A man who spends his entire adult life trying to stop thinking is dfferent from other people. He can't help it; what he does is not natural. Thought is ingrained in our being, more than any other vital sign. We can close our eyes, plug our ears, pinch our nose, relax our muscles, hold our breath, perhaps even learn to control the activity of the heart and other internal organs. But to still the mind--that endless stream of lies about time, space and permanence--requires exertion of a special force, inhuman in its origins, intensity, constancy and duration. Very few people can make this effort, and fewer yet in the flow of life.

Still, after twenty years of this struggle, Aaron Petiver had become fairly adept at doing what, for almost any other human being on earth, is second nature: appearing ordinary. As he sat on a crowded bench at the train station in Xining, one of the remotest outposts of west-central China, he could have been just another tourist, on his way back to Beijing or Shanghai. Though it had taken him half his life to learn how, he could now remain in the presence of others--even these nosy, excessively tactile peasants who seemed to have little understanding of personal space--and appear not just untouched by his surroundings, but integrated into them. Only someone of equally heightened awareness could see what he was doing, or not doing.

This is not to say that he wasn't attracting a great deal of attention. Very few foreigners ever see this desolate region of China, two thousand miles from the populous east coast, so the appearance of an American is always a somewhat special occasion. When he had arrived in town earlier that morning, a slouchingly tall, intensely unhesitant man in his late forties wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and carrying a small backpack, a crowd of small children had been drawn to him as though to a Pied Piper. Their elders, though more restrained, soon followed. By the time he reached the train station, Aaron was surrounded with people.

He was friendly to all of them, passing out candy to the eager, grabbing hands of the children and returning the shy smiles of the older people. Indeed, he seemed to be taking in everyone and everything around him, with interest yet not preference. To the further delight of his audience, he knew a little Chinese, though he was nowhere near fluent in it, laughing at his own mistakes. As the conversation continued, one of the locals, who worked at the town's major hotel, emerged as a translator.

"Where you come from?"

Aaron pointed to the southwest.

"Gujianwen ( ). It's near Yansu."

"How long it take you?"

"Two days."

"Where you stay there? Have friends? Chinese friends?"

"A few."

Aaron was alert, yet relaxed; fluid, yet still; focussed, yet open; sensitive, yet detached; intense, yet not preoccupied; empathic, yet uninvolved--in a word, there, but not there. A man who proceeds very far along his path comes to carry an enormous amount of energy in his being, accumulated through excruciating efforts that are made moment by moment, day by day, all of his years. He carries it lightly, gracefully, inauspiciously, indeed invisibly to all who surround him; yet with as much caution, attention and respect as though it were crown jewels, the secret of immortality, or a live grenade. For this energy is indeed all of these things, and much, much more; it is the most precious possession in the universe, the hardest to acquire, the easiest to lose.

To get it and keep it, one must constantly balance oneself between two worlds, the one that ordinary people live in, and the one that such people know nothing at all about. Both worlds have their rules, and to follow this path, both sets of rules must be obeyed. Yet frequently they cannot be, for such a life guarantees situations in which the rules of one world conflict with those of the other. Thus a traveller on this path is much more vulnerable than ordinary people; disaster is part of his everyday existence. Should the ordinary world require that he talk when he is not prepared to talk, he can lose himself, fall into a state in which he no longer has any idea of who he is, where he is or what he is doing. Should it demand that he move when he must be still, he can crash, drop precipitously in his level of awareness. Should it become noisy when he needs quiet, he can become several different people simultaneously, all of them quarreling with each other, threatening to rip his integrity asunder.

And regardless of how elegantly he performs this most difficult of all human arts, the one art that is truly more than human, his eternal reward is suffering. For the higher he gets, the more he is forced to see, and experience, all his flaws, limitations and desires. At the very highest levels, he is literally suffering every moment, there is a problem round every turn of existence, until finally he breaks through all of it and...well, this is why a few, though very few, follow this path.

"How long you stay in China?" persisted the translator. He was a small, thin, fairly intelligent looking man who spoke rapidly, constantly blinking his eyes. Clearly more familiar with and more relaxed around foreigners than his comrades, he seemed to command respect and deference even among those who were much older than he was. He sat very close to Aaron, occasionally jabbing him with a finger to make a point.

"Two years."

"Oo, that long time. You like China?"

Aaron nodded.

"What you do here? You work? Travel?"

"I'm an English teacher," Aaron replied with deceptive casualness. Necessary though it was, it felt strange, unnatural, to tell a lie, to be talking at all with people who lacked the power and perception to demand total honesty from him. People for whom honesty really made no difference at all. In his two years at DeskTop he had forgotten how acceptable lying was in this world, not just to others, of course, but primarily to oneself. He had forgotten that in this world, imperfections in people were not simply tolerated, but glorified, that being weak and fallible was taken as a sign of humanity, rather than as an inspiration to change.

How different life was for him and the other Files at DeskTop, where their every remaining thoughts and feelings were online twenty-four hours a day, where they struggled not to realize their desires but to transcend them, where they were never praised, admired or supported--or expected to be. Where all of them learned the hard way--that is to say, the only way--that every act a person makes, no matter how trivial, has consequences. Where Enneas, the Icon of the group, referred to them as "virtual" human beings, not yet worthy of being considered real.

The difference between life there and life here, in the rest of the world, was so great that all these people before him might have been another species, living on a different planet. But they were all one species, on the same planet, and that was why Aaron was here now, what his mission on the outside was all about. This was why Enneas had sent him, and what he was bringing with him, to America.

As the translator relayed Aaron's words to the others, they all revealed warm, if in many cases toothless, smiles of understanding. Having a foreigner to talk to was clearly a high point of their lives; it was certainly a lot more fun than the daily routine.

"Very good you help us learn English. We like English. We like Americans. What your name?"

"Aaron."

So saying, Aaron turned to shake hands with the other man.

"And you?"

"I Jiang Zhou. But you call me Jackie, OK?" He then proceeded to introduce Aaron to the others. The American shook hands with each, saying "ni hao" in every case.

"You have family here? Wife?"

Aaron shook his head. "Not here. In America."

"Tell us about America. Where you live? What you do?"

Aaron obliged, being as economical with his words as possible. He couldn't afford to get lost now; it was even more urgent than usual that he remain clear and centered around these curious peasants. He was carrying a potential bomb with him, after all, something capable of generating truly massive amounts of entropy if misused. Not a physical bomb, such as a nuclear device that would instantaneously annihilate all matter in its vicinity; nor a biological bomb, like a virus that would gradually kill all forms of life sensitive to it; not even a psychological bomb, an idea or theory that could eventually result in the decay and dissolution of an entire culture. As horrific as all these forms of destruction might be, their damage did not extend beyond the earth, and its three lower levels of existence: matter, life and mind. None of them touched spirit.

Aaron felt the pack against his back, never allowing its touch out of his awareness. That was what made the information he was carrying with him at once so indescribably precious and so devastatingly dangerous. For this ancient program that had waited more than twelve thousand years for the development of a computer powerful enough to run it was designed to achieve an explosion that would awaken spirit itself, that would rupture the invisible yet virtually impenetrable barrier standing between humanity and what lay beyond it. And the truly frightening aspect was that even if the program actually worked--even if it accomplished what it was intended to accomplish, what every human being on earth, if he or she could only understand, would want it to do--no one, not even the Icon, knew what would follow. No one, after all, had ever tried to raise the consciousness of the entire planet before--to introduce every single human being on earth, simultaneously, to God.

"Where you go now? To Beijing? Shanghai?"

"To Beijing on the train, then I fly to America. I return to my country."

"Ah, very good, you not see your country many years. And your family. "Tell us about your family. Have pictures? We like to see pictures."

Aaron shook his head. "No, I don't have any with me."

Several of the Chinese, curious, began to poke at Aaron's pack.

"They want to know what you have in there," said Jackie.

Aaron's face betrayed a brief flash of anxiety. Quickly recovering, he shrugged, trying to appear indifferent.

"Just clothes and a few other personal possessions."

More patter in Chinese.

"They like to see your clothes. They love American clothes."

Aaron paused for a moment. He recalled one of Enneas' favorite lessons: the key to invisibility is accessibility. If you want to blend in with the rest of the world, go unnoticed by others, open yourself wide, reveal everything. As soon as people see everything that it's possible for them to see, everything that they think is there, they become disinterested; they no longer notice you at all.

With an effort at appearing nonchalant, he took the knapsack off his back, opened it and brought out a couple of pairs of jeans and some shirts.

