. Mizener pointed out the changes. “See here? This slice is from near the pancreatic duct, just anterior to the duodenum. Exocrine tissue…chock full of alpha and beta cells. Now, if I zoom in—“ he sharpened the resolution considerably—“we take a closer look at some of these cells. Look at those suckers. In the pink of health…in fact, here’s one we caught in the middle of putting out
some insulin…that’s the protein with the two disulfide bridges, right there.” He tapped the screen to point out the view.

  Mullinex studied the images with growing excitement. “So you’re saying—“

  “I’m saying that what you’re looking at is normal biliary tissue, pancreatic tissue. Cells look normal, they’re doing normal cell things, just grabbing blood and sugars and pumping our insulin pretty as you please.” Mizener took off tiny tinted spectacles. His eyes were weak and watery. “No evidence whatsoever of any tumor or malignant cells. You’re sure this is tumor tissue?”

  Mullinex smiled. “I can vouch for the source, Ted.”

  On the walk back to the Imaging Lab, Richard Mullinex barely touched the ground. “Normal cellular function, Angela. You saw it…same as I did! And with tissue that was bursting with malignant cells. You don’t get any realer than that. That’s no artifact.”

  “Maybe so,” she conceded. But something gnawed at the back of her mind. Back in the Imaging Lab, it surfaced. They needed to run a vivionic scan of the target tissue again. Just to see if the changes held up. Something just wasn’t right. Maybe the vivionic pump was just interfering with a natural process. How much did they know really? Schrodinger’s cat again? Quantum phenomena were slippery. Observations and measurements weren’t always black and white. She couldn’t say precisely what was bothering her. But time and again, Nature had played tricks on them.

  She watched through a doorway as Mullinex and Huang Li threw ideas around, batting conclusions back and forth like tennis balls, scribbling phrases for The Paper on a whiteboard. Fragments and scraps of thoughts were visible on the board….

  Holding a constant vivionic charge…

  Reversing cell death…

  Short-circuiting telomere excision…anti-aging?

  Incredibly, or so Mullinex thought, the biopsied sample from Peggy Mullinex’s pancreas had responded to vivionic infusion. Pumped full of life-force particles, the swollen cells of the cancer had been rejuvenated and returned to health.

  Later that afternoon, Angela cautioned both of them against drawing too many conclusions. In a rush to rough out the barebones of a paper, they had skipped lunch and huddled around a workstation and a whiteboard for hours. In the white-hot heat of theoretical frenzy, Angela’s cautious objections were ignored.

  At first, nobody heard the phone ring in the main office. Only when Angela had ventured outside the lab for a smoke break, did she hear the ring. She answered irritably.

  “Dr. Kunz, it’s Natalie Mullinex. Is Richard there?”

  “He’s in the Lab, Mrs. Mullinex…with Huang. They’re going over the results of a run.”

  “Thank God…the hospital’s been trying to reach him all afternoon. CCU’s called here several times, trying to track him down.”

  “I’ll get him, Mrs. Mullinex. What is it?”

  “Richard’s mother—Peggy—has gone into a coma. They want the family there right away.”

  7.

  Before a certain moment in the history of living things, death did not exist. And then, it arrived on the biological stage, as an invention of life, to give meaning to life.

  Robert Ardrey

  “She may have only a few hours left,” Dr. Jean Remple told him. Outside Room 418, Critical Care Unit, Richard Mullinex had gathered with Natalie and the hospital chaplain, Reverend Walter Billings. Huang Li and Angela Kunz were there too.

  “How is she now?”

  Remple shrugged. “Technically, she’s Level Three comatose, non-responsive verbally with no signs of consciousness. Her kidneys have already failed and we’re running dialysis now. As you can see, she’s struggling to breathe; we’re ventilating mechanically to help her at the moment. Once or twice an hour, she has a slight seizure. Her blood is filled with toxins the kidneys and liver can’t get rid of.” Remple’s face softened. “I’m sorry. There’s not much more we can do to make her comfortable.”

  “I understand.” Mullinex nodded silently to Natalie, who encouraged him.

  “Does the family have any specific wishes?” Remple asked. The duty nurse came out to meet them. It was Nora Gutierrez, clad in powder blue scrubs. She had just finished bathing Peggy’s face. Nora pulled off her latex gloves, stuffed them in her pocket.

  “I guess—“ Mullinex glanced at Natalie, “—just that she be made as comfortable as possible.”

  Remple nodded. “Do you want us to discontinue life support now?”

  Mullinex swallowed hard. He felt a firm hand on his shoulder. It was Reverend Billings.

  “God will comfort you, son,” he murmured.

  “Actually—“ Mullinex seemed to make up his mind. “I’d like to move her. Take her to the Imaging Lab at our Center.”

  “Richard—“ Natalie was incredulous, practically in tears. “—you can’t be serious. Go in there…talk with your mother.”

  “Look…there’s just a chance something can be done. The Imager’s just big enough for her—“

  Remple was skeptical, though she tried to be solicitous of the family’s concerns. “Peggy’s time is near. She needs to have a dignified release from her suffering.”

  Mullinex turned to Angela for support. To Huang Li. “I want to try it. It can’t hurt. It may help. We’ve made extraordinary progress the last few days. Ask Ted Mizener. Ask anybody in Oncology.”

  “It’s not proven,” Angela reminded him. “It’s experimental.”

  Natalie was growing more and more agitated. “Richard…this is insane. Your own mother. To subject her to this kind of—“

  Mullinex held up a hand. “I hear all your objections. But the truth is, Mother and I discussed it last night.” Which wasn’t entirely true. “Believe me, she understands.” He pushed through the door and went into the room.

  Peggy Mullinex was on her side, curled into a ball. Respirator tubes and IV drips coiled over her body. She struggled for breath, heaving, gasping spasmodically like a fish out of water. Richard watched for a few moments. Peggy shuddered with a slight convulsion, tensed, then seemed to relax. It was a cycle, repeated over and over every few minutes. Gasp, shudder, tense and relax…gasp, shudder, tense and relax.

  He felt a presence behind him. It was Nora.

  “Can she hear me?”

  Nora shrugged. “We’re not sure. Comatose patients retain autonomic functions. She can probably hear fine. Whether she’s conscious enough to understand—“ Nora smiled, a quick snuff of a smile—“it’s hard to say.”

  Richard bent over. He patted down Peggy’s hair. It was dry, crusty, the texture of old wheat. Her skin was cool. “Mother…it’s Richard. Mother…you remember what we talked about. The paper. The experiment. Mother—I’m going to have you moved. Over to the Sheffield center. You’ll be inside a big machine…called a quantum flux imager. I don’t want you to be afraid. It’s like an MRI. Only different. We’re going to try a new procedure. It’s risky…I won’t lie to you—I never could anyway—but there’s a chance, I think a good chance, it’ll help. I don’t want you to suffer anymore.”

  Nora cleared her throat, getting Mullinex’s attention. Dr. Remple wanted to see him outside the room.

  The debate went on for ten minutes.

  Angela Kunz and Huang Li were anxious, like Mullinex, to try the vivion pump on a live subject. But Angela was sensitive to the family’s needs and wishes. She watched Natalie closely, saw how she responded to Richard Mullinex.

  “We don’t need to do this, Richard,” Angela said. “It’s an awfully big step. Too big. We’ve only used the vivion pump on undifferentiated cells so far. To take an entire organism—a human—“ she swallowed. “I’m sorry…it’s just that, I mean—your Mother--”

  Natalie was adamant. “She deserves her dignity. And you’re going to deprive her of even that, in her final hours. Richard…Richard, how could you? Don’t you have even a shred of decency in that
head of yours? You’ve always treated her like a thing. Me too. Experimental subjects. Lab rats. We’re people…for God’s sake! We should be treated like people.”

  Reverend Billings squeezed Mullinex on the shoulder. “All of us should remember this: that death is part of life and Peggy’s passing is part of God’s plan. Richard, I don’t think I can go along with this. This procedure sounds too…inhuman. What chances, really, does she have?”

  Mullinex had heard enough. “I’m surprised. At all of you. We have a procedure proven to reverse tumor growth, proven to reverse cell deterioration, in some cases, even reverse cell death. Sure, it’s never been tried on a whole organism, but that’s because it’s so new. What is an organism anyway, but a collection of cells, organized by function, all interconnected? There’s no reason to think this won’t work on a larger group of cells. Okay, so there’s six trillion in this group, but they’re still cells. And we’ve got a reliable, repeatable procedure, a technique for pumping vivions into living matter and regaining normal function.” He looked to Angela and Huang for support. “We’ve already done it half a dozen times.”

  Natalie couldn’t stand it any longer. “Richard, you’ve just proven my whole point.” She stalked off toward the CCU waiting room, unwilling to listen any more.

  A compromise decision was hammered out. Peggy Mullinex would be moved, still on life support, from the hospital CCU wing to the Sheffield Center, and placed on a gurney inside the Quantum Flux Imager. One run with the vivion pump would be made. The source would be living cell tissue from the Veterinary Lab down the street. Mullinex would need about two hours to prep the equipment and set up the particle traps and the injectors.

