No longer able to resist pressing her fingertips to her temples, Jilly felt no vibrations. Nevertheless, she said, ‘God, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Millions of tiny nanomachines and nanocomputers salted through your head, squirming around in there like so many bees, busy ants, making changes… It’s not tolerable, is it?’
Dylan’s face had gone gray enough to suggest that if his usual optimism had not burned out, at least it had for the moment grown as dim as banked coals. ‘It’s got to be tolerable. We don’t have any choice but to think about it. Unless we take the Shep option. But then who would cut our food into squares and rectangles?’
Indeed, Jilly couldn’t decide whether talking about this machine infection or not talking about it would lead more surely and quickly to full-blown panic. She felt a dark winged terror perched within her, its feathers fluttering agitatedly, and she knew that if she didn’t control it, didn’t keep it firmly on its perch, if she allowed it to take flight, she might never bring it to roost again; and she knew that once it had flown long enough, frantically battering its pinions against the walls of every chamber in the mansion of her mind, her sanity would take flight with it.
She said, ‘It’s like being told you’ve got mad cow disease or brain parasites.’
‘Except it’s intended to be a boon to humanity.’
‘Boon, huh? I’ll bet somewhere in that interview, the nutcase used the term master race or super race, or something like it.’
‘Wait’ll you hear. From the day Proctor first conceived of using nanotechnology for the forced evolution of the brain, he knew exactly what the people who underwent it should be called. Proctorians.’
A thunderous bolt of anger was the ideal thing to distract Jilly from her terror and to keep it caged. ‘What an egotistical, self-satisfied freak!’
‘That’s one apt description,’ Dylan agreed.
Still apparently brooding about the superiority of square-cut snack crackers to the sucky-shapey Goldfish, Shep said, ‘Cheez-Its.’
‘Last night,’ Dylan said, ‘Proctor told me that if he weren’t such a coward, he would have injected himself.’
‘If he hadn’t had the bad grace to get himself blown up,’ Jilly declared, ‘I’d inject the freak right now, get me an even bigger damn syringe than his, pump all those nanomachines straight into his brain through his ass.’
Dylan smiled a gray smile. ‘You are an angry person.’
‘Yeah. It feels good.’
‘Cheez-Its.’
‘Proctor told me he wasn’t a fit role model for anyone,’ Dylan said, ‘that he had too much pride to be contrite. Kept rambling on about his character flaws.’
‘What – that’s supposed to make me go all gooey with compassion?’
‘I’m just remembering what he said.’
Motivated partly by the twitchy feeling that she got from thinking about all those nanomachines roaming in her gray matter and partly by a sense of righteous outrage, Jilly became too agitated to sit still any longer. Supercharged with nervous energy, she wanted to go for a long run or perform vigorous calisthenics – or preferably, ideally, find someone whose ass needed kicking and then kick it until her foot ached, until she couldn’t lift her leg anymore.
Jilly shot to her feet with such agitation that she startled Dylan into bolting off his chair, as well.
Between them, Shep stood, moving faster than Shep usually moved. He said, ‘Cheez-Its,’ raised his right hand, pinched a scrap of nothing between thumb and forefinger, tweaked, and folded all three of them out of the motel room.
29
Being an attractive, personable, and frequently amusing woman with no halitosis problem, Jillian Jackson had often been taken to lunch by young men who appreciated her fine qualities, but she had never before been folded to lunch.
She didn’t actually witness herself folding, didn’t see herself become the equivalent of a Playboy Playmate sans staples, nor did she feel any discomfort. The cheesy motel room and furnishings instantly rumpled into bizarrely juxtaposed fragments and then doubled-pleated-creased-crimped-ruckled-twilled-tucked away from her. Beveled shards of another place folded toward her, appearing somehow to pass through the receding motel room, the departure point shadowy and lamplit but the destination full of sunshine, so that for a moment she seemed to be inside a gigantic kaleidoscope, her world but a jumble of colorful mosaic fragments in the process of shifting from a dark pattern to a brighter one.