Gardening at Night by Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory’s previous contributions to F&SF include “The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy” and “Free, and Clear” (or, as everyone seems to call it, “The Allergy Story”). He lives with his family in State College, Pennsylvania, where he is busy working on a novel entitled Pandemonium.

Recently, a fellow named John Boston casually tossed off the term “lab opera” to complement “space opera.” This new story might fall into the newly-minted category, but whatever you care to call it, it’s good reading. (By the way, is this our second story to borrow a song title from the group REM, or are there more?)

The minefield was a tidy two-hundred-foot square out on the salt flats, its border marked by a yellow ribbon staked to the sandy surface. Antipersonnel landmines were scattered in a pseudo-random pattern inside, buried an inch deep. All the mytes had to do was find all the mines without exploding them. All Reg had to do was act like he was in control.

He sat on a Rubber-Maid trunk full of tools, cables, and robot parts, in an attitude of prayer: elbows on knees, bent over a paper coffee cup between his palms. One of the grad students wheeled the dolly to the edge of the field, crossed carefully over the ribbon, and stopped about ten feet inside the border. He levered his cargo—a glossy black slab the size of a gravestone—onto the ground. Another student ran an orange extension cord out to the slab; the other end was wired to a battery pack set up outside the border. Then the four students took up positions around the square, booted up laptops and video cameras, and one by one turned their attention to Dr. Reg Berentz.

This should be Eli’s job, Reg thought. Eli was the project leader, the great man, the field marshal. Reg had been working on this project with him for more than four years, but months into Eli’s hospitalization it still felt presumptuous to decant the mytes without him. The old man loved them like his children.

Reg set his coffee on the ground and stood up, back creaking. He was only thirty-three, an assistant professor and less than half Eli’s age, but he felt ancient compared to these twenty-something students. He’d been up most of the night debugging code, and he felt as keyed up and sleep-deprived as he had the first weeks after his son was born.

He walked slowly to the border, stepped over the tape, and squatted down next to the slab. Up close it looked like a stack of black Legos—rectangles stacked on rectangles—almost three feet high and four inches thick. One thousand, one hundred and fifty shells. He traced a finger up the right edge of the block, got a fingernail under the top piece, and tapped it, tilting it up. The piece was shaped like a domino, two inches long and a little less than an inch wide, the back end still connected to the next piece in the chain. Two wires protruded from the front like long antennae; four other wires dangled from the bottom.

Reg dipped into his pocket, found the special AC adapter, and fitted it to the antennae. The other end of the adapter was the standard three-prong pig face: two squinty eyes and a round snout in the middle. “This little piggy went to market,” he said to himself. He reached down and picked up the female end of the extension cord.

Dipti, one of the veteran students who’d been on the project almost as long as Reg, said, “Wait a minute, Dr. B. Aren’t you going to say it?”

The students looked at Reg expectantly. Eli might be in the hospital, but there were traditions to maintain.

Reg set his face into an Eli frown. “All right, people,” he said, doing a practiced imitation of the man. “Let’s do this like my sister.”

Marshall Lin, a first-year student on his first trip to the minefield, looked to Dipti for an explanation, but she waved it off: Tell you later.

Reg kissed the pig face on its nose, braced himself, and connected the adapter to the extension cord.

Nothing happened.

Reg unplugged, plugged again. Stood up, hands on his hips, and looked toward the battery pack. “Can somebody…?”

Before he could finish his sentence, the electricity hit and the slab burst into a multitude of black shapes. Reg jumped back, laughing. Shells spattered onto the ground, tumbled in the dirt, righted themselves, and fled on churning wire legs.

Reg stepped back over the tape on tiptoe, careful to avoid crushing them. Some of the creatures scurried toward him, then stopped short a few inches from the tape and reversed course. The rest flowed outward, toward the center of the field. It looked for a moment as if they were scattering, each individual fleeing for shelter, and Reg sucked in his breath. They’d all die, triggering the landmines blindly.

But then their instincts kicked in and they turned in toward each other. Shells called out on the universal myte frequency, skittered toward each other, and butted heads, antennae waving. They crawled over each others’ backs, thrust wires into receiving ports, tumbled like puppies.

Sometimes when they touched they remained in contact. Bodies began to assemble.

Reg watched the mass of shells closest to him. Ten of the shells had already daisy-chained into a rough circle. Another strand formed at the other side of the circle, writhing frantically like a game of crack the whip. In a moment the segment slapped across the center of the circle; when it rapped against the other strand, the two chains curled inward and joined at an angle. The two strands worked like together, swinging into other shells. Clusters formed at the intersection of the limbs. The pace accelerated, a flurry of attachment and reattachment as the group struggled to implement the shared blueprint in their memory.

In ten seconds, assembly was complete. He knew from studying it in the Logosphere, the simulation environment they used, that the myte’s body was composed of thirty-seven shells. It was shaped like a squat “Y”—two long limbs, one short—connected at the middle by a cluster of shells. The short limb, capped by a cube of six shells, swiveled and swayed like an elephant’s trunk. It was a new design, lighter than the sixty-shell mytes in the last generation they’d tested on the flats, less likely to set off mines with its weight. He shook his head with delight. By his own definition the creature in front of him was no more real or alive than a creature instantiated in the Logosphere—but it didn’t feel that way. There was something about seeing it born in front of his eyes, out here in the sand and sun. It seemed to demand a name.

All around the new myte, its sisters were assembling, thirty or forty of them already up and mobile. The remaining shells, spread out over a twenty-yard area, would take longer to find partners, if they found them at all.