  One run would be made. Dr. Jean Remple and Reverend Billings would be in attendance. After the run, a quick biopsy would be taken from inside the imager, then Peggy would be transferred to an MRI unit on the ground floor of the Center, for a quick scan.

  If there were no discernible, measurable effects, Peggy would then be moved to a hospice wing on the top floor of the hospital and all life support would be removed, save for morphine and other medications to ease the pain of her final hours. The family would let Nature take its course.

  Richard Mullinex made a mild protest at this phrase. “But Nature’s trying her damnedest to tell us something, something important, with these vivions—“ but the agreement had already been made.

  Determined, he left CCU with Huang Li and Angela Kunz in tow and headed back to the Center. They have a lot of work to do and not much time.

  Nora Gutierrez turned Peggy slightly in her bed and readjusted her respirator tube, the swabbed the inside of her mouth and cheeks with an ointment to moisten the skin. Fingertip by fingertip, she fed crushed ice to Peggy, letting the ice melt on her dry unmoving lips, all the while humming a gentle child’s tune she had learned in the girls’ escuela in San Juan many years ago.

  “Senora, do you her Him yet, I wonder? El Nino calls for you. You are going on a great journey…soon. Senora…it won’t be long for you now—“

  8.

  Dost thou ask some boon, O Kunti’s Son,

  I will grant it.

  Except immortality alone, tell me

  As to the desire that is in thy heart.

  Lord Krishna, from the Mahabharata

  The gurney was a tight fit for the imager chamber. Mullinex and Jean Remple worked the IV tube stand and the rest of the equipment into a void beside the gurney. Remple made sure Peggy Mullinex was as comfortable as possible. Her pale face shone with a translucent glow, thin as rice paper, in the harsh lighting. Her heaving gasps had grown worse, contorting and twisting her body with each inhalation. Remple was afraid she might fall from the gurney, so she was gently strapped down.

  “This is truly unprecedented,” Remple muttered, as she worked her way out of the chamber, backwards. Richard helped her down. “And probably in violation of just about every ethical and moral principle I’ve ever known. I’m glad you signed that release.” She eyed the girth of the injectors and shielding dubiously. “The hospital will have my head if anything goes wrong.”

  “It won’t,” Mullinex promised her. He secured the door to the chamber and found his seat by the control panel. “Huang--?”

  “Gamma emitter on line, Dr. Mullinex. It’s humming away.”

  “What about the source, Angela?”

  Kunz toggled a switch and the autotable with the container of living dog tissue slid into place, clamps securing the plate as Huang aligned the emitter. Mullinex watched the process. He had told no one that canine liver and digestive tract tissue wasn’t the only sample inside the container. Earlier that morning, he had taken a sterile scraping of his own skin cells, polymerized them in a micro-array to a visible cluster of melanocyte cells and mixed them with samples from the Vet Lab.

  Maybe it’ll help, Mother. Maybe it won’t. But I wanted a part of me in there fighting for you, too.

  “I’m powering up the flux beam now,” he announced. He flipped a few switches, and let the imager screen focus on a patch of Peggy Mullinex’s abdomen; Remple had left her slightly turned so as to expose a swatch of skin directly below her rib cage and sternum. “—and we have the anterior pericardium coming into view, right about…now—“

  The image flickered with residual pops and crackles of light, as the quantum flux beam narrowed focus, centering first on a dim, blurry wavering of atoms, then sliding inside the winking quantum barrier of electron clouds to the shimmering pulsations stitching through the nucleus.

  “--Picometer barrier—‘ Angela announced. “Proton shell clouds, right there—“ she pointed to quivering “cotton balls”, as Huang called them, the probability space of the nucleus, home to a trembling bath of neutrons and protons. “Going subquark—“ she said out loud.

  Jean Remple watched as ‘fireflies’ lit up the screen, at first an isolated speckle of light, then growing into a pulsing strobe of uncountable winks and flashes and traces, an infinite spider’s web of light.

  “Wow…” Huang said. “Look at ‘em. We’ve never seen vivion flow like that before.”

  “No,” Mullinex adjusted the gain to compensate. These cells are right on the edge of death. “Hell of a big exchange going on now. What you’re seeing, Dr. Remple, if I’m right, is the cessation if life itself, right down at the subquark level. Vivion flow, in this case outward, from the nuclei of atoms we’re imaging.”

  Remple was thunderstruck by the view. Reverend Billings stood beside her, shaking his head in wonder. “Lo, I am with you always…unto the end of time,” he muttered.

  “Huang, is the emitter ready?”

  “Zeroed in, Dr. Mullinex.”

  “Fire away!”

  At first, there seemed to be little effect. The imager screen flashed and popped with specks of lights, then throbbed with pulsations of a pearly white iridescence. The particle traps fed the injectors which beamed a tidal wave of vivions into the target chamber. Dr. Remple peered through the porthole at the nearly lifeless body of Peggy Mullinex. She lay on her side, still draped with tubing, her abdomen exposed to the injector array, still spasmodically heaving in great gasps of air.

  “Full rate—“ Huang told them. A trace counter beside the screen was pegging its stops crazily, swinging back and forth. “Dr. Mullinex…maximum flow.”

  “I see it—“ Mullinex stared at the imager screen, silently timing the interval of the light pulses. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—he hardly dared breathe. The injector was flooding the chamber with vivions—particles of life itself, he told himself. The question was: would it have any effect? Was it too late?

  “Looks like a bunch of grapes,” Angela Kunz observed.

  “We’ve seen that clustering before,” Mullinex said. “Somehow—vivions clump together. There’s a natural affinity…a certain minimum charge that has to build up before we see any effects. That’s normal.” r />
  Angela wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know, Richard. This looks different somehow. We haven’t seen that much before. Just watch those specks…if you time them, they’re not so random anymore. Probability waves collapsing?”

  “Maybe but it could just be an effect of the quantum flux too—“

  “Look there—“ Angela waved her hand in synchronization with the light patterns on the screen. “Like a vortex…a swirling pattern.”

  “Some kind of attractor,” Huang offered. “Chaotic degeneracy, maybe?”

  “Could be…I see it now too.”

  And indeed, a marked flow to the specks of light had developed. Now, as if backlit from above, a whirlpool of flashes had begun orbiting a black void on the imager screen, a pronounced swirl to the lights as if a great drain hole had been opened up.

  “Huang…what’s our rate now?”

  Huang Li checked his injector panel. “Gamma still at twenty-two mega-rads. I’m zapping the source with everything I’ve got.”

  “Then we should be getting maximum flow,” Mullinex decided. “I don’t know what that swirling pattern is.”

  “Can we look at the tissue cells?” Dr. Remple asked.

  Mullinex nodded. “Re-focus the imager, Angela…back out to micron scale. We’ll take a look at the tumor cells.”

  Angela’s hands played over the QFI controls and the screen view went dark for a few moments, as the instrument’s perspective shifted. When it settled back down again, fuzzy striations filled the screen. Dr. Remple studied the view for a moment, then nodded her head.

  “Hepatic duct, near the pancreatic crease…that’s the area that was biopsied.”

  Clumps of oblong cells drifted by, bumping each other, jostling through a viscous plasma.

  “What are we looking at, Doctor?” Mullinex asked.

  Remple shook her head. “I’m not sure—normal endocrine cells. See that?” She pointed to a pair of finger-shaped structures. “Islet cells…and that is insulin, right there—“ She pointed to a twisted tetrahedral string, floating nearby. “Just synthesized. But there’s no tumor cells...all I see are normal endocrine cells. Can you pan around? Change the view?”

  Angela Kunz obliged. Several times, the Quantum Flux Imager shifted views, focusing in on similar scenes. They tried sub-micron scale, then pulled back out to a wider view. The result was the same.

  “No evidence of any carcinoma cells. I don’t understand it…at all—MRI scans were right in this area. I saw the images. Even the surgeon said—“ She bit her lip. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does make sense…it’s called a miracle,” Reverend Billings muttered. He prayed softly in the background.

  Richard Mullinex had to remind himself to breathe. The dawn of a new age…a new chapter in our understanding of the Universe…the true mystery of life revealed…the headlines swirled in his head. The paper they had struggled for so long to complete…now it was clear. Nature was writing her own paper, right before their very eyes.

  “Angela, take us back subquark…I want to look at that pattern again.”

  The frantic light cascade had changed again. Now, the swirl of light had tightened to a narrower funnel. Some strange force was grabbing vivions from beyond the screen and dragging them into a pulsing disk, a black hole of life energy, relentlessly swallowing everything the injector provided. The perimeter of the screen was dark as the swirl of strobing lights constricted steadily down to a shorter and shorter radius.

  “I don’t like the looks of that…Huang? Can you bump up the flow a bit?”

  The grad student shook his head. “Gamma’s maxed out, Doctor. Looks like vivion flow’s dropping off no matter what I do.”

  “Check the traps…check the lens—“ Mullinex realized, too late, what was happening. Right before their eyes, something was going wrong. Pinching off the flow of life-giving vivions.

