Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

"At night the signal is stronger"

"Maybe the word 'signal' is misleading, too. A signal is what the original replicators were designed to transmit. What I receive is coming in on the same carrier wave, and it does convey information, but it's active, not passive. It's trying to do to me what it's done to every other node in the network. In effect, Ty, it's trying to acquire and reprogram my nervous system."

So there was a third entity in the room. Me, Jase—and the Hypotheticals, who were eating him alive.

"Can they do that? Reprogram your nervous system?"

"Not successfully, no. To them I look like one more node in the replicator network. The biotechnology I injected into myself is sensitive to their manipulation, but not in the ways they anticipate. Because they don't perceive me as a biological entity, all they can do is kill me."

"Is there any way to screen this signal or interfere with it?"

"None that I know of. If the Martians had such a technique they neglected to include the information in their archives."

The window in Jason's room faced west. The roseate glow now penetrating the room was the waning sun, obscured by clouds.

"But they're with you now. Talking to you."

"They. It. We need a better pronoun. The entire von Neumann ecology is a single entity. It thinks its own slow thoughts and makes its own plans. But many of its trillions of parts are also autonomous individuals, often competing with each other, quicker to act than the network as a whole and vastly more intelligent than any single human being. The Spin membrane, for instance—"

"The Spin membrane is an individual?"

"In every important sense, yes. Its ultimate goals are derived from the network, but it evaluates events and makes autonomous choices. It's more complex than we ever dreamed, Ty. We all assumed the membrane was either on or off, like a light switch, like binary code. Not true. It has many states. Many purposes. Many degrees of permeability, for instance. We've known for years that it can transit a spacecraft and repel an asteroid. But it has subtler capabilities even than that. That's why we haven't been overwhelmed with solar radiation in the last few days. The membrane is still giving us a certain level of protection."

"I don't know the casualty numbers, Jase, but there must be thousands of people in this city alone who have lost family since the Spin stopped. I would be very reluctant to tell them they're being 'protected.'"

"But they are. In general if not in particular. The Spin membrane isn't God—it can't see the sparrow fall. It can, however, prevent the sparrow from being cooked with lethal ultraviolet light."

"To what end?"

At that he frowned. "I can't quite grasp," he began, "or maybe I can't quite translate—"

There was a knock at the door. Carol entered with an armful of linen. I switched off the recorder and set it aside. Carol's expression was grim.

"Clean sheets?" I asked.

"Restraints," she said curtly. The linen had been cut into strips. "For when the convulsions start."

She nodded at the window, the lengthening daylight.

"Thank you," Jason said gently. "Tyler, if you need a break, this would be the time. But don't be too long."

* * * * *

I looked in on Diane, who was between episodes, sleeping. I thought about the Martian drug I had administered to her (the "basic Fourth," as Jase had called it), semi-intelligent molecules about to do battle with her body's overwhelming load of CVWS bacteria, microscopic battalions mustering to repair and rebuild her, unless her body was too weakened to withstand the strain of the transformation.

I kissed her forehead and said gentle words she probably couldn't hear. Then I left her bedroom and went downstairs and out onto the lawn of the Big House, stealing a moment for myself.

The rain had finally stopped—abruptly, completely—and the air was fresher than it had been all day. The sky was deep blue at the zenith. A few tattered thunderheads cloaked the monstrous sun where it touched the western horizon. Raindrops stood on every blade of grass, tiny amber pearls.

Jason had admitted that he was dying. Now I began to admit it to myself.

As a physician I had seen more of death than most people ever see. I knew how people died. I knew that the familiar story of how we face death—denial, anger, acceptance—was at best a gross generalization. Those emotions might evolve in seconds or might never evolve at all; death could trump them at any instant. For many people, facing death was never an issue; their deaths arrived unannounced, a ruptured aorta or a bad decision at a busy intersection.

But Jase knew he was dying. And I was bewildered that he seemed to have accepted it with such unearthly calm, until I realized that his death was also an ambition fulfilled. He was on the brink of understanding what he had struggled all his life to understand: the meaning of the Spin and humanity's place in it—his place in it, since he had been instrumental in the launch of the replicators.

It was as if he had reached up and touched the stars.

And they had touched him in return. The stars were murdering him. But he was dying in a state of grace.

* * * * *

"We have to hurry. It's almost dark now, isn't it?" Carol had gone off to light candles throughout the house. "Almost," I said.

"And the rain stopped. Or at least, I can't hear it."

"Temperature's dropping, too. Would you like me to open the window?"

"Please. And the audio recorder, you turned it back on?"

"It's running now." I raised the old frame window a few inches and cool air infiltrated the room.

"We were talking about the Hypotheticals…"

"Yes." Silence. "Jase? Are you still with me?"

"I hear the wind. I hear your voice. I hear…"

"Jason?"

"I'm sorry… don't mind me, Ty. I'm easily distracted right now. I—uh!"

His arms and legs jerked against the restraints Carol had tied across the bed. His head arched into the pillow. He was having what looked like an epileptic seizure, although it was brief: over before I could approach the bed. He gasped and took a deep lungful of air. "Sorry, I'm sorry…"

"Don't apologize."

"Can't control it, I'm sorry."

"I know you can't. It's all right, Jase."

"Don't blame them for what's happening to me."

"Blame who—the Hypotheticals?"

He attempted a smile, though he was clearly in pain. "We'll have to find a new name for them, won't we? They're not as hypothetical as they used to be. But don't blame them. They don't know what's happening to me. I'm under their threshold of abstraction."

"I don't know what that means."

He spoke rapidly and eagerly, as if the talk were a welcome distraction from the physical distress. Or another symptom of it. "You and I, Tyler, we're communities of living cells, yes? And if you damaged a sufficient number of my cells I would die, you would have murdered me. But if we shake hands and I lose a few skin cells in the process neither of us even notices the loss. It's invisible. We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies. The same is true of the Hypotheticals. They inhabit a larger universe than we do."

"That makes it all right to kill people?"

"I'm talking about their perception, not their morality. The death of any single human being—my death—might be meaningful to them, if they could see it in the correct context. But they can't."

"They've done this before, though, created other Spin worlds—isn't that one of the things the replicators discovered before the Hypothetical shut them down?"

"Other Spin worlds. Yes. Many. The network of the Hypothetical has grown to encompass most of the habitable zone of the galaxy, and this is what they do when they encounter a planet that hosts a sentient, tool-using species of a certain degree of maturity—they enclose it in a Spin membrane."