The Chinese, mobbing him, could not keep their hands off of them. The articles of clothing quickly made the rounds, each man or boy holding them up enviously.

"You sell these?" asked the translator.

Aaron shook his head, genuinely smiling, and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"I need them!" he protested. "They're all I have to wear."

The men all laughed good-naturedly when this remark was translated. The clothes were handed back. But one of the onlookers, emboldened by the extraction of the clothes, reached brashly into the knapsack himself, and before Aaron could stop him, pulled out a large handful of books, spilling them onto the bench. All of them were in English, and therefore not understandable to the man, but curious, he began leafing through one. As Aaron watched, momentarily frozen, several other people gathered around him, each fingering one of the books.

Almost immediately, one of the Chinese gave a little yelp of surprise. For the volume this man had selected was not in fact a real book at all, but rather a box cleverly designed in size and shape to look like a book. He held it up so that everyone could see it. It was a very good imitation, with the edges of real-looking pages painted along three of its sides, and a title in Latin on its pseudocover: MORITURI TE SALUTAMUS. Below these words was an unusual-looking symbol, a four-pronged figure contained within a sphere:

Again Aaron recovered and took charge of the situation. He had planned that events would never get this far, but of course he had a fallback position if they did.

"It's a Chinese box," he explained to Jackie, smiling at the irony. Taking it from the man who was holding it, he opened it to reveal another box inside, one that fit very tightly against the first. He opened this to reveal a third box, set equally snugly to its superior. Briefly Aaron held up these separate pieces for everyone to see, then reassembled them back into their original form, and set the intact box casually down on the bench next to him. So much for that, his actions said.

But he had not counted on the stubborn curiosity of one of the young boys who emerged from the crowd. Blurting something in Chinese to the others, he boldly grabbed the box and re-opened it. As Aaron watched in growing unease, the boy did not stop with the second or third layers, but patiently continued opening each of the ones that followed them, piling them rudely down on the bench. There were seven boxes in all, each of them with walls so eggshell thin that the dimensions of the last were less than half an inch shorter than those of the first. And in this seventh box was what appeared to be another book, a smaller, thinner one just filling its space. It was handsomely bound in a thick, cloth-like material, but had no other identification.

The boy lifted it out and opened it, the others now crowding around him to look. There proved to be no real pages in the book, but rather a single, clear sheet of a translucent substance on the inside of one cover. The very sight of it evoked iimmediate oohs and aahs of marvel from the rest of the curious crowd, for it glowed with a warm, shimmering, multi-colored light, much like a video screen. In fact, had any of the peasants been more familiar with Western technology, they would have said that the book was a portable computer, except that there was nothing but this screen--no keyboard or mouse, and no ports or wires visible anywhere on its surface.

Jackie now took the book from the boy, so that he could look at it more closely. As he and the others watched in fascination, the play of light and color on its surface coalesced into an image, a circular form that instantly brought to mind art from an area not far from their part of the world: the mandala. Sun-like in the central intensity of its radiance, the figure was filled with figures and symbols, some of them common geometric shapes instantly recognizable to any of them, others of a form that none of them had never seen before.

The overall pattern of the figure was changing, even as they watched. Some symbols disappeared, to be replaced by others; some simply changed their form, became converted into some other symbol. The effect was a little like that of a kaleidoscope, except that the changes did not occur symmetrically throughout the entire figure; they could be initiated at any point on it, from which they seemed to be transmitted to the rest of the screen in wave-like movements. In fact, the symmetry of the image was constantly being broken, yet always in such a way that its overall impact on its audience remained balanced and beautiful. Swarming about Jackie with feverish intensity yet an uncharacteristic hush, the simple peasants could not take their eyes off it; there was something about it that mesmerized all of them.

After a moment, the pattern on the screen resolved itself into a more mundane and familiar form: an image of the earth. This image, still in vivid color, looked much as the earth would look to someone in outer space; the outlines of all the major continents were clearly delineated, along with major topographical distinctions such as forests, deserts and mountain ranges. This image, too, however, was only temporary; as the Chinese watched in quiet entrancement, the point of view began to zoom up closer, as though they were approaching the earth. The Asian continent loomed up at them, then China, then western China, then Qinghai province, where the city of Xining is located. Now the view appeared as though from a descending airplane, gradually revealing the familiar details of human civilization: roads, farm lands, clusters of buildings, vehicles, eventually the ant-like forms of people. Yet closer still did they zoom in, the buildings becoming larger and more familiar, the people beginning to stand out as recognizable individuals. And at that point, Jackie gave a shout of astonishment.

"This, this about me, my life!" he exclaimed excitedly. Gripping Aaron's arm, he pointed to the screen. "See that man? He my father, no longer alive now. I remember this day! I remember it so well! He take our family to--" Jackie stopped talking abruptly, as the truly extraordinary aspect of what he was seeing suddenly dawned on him. He struggled mightily to find the words to express it.

"Everyone here except me! My father, my mother, my brothers and sisters. But you can't see me!...It like, like...camera inside my head, long time ago. Everything I see then here now."

But of course, he could not keep such an extraordinary discovery just to himself and Aaron.  Looking up at the others, he began to speak rapidly and excitedly in Chinese. Then he carefully handed the book to one of the other men. As he did, all of the others crowded around to see for themselves.

The result of this was even more astonishing. This second man, after studying the sceen carefully for a moment, gave a shout, and said something in Chinese to Jackie. A third man then grabbed the book from the second, and soon, he too was shouting. In a matter of just seconds, the group had dissolved in chaos, with everyone talking at once, grabbing each other and pointing rapidly back and forth from the screen to themselves. Some of the men became so frustrated that they began stamping their feet on the ground, pushing and jostling each other. For a moment it appeared that they would tear the book apart.

This went on for several moments, during which time Aaron sat frozen on the bench, watching the men with enormous interest, but making no move to recover the book. It was, he knew, physically indestructible, nor was there any danger that the full program could run now. This computer wasn't powerful enough to provide anything more than a tantalizing taste of what was to come, though even that taste was more than the world was ready to see now.

Finally, Jackie, raising his voice loudly above the others, commanded something in Chinese. The book was handed back to him, and he turned to face Aaron. The translator had a look of utter, total confusion on his face.

"Every man here say this...this book about him," he explained. He pointed to one of the other men. "That Ding Zemin. He say he see his family long ago, eating dinner together. All of them there in front of him, at the table. But Gao Jianying over there say no, he see his friends working in the field; all of them, just as he remember it. And Liang Yizhong say he see his horse, he on his horse, riding to market." He flourished the book back and forth almost angrily. "But they all wrong. It all about me!" He stabbed the screen furiously, though frustratedly, for emphasis. He even looked at it from different angles, as if expecting the scene to change when seen from another direction. Then he looked at Aaron carefully, pointing at the seven-tiered box.

"Where you get this, this...book?"

"It was given me by a Chinese friend."

Aaron answered very calmly. He tried to act as mystified and surprised as everyone else.

"Who? What man's name?"

Aaron shrugged, trying to communicate that the name could not possibly mean anything to any of those here.

"Yong Sheng ()."

The Chinese translator shook his head.

"I not know him." He turned and translated for the others, who were still arguing somewhat feverishly among themselves, though more quietly than before.

"This...this not possible," said Jackie, finally, reluctantly handing the book back to Aaron. As the latter replaced it in the box, and began reassembling the seven hierarchical pieces, the Chinese added, "I see my life in this book. Someone else see his life. Another man, he see his life." He looked at Aaron curiously. "What you see?"

Aaron shrugged, putting the box and the real books back into his pack. "Nothing," he replied quietly. "Nothing at all."

Which was not entirely untrue. A few moments later, the train pulled into the station. Aaron, knapsack on his back again, said goodby to the Chinese and stepped in. After he had found an empty seat, somewhat at a distance from other passengers, stowed his possessions and sat down, he pulled out and again opened the seven-layered box that had caused such a sensation among these simple farmers and villagers. He carefully lifted out the strange book that the group of men still standing on the platform would perhaps argue about for the rest of their lives.

The scenes that now appeared to him were not in China, but America, and showed not their lives, but his. Some of his life story, that is, for much of it had been erased, and more yet would be. For as the train started up and began to gather speed, Aaron sat there looking at the screen, the scenes flowing endlessly along upon it, trying to see it as it really was. It really was blank.