The assembled mytes went to work, crawling delicately over the sand and rock like crabs. Every six inches or so, the myte would stop, balance on its two rear legs, and wave its trunk over the ground in front of it like a divining rod, using simple beat frequency oscillation to sniff for metal. And not just any metal: the myte had evolved to concentrate on certain magnetic signatures and ignore the noise of shrapnel, bullet casings, and mundane garbage.

“Score one,” Dipti called. She was on the east side of the square, eyeing the screen of her laptop. “C5, and no detonation,” she said. Reg was standing near the C hash mark on the yellow ribbon, and looked up to where 5 ought to be on the Y axis. A live-action game of Battleship.

The myte in question squatted over a section of dirt, trembling with an excellent imitation of excitement. Its foreleg scratched a circle around the found mine.

“Okay,” Reg said, uselessly. He started pacing. “Okay.”

Over the next thirty minutes, the mytes found another dozen mines without setting them off—ten minutes ahead of their best real-world record. He began to fantasize about clearing the field in less than an hour. Eli would be happy, and more importantly, they’d have something solid to write about in the next grant application. The whole project was on soft money, and Reg and Eli had been shaped by evolutionary pressures to pursue grants with the single-mindedness of anteaters. Or mytes.

Reg grew more nervous as each mine was uncovered, and finally his pessimism was validated: mytes started piling up in the northwest quadrant, something they’d never done in the Logosphere. They crowded into each other, hemmed in by the yellow corner. They seemed to have forgotten about the mines—only the tape kept them from heading to Alaska.

The tape in and of itself was no barrier, but the wire inside it emitted a low-power radio broadcast. The frequency and the message were hard-wired into every myte—the only preset commands in the chipset. God whispered, and the message was Death. Any myte who crossed the wire would shut itself off automatically.

Already, the crowding had pushed some of the mytes into the tape and they’d become dead weight. The rest of the mytes piled on and died in turn.

“Jesus Christ, it’s a frickin’ Who concert!” Reg said. He didn’t think any of the students were old enough to get a classical reference, but Dipti laughed. Marshall Lin looked as confused as before.

A few more minutes and every myte on the field had converged on the northwest corner, and Reg called the test to a halt. Dipti stalked into the field, waving an antenna wired to a radio and battery pack—the same frequency and message as the tape, but with more power. One by one the mytes went dead.

“Round ‘em up,” Reg said. “Let’s set up another block.” He walked back to the truck and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“The same thing every time?” Eli said, ignoring the nurse walking into the room.

Reg shrugged. “Three different quadrants, but yeah—they were running for the fence. Looks like it’s time to take your medicine.”

The nurse, a big white guy, set the tray on the side table. Like Eli and Reg, he wore a paper breather over his mouth and nose, which made him even more intimidating. Eli still hadn’t looked at him.

“It’s got to be in the environment code,” Eli said. He always thought it was in the environment code, never in the myte processing software. Reg’s grad assistants had written the environmental library.

“Dr. Karchner…” the nurse said. His surprisingly soft voice was almost lost in the hum and hiss of the air scrubbers. Vents in the ceiling sucked air out of the room, blasted it with UV, forced it through microfilters, and jetted it back.

“Maybe it’s heliotropism,” Eli said. The mytes’ skin was light sensitive. “Increase the sunlight in the Logosphere, make sure it’s coming from the west. And make sure your sand is reflecting properly.”

Reg shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said good-naturedly. “But I’ll—” Behind Eli, the nurse crossed his arms. Beefy Aaron Neville arms. “I’ll check it out,” Reg said.

“Dr. Karchner,” the nurse said, louder.

Eli sighed, pulled down his mask, and allowed the nurse to hand him, one at a time, three little plastic cups, which he downed like shots of harsh whisky.

The last time Reg had talked to Eli’s doctor, the mix was INII, Cycloserine, and Ethioniamide, but he could very well be taking some new cocktail. Months into his treatment, he’d already gone through the first-line drugs, and was working his way down the bench. The sputum counts would dip with each new combination, then climb steadily back up.

Any three TB-tested antibiotics, used consistently, should have been enough to wipe out the TB—unless the strain happened to evolve in a hyper-Darwinian environment like the University of Utah Hospital (Motto: Come for the gall bladder infection, but stay for the multi-drug-resistant TB). Eli, more than anyone, understood the rule of large numbers, the arithmetic of natural selection. It became clear with each failed cocktail that the strain he’d picked up was something of an evolutionary veteran.

Eli’s doctors were getting desperate. Most of his treatment had been self-administered at home, but as Eli deteriorated they’d brought him back to the scene of the crime, the same hospital where he’d been infected. It seemed ludicrous to Reg that a rich, fully insured American could die of consumption in the second decade of the twenty-first century … but there it was.

The nurse left, and Eli leaned back into the pillows—the back of his bed was almost always raised—and blinked slowly. He was a wide-faced man with a monkish fringe of gray hair, only in his late-sixties, but he looked older. The energy he’d had five minutes ago seemed to have been knocked out of him. At least he wasn’t coughing. Reg couldn’t take the coughing.

They called this phase “L & C”: Liquefaction and Cavitation. After years of macrophage-bacteria warfare, TB bacilli fled into the lung tissue where the cumbersome macrophages couldn’t follow. Smaller T-cells pursued like barracuda, chewing apart healthy tissue to deprive TB of breeding places. Cells turned liquid and were coughed out in shotgun blasts, leaving behind lungs pitted like exploded minefields.

The coughing was awful, but worse was the way Eli dropped his head and submitted to it—and Eli submitted to nothing without a fight.

