Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

Squinting at the pinch point where Shep still squeezed something between thumb and forefinger, Jilly thought she saw the air dimple like a puckered film of thin plastic wrap.

Then his pale fingers parted, releasing whatever extraordinary fabric he had held.

Even viewed from the side, his green eyes appeared to cloud, and in place of the ocean's depth that had been revealed, there came now a shallowness, and in place of enchantment… a melancholy.

'Good,' Dylan said with relief. 'Thank you, Shep. That was just fine. That was good.'

Jilly let go of Shep's hand, and he lowered it to his side. He lowered his head, too, staring at the floor, slumping his shoulders, as though, for an instant liberated, he had once more accepted the weight of his autism.

Dylan moved the second chair from the table near the window, and the three of them sat in a semicircle at the desk, in front of the laptop, with Shepherd safely in the middle, where he could be more closely watched.

The kid sat with his chin against his chest. His hands lay in his lap, turned up. He appeared to be reading his palms: the heart line, head line, lifeline – and the many meaningful lines radiating out of the web between thumb and forefinger, that area known as the anatomical snuffbox.

Jilly's mother read palms – not for money, but for hope. Mom was never interested solely in the heart line, head line, and lifelines, but equally in the anatomical snuffbox, the interdigital pads, the heel of the hand, the thenar eminence, and the hypothenar.

Arms crossed on her chest, Jilly sat with her hands fisted in her armpits. She didn't like having her palms read.

Reading palms, reading tea leaves, interpreting Tarot cards, casting horoscopes – Jilly wanted nothing to do with any of that. She would never concede control of her future to fate, not for a minute. If fate wanted control of her, fate would have to club her senseless and take control.

'Nanomachine,' Jilly said, reminding Dylan where they had been interrupted. 'Scouring plaque off artery walls, searching out tiny groups of cancer cells.'

He stared worriedly at Shepherd, then nodded and finally met Jilly's eyes. 'You get the idea. In the interview there on the laptop, Proctor talks a lot about nanomachines that'll also be nanocomputers with enough memory to be programmed for some pretty sophisticated tasks.'

In spite of the fact that all three of them appeared to be living proof that Lincoln Proctor wasn't a fool, Jilly found this chatter of technological marvels almost as difficult to believe as Shepherd's power to fold. Or maybe she simply didn't want to believe it because the implications were so nightmarish.

She said, 'Isn't this ridiculous? I mean, how much memory can you squeeze into a computer smaller than a grain of sand?'

'In fact, smaller than a mote of dust. The way Proctor tells it, with a little background: The first silicon microchips were the size of a fingernail and had a million circuits. The smallest circuit on the chip was one hundredth as wide as a human hair.'

'All I really want to know is how to make audiences laugh until they puke,' she lamented.

'Then there were breakthroughs in… X-ray lithography, I think he called it.'

'Call it gobbledegook or fumfuddle if you want. It'll mean as much to me.'

'Anyway, some fumfuddle breakthrough made it possible to print one billion circuits on a chip, with features one thousandth the width of a human hair. Then two billion. And this was years ago.'

'Yeah, but while all these hotshot scientists were making their breakthroughs, I memorized one hundred and eighteen jokes about big butts. Let's see who gets more laughs at a party.'

The idea of nanomachines and nanocomputers swarming through her blood creeped her out no less than the idea of an extraterrestrial bug gestating in her chest a la Aliens .

'By shrinking dimensions,' Dylan explained, 'chip designers gain computer speed, function, and capacity. Proctor talked about multi-atom nanomachines driven by nanocomputers made from a single atom .'

'Computers no bigger than a single atom, huh? Listen, what the world really needs is a good portable washing machine the size of a radish.'

To Jilly, these minuscule, biologically interactive machines began to seem like fate in a syringe. Fate didn't need to sneak up on her with a club; it was already inside her and busily at work, courtesy of Lincoln Proctor.

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.'