Darwin Everett Warren tilted his 7-foot pole back at a 60o angle to the ground, glanced behind him to make sure he was avoiding the pesky branches of a small aspen, and with both hands on the butt of the rod, heaved it forward, flinging 2 ounces of lead and two brightly colored corkies three-quarters of the way across the water and well upstream from where he stood. As the rig sank out of sight into the foam, and began rushing downstream even faster than it headed towards the bottom, he wound in the slack line and held the rod straight in front of him, feeling the action intently. Almost immediately the tip of the rod started jerking rapidly and erratically up and down, indicating that the weights were bouncing along the boulders of the river bottom. Long hours at this spot had taught him the contours of that bottom as clearly as if he could see them, and knowing exactly where to throw the rig to avoid snags, he was free to concentrate on that infintesimal nibble--that very slight, halting break in the steady bumping movement along the bottom--that signaled the interest of a monster salmon. But there would be no fish today.

When the lure had swept a long arc in front of him, he wound in rapidly, for the last time now, and slung the hook over one of the eyelets in the rod. Then he knelt down, closed his tackle box, and after one final, longing look at the river, turned around, crossed the narrow beach and began climbing up the steep, rocky bank to his car. Taking giant strides from jutting stone to stone, his steps were almost as quick and as sure-footed as those of the deer he loved to watch come down here to drink in the evening. Only once did his foot slip onto the loose surface of bare path, sending little stones and rock-hard clods of dry dust initially scurrying out from under his thick-soled boots, then lazily landsliding below him. But he quickly recovered, and a moment later climbed over the lip of the gorge.

There he luxuriated in the early morning sun, now climbing over the last of the spiky tops of the Douglas firs, though its light would not penetrate down to the river for several more hours. It was early July, and the thickets of raspberries and infant hardwoods fronting the forest on the other side of the road, which had been silent as well as dark when he had parked here almost two hours ago, had come alive with the daily chatter of their still invisible inhabitants; he could hear a busybody yellowthroat mumbling its way down the road, and further back, the almost melancholy whistle of a white-throated sparrow. He pulled his telescopic rod into halves, stowed it and the tackle box into the trunk of his ancient car, then got into the driver's seat. As he started the engine, he looked down at His Spot for the final time--just below where the comb-like froth of the rapids funneled and filtered the water into a single dark, almost sinisterly deep pool--then pulled out into the road.

As he drove the 45 miles back to Eugene, the deep, rock-rumpled gash of the gorge falling away more than sixty feet below him on one side of the road, and an unbroken wall of Douglas firs stretching an even greater distance upward on the other, thoughts of fishing were quickly swept away by the demands of the immediate future. He began rehearsing his talk again, though he had done it so many times that he knew it by heart. He tried to anticipate questions, read the minds of his potential investors, and began to feel overwhelmed by the expertise that would be in that room. He wondered again if he had made the right decision to come out here, leaving both a semi-settled life and a promising academic future back in Boston. Not to mention his longtime girlfriend, who had stayed behind to nurture her own career. Her parting words still stung in his mind.

Why does the world need a more powerful computer? she had wanted to know. Oh, sure, it might have applications in medicine and basic research and things like that, but everyone knew that wasn't why this computer was being developed. That certainly wasn't why the people Dewey was about to face were considering putting up millions of dollars to develop the software for it. They didn't care about esoteric applications, some ivory tower pet project, because that wasn't where the money was. The money was in the ordinary people who would buy a computer that would allow them to go one-on-one with their favorite celebrity in virtual reality, to talk with even more people they never had and never would meet face-to-face, to carry all their financial information around on their wrist, to control every facet of their homes with such precision that they no longer even needed--or really, could--live in them.

Is that why was he developing this computer? Ellen had wondered. And if that wasn't the reason, what was? And why had he never asked that question of himself before? Weren't scientists supposed to be universal skeptics, calling everything into question? Why, then, did they never call their own motives into question? Why did they assume that anything that science discovered or created was going to improve the world? What scientific proof was there for that assumption?

Dewey pushed these uncomfortable thoughts aside as he approached his destination. Situated on the northern edge of Eugene, Intron was a typical research and development building of the late twentieth century--a plain, efficiently-designed brick block of three stories, fronted by the necessary patch of well-tended lawn and flowers, and giving away absolutely nothing of what went on inside. He pulled his car into the parking lot and hurried up to the main entrance. Nobody got into this building without passing the approval of Uncle Bill, a computerized smart system that opened doors, ran elevators, regulated the heating and cooling, and took telephone messages, not to mention operating many of the heavy appliances in the laboratories. Dewey paused impatiently to let the cameras get a good look at the distinctive features of his face. They didn't need long to capture the nearly rectangular outline with a very prominent, almost bullying jaw; the intensity in the eyes, practically willing the camera to get on with it; the wrinkles in the brow, revealing that he was still rehearsing his forthcoming speech in his mind; and even the slight overall tension characteristic of someone who cannot live without always having a little more to do than he has time for. All of this, and far more that no author could do justice to, was seen and approved by the insect-like eyes of the cameras, for they were composed of thousands of tiny lenses that had been microfabricated by binary optics, a fairly new development that was doing for artificial vision what silicon chips had done for artificial communication.

Inside the building, he took the elevator up to the conference room on the second floor. Visitors to Intron could be forgiven for believing they were dreaming, drunk, or disoriented upon entering this room for the first time. What everyone noticed immediately were the tables and chairs: they had no legs, but were suspended in midair. After the guests had given up trying to find hidden wires from above or jets of air from below, they would be informed of the magnetic fields that levitated the furniture into position. Then there was the huge flat panel display covering the entire wall of one end of the room, which could give access to every computer terminal in the building; the electronic blackboard at the opposite end, where laser beams were used not simply as pointers, but as a way of temporarily etching notes and diagrams into the writing surface; and, at special times, virtual reality suits that allowed one literally to walk around and inspect any image that could be programmed into a computer.

But long after visitors had become accustomed to all these high-tech treats, they would feel and remember the unearthly silence of the room. For its walls were coated with a special material that absorbed all incoming sound from outside, and fed it into thousands of tiny sensors, where its amplitude and phase were analyzed. These in turn passed it along to thousands of piezoelectric cells, which produced a sound of exactly the same amplitude and opposite phase, thus cancelling out the incoming sound completely. This room was so smart it was sassy.

Everyone else was there already. At one side of the long, oval table were Intron's President, Rob Sawyer, and its two other co-founders and main shareholders; its chief financial officer; and a company lawyer. But his glance immediately went to the other side of the table, where the representatives from Bootstrap sat together. These were the people that he had to sell.

"Ah, Dewey, you're here, great," said Sawyer, from his seat at the far end of the table. "Let me introduce you to everyone."

Trying to keep in mind what Rob had told him about each of them earlier, Dewey briefly studied each Bootstrap official as he or she rose to shake hands with him from across the table. Vernon Chao, President and CEO of the software company, was about forty, yet with his graying, receding hair, modest, almost dowdy, sport coat and unexpectedly deferential demeanor appeared almost avuncular. He chuckled frequently though lightly, as though all of them were at a purely social gathering, and seemed sincerely pleased, almost thrilled, at meeting Dewey. The latter knew, however, that this attitude was somewhat deceptive; Chao was a tough cookie who was at that very moment in the process of winning an infringement lawsuit against another software company.

Philippa LaTronica was the whiz kid. A slender, flat-bodied woman with very short brown hair, a freckled, pixie-like face and a nervous, fidgeting energy, she was more handsome than pretty, yet possessed that kind of permanent beauty that only a very intelligent woman can have, a voluptuous mind that only an equally intelligent man can appreciate. Barely out of college, she had developed an Artificial Intelligence concept--a bundle of programs rather than any single one--that had later helped launch Bootstrap's successful foray into robotics. She had extensive contacts with the AI community in academia as well as in industry, including a stint with Rodney Brooks, MIT's legendary "bad boy". Brooks had stunned his peers with his tiny, insect-like robots that navigated through unfamiliar terrain simply by building up a repertoire of stimulus-response actions. Later, LaTronica had helped Brooks develop Cog, a larger and far more complex robot programmed to test theories about mental development in human infants. She would presumably be the expert on hardware as well as software sitting on the far side of the table this morning. As she rose to meet Dewey, she threw him a puckish, girlish smile that paradoxically seemed both shy and brazenly confident; her handshake was firm, but quick.