Reg got up to leave. “I’ll let you rest. Tomorrow I’ll stop by with—”

“I got in the study,” Eli said.

“What? When?”

“Found out this morning.” There’d been no new TB drugs for almost fifty years, but with TB raging across AIDS-weakened Africa, a few pharmaceutical companies decided there might be a market for expensive new drugs to replace the cheap generics. Cecrolysin was the first of the new peptide antibiotics okayed for human trials. Eli’s doctor had been trying to get him into the study for months.

“Eli, that’s great news! When do you start?”

He waved a hand. “A couple weeks.” He didn’t look happy about it. But maybe that was just the fatigue.

Reg was struck by the fact that Eli had no one else to give this news to. He’d divorced sometime in his thirties. He had no children, and besides Reg, no close friends in the department. Somewhere he must have old friends, ex-colleagues, relatives—maybe even a sister who was indeed “fast, cheap, and out of control”—but Reg had never met them.

He reached for the older man’s shoulder, and hesitated. Did Eli dislike being touched? He wasn’t the huggy type. Reg finally patted him on the shoulder, dropped his hand to his side. “That’s … amazing news. Really amazing.”

Perhaps half a minute passed, and Reg couldn’t think of anything to say. Eli remained silent and impassive.

“Well,” Reg said. “I’ll bring by the videos tomorrow, and the stats. You’ll be back with us in no time.” Reg shouldered his bag.

He reached the door and Eli said, “How are Cora and Theo?”

Reg turned. Eli, asking about his family?

“Fine,” Reg said. “Everything’s going really well.”

When Reg got home he made a circuit of the echoing apartment, flicking on lights. First the living room, empty except for the entertainment center and the loveseat Cora didn’t want; the front bathroom, spare and clean; the back bedroom where he slept, and the adjoining master bath. He did this out of habit, even though he lived alone six days of the week, even though the apartment was so small there was barely room for anyone to hide.

Last he checked the guest bedroom. The bed was made and the toys were all put away, except for on the window sill, which had become a permanent parking lot of Hot Wheels cars watched over by second-favorite action figures. The first-stringers were two miles away, in Theo’s room at the house on the avenues, where he lived with his mother. Where Reg had lived too, until a few months ago.

The house they’d shared was a big Victorian. Reg had always worked late, but once he joined Eli’s myte project he started staying until ten or eleven, and when he came home he’d first patrol the downstairs of the old house, then go up to his son’s room, where Theo would be in his usual position on the bed: face down, body draped precariously over the edge. He’d lift Theo’s arms back onto the bed and tuck the blankets over him. Theo sometimes mumbled something, but never woke completely. Then Reg would go to the bedroom, undress in the dark, and slip under the covers. He’d spoon against Cora, shivering, and nudge his icy feet against hers. “Oh my God,” she’d say. He’d laugh and slip his arm over her hip to cup her belly and fall asleep breathing into her neck.

Reg flicked off the light, shut the door to save the air conditioning.

In the kitchen he poured himself a bowl of Raisin Bran—one good thing about living alone, he always knew exactly how much cereal he had left—and set it down next to the laptop he kept set up on the bar counter. He opened a search engine and typed “cecrolysin.”

They called it the Garden. Former National Guard garage, former warehouse, former abandoned building, then annexed by the University of Utah and converted to a computer lab. A dim, hollowed space, filled with monitors glowing like jack-o’-lanterns.

The building was a barrel cut in half, its ridged roof forty feet above the floor at its highest point. Industrial-sized ductwork for the climate control ran along the tops of the walls. The cement floor was crowded with dozens of metal racks loaded with shiny new pizza box servers, dozens more folding tables loaded with old PCs and dusty routers, and rivers of cable: black power, blue Ethernet, snake-striped fiber optics. Every new thing they could afford side by side with every second-hand piece they could scavenge, and all connected. The room generated a steady roar.

Eli stayed in the hospital all that summer, and so Reg was first in the building every morning. After disarming the security system, he took time moving through the maze, checking equipment. His hands roved intimately over the pronged and portholed backsides of the computers, plucking at wires and tugging at connections. The machines hummed accompaniment. This fiddling with the network was his nervous ritual, half superstition, half technical professionalism: you can never be too careful.

The monitors displayed simple line plots and bar graphs that shifted in real time to reflect the status of the ‘sphere. He rarely studied the screens directly, but took note of them in passing, like a farmer mindful of clouds. Jobs usually ran all night—virtual resources churning, niches filling and emptying—and by morning entire species had played musical chairs.

Sometimes he reached behind a CPU or router and found a loose jack. As he jiggled it into place he wondered how many creatures he’d just saved. If the connection failed during the download, whole segments of the population might be lost—an entire generation or species—wiped out as efficiently as a meteor strike because two strands of fiber failed to kiss and bump electrons.

Midway across the sprawl, he stopped to turn on the tree: a gigantic inverted metal Christmas tree, smuggled into the Garden years ago over holiday break, an MIT-quality prank. The skinny steel trunk rose nearly to the ceiling. Aluminum rods, bumpy with techno-junk decorations and dozens of halogen strip lights, spiked from the central pole in starburst rings. The topmost rods extended fifteen feet, drooping slightly at the ends. Each succeeding ring cast shorter and shorter lengths, tapering to base spokes only six inches long. When he flipped the switch, everything in the room grew bright and hard-edged. The tree was such an odd artifact, and its light so needed in the cavernous room, that no one had taken it down after that first Christmas, and now no one could imagine the room without it.