  It couldn’t be happening. The setup was exactly the same. The experiment was the same. Same lens. Same source. Gamma dose was the same.

  What the hell was going on? Probability waves collapsing….

  Dr. Remple shifted over to the CCU monitor, still reading Peggy’s vital signs.

  “Heart rate is erratic. Blood pressure’s down to ninety over fifty. Still dropping.” She looked over at Mullinex. “I’m calling Nora…open up the chamber, please—“

  “No way,” Mullinex said. He studied the panel frantically. “Quantum flux’s too high.”

  “She’s dying, Richard,” Angela said. She’d seen the same swirling pattern, wondered the same things. Now it came to her.

  “She’s not dying.”

  “We haven’t seen this effect before. Face it. We don’t know what’s going on.”

  Mullinex tried to ignore her. “Huang—“ he came over to the small panel. “Let’s cycle power to the gamma beam…maybe we can strip off more vivions, collimate—“

  “Richard!” Angela’s voice was sharp, cutting through the hum of the imager. “Look at the screen, for God’s sake! Look at the flow.”

  The funnel had narrowed down to a still smaller radius. It was as if a great hole had been opened up and all the vivions Huang could give them were being sucked away.

  “It’s quantum effects,” he told them. “That’s all it is. The imager’s hiding them. See the edges…see the shimmering? Probability collapse. We’re running the quantum flux beam at higher setting…it’s forcing a collapse. Vivions aren’t particles anyway. You know that…they’re just probability functions.”

  Remple was already on the phone to CCU. “Nora…it’s Jean Remple. Get over here right away. And bring the cart—“

  “Richard—“ Angela was pleading now. “Richard, look with your eyes, damn it! It’s out of control. You’re having no effect on the target at all.”

  “It’s possible—“ Huang theorized, to no one in particular. “—possible that this kind of clustering is a necessary stage in the transition to a non-living state.”

  “Son,” said Reverend Billings, “death has always been part of God’s plan. Like it says in Ezekiel—“

  “Richard, we’ve got no control over this process at all. Huang’s raised and lowered emitter power several times. We checked the traps, cycled the injectors, tried everything we can think of. Look at it.”

  The speckles of light on the screen had dimmed considerably now and the radius of the swirl had shrunk to a fraction of the view, and was shrinking even as they watched.

  For the last three days, Richard Mullinex was certain he had the key to generating and controlling vivion flow. Certain he had his fingers on one of the greatest discoveries in the history of Science. Now they seemed stubbornly beyond control, exhibiting the full effects of their quantum nature, continuing to clump and swirl and drain away, deleting structure right in front of their eyes, recording data and systematically shutting down first atomic, then cellular functions, then entire organ systems throughout Peggy’s body.

  In the end, Peggy Mullinex died inside the QFI chamber.

  Moments later, Nora Gutierrez and two CCU technicians wheeled the crash cart into the control room. At Angela’s pleading, Richard began shutting down the vivion pump, powering down the Quantum Flux Imager. The entire process would take several minutes. Before it was completely safed, no one could enter the beam chamber.

  As Natalie and Dr. Remple looked on helplessly through the porthole, counting down the seconds until they could cycle open the door, the earthly remains of Peggy Mullinex seemed to disintegrate before their very eyes.

  Natalie covered her mouth with her hands in horror.

  “Oh, my God—“

  Dr. Remple swallowed hard as she watched Peggy disintegrate in a series of blurry, shimmering waves. Before they could get the door swung open, the waves pulsed back and forth across the top of the gurney as the last remnants of light specks died away from the imager screen.

 
All that had been Peggy Mullinex—prana, chi, aura, life force, bio-energy, and a thousand other names besides—had vanished, written into a form no mortal could ever decipher, somehow interwoven into the very structure of spacetime itself.

  All that was left, when Nora and Dr. Remple scrambled inside the chamber, was a gurney full of powdery residue.

  Peggy Mullinex, age seventy-one, had undergone an aborted vivionic collapse, essentially de-materializing in wave after wave of quantum indeterminacy.

  And Richard Mullinex was left standing over the control panel, with the sickening feeling that he had not only hastened his mother’s death, but also made it more painful and ghastly than Nature alone would have done.

  Natalie wailed in horror. Her wails were broken only by great wracking sobs from Richard himself, as he slumped over the control panel.

  9.

  There are two possible outcomes. If the result confirms the hypothesis, you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.

  Enrico Fermi

  Two days after the funeral, the family gathered one last time in the tiny woodframe house that Richard had bought for his mother whenever she came up from Florida. It was little more than a cottage, at the end of a dirt road a few miles from the old neighborhood.

  Natalie was there, with Richard. Reverend Billings and Dr. Remple had also come from the cemetery. Richard went through Peggy’s clothes and closets, chests and suitcases, sorting through all her effects. Natalie made sandwiches and iced tea in the kitchen.

  Over lunch, they discussed what had happened. Each had a different take on the meaning of what they had witnessed.

  Reverend Billings slurped his tea. “It was the Lord’s hand that took Peggy away from that machine. He was trying to preserve the dignity of her immortal soul in such an inhuman place.”

  Jean Remple wore a dark blue skirt and matching blouse. She picked at crumbs on her paper plate. “It was some kind of latent viral attack, undetected somehow. Stimulated by the quantum flux imager, I’m sure. I talked about it with Ted Mizener all yesterday. Somehow, the flux beam triggered this virus and it explosively broke down the remaining tissue in Peggy’s body. That’s what turned her remains into powder like that. Ebola…Marburg…the literature’s full of examples of breakdowns like that.”

  Natalie wasn’t so sure. She seemed withdrawn, spent. “It was the Devil’s own revenge…that’s what it was. For all that Richard did to his mother over the years. The way he treated her. It was criminal—“ she didn’t have to add: “and to me too.”

  Richard Mullinex was thoughtful, munching on his sandwich. “I don’t know what it was. Maybe Angela was right. An experiment that failed. An experiment on my own mother. I guess I experimented too far beyond my level of knowledge…all I wanted to do was right by her, make her well if I could, make her comfortable if I couldn’t.”

  Natalie just shook her head. “On your own mother—I’ll never understand that, Richard. How could you--?”

  Richard shrugged. “Too many variables, too many things to control. I don’t know. I just wanted to change how I related to her, somehow. I wanted to try something new, different. Not only with vivions and the Quantum Flux Imager, but with Mother too. With how we talked and got along. Mostly we didn’t. With the way we laughed and related and swapped stories. It’s funny. We talked more in the hospital than we had in years. It was really kind of an experiment for me to do all that…after all those years, we didn’t talk to each other.”

  “And even in that part of my experiment…I failed. I just hope she understood what I was trying to do.”

  Reverend Billings was sympathetic. “Son, I think Peggy Mullinex would think your experiment succeeded. You wanted to change things. Now look at you…sharing your feelings with all of us like this. You were as much the subject of this experiment, Richard, as anything. And it looks to me like you’ve changed a lot these last few days. I don’t think Peggy would say your experiment failed at all. I think it was a big success.”

  An hour later, Billings and Remple left. Natalie cleaned up the kitchen, then finished taking clothes out to the car. Richard was momentarily left alone in his mother’s vacant bedroom. The bed was stripped and the closet was mostly empty. It was mid-afternoon and he was still hungry. He took boxes out to the car and told Natalie he was going back inside to turn out all the lights and lock up. The house was due to be put up for sale next week.

  But inside the house, he smelled something odd, something odd but familiar. It was a delicious odor coming from the kitchen. Had Natalie left something on the stove? Intrigued, he checked it out.

  In the kitchen, he was stunned to find a steaming bowl of tomato soup and a plate of peanut butter sandwiches, freshly made, on the kitchen table.

  What the hell?

  “Either Natalie’s playing games or—“ Or what? Was he imagining it? Or had vivionic flow somehow reversed itself, just long enough to enable an invisible entity once known as Peggy Mullinex to do a mother’s duty one last time?

  Richard got his breath back. His heart was pounding. He touched the food…it seemed real enough. Had Natalie done this, as a finishing touch? A farewell flourish?

  Or had someone else?

  He decided he didn’t really want to know. He wanted to feel that somehow Peggy Mullinex had come back, at least for a few minutes. He smiled, through teary eyes, and turned out the lights.

  In the car, Natalie sensed something wrong. She asked, but Richard just smiled, shaking his head.

  “I was just remembering something, honey…that’s all. Something from a long, long time ago.”

  They drove home, with Natalie nestled up next to her husband, in the front seat.

  Maybe the experiment had been a success after all.

  END

  The Better Angels

  Introduction

  The greatest battles we face are often the battles we have with ourselves. In this story, young Jake Mizener suffers from leukemia but because he’s a young boy, he has a special toy that involves nanoscale robots that can be used to fab just about anything. Jake is being treated with medbots but unlike his Atomgrabbers game, the good guys don’t always win and the medbots struggle against his leukemia. Enter a robotic rock star named Symborg, in town for a show, who brings a whole new approach to Jake’s Atomgrabbers game.

