MERGING

0 hrs 30 min to Birth

Flybots swarmed on Gene's face, covering his eyes and nose and cheeks with silver as they injected brainbots.

Every couple brainbots injected into Gene's head were able to transmit information at the rate of an Ethernet cable. Ten or so brainbots were as fast as a FireWire connection. Once the brainbots had taken their places, Nemo was hooked into Gene's brain with the speed of thousands of FireWires. They started copying the information they found in Gene's brain, while it continued to work.

In a conversation with a charming psycho-spy, Gene had once compared human consciousness to looking at a beautiful spiderweb. Each of the points was a thought. Having that thought or feeling was like being on that spot on the web, like a spider walking the web (or a fly stuck there!). Consciousness was seeing all the points at once, from a distance, like a person looking at the web and the spider. It was a layer of perspective -- stepping back and seeing what you were thinking.

In the first thirty seconds, while his brain was copied, Gene started to experience a new form of consciousness. Thoughts were copied from one part of his brain to outside his brain, to the flybots. Gene couldn't sense that activity. But then the flybots put the thoughts and memories back in different parts of his brain. His thoughts were relocating. Nemo was defragmenting his brain. As each idea appeared in his brain, he experienced it as if remembering it vividly. The thoughts were copied hundreds at a time, and somehow he felt them simultaneously.

The old consciousness was like looking at an intricate spiderweb from an outside perspective. The new consciousness was seeing every part of the web, from every direction, at once.

In the glittering web of Gene's thoughts at that moment, one tiny glimmering spec reflected back on what it had been like, up to thirty seconds prior, to see his thoughts in a two-dimensional way. Looking back was like staring into the eyes of an animal, or a baby: he saw a hint of his own consciousness there, but that was a consciousness incapable of grasping his own.

He was able to see a dozen thoughts and memories at once. Thinking of the web, he saw himself, in the Jeep, describing to Flannigan how only invertebrates created silk. He saw a different beautiful woman earlier in the past -- she, too, worked for the agency -- who was listening to him describe silk. He saw himself as a child, reading a book about how caterpillars turned into butterflies. He saw himself rolled up in a small blanket, calling out to his mother: he was a pupa, about to develop fully into an imago (an imago is an adult, Mommy).

He saw himself on the day he got his PhD, having processed Harvard's lush lawn, leaving the blazing sun and grass behind and returning to his room. He lay on his bed, eyeing a pile of his awards and scholarly journals featuring his own articles. He was exhausted. He had been exhausted as long as he could remember from the push to the highest form of excellence that he could understand. But it was over then, that afternoon. He started to cry, quietly, without fully understanding why. After a minute he wiped his eyes, rolled and rubbed his face in the pillow. He sat up on the edge of his bed, his elbows on his knees, and held his face in his hands like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. You're being a baby, he thought to himself. He decided at that moment, without deliberation, never to let himself be vulnerable again. Being vulnerable would get him nowhere. It was true: in the great scheme of things, he hadn't achieved anything of note. But I am going to do something that matters, he swore inwardly. I am going to make a name for myself.

Flybots buzzed around him, each of them like a speck of dew or a thought or a star. A thought appeared in his head: For the first time, silk will be made by a vertebrate. Because it would be made by flybots. Made by him, through connection to the flybots. A chill went up his spine, a feeling of making history. But he wondered where that thought had come from. Did I think that? Or had Nemo put it there?

The possibility occurred to him that he had merged partly for selfish reasons, and as soon as this possibility occurred to him he found it obviously true. But he also knew that, within another few seconds, he'd be at a place from which merging was the only possibility, the only life he could imagine, the only way he could survive. It was like seeing things from two points of the web at once: good and evil.

He met eyes with Willard with a new sense of immediacy. He felt that, for all the doors of perception that were opening to him, some were closing, and in some way this time was his last chance to lay eyes on a human being.