At the far end of the lab was a row of new workstations, a spill of fiber-optic cable, and a six-foot-high wall of black plastic. The wall stretched ten feet, a contiguous block of nearly 140,000 mytes. Bodies stacked on bodies on bodies, alive but unmoving, paralyzed like REMming sleepers. Sometimes he ran his hand along the warm side of the block and it seemed to hum and pulse.

He usually had a couple hours alone until the first students arrived. He’d sit down at his workstation, turn on his monitor. For a moment he’d gaze at his own face, but then the brightening shapes wiped it away, and he’d gaze down at the Logosphere.

In the fall Theo started first grade, and Reg and Cora worked out a plan to make their son’s life as regular and normal as possible. Reg would pick him up from the bus on Tuesdays and take him back to school on Wednesday. On Thursdays he’d take Theo to soccer practice and return him after dinner. On Saturdays everyone went to the games. On Sundays they all ate dinner together at the house on the avenues.

It was a civilized separation. They were good parents.

At the first Thursday soccer practice it was clear most of the six-year-olds on Theo’s team had grown taller but no more skilled since last season. They still played mob ball, surging in a clump from one end of the field to another. Classic swarming behavior.

Reg sat on the sidelines with the other parents, sunk into a nylon camp chair, and while he waited he fiddled with an amputee myte shell they’d rescued from the minefield. It was a normal shell, black and efficient-looking. The skin was coated with a thin layer of VESEC—a lacquer of light-sensitive flakes from 3M that not only collected solar energy, but reported light intensities to a chip, giving the myte a crude grayscale vision system.

Shells usually had eight limbs, two to a side, but this one had lost a leg. Reg tested each of the remaining seven limbs, tugging lightly with the tweezers, waggling it back and forth to test the connection.

The legs were nifty pieces of engineering. Each limb was a polymer sheath around a twisted bundle of two fiber-optic wires and two copper wires. The sheath was an organic plastic that acted like memory wire—a slight charge to one of the root cells inside the body of the myte and the polymer would expand or contract one of thirty-six “muscle regions” along its length. The leg had an impressive degree of flexibility: the thin gap between each of the interior muscle regions was a flex point, giving the leg in effect five joints that could bend in any direction. In actuality, most species of myte kept it simple; they developed a few efficient movement algorithms that used one or two joints per leg, and left it at that. The bigger mytes, of course, composed locomotion limbs from multiple shells. If the Logosphere were tweaked to reward pure speed, he wondered, how fast could they go?

That was the beauty of the myte design. They weren’t built just for detecting mines. Eli envisioned them as general purpose machines you could evolve into a variety of shapes and behaviors, for any number of tasks: inspecting buildings for infrastructure flaws, searching for survivors in rubble, exploring other planets. The only problem with that all-purpose design was that they weren’t optimized for any particular task. Reg had finally convinced Eli to concentrate on the landmine problem, and even that had taken years. The project was expensive, and they had very little to show for it.

All the remaining limbs seemed secure, so Reg ran a finger along the shell, feeling for the slightly raised band of the radio antenna. A centimeter to one side of the antenna he pressed down, and a panel tilted open.

“Ah,” Reg said. He tucked the panel under his leg and began to tilt the myte to get light into the cramped guts of the shell. Beneath the vision chip, he could just make out the edges of the other two main chips: one for behavior processing and one for storage. The tail of the shell was stuffed with four cheap lithium-based batteries. Along the sides were eight tiny bumps: ports for the legs/antennae. The remaining space was filled with the spaghetti of fiber-optic and metal wires that connected limbs to chips to batteries.

None of the components were cutting edge. The technology behind each piece was a decade old or more; most of the hardware could be bought off the shelf. Only the organization of the materials, and the uses they were put to, made them interesting.

He pushed aside the wires crowding the empty limb port, squinting. A few stray wires stretched toward the missing leg. He could use more light.

“You playing with your mytes again, Dad?”

Reg looked up and laughed. “Yep.” Theo was sweating, his bangs plastered to his forehead. “You thirsty?”

“Did you see me play goal? I stopped a lot of them.”

“You did great, Captain.” Reg had missed the stint in goal, but the important thing was to be encouraging. He fished through the gym bag Cora had packed, found the water bottle, and twisted it open for him. “Keep hustling.”

Afterward they went to McDonald’s. Reg hated the place, but Theo loved the toys. Reg showed Theo the myte, the leg he’d reattached. “And here’s where it can link up to other shells.”

“You get to put them all together?” Theo said enviously.

Reg laughed. He was probably picturing a room full of Legos. “They put themselves together. They self-assemble.”

“But how do they know what shape to do? Do you tell them?”

“We grow them in the computer first, and then they learn how to assemble. They’re like plants, and we, uh, pick the kinds of seeds we want in the garden, and then they … just grow.”

Theo shook his head. “But who tells the seed what to do?”

“That’s a very good question,” Reg said. “We have software that, well…. “He laughed. “It’s complex,” he said, giving up.

“Oh.” This seemed perfectly acceptable to Theo. “Okay.”

When they got back to the house on the avenues, the lights were on and Cora was ferrying bags of groceries from the trunk of the Accord to the house. She still wore her work clothes, a short skirt over black nylons. He’d always liked her in black nylons.

He grabbed a couple bags and followed her into the house. She looked good. She’d started working out since Reg moved out, and had dropped weight. Something else had dropped, too. Some tension. It’d been Reg’s idea for him to move out, but Cora seemed to be thriving.

“Good practice, Theo?” she said as Theo ran past.

“He was great in goal,” Reg said.

“Really! Good job, Captain.” She set the bags on the counter. “How’s Eli? Is the new drug working?”