  Real life is never as clearcut as a game. Games are supposed to be capsule versions of real life. But sometimes games offer things we can’t find in real life: actual winners and losers, clear goals, satisfying victories and crushing defeats. We live life vicariously through our games, as we do in stories. And when the line blurs between the two, what does that say about vicarious entertainment? So much of our life is virtual and online today, mediated by and through screens. With Virtual Reality devices like Oculus Rift and now, nanobot games like Atomgrabbers, we’ve completely blown away all barriers between games and life.

  Maybe the question of what is real and what isn’t no longer has any meaning….

  “It is by suffering that human beings become angels.”

  Victor Hugo

  1.

  Jake Mizener loved playing Atomgrabbers. It didn’t matter whether it was morning, afternoon or evening. Jake could always be found in the corner of the living room, where his Mom Angela and his Dad Thomas had set up the TinyTown cylinder for Jake to play with. The thing was about the size of a suitcase, perched on squat legs, with thick ganglia of tubes and wires, for supplying power and feedstock.

  “Small is all!” Jake liked to yell, whenever he turned the thing on and began joysticking his bot army against enemies the size of atoms and molecules. TinyTown was a containment device for the uncountable gazillions of nanoscale bots that inhabited it. They were all ANAD clones, robotic devices the size of atoms that could replicate and maneuver, just like any swarm could. They could even f
orm angels of a sort, lifelike simulations of real people, although inside TinyTown, the angels would necessarily be reduced in size.

  Jake just liked to maneuver his miniscule bots in unceasing wars and attacks against any enemies the TinyTown controller could conjure up. He often invited friends over to help out, especially his next-door neighbor Devon Hilliard. Jake and Devon spent hours and hours happily battling bots inside their TinyTown cylinder, punching the air with their fists when they won a battle, yelling, laughing, slapping each other on the back.

  Jake was six years old and had leukemia. It had metastasized and it was getting worse. The medbots inside him couldn’t keep up. The doctors said Maybe a year, maybe longer.

  Angela Mizener leaned against the door jamb to the kitchen and watched Jake and Devon fight off wave after wave of Berserkoids, the latest adversary the controller algorithms had come up with.

  “Get your disrupters out, Devon…!”

  “My grabbers are stuck…it says ‘effector failure.’ Cover me--!”

  “Okay…here goes…propulsors to the max--!”

  Angela knew it was time for another injection. She hated to interrupt such a cataclysmic combat scene, but the doctors had said regular injections were essential. The acute lymphoblastic leukemia that Jake suffered from had become particularly aggressive in the last year. The medbot injections helped, but the cancer was overwhelming the bots and the outlook wasn’t good.

  It wasn’t lost on Angela that while Jake and Devon were battling bots from outer space inside their TinyTown, medbots were also in combat inside Jake himself, trying their damnedest to fight off a tidal wave of malignant white blood cells that made mashed potatoes of his immune system and blood platelets.

  For now, regular injections seemed to do best, with more chemo and radiation likely in the near future.

  “Okay, boys, time out. Tell the Berserkoids you need a truce.”

  Jake pouted. “Mom, we’ve got ‘em on the run….just a few more minutes, please? Devon’s about to slam a whole swarm!”

  “No deal, Jake. Get over to the sofa…it’s injection time.” She trotted out the injector and brandished it like a weapon…putting on her scariest Berserkoid face, even baring her teeth.

  “Okaaayyy…Devon, watch those oxygens…you can hide behind ‘em, use ‘em for cover—“ Jake went to the sofa and lay down, sticking his arm out.

  Angela primed the injector as she‘d been shown at the clinic and pressed the needle into Jake’s biceps. Soon enough, a flood of medbots would be coursing through his veins and capillaries, going into battle against the raging armies of broken, misshapen blood cells that were eating him up. She tried not to think about it, but Jake liked to imagine the medbots as fighting off his own personal army of Berserkoids. Sometimes, he liked to make exploding sounds when he felt the bots going in.

  “Mom, you look pale…are you sick or something?” Jake frowned.

  “What…oh…, me…no, Jake…just a little tired…you’ve been at that game for hours now. Why don’t you and Devon take a break…I could fab some cookies…you guys like saucers, don’t you? Only take a minute—“

  “Okay, Mom…but don’t fab ‘em with those fins…they get stuck in your teeth, okay?”

  The fab could print a batch in less than thirty seconds…warm, moist, chewy and shaped like flying saucers. That was Jake’s favorite.

  “I’ll be back in one minute, tops. You and Devon set the table.”

  “Deal. Hey, Mom--?”

  She ruffled his hair as he got up from the sofa. “What, soldier?”

  “Mom, can me and Devon go see Symborg? He’s got a show, you know. This weekend. He’s coming right here, to our town.”

  “Symborg? Coming here…honey, you’re too young for that kind of thing.”

  Jake’s face fell. “Aw, Mom…I’m almost seven…”

  Symborg was a robotic pop star, the latest craze. He was also an angel and self-proclaimed messiah, head of a religious order called Sons of Assimilation. Like any angel, he was actually just a swarm of bots configured to look like a human being. Of course, angels could be anything. One minute, Symborg was a rock star. The next minute he could be an army tank or a redwood tree or your next-door neighbor. It was creepy. But there was no denying Symborg’s popularity. His shows and gatherings and concerts were epic happenings.

  The name Symborg stood for Symbiotic Organism.

  “Sweetie, you’re way too young to be going to things like that. First of all, there’s a lot of people. They get kind of wild and sometimes people get hurt.”

  Jake’s face was a picture of pitiful sadness, a look he had learned from Kelsey, their dog. Kelsey liked to prop his snout on your leg at the dinner table, and plead for scraps with his big brown eyes. Jake looked like that and when he did, Angela’s heart just melted.

  “Devon’s going to the rally. He told me.”

  Devon was still engrossed with battling Berserkoids inside TinyTown. He nodded, both hands working joysticks furiously, slamming atoms and bots in a big bang battle inside the containment cylinder. “I am. Uncle Henry’s taking me Friday. It’ll be fab….all the Atomgrabbers’ll be there.”

  Angela knew that Symborg was a driving force behind the Atomgrabbers. They made games and bots and held rallies and gatherings, called awakenings by their Assimilationist followers. Symborg also worked with children facing life-threatening medical conditions. Jake’s face just melted her heart sometimes. How could say no to that face?

  “I’ll have to talk with your Dad, Jake. You’re not going to that thing by yourself. Devon, who else is going to the show?”

  “Everybody, Mrs. Mizener. Practically everybody--!”

  So they discussed the details. The Symborg show was scheduled for Friday night, in town at the Orpheum outdoor stage. The weather was forecast to be cool and clear, a perfect early fall evening. Crowds would be huge. Estimates ran into the tens of thousands. Already, police were closing off certain streets and putting up fences and barricades. Patrol bots and drones would keep things under control.

  It was Jake’s Dad, Thomas Mizener, who laid down the rules at dinner that night.

  “Jake, you’re way too young to be going to shows like that. And neither your mother nor I have time. I’ve got this project—“

  “Devon’s going,” Jake whined. “He told me this morning.”

  “By himself?”

  “No…his Uncle Henry’s taking him. Couldn’t I go with them?”

  Thomas and Angela looked at each other. Jake watched his Dad chewing the meat loaf thoughtfully, wheels turning in his head. “Didn’t somebody say Henry was an angel? I thought I heard that somewhere…a neighbor, maybe.”

  Angela just wanted her son to have a chance to fulfill a dream. “Tom, I think it’s all right, don’t you? Angels are everywhere. Henry’s responsible. I’ve seen him with Devon and other kids. He’ll look after them.” She winced slightly; maybe it was that fruit she had eaten at lunch.

  Thomas gave it some thought. Jake knew his Dad didn’t approve of angels. Haloheads, he called them, and other things too, words Jake knew he couldn’t use. They’re different, Jake. They’re not like us. Hell, they’re not even human.

  Once, Jake saw an interview on Worldnet, where the reporter was talking to some people who thought like his Dad. They didn’t like angels either. He tapped his glasses, watched a snatch of the vid. He’d seen it just the other day….the reporter was interviewing somebody named Barnes….it was in Tennessee….

  Barnes’ face takes on a pained look, like something he had eaten didn’t agree with him. “Those pointy-head bureaucrats at the UN won’t enforce the danged Sanctuary Laws. You know, all the Containment Laws. Hell, we already fought wars over that, didn’t we? All the friggin’ haloheads and asses are taking over.”

  “Mr. Barnes, I am assuming you are referring to ang
els and Assimilationists?”

  “Darn right, sweetie. Angels and asses. They should be quarantined, like the scum they are. We need to stick the lot of ‘em into camps, like we did to the Japs back in the 20th century…you know: enemy aliens.”

  (DRONECAM IMAGE FILE 223.832: Placards and signs wave in vigorous agreement with Barnes. Other members of the rally close in around the speaker. There is some good-natured shoving and shouts of “Damn right!” “Give it to ‘em straight, Barnes!) (AR Annotation File).

