She went into the bedroom, and he nervously asked where she was going, and she returned with a straight-backed chair.
She sat on the chair, looked him over, shook her head. “Yeah, you peed yourself. So tell me, the nanotech brain implants that control those girls…how are they installed? Not with surgery.”
He hesitated but gave it up. “Injection. The control mechanism is made up of thousands of parts, each just a few molecules. They migrate to the brain and self-assemble into a complex structure.”
“And the blood-brain barrier doesn’t screen them out?”
“No. I don’t know why. I’m no scientist. It’s just part of Shenneck’s…genius.”
The blood-brain barrier was a complex biological mechanism that permitted vital substances in the blood to penetrate the walls of the brain’s capillaries and enter the brain tissue, while keeping out harmful substances.
“How do all these tiny parts, all these machines made of a handful of molecules, know how to self-assemble when they get into the brain?”
“They’re sort of programmed. But not exactly by Shenneck. It’s all about precise design. If all the parts are perfectly designed to fit together like a long series of puzzle pieces, like locks and keys, and if each piece has only one place it will fit in the larger structure, then Brownian movement makes it inevitable that they’ll link up properly.”
“Progress by random motion,” she said. “A drunkard’s walk.”
“Yeah. Shenneck says it happens in nature all the time.”
“Ribosomes,” she said, remembering that example from Shenneck’s video about the mice.
Ribosomes were mitten-shaped organelles that existed in great numbers in the cytoplasm of every human cell. They were the sites where proteins were manufactured. Each ribosome had more than fifty different components. If you broke down a slew of them into their separate parts and thoroughly mixed them up in a suspending fluid, then Brownian movement—caused by encounters with molecules of the suspending medium—kept knocking them against one another until the fifty-some parts assembled into whole ribosomes.
If the thousands of parts in Shenneck’s control mechanism were each perfectly designed to fit only one place in a larger structure, the forces of nature would ensure they linked up in the brain. At every level from the subatomic to the formation of galaxies, nature routinely created complex structures because the perfection of its operative designs made its various constructions inevitable.
“Once a control mechanism is in place in the brain of one of these poor girls,” Jane said, “is there any way to undo it, any way she can ever be again who she once was?”
Her question clearly stressed Overton, and he read in it a judgment of himself that unnerved him. “Shenneck built it this way. I didn’t have anything to do with how he designed it.”
“Good for you.”
“There should have been…I don’t know, it’s not the right word, but there should have been an antidote.”
As if a sleeker design would have made Frankenstein’s monster less of a monster and his maker a hero.
“So there’s no way to undo it?” she asked.
“No. The controller breaks down the existing personality and deletes the memories that helped to form it. The result is a new level of…call it consciousness. Shenneck has been adamant about…”
Unthinkingly, he chewed his lower lip, breaking the fragile clot that had begun to heal the split, bringing forth fresh blood.
“Keep going, Sterling. It’s show-and-tell day. You remember show-and-tell from elementary school? Earn your gold star, your works-well-with-others checkmark on your next report card. Tell me what Bertold Shenneck has been adamant about.”
“He’s adamant that the design can allow no possible pathway for rebellion.”
“So once they’re enslaved, it’s forever.”
Overton clearly didn’t like the word enslaved, as though there could be any other, but after a hesitation, he said, “Yes. But they don’t see their condition the way you do. They’re content. More than content. They’re happy.”
Jane worked her tongue around her mouth and nodded sagely, as if considering his argument, when in fact she was suppressing the urge to pistol-whip him. “I found your smartphone in the closet. You must have Shenneck’s numbers on speed dial. Give me your password, tell me how I get everything you’ve got.”
Alarmed, he said, “You can’t call him.”
“Sure I can. I know how to use a phone.”
“He’ll know it’s me you got the numbers from.”
“As if that’s your biggest worry.”
“You’re a real piece of shit.”
“You like having two eyes, Billy?”
“You couldn’t torture anybody.”
“That’s what I said before I saw Aspasia. I have a new appreciation for extreme measures. Which eye don’t you need?”
He gave her the password.
She went into the bedroom, worked with the phone, got his address book, scrolled through it. Good enough. She switched the phone off.
In the bathroom again, she said, “Okay. I understand Aspasia. Some sick, twisted people are self-absorbed adolescents all their lives. Other people aren’t fully real to them. Know what I mean? Of course you do. But why this other project of Shenneck’s?”
Overton pretended ignorance. “What other project?”
“What’s the intention of engineering thousands of more suicides every year? Why program people to kill themselves, sometimes to kill others and then themselves? Why did Dr. Shenneck inject his self-assembling control mechanism into my husband and direct him to kill himself?”
17
* * *
PERHAPS A NATURAL TAN would have sustained better, but William Overton’s machine tan seemed to react chemically with his sweat and with the pheromones of terror that his body expressed in abundance. His beach-guy glow acquired a gray patina, the way copper will in time develop one that’s green.
Overton had thought he would be killed because of a sister, and when the sister turned out not to exist, he had thought there might be hope of a reprieve. But now his captor had a husband. And the husband was dead.
“Billy?” she said.
His dread was palpable. He closed his eyes again, as if the sight of himself in his current condition could not be borne. “How do you know about this?”
“The engineered suicides? It doesn’t matter how I know, Billy. All that matters is I know, and I need answers.”
“For God’s sake, who are you?”
She considered his question and decided to answer it. “Let’s talk movies. You want to talk movies?”
“Something’s wrong with you. What’s wrong with you?”
“Just humor me, Billy. It’s always wise to humor me. You’ve probably seen that old movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“Newman and Redford.”
“That’s right. They’re being chased by this posse that just won’t quit. At one point they look back across a vast landscape and they’re still being pursued, and they can’t believe the doggedness of that posse. Butch says to Sundance—or Sundance says to Butch, I don’t remember which—he says, ‘Who are those guys?’ He says it like maybe they’re supernatural or they’re fate personified. See, Billy, all you need to know is—I’m those guys.”
When Overton opened his eyes and shifted uncomfortably in his plastic shackles, he appeared to be resigned, at last, to complete cooperation. “It’s not Shenneck’s intention or mine, or anyone’s, that ninety percent of the population will end up programmed like those girls at Aspasia. Or even fifty percent. That’s not a world anyone would want to live in.”
“So even Shenneck has moral limits? Or is it merely a matter of practicality? Might be impossible to produce the billions of injections that would enslave all but the elite.”
He soldiered on. “There are people in all professions who have greater influence on society than they should.”
“What people would they be?”
“Those who push the culture in the wrong direction.”