Amanda Iversen was perhaps five to ten years older than Dewey, and had long dark hair, broad shoulders, a slim-hipped figure and a long face that was attractive in an almost beat sort of way. She was Bootstrap's molecular biology expert, and Dewey was quite familiar with her work, though he could not recall actually having met her before. She no longer did research herself, having left the laboratory several years ago for a career in consulting biotech companies, but her credentials were solid. Among her other accomplishments, she had been a member of one of the first research teams to identify and clone a gene involved in hereditary breast cancer. She was really the only person there besides Dewey who could appreciate what he had accomplished. Except that she wasn't really there. She was only virtually there. She had been unable to make the trip, so they had agreed to let her atttend by teleconferencing. Her image flashed briefly on the large screen at the end of the room, and she nodded as she was introduced.

The fourth guest, who was present in the flesh, was a total surprise to Dewey, and he raised his eyebrows as Rob introduced her. She was a petite, dark-complexioned woman informally dressed in a plaid cotton shirt and jeans who sat somewhat noticeably apart from the others. She appeared quite at ease and full of enthusiasm and anticipation for the meeting. She shook Dewey's hand heartily enough, and said something about it being a great privilege to meet him.

"Dewey, this is Dr. Cristina Palade-Moran. Cris is from the Santa Fe Institute--the Artificial Life group. She will explain why she's here a little later."

The introductions were concluded with Bootstrap's lawyer, then the meeting got underway. The atmosphere was fairly informal. There were coffee and doughnuts on a tray in the center of the table, and several of the assembly helped themselves, standing up and reaching over others when necessary. Dewey took a seat at one end of the table, the Bootstrap contingent on one side of him and his Intron colleagues on the other.

"As you know," he began, "what we're going to show you today is a new computer. Not simply a new model, one that is faster, cheaper, smaller or more versatile than other computers, but a new kind of computer. A new concept of computer."

Dewey rarely drank coffee, tea or softdrinks, but he was a voracious eater of anything solid that was put in front of him. He took nearly half of a large donut in a single bite, all the while glancing at his guests to see their reaction to his opening words. They were not, of course, completely in the dark about what he was going to tell them; it was the details they had come to learn about.

"Now you people know," he began, quickly gulping the donut down and out of the way, "better than us, what the most vital part of any computer--its heart and brains--is. It's the silicon transistor, a simple switch that can be opened or closed to the passage of electrical current. You also well know that one of the keys to advancing computer technology--what has made it possible to develop new computers, year after year, that are increasingly more powerful--is our ability to miniaturize the transistor. The smaller the transistor, the more of them can be packed into a given unit of space--the silicon chip. And the more transistors a chip contains, the more powerful it is."

To emphasize his point, Dewey held up in the air a single chip. It was about the size of a small fingernail.

"At our present level of technology, transistors can be made that are less than a quarter of a micron long, or about 1/50,000 of an inch. At this size, as many as four million transistors--ten or even twenty million if we really push it--can be packed onto a single silicon chip." He cracked a slight smile. "Pretty awesome, I'd say. But all of us would like to do better--a lot better."

There was a murmur of assent in the room.

"In fact," Dewey continued, setting the chip down firmly and consciously on the table in front of him, almost as though it were a vital piece in a chess game, "further miniaturization is absolutely necessary if computers are going to become any more powerful. Again, I'm not telling you folks anything new. We all know the only alternative to making transistors smaller is to make computers larger. But larger computers mean greater distances between their components, which means slower performance. So miniaturization is the only way to go."

He finished the rest of his donut and immediately reach for another.

"The question is, how? Ultimately, we're talking about transistors that are composed of single molecules--that's clearly where this technology is headed. But making transistors of silicon molecules is a long, long way off."

Vernon Chao raised his hand and cut in.

"Dr. Warren, what about these new techniques that are being developed to manipulate single atoms, like scanning tunnelling microscopy? There's talk about developing computers where a single electron stores one bit of information. Don't you see that going somewhere?"

Dewey shook his head. "Not for a long time, Dr. Chao. Remember, it's one thing to play around with a few atoms, but a very different story when you need to arrange literally billions of them. These techniques are still in their infancy, and they require special conditions, including low temperatures and high vacuum, that really aren't very practicable yet."

He set down his donut briefly and gestured with his hands.

"To operate at this molecular level," he continued, "we really need to have some help from nature. That is, what we need is a way of persuading molecules to assemble themselves. Having them, in effect, do much of the work for us."

He paused a moment to let this idea sink in.

"You mean, a chemical reaction?" Palade-Moran asked.

"Sort of," replied Dewey. "But of all the molecules known to science, there is only one that can do what we require it to do. And this is where Intron comes into the picture, why a biotechnology company suddenly finds itself going into the computer business. Because the one molecule that can do what we require it to do is DNA. And DNA, of course, is the center of our entire industry, the thing I and my colleagues here are experts on. As the genetic material of all organisms, DNA has the fundamental, unique property of being able to reproduce itself--to create other molecules of DNA just like itself. This unique property of DNA is the basis of all biotechnology, and this same property is what makes it possible to design a transistor that can, in effect, assemble itself."

A greater wave of murmuring swept over the visitors, several of whom began whispering among themselves. Finally, Amanda Iversen spoke up from the large screen.

"So you're designing a transistor...made of DNA molecules. Is that what you're saying?" she asked.

"In a nutshell, yes," replied Dewey. "In fact, it's not quite that simple, there's more to it than DNA. I will explain all of that to you later. Before we get into those details, though, I want to show you what one of these computers looks like."

At this, Chao nodded. "Yes, I was wondering when we were going to get a chance to see one of these, Dr. Warren. You know, there have been so many rumors going on down in the Bay Area about what you people have created." He glanced around the room, though he had already done that several times before. "Frankly, I thought there would be one waiting for us here."

At these words, Dewey was no longer able to repress a full, uninhibited smile. This was obviously a moment he had waited for eagerly.

"Ah, but there is, Dr. Chao," he replied sweetly. "It's right here."

So saying, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out what appeared to be, by both its size and shape, a simple hand-held calculator. It was about three inches long and two inches wide, and like an ordinary calculator had several rows of keys, or buttons, protruding from one side.

"This is it," he said, holding it well into in the air. The continuing restraint of his voice and his gesture made the movement all the more dramatic.

There was a collective gasp of astonishment from the audience. The computer was so much smaller than anyone had anticipated that it was hard to believe that it could be anything other than exactly what it appeared to be: a calculator.

"So what can it do?" asked Philippa LaTronica, the one person on the Bootstrap side of the table who did not yet appear to be particularly impressed.

"Not a lot yet," admitted Dewey, "because we don't have much software for it. That's why we want you people in on this. But," he added quickly, "it has power to put a typical microcomputer to shame. What kind of power are we talking about? It has ten gigabytes of RAM and one thousand gigabytes--that's one million megabytes, ladies and gentlemen--of storage capacity." He paused briefly to let this sink in, then added, "And it has a high-definition flat display panel that is far more than the equal of any full-sized conventional cathode-ray monitor in the world today."

As he was making this last point, Dewey pushed one of the buttons on the tiny computer, and revealed an even more astonishing feature: as the Bootstrap people looked on with amazement, a flat, shiny, silvery substance began to assemble itself, apparently out of nowhere. In a matter of seconds, the computer had a screen of about six by eight inches attached to its tiny keyboard.

"Jesus!" exclaimed Vernon Chao, half rising from the table to be sure he was seeing right, and clearly emoting on behalf of all his colleagues. "Where did that come from? It looked like it was created out of thin air!"

Dewey, smirking unabashedly, was clearly having fun.

"Ah, but the air is not so thin. It has plenty of carbon dioxide. Using that, and a few other elements stored on the surface of the computer, a few chemical reactions can construct almost any material we want. It's much the same principle that we use to make the biotransistors. Nanotechnology. The screen is assembled molecule by molecule, in a series of chain reactions."

The room was now abuzz with awe and appreciation. As Dewey set the little computer down on the table, the Bootstrap people quickly got up from their chairs and began crowding around him to watch. Dewey pushed one of the buttons on the keyboard, and immediately a simple picture of the Intron building, in full color, leaped onto the screen. The detail in the picture was absolutely astonishing: one could see individual blades of grass in the lawn, individual imperfections in the bricks of the building, and the most subtle changes in the color of the sky in the background.

Dewey pressed another button, and the screen changed. The picture had now zoomed up to the front door of the Intron building. The door opened, and the viewer was moving inside, walking along a hall, stopping before an elevator, getting in, riding to one of the upper floors--a complete little video tour of Intron.

"So this computer has both a microprocessor and a hard disk?" asked Philippa.

"Lots of them, actually," replied Dewey. "It even has a printer of sorts." So saying, he pressed another button on the tiny keyboard. At first, nothing seemed to happen; but then he carefully put the thumb and forefinger of one hand on one corner of the screen, and peeled off a sheet of paper. Like the screen itself a moment earlier, the page seemed to come miraculously out of nowhere. As Dewey held it up triumphantly in front of the group, everyone could see that it was a full-color print-out of the picture on the screen. It was as though the very surface of the tiny terminal had shed a layer of itself.

