“Yeah. Shoulder,” Vincent said. “Jin, take my hand.”
“Oh, how I’ve waited for this moment,” Nijinsky snarked. But he understood. He took Vincent’s hand and they smiled at each other in a very friendly way that caused the suspicious agent’s eyes to slide away to some more likely target.
“Mite,” Nijinsky said, gazing into Vincent’s eyes.
“I see it. I’m feeling the vertical. Neck.”
“Yeah.”
A few hundred yards away, four biots might determine the fate of the human race. And here, in the macro, Nijinsky began to realize he needed a bathroom.
More fire engines. It was an all-out five alarm, with ladder trucks and ambulances, and it was possible to feel the tension in the crowd. Something had clearly happened, and the demonstrators and tourists and spies all wondered what the hell it was.
Word started to move through the crowd. “Fire. Some kind of a fire.”
“Is it terrorism?”
“Just fire trucks so far.”
The NYPD were definitely interested, and a police captain talked into his walkie-talkie. Nijinsky saw worry in his eyes. And he could swear he saw the man’s lips form the words, “Shots fired.”
The ripple of information moved through the cops, who were suddenly no longer taking an easy shift of crowd control and were beginning to realize something bad was happening.
“Jaw,” Vincent said.
Vincent’s phone lit up with a message. He let Nijinsky read it over his shoulder: Presumed terrorist incident at UN bookstore.
So much for presidential speeches at the UN, Nijinsky thought. No way would the Secret Service let the POTUS near the UN Building now. He had no idea what the hell Wilkes and Ophelia had managed to do, but it was something rather more dramatic than merely drawing security to the hidden twitcher room in the UN basement.
He glanced at Vincent and saw a tight-mouthed half smile.
“Ear,” Vincent said. “Time to split.”
“She could use a little electrolysis,” Nijinsky said.
At the best of times Vincent had not much sense of humor, and none now. He did not answer.
Both men aimed their biots up and headed for the presidential eyeballs.
(ARTIFACT)
Partial text of speech by Grey McLure prepared for delivery at an MIT seminar on the dangers of nanotechnology. His wife’s illness forced him to cancel the trip, and McLure never spoke publicly on the subject.
Begin with a square sheet of tofu perhaps eighteen inches on each side. Now carefully lift that fragile, gooey mess up and begin folding it. Soon you have a handful of wrinkled tofu, a sort of slimy ball of the stuff. That is the cerebrum. The part of the brain that makes a human human.
It rests atop a sort of upside-down leek. That’s the brain stem. And stuck up underneath the tofu and resting behind the brain stem is the cerebellum. The cerebellum looks a bit like a wad of cooked but sticky spaghetti squished into a clump.
But this map is nothing, not even a bare beginning. It’s the equivalent of having a world map that only names continents. You won’t find your way around with a map that just says “Asia.”
No, there are countries down there. There are barriers and borders, individual nations called Wernicke or Thalamus or Broca. Hundreds of them, and each has a unique character.
But you still don’t know your way around. Your map shows you how to find Mexico and France and Azerbaijan. And that’s better than just knowing the continents, but it won’t get you to a particular city or house.
The complexity is as great as that of Earth itself. Three pounds of goo stuffed into an elliptical bone cage. Within that goo are arteries pumping oxygen—far more than to any other organ. And massive bundles of nerves running from nose and ears, from fingers and toes, from your stomach and your heart, and above all from your eyes.
Those nerves are a fire hose of data. Millions of data bits. All of it pouring into what may be as many as ninety billion synapses. Those nerves are the oceans, the ports, the airspace of the brain. And each synapse is like a one or zero in a binary computer. These are the roads, the streets, the alleyways of our map.
But we haven’t begun to see the complexity. Because those billions of synapses generate as many as a quadrillion connections.
And you see now that we have gone from continents to countries to the oceans and rivers and then down to the roads and alleyways, and down there, down there if you see the map in its ultimate detail, you see a planet with a quadrillion—a thousand trillion—people.
Imagine a large beach. Huntington Beach or Waikiki. Imagine the grains of sand on that beach. You may approach a quadrillion grains of sand.
So how do we begin to imagine that we can map out the human brain with sufficient accuracy as to allow manipulation at the physical level?
Because we don’t need the quadrillion. Or even the billions. We don’t need to see all the detail. The brain itself will find what we need. It will show us synaptic networks.
Memory is elusive because it is spread across so much of the brain. Go back to that sheet of tofu. Stab eight pins into it. Draw lines between them. There’s your memory of your mother’s face, each pin a piece.
But as you look at the pattern you notice something. All those connections passed through the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the router. Tap the router and you can light up the networks of memory.
It’s not much to look at, the hippocampus. They say it looks like a cross between a slug and a seahorse. Just a couple of inches long, one on each side of the brain.