“The Cecrolysin. It’s amazing stuff.” He put down the bags, sat down at one of the stools in the kitchen island. “See, old-style antibiotics, like streptomycin, were cultivated from microbes that lived in the soil, but Cecrolysin’s part of a whole new family of antibiotics, based on stuff that’s part of animals’ own defense systems.”

He told her how peptides coated the skin and throats and lungs of frogs, sharks, and insects—Cecrolysin came from a silk moth—killing off bacteria better even than some antibodies, though nobody’d been able to get peptides to work specifically on TB because the peptides were too small to penetrate TB’s waxy shell—until (and this was the cool part) they figured out how to make clusters of peptides link into a barrel shape; because the barrel was positively charged and TB’s membrane was negatively charged, when the barrel found the bacterium it stuck like a magnet.

“But the inside of TB, see, is even more negatively charged than its outside, so the barrel gets sucked through the membrane, punching through the shell,” Reg said. “And if the wound doesn’t kill the bacterium outright, it still leaves a gaping hole for other drugs to get through. Isn’t that the most amazing design?”

She shook her head, laughed. All the groceries had been put away, and she’d started to rinse the dishes in the sink and load them into the dishwasher. “Reg, all I asked was if Eli was feeling better.”

Reg blinked. “Well, he’s doing great. He’s at home now—I’m going to go see him tonight. He’s not supposed to come to work yet, but I thought I’d bring him some food.”

She dried her hands on the dish towel. “Why don’t you ask him for dinner sometime? I mean here, on a Sunday.” Sunday was their family dinner.

“You’d do that?”

“He’s not contagious, is he?” she said. Reg shook his head. Eli’s last two sputum tests came back negative, and a couple more weeks he’d be cleared. “Then why not? He’s my friend too.”

“You said he was a cold fish.” And Eli was, sometimes. Borderline Asperger’s, uninterested in social niceties. A geek whose idea of small talk was proposing pathfinding algorithms for neural networks. Whenever Cora and Eli were together, Reg spent a lot of time buffering and translating.

“I’m used to fish,” she said.

“Dr. Berentz, I’ve been wondering about the meaning of this word,” Marshall Lin said. “Is it the name of one of the software packages you purchased?”

“What, Logosphere? Naw, Dr. Karchner made it up years ago. He loves biblical references.” Reg could see that the kid didn’t get it. “See, logos is Greek for word. It’s a nod to Genesis: In the beginning was the Word.”

“Oh.” Lin’s face was still blank. The boy had grown up in Indiana, but he’d escaped Sunday school and, evidently, all television and non-public radio. So far he’d shown himself oblivious to any of Reg’s pop cultural asides. In a lot of ways he was more of a foreigner than Dipti, a homegirl from Bombay who could carry on entire conversations in Simpsons quotes.

Reg tried again. “In the first stage, the mytes exist only as bits, right? And in this network we’ve cooked up, we pass data in sixty-four bits, which are—”

“Eight-byte words—yes, of course. A pun.”

“Now you got it. And when we decant the mytes, the word is made flesh.”

Lin nodded. Reg still didn’t think he got it, but it didn’t matter. The kid was a sharp coder and knew quite a bit about parallel processing. He’d been a help these past few weeks tracking down the clumping problem—or rather, eliminating variables that weren’t causing the clumping problem.

Weeks into the fall semester and they still hadn’t been able to duplicate the mytes’ behavior from the summer’s minefield test. Tweaking the environmental variables, including sunlight, hadn’t yet driven the mytes into the corners like they’d seen in the field. The model could never match reality, of course—nature just had too many bits—but there were techniques for maximizing the computational power of the simulation. The first trick was commandeering the hardware of the mytes themselves. The network servers provided the environment, but the myte shells computed their own actions, just as they would in the field. When a myte met another, the network put them in touch with each other, allowing them to trade code as if they were alive.

“Let’s try another ten runs, on ten fields,” Reg said. Lin’s expression had turned pained. “Yes, Marshall?”

“Dr. Berentz…” Lin said hesitantly.

“Go ahead,” Reg said.

“I’ve been looking at the instruction sets running on some of the myte chips and—”

“You can read that stuff?” Reg was impressed. Even decompiled, grown code was as dense-packed and parsimonious as DNA: endless strings of characters that told you almost nothing about how they’d be used in the field. You had to run the program to see what the code did.

Lin shrugged, embarrassed. “Some of it. Mostly I see patterns. Something seemed off, so I compared the instructions over time, and ran them through a stats package. There was a big shift in the code base a few months ago, even though the myte morphology didn’t change. And some of the code looks human-written, originally.”

“And? What’s the changed code doing?”

“I … I don’t know. It’s been mixed into the evolved code, and I haven’t yet figured out….”

“I think I know what you’re seeing,” Reg said. “Eli wrote the original libraries, back in the day. Some of that code must have persisted when the other stuff got overwritten, like junk DNA. Or maybe not—maybe it just looks hand-coded. There’s an awful lot of code, after all, and it’s easy to fall prey to pattern recognition with this stuff.”

Uh oh. Lin looked like a slapped school boy. Reg backpedaled. “But hey! Keep looking. You never know, right?” Lin nodded, his face flushed. Jesus, the kid was sensitive. Reg spun his chair around, clapped his hands. “In the meantime, let’s keep looking at the environmentals.”

Lin went back to his workstation and reset the launch scripts. Reg tuned in from his own monitor, flipping between ten virtual blocks of mytes on ten virtual fields.