Again, there were whistles and shouts of disbelief. But even this display of technical virtousity, so totally beyond what a conventional computer was capable of, was about to be topped.

"Suppose we want to make a change in this print-out," explained Dewey, pointing to one feature in the scene on the page. "Maybe we want to change the color of this wall in the picture. No need to print out another copy." As he spoke, he quickly but carefully laid the sheet back on the computer screen; it seemed to melt into the terminal, disappearing as a distinct object. He pressed a few more buttons on the keyboard, then again stripped off the sheet. As he held it up, everyone could see that the desired color change had in fact been made.

"Jesus Christ," muttered Chao.

"We call it electronic paper," Dewey concluded, keeping his voice intentionally low-key to his thoroughly awed audience. "It obliterates the distinction between hard copy and electronic information."

For the next few minutes, he let the Bootstrap people try out the tiny computer, pressing various buttons and watching different images come up on the screen. After all had had a chance to play with it, they returned to their seats.

"In few minutes," Dewey continued, "I will explain to you exactly how the biochip is made--the basic prinicples of nanotechnology that underlie this computer. Before we do that, however, are there any general questions?"

Philippa's dainty hand immediately shot up.

"If you folks can really put a thousand gigs of memory into a little wallet like that"-she indicated the computer on the table in front of Dewey--"you can get up to the terabyte level in a normal, PC-sized machine, and God knows what in a mainframe. Do you have any plans for making any of that size?"

Dewey nodded. He had expected this question. "Not on a production-level scale, but yes, we intend to make a few prototype models."

"Obviously," Philippa pursued, "memory of that magnitude would not be necessary for the ordinary user. You must have some special project in mind--such as modelling the origin of the Universe, perhaps?"

Everyone laughed at this. Rob Sawyer now took the opportunity to introduce his surprise guest.

"Well, our aims aren't quite that lofty," replied Intron's President when the mirth had subsided, "but as it happens, you are close." He looked over at Palade-Moran. "Cris, before we move on, maybe you should describe your plans to us." Addressing the rest of the group, including Dewey, he explained, "I invited Dr. Palade-Moran today because she just happens to have a burning need for the kind of memory we have. While you people," he said, referring to Bootstrap, "are, I hope, going to create some general software for the mass market, Cris has a much more specialized aim in mind."

Everyone now turned his attention to the small, dark-featured woman sitting near one end of the Bootstrap side of the table. She had been very quiet till now, even when watching with the others the performance of the biocomputer, but when she spoke, she did so with an easy authority that made people forget that she was barely five feet tall. Her enthusiasm for her work was evident in the way she constantly though lightly bounced up and down in her chair as she talked.

"I'm an evolutionist by training," she began, "and you may well wonder what interest I would have in computers--besides, of course, as a way of storing data and writing up research findings. The answer is that computers offer us a powerful new way to study the evolutionary process. Evolution, as all of you know, requires an immense amount of tiny, individual changes--thousands and thousands of mutations in organisms that are selected for over immense periods of time. This makes it very difficult for us to test theories about how any individual organism arose. It would take us literally thousands or millions of years to run such an experiment!"

She gestured at the biocomputer in front of Dewey.

"Computers, because of their great speed, provide us with a way of doing this; what takes thousands or millions of years in real life can, when simulated on a computer, occur in a few hours, days or weeks. What I'm in the process of doing is creating a series of computer programs that mimic real forms of life. They are, so to speak, artificial animals, which live in cyberspace. Each program specifies a particular body shape, a certain kind of brain and nervous system, a certain kind of feeding pattern, metabolism, rate of reproduction and growth, and so on. When these programs begin to run, they interact with each other, just as real organisms do. They compete with each other for survival. In the process, some programs evolve, developing new properties that take advantage of the environment they find themselves in, just as real-life organisms do."

"Genetic algorithms, in other words," Philippa LaTronica pointed out. "Computer programs that evolve by natural selection."

"Yes," replied Cristina, "but these are not your garden variety genetic algorithms. Each one is essentially a total simulation of a particular organism, providing a comprehensive account of its genetic, cellular and phyisological composition. And the programs look exactly like real organisms on the screen. They eat, sleep, move about and so on, everything that real animals do."

"Which is why you need such a humungous amount of memory," Philippa suggested. "No ordinary computer could possibily store that much information."

"Exactly," nodded Cristina, her eyes shining. "That's where the biocomputer comes in. We're hoping it will make it possible to simulate evolution in enough detail to provide us with real insights into what's going on."

"Interesting," Vernon Chao commented. "Very interesting. But what exactly are you trying to find out? Do you hope to be able to duplicate the evolutionary past on the computer? Or are you trying to create entirely new forms of Artificial Life?"

"Both," replied Cristina. "First I want to retrace the evolutionary past, to demonstrate that a computer really can make accurate simulations of our natural history. I don't expect that it will duplicate evolution exactly, of course, but I am hoping that it will recreate the same major forms of life that we know today."

"And then?"

"Then," replied Cristina, "I want to go beyond history, to peer into the future. I want to use the computer to see what the next stage in our evolution is, or could be."

Pandora Mistinger unlocked the door to her office, started to switch on the light, then changed her mind. Though it was barely dawn, she could see well enough through the light of late June from the window. Peeling off her coat, she walked over to her desk and dropped the garment unceremoniously onto the back of her chair as she turned on her computer. As the machine began to boot up, she went over to a low wooden cabinet at the left side of the office, where the coffee pot was kept. After a short trip back out into the eerily quiet hall to get water, she soon had the pot boiling. She poured the water slowly into the filter, her thoughts still elsewhere as it dripped into the mug below, decorated with an almost psychedelically bright fractal design.

She always arrived early, as much as an hour before anyone else. She had been doing it ever since she had begun living alone again, most of the time hardly aware of how quickly she got out of the house in the morning. For the office, even empty and quiet as it was now, was a great source of comfort to her. The moment she stepped into the presence of all this information processing technology, she felt at ease again, felt the relief of a mind confronted with challenging, but solvable, problems.

She found herself toying with the simple little pendant--just a cross within a circle--that seemed to demand her attention as it flopped about on its leash of plain beads. Funny how this necklace, and everything that it was supposed to mean, would hit her with a jolt, literally and figuratively, when she was least expecting it. She never remembered consciously choosing it when she dressed in the morning, but some days she would look down at her breast, and there it was.

It had been her mother's. She had kept quite a number of her mother's possessions--old letters and photographs, several dresses, a favorite book or two--but this was different from all the others, wasn't it? Partly, she supposed, because her mother had made it herself, but there was much more to it than that. Everything else that she had kept she had done so because it reminded her of her mother's life--the woman who had raised her mostly alone, independent, very liberal, near-genius intelligence (or so her daughter felt) yet utter lack of ambition, the most reliably honest person her daughter had ever met, yet almost completely amoral. This necklace, and this alone, she had kept because it reminded her of her mother's death. Not that she had ever wanted to be reminded of that--that had been her mother's wish, not hers.

"This is the only thing I ever felt I could give you that you couldn't find for yourself," her mother had insisted when she had handed it to her, meaning not the necklace itself, but what it was supposed to symbolize. Her mother had always loved symbols, not as simple representations of some abstract concept, but as material objects that you could hold in your hand, literally grasping their meaning. "You're really too young to understand any of this now, but of course that can't be helped. Some day you will understand, I promise you. Then it will be up to you what to do with what you know."

And that, typically, had been all she would say--no more explanation, and certainly no apology, to either of them, for what she was about to do. What her mother did--was in the process of doing even as she gave her daughter that necklace--was so horrible that it almost completely obscured the essential beauty of the act. Had her daughter been less intelligent, had she been brought up in a less liberal environment, been less encouraged to make her own decisions, come to her own opinions, she almost certainly would have missed that beauty, would have completely failed to understand what her mother was really trying to tell her. Or did she understand? Maybe she never had. Maybe if she really had, she wouldn't be...

She let the pendant slip from her fingers, turned and glanced across the office at her slowly awakening monitor. By now, the light had flooded into the screen like a sunrise, its soft glow making flickering shadows as it bounced into the darker recesses of the room. Seconds later, the LaserWriter lurched into action, printing out the overnight's e-mail messages that were sent to it by an automatic forwarding program. She skimmed rapidly through each one, making mental notes to herself, the details of another very busy day eagerly coming together in her mind.

