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They remain like that for several moments, Wendy's small hand steady despite the revolver's weight, Alan staring into its short dark barrel. His eyes flicker between it and her face as he tries to listen. "My husband Richard was a neurologist who wanted to improve human intelligence by improving memory." Words fall out of her in a rush. "Three years ago he got sidetracked by the nature of dreams, which current science thinks are byproducts of the mind organizing each day's experiences. He thought maybe... He wanted to control the dream state and tried bio-feedback, drugs. Finally he created a universal program that would redirect the mind in organizing short-term memory more efficiently." She pauses long enough that Alan considers running. But the mess will slow him, make him a target. Words spill from her in a rush again: "One of his test subjects went insane in her isolation tank and the other strangled on a contact wire. Intentionally. Two days later Richard jumped off a roof, I thought because of the disgrace, because they were going to ban him from..." Wendy rocks and rocks on her cluttered sofa, covering both ears as if trying to drown out her own voice. "Two months ago," she says, "when I had to move to this apartment, I found some of his programs in our PC. Artificial intelligence, maybe. Certainly it's self-replicating. Changing. I first noticed it when it piggybacked on an e-mail to my friends. It was trying to get out." She stops rocking and glances up from the floor. "We were all very lucky. The netserver software scrambled it into meaningless gibberish." Alan tries to say something, anything, but his eyes are still locked on the revolver. "It did get into me. And it's gestating." Wendy hugs herself with her free hand. Her voice is almost a whine. "It's using everything I know to evolve. Controlling me. I wipe magnets over the harddrive but catch myself rewriting it from memory. I burn stacks of notes and then find the most recent version still in my desk. The photos... Fortunately I'm not very educated. It hasn't benefited much. But it might not need to change a lot more to find a form that's easily communicable. If it does... if it reaches the world..." Her voice is genuinely sad. "I can't let it have whatever it might learn from y--" Alan leaps across the coffee table, banging his knee into a stack of paper, slipping, clawing. Wendy fires. She misses, barely, the muzzleflash scorching his cheek and deafening his left ear. He slaps her hand aside as the revolver goes off again. This bullet scratches his right shoulder. The third punches a wet hole through her cheek as they struggle. Alan barely remembers to grab the pictures and the deposit envelope before he escapes. Home again, he composes for nineteen hours, burning, surging, stopping only to suck down half a gallon of water. The slapdash whirling collage inside him easily overpowers the aches of his damaged ear and bleeding shoulder -- and eagerness mutes his fear. This is like nothing he's ever known: orgasm, pot dreams, the normal thrill of creation. This is the unfettered confidence of a diving eagle. He catches himself in the moment between finishing his long song and posting it on the Net, like a man at the edge of a building. Breathing hard, blinking, he recalls Wendy's wretched face, her dry voice. Can he stop himself? It's too beautiful. He presses 'Enter.' Adrenaline courses through his limbs, but fades as nothing happens... Then e-mail returns to him from all over the world, terribly fast. He double-clicks on several and his song pours from the computer speakers, altered, added to -- accompanied by something more. A fearsome storm explodes within Alan: other minds, other perspectives and personal histories, different languages, new bodies, a prism of humanity. Desire, energy, industriousness. Madness and perversion. The darkness is just as strong as the light. His physiology allows only a few instants of roaring input before he collapses onto the floor. Seventy-one individuals across the planet died of cardiac arrest or cerebral events. Thirty-nine more smothered, burned or were electrocuted as they lay unconscious. Another one hundred and four committed suicide in the minutes immediately following, unable to face what been reflected back at them. They all live on inside us now. Millions of us experienced the merging. Millions of us everywhere were changed. The first crude version of the meme had been too much for isolated people to withstand, like Richard Dannenbring's test subjects and, later, his wife -- yet it transformed into something truly majestic as it echoed back and forth through a sea of minds. It became an actual "collective unconscious," if only for several seconds. Here and there a few delicate souls were deeply wounded, yet many more agitated ones were calmed. Together we found balance, empathy, the essence of peace. But we didn't find as much of ourselves as we'd like. The wars in west Africa and eastern Europe continue, as do the politically-induced famines in central Africa and North Korea. Not enough minds were awakened in those places. Yet we know that our immortal union will be repeated and spread further in years to come as we study and recreate the phenomenon. As instigator of the so-called Explosion, Alan Lilly finally discovered the fame and small fortune that he had long sought, but neither seem important to him now in comparison to our love of the human song. Discuss this story in the RevolutionSF Fiction Forum. |
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