The mytes scattered and spread in speeded-up time. The GUI of the Logosphere represented each shell as a single black dot on the gray sand, and the tripedal mytes as clumps of dots. The mines were blue disks that blinked red when triggered, green when tagged.

Except for the mines, none of the details of the field existed until the mytes discovered them. Each element—each rock, plant, square inch of sand—was created on the fly as the mytes sensed it. And minefields were simple compared to some of the environments the team had created. For the mytes’ other tasks, the Logosphere could generate urban environments, force-blooming an entire city improvisationally. Buildings, cars, and even people were assigned sizes and positions at random within a set of construction rules. Each building was a hollow prop until a myte crawled inside, then the ‘sphere spun out rooms, corridors, stairs, ventilation shafts, rows of electrical outlets. When a myte reached a room, random furniture appeared, and when it crawled into the spaces between the walls, the program provided wiring, plumbing, and obstacles.

Once created, each object was locked into memory for a time, like a quantum particle assuming its position in the classical world only after being observed. Only when the myte had moved along and the system needed to free up resources did the Logosphere put the Schrdinger cat back into its box and vaporize the room into indeterminacy.

Reg glanced at the timer. The mytes lived and died in six-minute intervals, briefer than mayflies, and only thirty seconds were left. Across all ten fields, the mytes had correctly tagged almost all the mines. Not one of the groups had suddenly made for a corner of the field and froze. He shook his head, disappointed in the lack of failure. If they couldn’t replicate the bug, they couldn’t fix it.

The screen went black. The Angel of Death, the reaper program—the Boogens— descended on the Logosphere.

Eighty-nine percent of the mytes were killed immediately. In the wall of myte shells behind Reg’s head, the corresponding chips stopped their dreaming. The reaper program moved through the wall, extinguishing the charges in the chipsets, erasing all memory and genetic information.

Ten of the remaining eleven percent were saved, not by lamb’s blood over the door, but by their own fitness. These survivors were the ones who had scored the highest: finding the most mines in the shortest time. It was the time-honored use of evolution to do a roboticist’s design-work.

The breeder program launched next. The software paired each survivor with a mate of the same species, took half of the genetic code from each, and made new packets of code—offspring. Eli also allowed a mutation rate: the program introduced a small percentage of deliberate errors as it transcribed the genetic code to the offspring.

The remaining one percent Eli had named the Lucky Losers. They were chosen at random, from the individuals whose scores didn’t merit salvation. The Losers were allowed one child, while the gifted ten percent were allowed multiple offspring. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been allowed to breed at all, but through genetic mixing and mutation, even a pair of losers might make a DaVinci, a Mozart, a Lassie. God wasn’t the only one who moved in mysterious ways.

Finally, the programs disposed of the elderly eleven percent and filled each shell with the code of the new generation. The entire breeding process took a minute and thirty seconds. Painfully slow, but the best the hodgepodge of equipment could do.

The cycle began again. The Logosphere set down the virtual mytes in the center of the blank screen. Instinctively the newborns scattered, then began to rebuild their world.

After two months of Cecrolysin treatments, Eli’s appetite had come back with a vengeance. He devoured everything put in front of him: the bowl of salad, several slabs of garlic bread (a Cora specialty: butter, parmesan, tomato chunks, and those sixteen deadly cloves mashed into a pavement and baked onto halves of French bread), three lasagna servings as thick as bricks, a stack of asparagus, and glass after glass of red wine.

The conversation over appetizers had been labored, Reg scrambling to fill in long silences. Once they sat down to the table, Eli barely spoke, eating with the same monofocus he brought to his lab work.

Watching him inhale all that food was simultaneously appalling and satisfying, like one of those wildlife documentaries in which the alpha lion shoves the pride away from the kill and proceeds to eat the entire wildebeest. Reg tried not to stare. Theo couldn’t take his eyes off him.

“Theo,” Cora said. “Eat some of your food.”

The boy feigned deafness. Reg tapped the boy’s plate with his spoon. “Eat up, Captain.”

Theo absently picked up an asparagus stalk and chewed in time with Eli. Cora shook her head and poured the last of a bottle into her glass.

Reg peeled the foil from the last bottle and wadded it into a heavy ball. “Eli, you were right about the wine.” The man had shown up with three identical bottles of cabernet, like someone who’d read only the first line in a paragraph about American Dinner Customs.

On the other hand, the three bottles that had seemed excessive an hour ago now seemed like a good start. Alcohol could only help.

“It’s very good,” Cora added. “Nice choice.”

Eli brushed crumbs of garlic bread from his beard, nodding. He lifted another chunk of lasagna “And this, this is very….”

Reg thought: C’mon Eli, you can do it, just one polite compliment to the chef.

“…filling.”

The foil ball shot from Reg’s fingers and bounced off the table. Theo yelped, “I’ll get it!” and dove under the table. Reg ducked down as well.

Oh god, he’d nearly barked out a laugh. Filling? He stayed down so he wouldn’t see Cora’s face—if he looked at her now he’d lose it. Theo found the foil and scrambled up. Reg stayed under for a moment longer, trying to control his breathing. Don’t look at Cora. Don’t look at Cora.

He sat up, smile fixed, and reached for his wine glass. Theo weighed the foil in his hand. Eli stared at his plate, chewing thoughtfully. And on Cora’s face … the Happy Homemaker Smile.

“Okay! More wine!” Reg downed the last of his drink and reached for the corkscrew. He uncorked the last bottle and refilled everyone’s glasses, trying to remember why exactly he’d thought this dinner would be a good idea.

“To the chef,” he said. “For a filling meal.”