Now the coffee was ready. She picked up her mug and carried it and her e-mail over to her desk. Sitting down before her computer, she took her first sip, and as the warmth of the liquid suffused her body, she felt herself relax as she finally began to awaken completely. She studied some of her messages for a few more moments, then finally set down her mug and turned her full attention to her computer.

Quickly opening her connection to the World Wide Web, she proceeded to access a large library in Europe. In virtual reality, she could now walk through the halls and rooms of this library, and she did so until she came to a small room in the back of the building. This was a special reference section, access to which was restricted to users with a password. She clicked on the door of the room and a dialog box appeared, requesting her password. As she had done numerous times before, she typed in her password, submitted it, and and stole another sip of coffee as she waited for the door to the room to open.

To her surprise and annoyance, however, a message appeared saying that this Web site could not be accessed at this time, that she should try again later. This puzzled her. She had never experienced this problem at this site before, and she knew that very few people used it. She repeated the access process several times, but the same message appeared each time.

Pandora sat back in her chair for a moment, wondering what to do. She could send an e-mail message to the library asking them to help her, but she knew it might be some time before she received a reply. She needed to get into this room now. She was about to compose the e-mail message, anyway, and hope for the best, when she suddenly remembered: she knew another way into this online section. She had discovered it quite by accident one day, when she was browsing though some journals in the publicly accessible section of the main library. An article in this journal had a hypertext link to a book in the restricted reference section, a link which had somehow gone unnoticed when the restrictions had been created. If she could only remember what that journal was and find the article, she might be able to slip into the reference section through this back door, so to speak.

It took her several minutes of trial-and-error wandering through the journal section of the main library, but she eventually found the issue of journal she was looking for. Opening it by clicking on it, she scrolled to the article, then began turning over its pages. The hypertext link was still there, and to her relief, it opened as soon as she clicked on it. Her sense of triumph, however, was very short-lived. Though she immediately found herself transported to what appeared to be another section of the library, it was not the section she wanted to be in.

Her first hint of this was provided by the virtual door that now confronted her. The door to the reference library had a sign on it, identifying the kinds of books that were archived there. This door, in contrast, had a large symbol, a four-pronged figure enclosed within a globe:

Below the symbol was a single phrase: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH LIES WITHIN. Below it, in turn, was a series of numbers, all of which were increasing slightly, even as she looked at them. The first of these numbers was: 6,109,427,632; the remaining numbers were even larger, much larger.

Upon clicking on this door, it opened, and she found herself in a virtual library; but now it was obvious, sheerly from the size of it, that it was not the right one. The reference section that she was trying to enter was a relatively small space, not much larger than the living room of an average-sized house. One could walk from one end of it to the other in a few steps--a few clicks of the mouse--and even with bookshelves covering all four of its walls, from floor to ceiling, there were no more than a few thousand volumes. The virtual room she now found herself in, in contrast, was cavernous, so enormous that she could not even see to its end; it appeared to be far larger than the main library in its entirety, larger indeed than any enclosed space she had ever been in. Even at a glance, a glance that revealed nothing but shelves solid with books as far as the virtual eye could see, it was obvious to her that this room contained millions of books.

Puzzled, she turned towards the nearest shelves to examine the titles of some of the books, hoping to get some hint as to where she might be. The first few that caught her eye were in Chinese, the characters though not their meaning recognizable to her on the spines of the books as they protruded from the shelves. Increasingly curious, she began to glide along one of the virtual shelves, glancing rapidly at the volumes, trying to find a book in a language that she might understand. She soon discovered that the titles of the books were in many different languages: not just Chinese, but Spanish, Hindi, English, German, Russian, Japanese, and so on and so on. And even before she found her first English title, it had dawned on her what each of the titles, whatever its language, meant: it was a name. Every book in this virtual library seemed to be by, or about, a particular person.

There was no organization nor order to these names that she could discern immediately. The books were not grouped by nationality, for example, nor by alphabetical order in the case of names spelled with the Roman alphabet. Nor did any volume, as the back of it presented itself to her on the shelf, contain anything except a single name.

Now overcome with curiosity, she clicked on one of the books at random; it had an English name, a name that could, almost certainly did, belong to some real person, perhaps several: MAY H. WAITE. As was customary in virtual libraries, the volume immediately sprang out of the shelf and opened itself on her computer screen to its first page, ready for perusual. Further clicking of the mouse allowed her to turn its pages, one by one. As she did so, it became clear that the book contained extensive information about this particular woman. The data began with numerous pictures of her, both still and moving, taken at different times throughout her life as well as from different perspectives. Then came an exhaustive physical description of the woman--not merely sex, age, height, weight, eye and hair color, but the most detailed account of every other portion of her anatomy, internal as well as external.

This information, which went on for more than two hundred pages, was followed by an extensive life history: not merely where she had been born, raised and educated, and marital and employment record, but an incredibly detailed summary of, it seemed, everything she had ever done, including the name of every other person she had ever interacted with. This biographical information filled several hundred more pages in the virtual book, and was littered with literally thousands of hypertext links to other documents; for example, information on every person, place, object or idea this woman had encountered during her entire life could apparently be accessed.

But these were just the physical data. The mental data, which followed, were even more exhaustive, including numerous descriptions and evaluations of intelligence, personality, temperament, tastes, values, beliefs, attitudes, morals--the most comprehensive picture imaginable of this person's behavior. This list went on for several more hundred pages, so long that she despaired of ever reaching the end of it. Yet when she did, there was even more, yet another set of data that were the most astonishing of all.

At first, she could make no sense of this information at all. It was simply a series of ideas, observations, memories expressing seemingly anything and everything--other people, events, ideas. While some of the information was clear and concrete, other parts of it were fragmentary, some of it apparently even distorted, bizarre. And the bits of information on this list often seemed to have no logical sequence to them, no relationship to what came before or after. Yet it took her less than a moment to guess what she was looking at it, simply because of its most obvious feature: it was constantly changing. New information was being added to the screen even as she watched.

It was the person's thoughts, she realized with a shock. The program was describing the person's on-going mental activity, what was actually going through the woman's mind. New thoughts were appearing rapidly and constantly, with the older ones gradually fading from the screen; the latter left behind them hypertext links, suggesting they were being stored in still another part of the program. Together with the rest of the woman's profile, this program was presenting as near a complete description of this human being as possibly could be put into language. Even the amount of personal information and insights present in a lengthy, heavily annotated biography paled in comparison to what existed here.

Pandora watched the thoughts for a few moments, quickly realizing how trivial, boring most of them were. But that only deepened the sense of mystery she felt. Who could possibly have created a program like this? she wondered. Did the names actually correspond to real people, or were they fictional? If they were fictional, why had the author of this program gone to the trouble to create such a massive amount of information--and how? How had he or she managed to generate what was realistic, if not real, mental activity, thoughts that appeared and faded before her very eyes?

And where could such a program be stored? She did a quick calculation in her head. The immediately visible features of this virtual library--the millions of books, each with a different name--would by themselves require at a minimum several gigabytes of space or more. But the names constituted only the tiniest fraction of the total amount of memory that had to be in this program. If every book had a profile as detailed as this associated with it, including not only reams of text but a seemingly endless series of photographs and videos, then the total amount of memory that would be required to store this program was absolutely prodigious. Taking into account all the hypertext links associated with each person's profile, there might not be enough computer space in the entire world to store such a program.

She closed this book, and selected another at random: STEVYN SHARP GIESE. A different person, yet the same kind of book. Again, pages and pages of physical, mental and emotional data, together with a complete life history, pictures, hypertext links, everything that could possibly be relevant to understanding this human being--including, again, an on-going record of what appeared to be his every thought and feeling. Studying this volume, absorbing all this information, it was possible not just to imagine but actually to witness this person behaving in every possible situation. Incredibly, the programs in this book enabled the reader to place this person in any conceivable context, and observe his behavior, actually watch the man as he responded. Could anyone who actually knew this man in the flesh understand him any better?

Even before she closed this second volume, now feeling overwhelmed by awe at what she had stumbled upon, she knew what book she wanted to open next. It had been in the back of her mind ever since she realized what this virtual library contained, or seemed to contain: she wanted to see her book. Was it really possible? Did these massive characterizations portray real people, and if they did, was she included among them?

But how to find out? There was no organization to these names that she could fathom, and the rest of her life would literally not be long enough to find her book by browsing. She paused, thinking. Whoever or whatever had created such a stupendous amount of information could not possibly have done so without some kind of plan; these millions of biographies could not have been assembled with such meticulous care, then shelved at random. There had to be some organizing principle to this library, she was certain of that.

