Dylan continued: ‘Proctor says the protons and electrons in one atom could be used as positive and negative switches, with millions of circuits actually etched onto the neutrons, so a single atom in a nanomachine could be the powerful computer that controls it.’
‘Personally,’ Jilly said, ‘I’d rush out to Costco the moment I heard they were selling a reasonably priced teeny-tiny microwave oven that could double as a bellybutton ornament.’
Sitting here with her arms crossed and her hands in her armpits, she could barely make herself listen to Dylan because she knew where all this information was leading, and where it was leading scared the sweat out of her. She felt her armpits growing damp.
‘You’re scared,’ he said.
‘I’m all right.’
‘You’re not all right.’
‘Yeah. What am I thinking? Who am I to know whether I’m all right or not all right? You’re the expert on me, huh?’
‘When you’re scared, your wisecracks have a desperate quality.’
‘If you’ll search your memory,’ she said, ‘you’ll discover that I didn’t appreciate your amateur psychoanalysis in the past.’
‘Because it was on target. Listen, you’re scared, I’m scared, Shep is scared, we’re all scared, and that’s okay. We—’
‘Shep is hungry,’ said Shepherd.
They had missed breakfast. The lunch hour was drawing near.
‘We’ll get lunch soon,’ Dylan promised his brother.
‘Cheez-Its,’ Shep said without looking up from his open palms.
‘We’ll get something better than Cheez-Its, buddy.’
‘Shep likes Cheez-Its.’
‘I know you do, buddy.’ To Jilly, Dylan said, ‘They’re a nice square snack.’
‘What would he do if you gave him those little cheese-cracker fish – what’re they called, Goldfish?’ she wondered.
‘Shep hates Goldfish,’ the kid said at once. ‘They’re shapey. They’re all round and shapey. Goldfish suck. They’re too shapey. They’re disgusting. Goldfish stink. They suck, suck, suck.’
‘You’ve hit on a sore point,’ Dylan told Jilly.
‘No Goldfish,’ she promised Shep.
‘Goldfish suck.’
‘You’re absolutely right, sweetie. They’re totally too shapey,’ Jilly said.
‘Disgusting.’
‘Yes, sweetie, totally disgusting.’
‘Cheez-Its,’ Shep insisted.
Jilly would have spent the rest of the day talking about the shapes of snack foods if that would have prevented Dylan from telling her more than she could bear to know about what those nanomachines might be doing inside her body right this very minute, but before she could mention Wheat Thins, he returned to the dreaded subject.
‘In that interview,’ Dylan said, ‘Proctor even claims that one day millions of psychotropic nanomachines—’
Jilly winced. ‘Psychotropic.’
‘—might be injected into the human body—’
‘Injected. Here we go.’
‘—travel with the blood supply to the brain—’
She shuddered. ‘Machines in the brain.’
‘—and colonize the brain stem, cerebellum, and cerebrum.’
‘Colonize the brain.’
‘Disgusting,’ Shep said, though he was most likely still talking about Goldfish.
Dylan said, ‘Proctor envisions a forced evolution of the brain conducted by nanomachines and nanocomputers.’
‘Why didn’t somebody kill the son of a bitch years ago?’
‘He says these nanomachines could be programmed to analyze the structure of the brain at a cellular level, firsthand, and find ways to improve the design.’
‘I guess I failed to vote when Lincoln Proctor was elected to be the new god.’
Taking her hands out of her armpits, Jilly opened her fists and looked at her palms. She was glad that she didn’t know how to read them.
Dylan said, ‘These colonies of nanomachines might be able to create new connections between various lobes of the brain, new neural pathways—’
She resisted the impulse to put her hands to her head, for fear that she would feel some faint strange vibration through her skull, evidence of a horde of nanomachines busily changing her from within.
‘—better synapses. Synapses are the points of contact between neurons in a neural pathway inside the brain, and apparently they become fatigued when we think or just when we stay awake too long. When they’re fatigued they slow down our thought processes.’
Dead serious, not reaching for a wisecrack, she said, ‘I could use a little synapse fatigue right now. My thoughts are spinning way too fast.’
‘There’s more in the interview,’ Dylan said, pointing again at the laptop screen. ‘I skimmed some of it, and there was a lot that I just didn’t understand, a lot of fumfuddle about something called the precentral gyrus, and the postcentral gyrus, Purkinje cells… on and on with the arcane words. But I understood enough to realize what a hole we’re in.’