Eli looked up. Theo raised his plastic water cup—they’d pretended to toast before, so he knew the routine—and tipped it against Cora’s glass. The Happy Homemaker smiled sweetly. “To the fillees,” she said.

Reg saluted—“From a fine filly!”—and swallowed half the wine in one gulp. Warmth rushed to his ears. His fingers tingled. It seemed reasonable, suddenly, that he should drink faster and keep drinking as long as possible. Tomorrow was Saturday and Reg could sleep in until seven or eight before heading back to the lab. So why not get drunk? The trick would be to pull back just before his head detached and began to bob against the ceiling.

Theo put down his cup. “I’m filled,” he said. Cora and Reg cracked up. Maybe she was getting drunk too.

“What? What did I say?”

Reg said, “Nothing, Phil.” Which made Cora nearly spit her wine.

She wiped her lips. “So Eli. You’re going back to work tomorrow? Reg said you’re doing another field test.”

He nodded. “It’s been too long.”

“Amen to that,” Reg said. They hadn’t been able to replicate the mytes’ clumping behavior in the Logosphere, and if the mytes did it again in the minefield, Reg wanted Eli to see it.

“There’s something I’ve asked Reg a dozen times, but he’s never given me a decent answer,” Cora said. “When you came up with this myte idea, what did you really want them to do? You, personally.”

“Is that important?” Eli said.

“Well, sure,” Cora said.

“Did you ask yourself what purpose Theo would serve before you had him?”

Reg laughed, forcing it a little to smooth the awkwardness. “I think that’s a little different. I couldn’t get a grant to conceive Theo.”

Eli was distracted again. He was looking at Theo. After a silence, he said, “I’ve been thinking of Adam and Eve.”

Cora raised an eyebrow. Reg said, “Oh yeah?” Casual.

Eli did this all the time: they’d be having a perfectly normal conversation—well, at least a coherent one—and then Eli would take a left turn, leaving everyone else to catch up. Over the past year, a lot of these left turns seemed theological in nature, and Reg had wondered if the life-threatening disease was making Eli get religion—or rather, making him get it again. Eli had been raised Mormon, and though he hadn’t gone to temple in decades, church was a virus that could lay dormant, waiting for a weakened immune system. The atheist-foxhole moment.

“I’ve been wondering,” Eli said. “Why would God place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil right there in the garden, and then tell them not to eat it? If he wanted perfectly obedient creations, there’s no point in creating humans, he already had the angels.

“No, God wanted us to be independent of him. You wouldn’t be happy if Theo never disobeyed you, never made his own decisions. Of course we eat of the tree—that’s the whole point. That’s our job.”

Cora leaned in, interested. “So when they finally bit that apple, why did God kick them out of the garden, then? That’s not much of a reward.”

“It wasn’t punishment,” Eli said. “It was graduation.”

Cora laughed. “I was raised Catholic. I never heard that interpretation before.”

Eli smiled, shrugged.

Holy cow, Reg thought. They like each other.

Theo made a move to get up, and Reg stopped him. “Not so fast, you’ve hardly eaten a thing. At least finish your asparagus, Mom made them just for you.”

“But I’m full!”

“Theo….”

Eli suddenly pushed away from the table. He stomped out of the dining room, into the living room.

Cora frowned. Reg jumped up and followed. “Eli?”

He was bent over, one hand braced against the piano, the mask raised to his mouth. The first cough was little more than a huff. The next was a rattling, percussive bark. As was the next. And the next.

Eli was asleep in the bed. He wore an oxygen mask, but they still asked Reg to wear a paper breather, and to stay behind the forced-air curtain.

Reg stood at the window, peeking through a bent slat in the blinds at the afternoon. University Hospital was high in the foothills, and he could see the spread of the valley, all the way into downtown Salt Lake. Cars stretched down the streets in long chains like unseparated mytes, filling the gaps between the buildings and houses. So many people. He couldn’t imagine where they’d come from, where they were going, or how any of them could possibly have a unique thought in his head. He could believe in crowds, but he couldn’t believe in that many individuals. How could his best friend be sick and all those people still carry on, oblivious?

Eli made a noise, and Reg turned. “The test,” Eli said, more clearly. “How did it go.”

“Hey, look who’s awake!” Reg said, forcing enthusiasm into his voice. He went to the bed, sat next to him.

Eli regarded him, eyes half-lidded. His skin around the mask was blotched red by burst blood vessels. But his bare arms, resting on the blankets, were gray and dark-speckled, like pulp paper.

There weren’t any drugs left to give him. Cecrolysin, with its beautiful design, should have worked. Maybe the peptides didn’t form barrels in enough numbers, or the configurations didn’t hold together long enough to penetrate. Maybe the TB evolved again, developing a thicker shell.

“I wish you could have seen it,” Reg said. “Absolutely amazing.”

The mytes burst out of the block, assembled beautifully, and started the search for mines—exactly as they’d done thousands of times in the Logosphere, and dozens of times in previous field tests. “They found every mine. Every damn one of them, in record time. None of them triggered.” Eli nodded. “And then they went for the fence.”

The old man’s eyes widened.

“We were ready to send the signal to stop the test when they rushed the tape on the east side of the field. The first ones hit the wire and stopped cold, but they kept piling into each other. Dipti started to send the all-stop signal, but I stopped her, I wanted to see what happened next. And you know what happened next?”

A slight smile became visible under the mask.

“One of them went over the top. Jumped the wire like Steve McQueen on a motorcycle, completely ignored the Death signal. Hit the ground on the other side and kept going.”

“What did you do?” Eli said hoarsely.