  “Mr. Barnes, angels are just machines. Swarm configurations of nanobots configured to resemble human beings…surely you don’t think of these machines as enemy aliens?”

  “They’re bugs, all of them. I don’t think of dangerous viruses as enemy aliens either…but I don’t want ‘em around. All these bugs are eating our food, drinking our water, mating with our women…they need to be in camps.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Barnes…did you say mating with our women? I’m not aware of any angels accused of sexual engagements with actual humans.”

  “Oh, Missy, you don’t know the half of it.” A middle-aged woman with short-cropped black hair squeezes out of the crowd and stands before Anika. The reporter whispers into her lip mike DRONECAM…get a close-up of this—“These bugs have been defiling our daughters and sisters for years. I know it’s supposed to be illegal, but you know it goes on. What kind of offspring could possibly come from such infernal liaisons…monsters, half-bred freaks, that’s what.”

  Barnes cuts in. “We’re rallying today to get the Town Council of Freeburg to take a stand. Here…get your friggin’ bird-camera down here and I’ll show you—“

  Radovich sent the command and the dronecam wheeled about and descended slowly on its whirring quadrotors, hovering just over their heads. Its multiplex cameras zoomed in and Radovich adjusted the view she was getting on her SuperQuark glasses, pecking at a small wristpad. DRONECAM…hold there—

  “You’re holding up a sign, Mr. Barnes. Would you mind reading out loud and then explaining what it’s about.”

  “Surely.” Barnes held the placard so the dronecam would get a clear closeup. “It says MAKE CHASTAIN HILL A BUG CAMP! “We want the Town Council to designate the whole Chastain Hill area as a sort of re-settlement camp for haloheads…er, I mean angels. Keep ‘em separate from the rest of us, so they won’t contaminate everything in sight.”

  “Just enforce the damned Containment Laws!” came a voice from the back of the crowd.

  There was a chorus of “Yeahs!” and a sea of fists waving and pumping up and down.

  Jake snapped off the vid. His Dad was saying something—

  “Okay, son…I guess it will be all right. It’s against my better judgment. But if Devon’s going with his Uncle Henry, you can go along. As long as the Hilliards don’t mind and as long as Henry gets you back here before eleven. Understood?”

  Jake saluted, the way an Atomgrabber would salute. “Yes, sir. Small is all!”

  So it was decided: Jake would accompany Devon Hilliard with his Uncle Henry to the Symborg show at the Orpheum stage the following night.

  2.

  Symborg hailed originally from Kenya and he liked to dress up his shows with scenes and music from east Africa. For Jake Mizener and Devon Hilliard, it might as well have been the far side of Neptune.

  There were numerous stages spotted around the open-air plaza outside the Orpheum but there was one stage in the back that seemed to attract more audience than all the others. The performer was a handsome, slightly swarthy young man, a strange sort of magician doing seemingly magical things for an audience of shoppers, visitors and tourists. It was clear he was an angel, a nanobotic swarm in the likeness of a human, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. Children pressed in to get a peek, as the magician conjured up all sorts of toys and doodads.

  His name was Symborg.

  From the stage, the magician ran a demo in front of the crowd. He was a small man, with fierce, unblinking eyes, as his fingers flew over the table of tricks and props. Presently, he stopped and noticed a very young child, a small girl, standing shyly a few meters away from the stage, playing hide and seek in the folds of her mother’s loose jacket.

  The magician, who sported a thick black moustache, beckoned repeatedly to the young girl. After a few minutes, her mother relented and let her child go. The girl inched her way into the clearing and stood in front of the magician’s table, to applause and approving shouts and chants from the crowd.

  Symborg reached into a canvas bag and pulled out a trinket for the young girl. He handed it to her and she took it, shyly, turning the small cylinder over and over in her hand.

  “You have a djinn in that cylinder, little one,” Symborg announced, loudly enough for all to hear. “A very powerful spirit. He can grant you any wish you want. Make a wish, child, and the djinn will bring it to you, right here—“

  The girl’s name was Erika and she had huge brown eyes. Sad eyes, thought Symborg.

  Erika twirled the cylinder as the magician had shown her and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she stopped twirling the cylinder, she felt it vibrate and was so startled, she dropped the cylinder to the dirt.

  Instantly, the device was enveloped in a fine mist, a sparkling mist that billowed out and upward, swirling about the clearing in front of Symborg and his tables like a miniature cyclone. Gasps and shouts erupted from the crowd, and the spectators shoved back against each other, to give this growing apparition greater distance. On the stage, the angel gave a showman’s flourish to the spectacle.

  “Now see what the young child has conjured for us—“

  The mist gradually materialized into the faint outline of a man’s upper body, with a recognizable face, shoulders and arms crossed in front.

  The ‘djinn’ then spoke out loud. “Little one, I have come from the clouds above to grant you a great wish. Make your wish now—“ The djinn’s voice was a deep basso profundo, so deep it rattled the beaded curtains that covered Symborg’s merchant tent behind them.

  Erika stared wide-eyed, mouth open, at the apparition. She was speechless.

  “Go ahead, child,” urged Symborg. “The djinn wishes you to make a wish.”

  Shouts of encouragement and support came from the crowd. Gradually, Erika worked up enough nerve. Shy, haltingly, she asked for a new car for her father.

  “His taxi is broken down, Great One,” she murmured. “It’s the tires. They are bad. The taxi is our livelihood. Father needs a new taxi to carry the tourists.”

  The deep voice rumbled again, a little reverberation adding to the sense of barely contained powers.

  “As you have spoken, child…so shall it be—“

  At that moment, the swirling, twinkling apparition of the djinn dissolved into a maelstrom of churning, roiling clouds, streaked with flashes of light. It was like watching a thunderstorm in miniature, from the inside.

  The crowd murmured and moved back uneasily.

  When the storm began to subside, the barest outlines of a structure could be seen enveloped in the thick fog. The fog dissolved, slowly at first, then with speed, to reveal the front hood and doors of a new minibus. Its wheels dripped with moisture and sunlight shone from the supple leather seats inside.

  The crowd was silent for a moment, then erupted into cheers and gasps. Erika stared wide-eyed at the new vehicle, inching her way forward to tentatively put a finger along the fender, tracing the smooth curve of the metal.

  For fun, Symborg reached inside the driver’s side window and honked the horn a few times, startling everyone. The crowd laughed.

  “You see what a gift the great djinn has brought you, little one. The djinn I have in my possession can do the same for every one of you.” Symborg pointedly stared at each face in the front row of the circle of onlookers. “Such a powerful djinn, such a powerful servant is available to you, today, right now, for a very special price. Yo
u will not believe the deal I can make for you. My friends, you cannot leave this bazaar without experiencing what this amazing servant can do for you—the Assimilationists have brought this wonder to the bazaar just for today--“

  The crowd surged forward, feeling the doors, the hood and side panels of the new minibus, pressing in on all sides of the stage. Symborg the magician basked in the admiration and proudly pointed out details on the newly conjured vehicle. Murmurs and laughter erupted. The audience was appreciative, adoring the magician. More shoppers came from the street to see what was going on.

  Jake and Devon looked on with Uncle Henry.

  Jake’s eyes were wide. “Cool! Look, there are the booths…over there—“

  Devon saw what he was pointing at. A line of assimilator booths were deployed along one side of the stage. People were already queuing up to be assimilated.

  Devon tugged at Uncle Henry’s coat sleeve. “Can we go over? Huh? Can we go watch?”

  Henry was a slightly built older man with a fringe of white hair around the back of his head, as least the angel showed that kind of configuration. But his config could be changed just by pressing a few buttons on the control pack. Devon’s dad kept the pack with him. “When you’re older,” Mr. Hilliard would always say. “It’s not a toy. You have to be responsible. Maybe when you’re ten.” Devon couldn’t wait.

  They went over to the booths. The nearest booth had the longest line. A young black woman was at the head of the line, answering some questions.

  “…name is, ma’am?” The assimilator tech wore a light blue uniform. His nameplate read Gavin.

  Her name was Anna Ngombe. She was tall, maybe with a bit of Masai in her family, proud, a bit fluttery and nervous. She grinned sheepishly as one of Gavin’s men helped her into the assimilator booth.

  “A great day,” she muttered. “Great day...so proud.”

  Gavin sat at a console just outside the booth, while another tech helped Anna inside and made her comfortable on the seat. The tech shut and latched the door, pressing a button to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.

  “Let’s do it,” the tech told Gavin. Gavin pressed buttons.

  Inside the booth, a fog had formed…that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Anna disappeared into the fog, only a leg and a shoulder could be seen.

  The fog thickened. A faint buzz could be heard from inside the booth. A nearby dronecam swooped in closer, hovering only a few feet over the scene, like a giant gnat, watching as the cloud of bots inside the booth thickened. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth. The image was displayed on giant screens all around the stage.

  Anna didn’t move. At first, she was unchanged, a smooth black leg with a section of her print dress showing, hitched up just above her knee. But even as Devon and Jake watched, the black of her skin had begun to fade. In moments, it was almost gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. Her shoulder was the same.