She used the mouse to turn away from the shelves, looking out upon the vast, seemingly endless space of this virtual library. The bookshelves lined the walls in unbroken fashion, stretching as far as she could see. Then she turned back to study the shelves before her thoroughly, using the mouse to scroll from bottom to top. When she reached the top shelf, she encountered a sign that she had not noticed before. It had an arrow pointing upwards, and said: TO LEVEL 2.

So there was yet another floor, another level, to this immense library. She clicked on the sign, and was immediately transported to this level. There she found herself confronting another set of shelves, much like those she had just browsed. A cursory exploration confirmed that again, the books were in many different languages and that each book corresponded to some person. As before, however, she could find no clue that would help her sort through these names and find her own. As far as she could tell, the books on this level were much the same as those on level 1.

So she scrolled to the top shelf on this level, and found a sign indicating access to still another level, level 3, as well as a downward arrow directing the browser to level 1. She accessed level 3, and found much the same arrangement as she had on levels 1 and 2. Not knowing what else to do, she decided to move up yet another level. She scrolled up to the top of the bookshelves, and found a sign with an arrow pointing to level 4. To her surprise, however, when she clicked on this sign, she received the message: LEVEL FOUR - ACCESS DENIED.

So, there were at least four levels to this virtual library--maybe more--but she had access to just the first three. But which one was her book on, and how was she going to find it? She fell to thinking: what were the possible ways people could be classified? If not by alphabetical order or nationality, what? Not location on earth, for that would be strongly correlated with nationality. Date of birth? Some physical parameter, such as height or weight? Occupation? Level of intelligence? The more she thought about it, the more she realized that there were an endless number of ways that one could classify people, any one of which might form the basis for ordering them in a library. But what type of classification did this library use?

Suddenly, she had an idea, a way to find her book, wherever it was. Every book in this virtual library clearly had extensive links to many other books, perhaps thousands of them. If she picked any book at random, the odds were that at least one of its links would be to a name that was familiar to her, a person she either knew or had heard of. That person's book, in turn, would contain a link to someone still more directly associated with her...Thinking this over, she felt certain that she could reach her own book through accessing just a small number of others.

Once she started this approach, she discovered that it was even easier than that. She selected the first English-name book that she saw, and moving quickly now that she was becoming familiar with the way an individual book was organized, found a list of all the places on earth that that person had visited in his life. Her own state was on that list, so she clicked on that, and was immediately presented with an enormous body of information about that state, including a highly detailed map. This map, together with the other data, removed from her mind any lingering doubt over whether or not the information in this library was real. It clearly was, though it did appear to be several years out of date. She then located on the state map the city where she lived, and clicked on that, calling forth a body of information about that city, again including a map.

By now, she understood how the library worked; she could access any person--or for that matter, any other piece of information--in it by using any relationship available to her, such as physical or mental encounters, blood ties, occupations, or in this case, geographical location. Now she examined the city map, located the building where she had worked several years ago, and clicked on that--sure enough, a large body of information on her former company came onto her screen. As it did, she noted that the information was not stable; portions of it were constantly changing, as if in the process of being updated right before her eyes. In seconds, she had found her name.

She paused, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. Her name. Somewhere in this library a book existed containing, it seemed, more information about herself than she herself could have provided. More details about her life history, her physical and behavioral characteristics, the animate and inanimate influences on her life, than she herself was aware of. Was this really possible? Could such a book exist?

She clicked on her name.

Instantly, she was transported to another portion of the virtual library. She was now positioned in front of another bookshelf, just like all the others she had seen. And there, in the center of the screen and highlighted on the monitor, was her book, the book with her name on the spine. She was about to click to open it when other questions occurred to her. What were the names on the books next to hers and close to hers? Perhaps they could provide some clue as to how the virtual library was organized. And what level was she on now?

The answer to the first question provided no help at all. The names meant nothing to her--she did not recognize any of them, and some of them were not even in English. To answer the second question, she scrolled to the top of the bookshelf and checked the sign; she was on level 3.

Now totally consumed by curiosity, she scrolled her way back down the shelf to open her book at last. But another surprise awaited her: it wasn't there! It wasn't in the spot where it had been before. She had marked it very carefully by its position from the floor, and in relation to several other books. But that position was now filled by another volume, and some, though not all, of her book's former neighbors were also absent. It seemed that the books themselves were constantly moving, changing their positions on the shelves.

A quick glance in the neighborhood did not reveal her book. So there was only one thing to do: repeat the search process. Now that she knew what she was doing, she was able to relocate her book in just seconds. Again, she was transported to another part of the virtual library, and again, she had no real idea where she was in relationship to anything else. But this time, fearful of losing her book again, she immediately clicked on its spine.

To her great surprise, nothing happened. Unlike all the other books she had accessed, this one did not pop out of its place on the shelves, opening itself to its first page. Puzzled, she clicked again. Still, no response. Frustrated, and now overwhelmed with curiosity to see what was in this book, she clicked repeatedly.

The book would not open. But as she clicked, she noticed a strange symbol appear on its spine, just below her name. The symbol was very faint, so she could not make out its form very well. She could only tell that it was circular in shape, yet not the same symbol that appeared on the door to this virtual library; this symbol appeared to have seven spokes, or radii, emerging from its center. It seemed to be activated by her use of the mouse; every time she clicked on the book, the symbol would appear, and when she paused, it would fade again.

She was abruptly brought back to the present by the sound of someone walking down the hall outside the office, another early bird on the way to work. The enormous gap between the real world that she lived in and this strange, fantasic world of cyberspace she had been immersed in hit her with the shock of cold water. For the first time in...what? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? She had completely lost track of time--she took her head away from the screen, and looked around at the familiar confines of the office. For a few seconds, she could hardly believe she was really there, still in this very ordinary, unmagical world, where everything was predictable, explainable and expected. It made the Internet library she had been touring seem like a dream, a world that wasn't even virtually real.

And perhaps it was a dream. For a moment later, when her attention returned to the screen, she discovered, to her astonishment, that the library of names was gone. Her computer had not bombed; she was still on the Web, but was now back where she had started, at the main library, the familiar library in Western Europe where she had spent so much time researching in the past. It was a large virtual room, but not nearly so immense as the library she had been in, and on these shelves were books with titles on them, not simply the names of people. Puzzled, she again searched out the hypertext link that had originally given her access to the library of names. But when she clicked on it now it took her to the special reference section, the tiny room with a few thousand volumes of rare books that had been her original destination. The library of names was gone.

Yet not completely. For as she began to search for the reference that she had originally needed, her eye was caught by a strange flickering movement in one corner of the screen. Bending close to the computer to examine it more carefully, she discovered to her shock that it was the symbol she had seen when she had tried to open the book with her name on it. As she watched in horrid fascination, it began to move, in a strange, undulating fashion, across her screen. Then abruptly, it disappeared into one of the books.

Following the preliminary demonstration of the biocomputer to the representatives from Bootstrap, Dewey Warren prepared to begin explaining the scientific principles underlying it, as well as showing everyone the actual process by which it was made. Everyone at the meeting had already been given a small but detailed technical manual, that each could look at but not take out of the building, that was designed to go into all the finest details. But for now, they would be given a fairly substantial overview.

By way of introduction, and also to give the Bootstrap representatives a chance to stretch their legs between sessions, Dewey began by leading the group out of the conference room, and up the elevators to the third floor, where his laboratory complex was situated. The main purpose of this little tour, as everyone associated with both companies was aware, was not to demonstrate the detailed, hands-on process by which biochips were made, but simply to show off: to make it clear to the Bootstrap people that Intron had the space, the equipment and the personnel necessary to carry out their part of a joint project.

And indeed, the physical plant was very impressive. As Dewey briefly pointed out some of the state-of-the-art laboratory equipment used in Intron's research, he casually, but without attempting to hide his pride, explained that virtually everything in the laboratories was under the control of the building's main computer--not only the refrigerators, freezers, centrifuges and other laboratory appliances, but even the doors to all the rooms, the lighting, the temperature, the relative humidity, and so forth. In sum, the entire indoor climate of the building.

"Much of the system is run by knowbots," Dewey explained, referring to semi-intelligent programs that were the mental equivalent of robots. The knowbots carried out specific assignments, such as determining the optimal schedules for the use of various pieces of shared equipment, adjusting air temperature, pressure and noise levels in a particular room according to the number and identity of people working there, or searching out from the literature data relevant to the planning of an experiment. "All we have to do is work," he added, smiling.

