Postsingular | Page 3

bottle into its hole. "Battle stations, Carlos."
The boys backed down below the crest and lay side by side staring at Jeff 's little screen. The last ten seconds ticked off. And nothing happened.
"Shit," said Carlos, raising his head to peer over the dune's crest. "Do you think the dog--"
The blast was something Jeff felt more than heard. A hideous pressure on his ears. Shrapnel whizzed overhead; he could feel the violent rippling of the air. Carlos was lying face down, very still. Blood stained the sand, outlining Carlos's head. For a second Jeff could think he was only seeing a shadow. But no.
Not sure if he should roll his friend over, Jeff looked distractedly at the screen of his cell phone. How strange. The chaotic explosion must have sent a jet of nanomachines into Carlos's face, for Jeff could see a ghostly form of his friend's features on the little screen, a stippling of red dots. Carlos looked all right except for his--eye?
Jeff could hear sirens, still very far. Carlos didn't seem to be breathing. Jeff went ahead and rolled Carlos over so he could give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Maybe the shock wave had knocked his breath out. Maybe that was all. Maybe everything was still retrievable. But no, the five-inch metal tube that served as launch lug had speared through Carlos's right eye. Stuff was oozing from the barely protruding tip. Carlos had definitely stopped breathing.
Jeff leaned over his beloved friend, pressing his mouth to Carlos's blood-foamed lips, trying to breathe in life. He was still at it when his mother and sisters found him. The medics had to sedate him to make him stop.
CHAPTER 2
Nant Day
Little Chu was Nektar Lundquist's joy, and her sorrow. The six-year-old boy was winsome, with a chestnut cap of shiny brown hair, long dark eyelashes, and a tidy mouth. Chu allowed Nektar and her husband to cuddle him, he'd smile now and then, and he understood what they said--if it suited his moods. But he wouldn't talk.
The doctors had pinpointed the problem as an empathy deficit, a type of autism resulting from flawed connections among the so-called mirror neurons in Chu's cingulate cortex. This wetware flaw prevented Chu from being able to see other people as having minds and emotions separate from his own.
"I wonder if Chu thinks we're cartoons," said Nektar's husband, Ond Lutter, an angular man with thinning blond hair. "Just here to entertain him. Why talk to the screen?" Ond was an engineer working for Nantel, Inc., of San Francisco. Among strangers he could seem kind of autistic himself. But he was warm and friendly within the circle of his friends and immediate family. He and Nektar were walking to the car after another visit to the doctor, big Ond holding little Chu's hand.
"Maybe Chu feels like we're all one," said Nektar. She was a self-possessed woman, tall and erect, glamorous with high cheekbones, full lips, and clear, thoughtful eyes. "Maybe Chu imagines that we automatically know what he's thinking." She reached back to adjust her heavy blond ponytail. She'd been dying her hair since she was twelve.
"How about it, Chu?" said Ond, lifting up the boy and giving him a kiss. "Is Mommy the same as you? Or is she a machine?"
"Ma chine ma chine ma chine," said Chu, probably not meaning anything by it. He often parroted phrases he heard, sometimes chanting a single word for a whole day.
"What about the experimental treatment the doctor mentioned?" said Nektar, looking down at her son, a little frown in her smooth brow. "The nants," she continued. "Why wouldn't you let me tell the doctor that you work for Nantel, Ond? I think you bruised my shin." The doctor had suggested that a swarm of properly programmed nants might eventually be injected into Chu to find their way to his brain and coax the neurons into growing the missing connections.
Ond's oddball boss, Jeff Luty--annoyingly a bit younger than Ond--had built his company, Nantel, into a major player in just five years. Luty had done three years on scholarship at Stanford, two years as a nanotech engineer at an old-school chip company, and had then blossomed forth on his own, patenting a marvelously ingenious design for growing biochip microprocessors in vats. The fabulously profitable and effective biochips were Nantel's flagship product, but Luty believed the future lay with nants: a line of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines that he'd patented. For several months now, Nantel had been spreading stories about nants having a big future in medical apps.
"I don't like arguing tech with normals," said Ond, still carrying Chu in his arms. "It's like mud-wrestling a cripple. The stories about medical nant apps are hype and spin and PR, Nektar. Jeff Luty pitches that line of bullshit so the feds don't outlaw our research.