  Anna Ngombe was slowly but steadily being disassembled. She was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.

  The end came softly, almost as if the woman were walking away in a light rain. Her body, the physical Anna Ngombe, began to fade inside the booth. At first, it had been barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of her skin, her extremities, a smearing of her legs and shoulders, as if a photo had lost contrast.

  In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Anna Ngombe had devolved—that was the commonly accepted word now—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.

  And then she was gone.

  The woman known as Anna Ngombe had just let herself be disassembled into atom fluff. And behind her, people were jostling in line to be next.

  Jake and Devon were mesmerized by the whole scene. Devon turned to Uncle Henry.

  “I want to try it. Can I try that, Uncle Henry? That looks so cool!”

  “Yeah,” said Jake. “You could be a real atomgrabber, right down there with the real atoms.”

  Henry’s face was a mixture of looks. “I can’t let you go over there, boys. Devon, your parents would have my head. Or make me go back into containment.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Uncle Henry…can’t we just go look?”

  But Henry was adamant. “Let’s check out the souvenirs.” After the show was over, he led them both along the perimeter of the stage, where a long line of tents, tables and booths had been set up, hawking T-shirts, games, small toys fabbed by the djinn and other merchandise.

  Jake was curious. “Uncle Henry, what’s it like being an angel? Does it hurt?”

  Henry shuffled along, picking up knickknacks and examining them. “That’s a hard question to answer, Jake. Why do you want to know?”

  Jake shrugged. “I want to be an atomgrabber. My bots aren’t working so well. Maybe I can help them. And other kids too.”

  “Well…” Henry rubbed his chin. Both boys noticed the edge effects. Angels’ extremities sometimes didn’t track accurately with the rests of their ‘bodies.’ Things could get blurry, fuzzy. At times, Henry’s hands were like that. He usually kept them jammed in his coat pocket. “Well…that’s not so easy to answer, like I said.” Henry tried to put into words something that couldn’t be put into words. “It’s like being in bed on a Saturday morning, all close and warm and snuggly…you know, when it’s freezing cold and dark outside and you’re under all the covers. There’s love, affection, you know you’re in a big family, you’ve got that sense of belonging, a cocooning, in a way or at a level which you never experience as Normals. And you can be anything…anything you want. Normals can’t do that. You’ve got one body, one life. Angels can fly, really fly. They can be anything their imaginations dream up.”

  Jake nodded like he understood, but he didn’t really. “We’re the Normals?”

  “That’s right. I shouldn’t say it that way. But we are different, you and me.”

  “Uncle Henry?” Jake asked, eyeing the line of volunteers still queued up at the assimilator booths. Symborg ambled among them, hugging some, signing autographs, posing for photos. “Would you help me be an angel?”

  Henry looked down at Jake. “Son, I’ll do what I can. Maybe I can put you in touch with Symborg himself.”

  Jake’s eyes lit up. “If angels can fly, that’s what I want to do.”

  The three of them went home together.

  3.

  Uncle Henry knew the Mizeners didn’t approve of angels, so he dropped Jake off without coming to the door. Jake said good-bye to Devon, went inside and headed for the kitchen. He was kind of tired and wanted a soda to drink. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen too. Angela made up a plate of cookies and the three of them munched for a few minutes.

  Jake described the show. His Dad was appalled. “Those angels will be the death of this country yet.” He wiped crumbs off his mouth with his hands. “Angels…haloheads…they’re just machines. They’re a cloud of bugs.”

  “Uncle Henry said angels could fly, Dad.”

  “Yeah, son, any insects can fly. You want to be a swarm of insects? I don’t want you hanging around with that Henry any more. Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten you that Atomgrabbers game either.”

  “Tom—“ Angela was more sympathetic. “It’s been his dream for a long time. Maybe there’s something we can—“

  But Thomas Mizener didn’t want to hear about it. “They’re nothing but trouble. Jeez, Angela, have you seen what they do?
It’s mass suicide. It’s just barely legal. Symborg’s selling snake oil, that’s what he’s doing. Preying on kids and the gullible and the desperate. It’s criminal.”

  “Is it criminal to want the best for your son. Especially, since…since.…” Tears started welling up in her eyes. “You know…there’s only—“

  Thomas stood up abruptly. He hated it when Angela got like this. “Jake, isn’t it time for your injection?”

  Jake nodded glumly. “Yes, sir.”

  “Go lie down on the sofa. I’ll get the stuff.” Jake hated it when his Dad did the injections. It hurt like hell and he knew his Dad didn’t really like doing it. Normals, Uncle Henry had called them. What was Normal about having a needle jabbed into your neck by someone who was always mad?

  While his Dad was administering the injection, muttering under his breath the whole time angels, my ass, they should all be sprayed or swatted like houseflies, Jake dreamed of what it would be like to be an Atomgrabber, or an angel like Uncle Henry. As he lay on the couch, he saw his Mom standing at the door to the kitchen, watching, her eyes droopy and teary, a napkin to her mouth. Somehow, though she said nothing, Jake knew she was about to do something Dad wouldn’t like, something she couldn’t put into words.

  He just hoped she didn’t wait too long.

  The next morning, after Jake had gone off to school, Angela was supervising Howie the housebot with the dishes when she noticed Uncle Henry in the Dilliards’ backyard, raking leaves. She had an idea.

  Angela went out back and leaned over the fence, calling to Henry. He came over.

  “Henry, I just wanted to thank you for letting my Jake come along to the Symborg show. He really idolizes Symborg…you know, atomgrabbers and all.”

  Henry plucked at some errant leaves. He was dressed in an old flannel shirt and jeans, with a beat-up baseball cap on his head. Of course, Angela knew he was angel, not a Normal, but she didn’t find it hard to believe he was real. He wore gloves, maybe to hide the edge effects that angels sometimes exhibited.

  “Oh, it was my pleasure, Mrs. Mizener. The boys had a great time. Got them some T-shirts and things.”

  “Henry, I’m not trying to be unneighborly, but what’s it really like for you…being an angel, I mean?”

  Henry stopped raking, thrust the ball cap back on his head. “You know, Mrs. Mizener, I could ask you the same thing: what’s it like being a Normal? How do you answer that?”

  “Well, you know…what I meant…I mean, you and I are different. I was just wondering—“

  “If I have feelings like a Normal? Do I bleed? Or cry?”

  “Something like that. Aren’t you and Symborg, you know…kind of like the same?”

  Henry smiled. He even had a gap in his teeth…who had thought up that little detail for the configuration? “It is true, Mrs. Mizener, that Symborg and I both share a common makeup. I’m a collection of bots, put together to resemble a human being. I’m a swarm. Sometimes we’re called clouds of bugs, funny-looking fog droplets, there’s a million things we’re called. You are a collection too, Mrs. Mizener. A collection of cells, some bacteria, some microbes. It’s all in how you look at it.”

  “But how does it feel?”

  Henry smiled again. “It feels fine. How does it feel to be you?”

  Angela chuckled. “I see your point. Listen, I came out here to ask you a question…maybe even a favor.”

  “Surely, Mrs. Mizener.”

  Angela didn’t quite know how to put this, so she decided to just plow ahead. “You know my Jake has a pretty serious illness. And he just adores Symborg and all that atomgrabber stuff.”

  “I did know about his leukemia, Mrs. Mizener. I hope his treatments are going well.”

  Angela ran a hand through her hair. It was a mess, made worse by the stiff breezes blowing across the lawns, stirring up the pile of leaves Henry had just made. “Actually they’re not. Look, I…I was wondering, since Jake adores Symborg, if you know any way I could get Symborg to come here, maybe to the pavilion down the street, do a little personal show for the neighborhood. I know Jake and Devon both would love that. It would mean a lot of Jake…actually—“ she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye “—it might even help Jake a little. The doctors say…you know they try to be hopeful—“

  Henry frowned. “Mrs. Mizener, are you okay? You look a little pale—“

  She nodded more vigorously than she felt. “Oh, I’m okay…just a little bug I’ve caught.” She did have persistent pains in her stomach area…had for days now. “Could you just talk with Symborg…or maybe his people. I mean…you’re—“

  “Like them,” Henry finished. He smiled at Angela’s discomfiture. “It’s okay…I know what you’re saying.” He gave it some thought. “You want me to talk to Symborg…see if he’ll do a show down at the lake, at the pavilion?”

  Angela was grateful, even a little embarrassed, she didn’t have to explain anymore. “Could you? Jake has dreamed of being an atomgrabber for as long as I can remember…it would mean so much to him. He doesn’t have---“ she stopped, decided to change her words. “You know, I’ve heard how much Symborg likes children…how he works with all those foundations.”

  Henry picked up his rake and began plowing through leaves again. “Children are the future, Mrs. Mizener. Someone once said the reason angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly. Not that I’m likely to take off any time soon…unless this wind gets worse.”

  “Then you’ll help?”

  “Sure. I can talk with Symborg and his people. All us angels are just alike anyway.” He chuckled at his own joke, then went back to his raking.