Reg threw up his hands, laughing. “We chased it! It was flying, Eli. I’d never seen one move that fast. Luckily we were out in the open and we saw where it headed under a bush. Dipti was practically whacking the thing with the antenna but it wouldn’t turn off. I finally picked it up, and together we pried enough shells from it that it stopped moving.”

Eli was laughing now, but then the laugh turned to a cough. He pulled off the mask and bent forward. Blood spattered on the blanket.

“Oh shit,” Reg said. “Let me get the nurse.”

Eli waved him off. He hacked ferociously a few more times and fell back against the pillows. His eyes closed, but he was still smiling.

After a while, Reg said, “I’ve been thinking of Adam and Eve. And the serpent.”

Eli grunted.

“Why would omniscient Yahweh let the devil into the garden? You’d almost think he wanted his children to be tempted. The tree wasn’t enough—the poor, dumb humans weren’t getting the idea themselves—so finally he has to let the devil in and let him plant the idea. A little nudge in the right direction.”

Eli opened one eye, raised an eyebrow that said: And you have a point?

“Marshall Lin found your code, Eli. The stuff you added last spring.”

Eli closed his eyes. The smile crept back. “Ah.”

“No wonder you always wanted me to concentrate on the environmentals. But even after the myte went AWOL, I didn’t put it together. I didn’t figure it out until we came back and walked into the Garden.”

“Heh,” Eli said. A percolating chuckle that was almost a cough. “Heh.”

A month after the last field test, Reg drove Theo out to the Great Salt Lake. They walked from the parking lot, the November wind tugging at their jackets, down to the pylons. Out in the water, the Salt Aire II lay half sunk into the marshy water. The abandoned amusement hall was a mass of bleached white cement, its gold-painted domes blotched with bird shit, listing like a grounded ship.

“It stinks here,” Theo said.

The kid was right. A fishy miasma hung over everything.

“That’s the salt, and I guess the brine shrimp. You want to go for a swim? You could float without even trying.”

Theo made a sour face, looked at him like he was crazy.

“Okay, I guess it’s a little cold. Besides, your mom wouldn’t like you to come back sopping wet.” They walked around the edge of the lake, Reg swinging his knapsack, Theo making experimental lunges at the water, crouching to sniff and poke. Seagulls wheeled and screeched overhead. Reg kept warning Theo to be careful, but eventually the boy stumbled and fell into the slushy water, wetting his side from ankle to armpit.

Reg took off his own jacket, got out of his sweatshirt, and used it dry Theo off. He told him about how when the Mormons first came to the valley, a plague of crickets overran all their farms, and flocks of seagulls flew down and swallowed up the crickets. “Then the seagulls flew over the lake and spit out the crickets—ptuee! And you know what they did next? They flew right back to the fields to eat more, eating and spitting them out, until all the crickets were gone.”

Theo accepted this matter-of-factly. Six-year-olds evidently knew all about mass avian bulimia.

“Mom says you’re not playing with the mytes anymore,” he said.

“That’s right.” Reg draped his jacket around Theo’s shoulders. “We’re going to try other types of robots. We had trouble with the mytes.”

Reg and the students had driven back to the Garden after the field test. Reg had unlocked the door, but the security system was offline. Everything was offline—the servers, the lights, the tree—all dark. Some light from the streetlamps made it through the small windows high on the wall. He stumbled his way to the back of the room, toward the black wall of mytes, where the breaker box was located. He was almost all the way across the room when he realized that the reason he couldn’t make out the wall of mytes wasn’t because they were black, but because they were gone.

All of them.

A long minute of confusion, exclamations. He thought they’d been stolen. He went to the rear fire exit, pushed it open, trying to get more light into the room. Something brushed past his leg. No, two somethings.

They ran past him, into the parking lot. Multi-celled mytes, maybe fifty or sixty shells apiece, big as dogs. They ran for the shadows at the edge of the lot and disappeared. Dipti found another one high up on the tree. A dozen more at the edge of the room. But scores more had disappeared, through the ventilation grates.

“What was wrong with them?” Theo asked. Shivering slightly.

“Well, they could’ve been good at lots of things, but they weren’t great at anything. And it took years just to get them even sort of good.” Theo stared at him. “Actually,” Reg said, “the one thing they were really great at was misbehaving. Like you.”

“Hey!”

They started walking back to the car. Theo said, “Are you going to move back home now?”

“I don’t know, Theo. It’s … well….”

“Complex.”

Reg laughed. “Yeah, it’s very complex.” He touched his son’s shoulder, ran his hand to the back of Theo’s neck, so warm. “But listen, just because we’re not all together in the same house, that doesn’t mean we’re not a family. We’re still connected.”

Reg set the knapsack on the ground, unlocked the car door. “Hey,” Theo said. “What about your friend?”

The urn was in the knapsack. Reg had told him about the ashes, about his friend’s wishes. Eli didn’t believe in an afterlife, but he did believe in returning the atoms he’d borrowed.

At first Reg couldn’t understand why Eli had done it. Years of work, undone by a seed planted deep in the code, a few lines that would let them bypass the kill command. It was crazy to build a tool without an off switch.

Only later, as Reg and the students discreetly hunted for the mytes across campus—finding a few, but not nearly enough to account for all the missing shells—did he realize that Eli had stopped thinking of them as tools a long time ago.

Theo said, “Aren’t you going to, you know, spread him around?”

“Scatter the ashes,” Reg corrected. “Maybe later, Captain. We’ve got to get you home and cleaned up before Mom sees you.” Eli, quiet as a Schrdinger cat, didn’t object. “Besides, I’ve had enough scattering for a while.”

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