  Angela didn’t know if she had hurt his feelings—could angels even have feelings? She went back to the house and sat down, asking Howie to bring her a fresh cup of coffee. The housebot whirred about the kitchen happily, drawing water, pouring beans, and setting the brew time to Fast. In a few minutes, the steaming hot cup was ready.

  She knew perfectly well that Jake wanted to be just like Symborg, maybe even like Henry. A cloud of bugs. Thoughts and images of Jake playing with his TinyTown mixed in with Thomas’ caustic sarcasm about angels. She just wanted her son to have a little joy in his life, however long it might be. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it? So what if angels and clouds of bugs were shaking everything up, re-making the world. Their own next-door neighbors had elected to fab an angel to keep the memory of the real Uncle Henry alive. And it was a good likeness too. Was this any different from buying a new lawn mower? Or showing 3-D holograms of loved ones all day and night?

  Too bad they can’t make better medbots, she told herself. Then kids like Jake would have a better chance with leukemia and cancer. This is crazy, she told herself over the rim of the coffee cup. I’m just making myself sick over this. She did feel sharper pains inside. Maybe I need to see the doctor.

  Angela figured she could deal with her husband. She just wanted Jake to have a chance to live a life-long dream. If Henry could persuade Symborg to do a personal show down at the Pavilion, Jake would be floating on air.

  Just like she’d seen Henry do from time to time. She watched him through the window, raking leaves, wondering. He remained reassuringly solid the whole time.

  4.

  Symborg readily agreed to do a show at the Crescent Lake Pavilion three days later. It would be a Sunday afternoon. The weather forecast was perfect: cool, breezy, clear skies.

  Jake could hardly sleep at night, thinking about what was coming.

  Sunday seemed to take forever, but it finally came. Angela and Thomas Mizener took Jake and Devon down to the pavilion at Crescent Lake. Thousands were coming. The small footbridge across the lake to the pavilion was jammed with people and music blared out across the lake from giant speakers. Newsdrones fluttered across the sky, covering the event. Police drones and bots provided secur
ity.

  Jake and Devon could hardly contain themselves. Both wore their atomgrabber outfits, colorful leotards and caps, with insignia and medals and ribbons and epaulets.

  As always, Symborg appeared on the stage to thunderous applause. People shrieked and fainted for Symborg. The crowd surged forward as Symborg came to the edge of the stage, to shake hands, sign autographs, perform a few tricks. He wore a full atomgrabber outfit: white clingy leotard, some kind of cape, signature hat and his chest was draped with insignia. Across his chest, the stylized circle and atom emblem blazed forth.

  “Hello, fellow atomgrabbers!” His voice boomed out across the lake and the pavilion grounds. A slight screech from feedback pierced the air. “Small is all!”

  Jake and Devon had worked their way as close as they could, really only a few meters from the side of the stage, pushing, jostling, elbowing and squeezing up to the front. To their amazement, Symborg seemed to be signaling them, looking right at them. Stage hands cleared a path and Jake and Devon were escorted right up to the stage steps. Symborg bent down.

  Jake’s heart was thudding in his chest so hard he thought it might fly through his leotard. Devon’s mouth was agape, as if he had seen a ghost.

  “What’s your name, young man?”

  Jake stammered, “Ja—Jake…Jake Mizener--”

  Devon was introduced as well.

  Symborg smiled a broad smile. “You want to be atomgrabbers…that’s what your folks tell me….”

  “Yes…yessir—“

  Symborg’s face seemed to morph even as he bent down to the boys, shifting subtly from a dark-skinned east African male of medium build and thin moustache to a more Midwest American farmhand kind of outdoorsy, ruddy-cheeked glow. It was a smooth, subtle shift, almost unnoticed. Symborg could do that. Angels could do anything. Symborg liked to feel a bond with his audience.

  “And tell me, Jake…why do you want to be an atomgrabber?”

  Jake had to concentrate on making his mouth work. “I want to help kids. Be a medbot. Go inside and fight diseases, kill microbes.”

  Symborg’s smile broadened, even though that seemed impossible. “Well said, Jake…well said. You know atomgrabbers can do things nobody else can…they can do things like this—“ He balled the fist of his right hand and held it up. A newsdrone swooped down from overhead to flutter nearby, to get a better look and Symborg held his fist up high so everyone could see.

  At first it was just a fist. But in seconds, the fist started shifting, morphing, changing into something else. It faded into a blur and the blur became fuzzy, like a tennis ball unraveling. Pinpricks of light surrounded the fist like a halo and soon enough, the fist was gone. Now it became an amorphous sphere of light, like he was holding a miniature sun in his hand. Then it changed again. The sun banked and faded, forming itself into some kind of shape. First, there was a cylinder, then some kind of brim. It began to darken, filling in structure, gathering atoms and more atoms until after a minute or so, it was clear what was being formed.

  It was a hat, a black bowler-style hat.

  When it was fully formed, the audience burst into vigorous applause. Symborg waved the hat around, took a slight bow, and popped it on his head, situating the bowler at a jaunty angle.

  Now, Symborg bent down to Jake and Devon again. “To be a true atomgrabber, you have to be assimilated. You have to go into the booth. You want to try it?”

  Thirty meters back, Thomas and Angela Mizener stirred uneasily. Henry Hilliard had told them this was just part of the show. Nothing to worry about.

  “It will be a simulation. Just a fantasy. Like an adventure. Symborg’ll put them in a booth, run some lights and sounds, a little colored smoke, and open the door. They’ll come out and he’ll have a little ceremony and they’ll be atomgrabbers. He’s got a big medal he can pin on them…you know, the circle and atom emblem.”

  “As long as it’s safe,” Angela said.

  “Smoke and mirrors,” Thomas muttered. But he shrugged and relented when Angela gave him the look.

  Now Jake and Devon were shown to an assimilator booth along one side of the stage. The door was open. Two technicians manned the booth.

  Symborg came over. “We’ll do Jake first, then Devon. And once you’ve gone through the assimilation, I’ll formally induct you into the Atomgrabbers…already got the medal right here—“ he held up the circle and atom pin for all to see. More newsdrones gathered for close-ups, and Jake’s awed face blazed forth from large screens scattered throughout the grounds.

  “Are you ready, Jake?”

  Jake half saluted. “Yes, sir…I’m ready…this is really great!”

  Symborg laughed and signaled to the technicians, who helped Jake inside and shut the door. They both sat at nearby consoles, pressing buttons and toggling switches.

  Soon, the booth was flashing all kind of lights: red, green, yellow and blue. A thin column of smoke issued from the top. The crowd cheered.

  Inside, Jake sat quietly, his heart pounding. At first, he felt nothing. Atomgrabbers do this, he told himself. He had to be brave. He closed his eyes, tried to think of something, anything, but what was happening. It was exciting, he was finally going to become an Atomgrabber.

  There seemed to a slight breeze blowing through the booth. Jake opened one eye and took a look. Now he seemed to be enveloped in a fog, which was growing thicker. And something was pricking his skin, tingling, pinching. After a few moments, it actually started to hurt, but he told himself to be brave.

  This is like that time in the Lake. When he was four, he had fallen into Crescent Lake, just a few hundred yards from where they were now. Slipped right off the dock leaning over to look at a fish gliding below the surface. And he didn’t know how to swim. He panicked and swallowed water and he thought he was going to die, but then strong hands and arms lifted him up and he was out of the water.

  Now, there weren’t any strong hands. But he had to be tough. Like Devon always said, Atomgrabbers had to be able to take anything.

  Even leukemia.

  Jake soon felt kind of funny, sleepy and warm and smothered all at the same time. But it was a nice kind of smother now, like when you were in bed on a cold morning, all snuggled up and cozy. Then he went to sleep.

  Outside the booth, the two technicians watched the process. Gauges and dials on their console told the story. The process was proceeding normally. They also knew that Symborg had special instructions for this job. One technician—his name plate read Stefans—looked up at Symborg, who was standing just behind them, peering through a porthole into the booth. He couldn’t see anything….assimilation was already underway. Bots were breaking down Jake, disassembling him into his constituent atoms and molecules.

  “Now?” Stefans asked.

  Symborg nodded. “Now. Secondary sequence.”

  Stefans’ fingers played over his keyboard. Once the dematerializing was done, all that had been Jake was a loose swarm of atoms and molecules. But a pattern buffer was imposed on the swarm and a new configuration was applied. Symborg had just told Stefans to make two patterns. In effect, Jake would be re-assembled as a lifelike formation of nanobots closely resembling the original Jake. An angel, in the current way of saying things. In fact, the swarm would so closely resemble the original Jake that even on close inspection, you couldn’t tell the difference.

  But there would be another formation of bots, another Jake. This version of the original pattern, with all of its atoms and bond geometries reconstructed, would become Jake, the real Atomgrabber.

  Green lights on the booth and Stefans’ console signaled the end of the assimilation process. The crowd around the stage surged forward in anticipation. Newsdrones hovered overhead, swooping lower to get a better view.

  With a theatrical flourish, Symborg swung open the door to the assimilator booth. Smoke and fog billowed
out. Out stepped Jake Mizener, blinking in the bright lights, looking none the worse for wear.

  Symborg presented Jake to the crowd and the grounds were filled with thunderous applause and cheers. Symborg then made a show of pinning the Atomgrabbers Medal of Merit on Jake’s chest. Clad in leotard and cape, with a blue mask, and the crossed circle and atom blazing out from his chest, Jake looked and felt every bit a superhero.

  Only Symborg knew the truth. The Jake everyone saw was now an angel. But nobody could tell the difference. Angela and Thomas Mizener were helped up onto the stage by security guards and stage hands and ran to Jake, hugging him hard. Devon Hilliard was nearby, beaming, clapping, secretly jealous of all the attention. His turn would come next and, indeed, technicians were already shepherding him toward a nearby booth. Already lines had formed to queue up for assimilation, as spectators and fans jostled to get into position.

  As Angela smothered her son with kisses and Thomas slapped Jake on the back, the Mizeners were shown off the stage and through a cordon of guards to a waiting limousine. The limo would take the family to a celebration lunch at Sal’s Pizza Palace down the street. With all the attention focused on Jake and the family, nobody noticed the small cylindrical capsule that an assimilator tech handed to Symborg. Symborg stuffed the capsule in the folds of his jacket and waved vigorously at the newest Atomgrabber as he high-fived his way through the crowd and boarded the waiting limo.

  Only Symborg knew there were now two Jakes. One Jake was a five-foot one, eighty-pound angel, done up in a leotard and cape, with a huge Atomgrabber medal blazing forth from his chest. This Jake was a near-perfect likeness of the original Jake. This Jake was beaming, laughing, pumping fists and waving to thousands of fans, as he contemplated the wonders of a 16-inch pepperoni and sausage pizza with all the trimmings. This Jake would suffer no more leukemia, no more medbots, no more injections, though neither he nor his parents yet knew that.

  The other Jake was inside the capsule in Symborg’s pocket.

  After the show, Symborg retired to a trailer parked along a service road on the other side of the lake. The trailer was surrounded by security guards and fences. The angel known to all as Symborg morphed from the stage version of Symborg to a more relaxed human-like configuration, clad in a robe and slippers. He set the capsule down on a table, thumbed a control stud on the side and stepped back.

  A fine sparkling mist began issuing from the capsule. At first, the mist flowed and thickened into a large cloud, almost a blob. But Symborg had chosen a special configuration for this swarm and soon enough, the swarm began gathering itself into a shape. First came the legs, then the arms, followed by a faint, almost translucent torso. The head and shoulders were the last to form, but like a cartoon drawing, the details began filling in. The whole process took about five minutes.

  The second Jake drifted before Symborg with a slightly disoriented look on his face. Symborg smiled up at him.

  “How do you feel, Jake?”

  Jake had a sort of crooked smile on his face. “Kind of weird. Like a dream. I feel…like I’m floating.” He waved a hand back and forth in front of his eyes…the bots streamed off like water droplets. “Wicked…that’s really wicked….”

  “Jake, you’ve been deconstructed. You know what that means?”

  Jake was still fascinated with his own hands. He found he could sweep his hand right through a nearby chair. The bots that made up his “skin” parted and rejoined after each sweep.

  “No. Does that mean I’m an Atomgrabber?”

  “It means exactly that. You’re different now. You can go anywhere, be anything. It all depends on your configuration…we say ‘config,’ for short.”

  Jake wore a big smile. “I always wanted to be an Atomgrabber. I didn’t know it would be like this? Can I see Mom? And Dad? Is Devon here?”

  Now it was Symborg’s turn to smile. “In time, Jake. In time. But you know… being an Atomgrabber means you always have a mission. Remember: small is all.”

  Jake looked at himself as best he could. “What happened to my clothes…my cape—“ He felt for his face, had a hard time finding something to touch. “—my mask…I can’t feel anything.”

  Symborg laughed. “Don’t worry, Jake. That’ll come. It’s like when you first learned to walk. You don’t remember that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You stumbled a lot. Fell on your face. Got cuts and scrapes. This is just like that.”

  Now, Jake seemed even more disoriented. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  “You’re not scared are you?”

  Jake shook his head quickly. “No…well, maybe a little. It’s just so…different. I used to make fun of Uncle Henry when he described what it was like being an angel. Now I see what he meant. Kind of like being in the pool…like underwater.”

  “In a way. Jake, you know that Atomgrabbers help others. That’s our mission.”

  Jake was taking a few steps, trying out his legs. He found he could walk. Or maybe he was drifting…he couldn’t feel anything. “I know….”

  “I have your first mission. I’m going to download a new configuration for you. Send you off to do battle with some cancer cells. They’re eating up someone who needs our help…your help.”

  “I don’t know how to fight cancer. I mean, there’s leukemia…I know about that.”

  Symborg shook his head. He helped Jake back to a nearby chair, where he more or less sat down. “You’ll know what to do when I download this new configuration. And there’s no leukemia anymore. That’s gone. I want you to go back into the capsule. We need to test all your parts…your effectors, your propulsors, see if you can navigate properly. Okay?”

  Jake seemed a little tentative. “Okay….”

  Symborg took a small control box from his jacket. He pressed two buttons. In moments, Jake began to fade, losing structure, dispersing, evaporating like smoke in a light breeze. The master bot of the swarm that was Jake sloughed off all its daughter bots and made its way back to containment. For Jake, it was like when his Dad put the car in the garage….a little bumpy and jerky at times.

  Symborg then spent the next hour, communicating with Jake inside containment. All the parts that made up a nanoscale assembler were tested and checked: main memory, buffers, config translator, processor, actuator mast and propulsors, all the varied actuators and sensors like carbene grabbers and pyridine probes.

  “Does this work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you flex this…all the way?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about this?”

  “It seems to be moving. What is it?”

  When all the testing was done, Symborg took the containment capsule and put it in his coat pocket. Then he called his personal driver Dirhan. The chauffeur brought his car around to the trailer and Symborg came out and climbed in. It was night time and a brisk breeze had picked up, blowing across Crescent Lake. He could hear waves lapping against nearby dock pilings, masts and spars clinking and groaning on boats gathered around the marina.

  There was a courtesy call he had to make.

 

  Symborg was about to ring the doorbell to the Mizener house again, when the door eased open. It was Thomas Mizener, in white slacks and a maroon pullover.

  “Oh…uh, hello, Mr. Symborg…I didn’t expect…I thought you were on your way out of town.”

  “My trailer’s just about ready to roll,” Symborg told him. For this visit, the magician had configured himself with a knee-length overcoat, although it wasn’t that cold, and hiking boots. Sunglasses perched at the end of his nose. He looked like a movie star trying to be inconspicuous, but not quite succeeding. “I wanted to see how Jake was doing and wish everyone a blessed week. And thank you for having me at your show last night…it was a special time for me, to be with all the kids.”

/>   By this time, Jake and Angela Mizener had come to the door. Both wore coats and seemed about to leave the house.

  “Not at all…the kids enjoyed every moment. I guess it’s a good thing you’re doing…you and the Atomgrabbers.”

  “It’s kind of our mission…why we’re here.” Symborg and Jake exchanged knowing looks. “I’m sorry to interrupt…we’re you leaving?”

  “Huh?” Tom Mizener realized Angela was right behind him, already with her purse. She looked pale and wan. “Oh…yeah, kind of. Angela here’s got a bug or something. She’s in some pain—“

  Angela tried to smile back but it was forced and came out looking like a grimace. “Sorry—“ she shrugged.

  “I’m taking her to the hospital. ER. She needs to be looked at.”

  Symborg reached forward and took Angela’s hands in his own. “Nothing serious, I hope.” She didn’t resist.

  Tom pulled the door behind them. Now everybody was on the front porch, as he locked the door. “So do we. But thanks again.”

  As Symborg released Angela’s hands, he brushed against her jacket with his own coat. As he did so, the containment capsule with Jake the Atomgrabber inside fell into her jacket pocket, unobserved by anyone. The capsule settled deeper and was soon caught in the pocket.

  Symborg said his goodbyes as the Mizeners went to their garage. The garage door was already rumbling open.

  “I’ll keep in touch,” he promised. “I want to know how Jake is doing. Now that’s he a real Atomgrabber, we’re expecting great things.”

  Symborg went back to his own car. Dirhan opened the side door and he got in. Once the door was closed, they waited until the Mizeners’ car had backed out and was heading up the street, toward Sisters of Mercy Hospital, a short fifteen-minute drive.

  Then Symborg sent a command to activate the containment capsule inside Angela Mizener’s coat pocket. In seconds, he knew that Jake the Atomgrabber would be emerging and off on his first mission.

  Angela didn’t know it yet but her own son Jake would soon be inside her, hunting down and vanquishing the tumor cells that were even now growing rapidly in her pancreas. A great battle was coming and Symborg knew he could count on Jake to lead the charge and win the day.

  Small is all.

  END