As the guests from Bootstrap watched in fascination, a technician guided a cart loaded with media and other reagents as it moved down a motorized track in the center of the corridor. When she came to one of the laboratories, the door automatically opened for her, the lights were switched on, and a needed laboratory bench, that had temporarily been folded back out of the way to increase the space in the room, assembled as she required. Peering curiously into the room, Intron's visitors further discovered that almost anything the smart system couldn't do was handled by a robot, which turned on and off taps, cleaned glassware, weighed out chemicals, and ran some of the more complex machinery.

Philippa LaTronica, the robotics expert, watched it approvingly. "Not bad," she remarked.

"Is the smart system located in the computer down in the conference room?" asked Cristina Palade-Moran. "That plain old silicon transistor mainframe--is that the central terminal?"

"Yes," replied Dewey. "Uncle Bill is the brains of the building. It runs the whole show."

"What happens if the system goes down?" she asked.

"The elevators, individual laboratories, lights, and so forth can all be decoupled from the main computer in an emergency," explained Dewey. As he now led the group back towards the elevators that would return them all to the second floor, he added, "However, we've never had that problem. Uncle Bill does not make mistakes."

Back in the conference room, everyone settled back into her seat as Dewey made his way to the end of the room where the electronic blackboard was located. As he began his explanation of the biochip's underlying principles, his ease and informality projected a quiet, professional confidence in his remarkable achievement. There was no trace of arrogance in his demeanor, but neither did he pretend a false modesty. He was all business.

"Let's begin by reviewing exactly what a transistor is, and what it does," he said briskly as he turned to face his audience. "Strictly kid stuff for most of you, I realize, but this review will help you understand the molecular details."

He began drawing a simple sketch on the blackboard.

"A transistor, basically, is just a wire, conducting electricity from one end to the other, with a junction, or diode, in the middle of it that controls this flow. When the junction is in one state, the current flows through; when it's in its other state, the current doesn't flow. Which state the junction happens to be in at any particular time, in turn, is generally controlled by a second wire, leading to that junction, which applies a certain voltage to the junction. Depending on that voltage, the diode junction either does or does not pass current. Thus a transistor always exists in one of two states, on or off, determined by the voltage applied to it. This simple principle, repeated literally millions or billions of times, is the principle underlying all digital operations on a computer."

Having finished the sketch, he turned around to face his audience again.

"From this diagram, you can see that a transistor, boiled down to its essential elements, really consists of three wires, merging at a single point, the diode. This is the basic pattern that we want our DNA template to adopt. We want to form a network of DNA molecules in which every node, or junction, joins three separate strands."

He turned back to the blackboard.

"In order to get DNA to do this, we take advantage of the way it normally reproduces itself. I think all of you know that DNA is a double helix--two complementary strands of nucleotide bases that spiral around each other. When the double helix reproduces itself, these two strands begin to separate at one end, so that each separate strand can synthesize its complement."

He drew a small sketch of this process.

"From this diagram, you can see that we already have the beginning of the transistor. That is, we have a strand of DNA that, at a certain point becomes two strands. In other words, we now have three double-helical strands of DNA, all merging at one point."

He turned around to face the others again.

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is the basis of our biochip's structure. I won't go into great detail on how we have accomplished this--it's all in that handout that all of you have--but basically, we have simply developed a rapid, convenient process that allows us to start and stop DNA replication at will. In this way, we can very quickly produce millions of DNA molecules that have this three-pronged form, the basic outline of a transistor."

He paused briefly to see if there were questions. He was acutely aware of Amanda Iversen's virtual visage looming up from the screen at the opposite end of the room, and he could imagine her mind going into overdrive, but she was holding her fire, at least for now. Perhaps Vern had told her to save her really detailed queries for later, as the rest of the Bootstrap group would not understand them.

"So far, so good," he continued. "But now we come to a problem: DNA, as it happens, is not a very good conductor of electricity; it really isn't suitable as a transistor itself. So what we have to do is use another type of molecule, one that can polymerize into long chains or polymers just as the nucleotide bases of DNA do, but which also has the ability to conduct electricity. Molecules with this property are known as electronic plastics, because they have the same polymeric structure as other types of plastics, yet can carry a current and so be used in electronic devices."

Dewey went on to explain how they had chosen the particular molecule they used, and how, in the presence of the DNA, it would polymerize so as to form strands of polymers that followed the outlines of the DNA molecules completely. These strands became molecular wires, which carried the current in the transistor.

Then, in response to a question, he dropped his first bombshell, the first indication of how truly revolutionary these biotransistors were.

"So the DNA is just a simple structural support?" Amanda asked. "The whole purpose of it is to hold the molecular wires in place?"

"Yes and no," replied Dewey. "It is a structural support. However, it does more than that in our biocomputer. In fact, we use the DNA to synthesize the molecular wires themselves." He paused a moment, looking around at the group, again trying to judge whether they were following him. "I think all of you understand that DNA molecules carry information coding for enzymes, or proteins. Enzymes, in turn, are catalysts that can synthesize almost any other molecule in nature. What we have done is engineered into the DNA a gene that codes for an enzyme that in turn synthesizes the molecule that forms the basic structure of our molecular wire. The DNA, in other words, contains all the information necessary to construct the molecular wire that will be basis of our biotransistor."

A murmur of awe and appreciation swept over the Bootstrap contingent. Amanda was deadpan, listening intently.

"So the DNA is really doing all the work for you?" Vernon Chao said. "It's actually creating the transistor by itself, from the information coded in its genes?"

"Exactly," replied Dewey, still keeping an eye on Iversen. She well knew, of course, how oversimplified this explanation was, how devilishly difficult it could often be to get genes to do anything at all. Even when they were inserted into living cells where they had everything they needed to promote synthesis of RNA and proteins, they frequently didn't work. The logistics in the biochip, where everything not only had to be made in the right quantity but in the right place, were far more challenging.

"But how do you keep the electrical current confined to these molecular wires?" Philippa asked pointedly. "Surely the wires have to be insulated from each other, and from this, er, medium, or whatever it is that the DNA is in?"

"Good point," responded Dewey quickly and appreciatively. "Very good point. The answer is, yes, they do, and to do that, we use another molecule, which is synthesized by another gene that we have engineered into the DNA."

He then went on to explain the emerging technology of nanotubes, molecular structures that formed hollow, tube-like structures open at both ends. These tubes could be made out of many substances, but Dewey used peptides, very small proteins consisting of just a few amino acids linked end to end. Though peptides are normally long, string like structures, some of them had the ability to bring their two ends together to form a circular structure--rather like a snake biting its tail. These molecular rings or circles could then be stacked up on each other like a roll of lifesavers to form the nanotube, which completely enclosed the molecular wire, insulating it from not only other wires but from anything else near it.

"However, we're not home yet," Dewey continued after a pause for questions and comments. "We still have to have a diode, something that controls the passage of current. In a conventional silicon transistor, as you all know, the diode is controlled by electricity. A voltage is placed across it, which determines whether the transistor will or will not pass electricity. What we need, therefore, is a single molecule that will perform this function."

He then explained how this was accomplished in the biotransistor. There were many molecules with the property, upon accepting an electric charge, of changing their shape, that is, of flipping from one conformation to another. By building such a molecule into the junction of the three molecular wires they could create a molecular switch. Depending on the flow of the current into this switch, it would either open or close, by flipping into one shape or another, and in this way regulate the flow of current through the transistor.

This induced some murmurs of appreciation from the visitors. Philippa seemed particularly impressed.

"Neat," she remarked, "real neat."

Dewey felt some measure of relief now; though there was a good deal left, perhaps the most difficult part of the presentation was over. If all of them had followed him up to this point, they should be able to get through the rest.

"And I take it," Amanda Iversen asked, "that again, this particular molecule is synthesized by enzymes coded for in the DNA? That the DNA controls the synthesis of this molecular switch?"

"Exactly," replied Dewey, again waiting for a pounce, a tough question, that never came.

At this point the Bootstrap people fell to discussing what they had heard among themselves, making certain that they understood everything that had been said so far. Several more clarifying questions were asked, such as electrical grounding in the biochip, with Dewey drawing more figures in illustration. Then, in response to another question, they moved on.

"What about information storage?" asked Chao. "How is that accomplished in your system?"

Dewey nodded. "Right. So far, I have just described the basic structure of the CPU, the central processing unit. This is what carries out all the calculations in any computer, all the logical steps, manipulates all of the data. But obviously, the biocomputer has to have data to manipulate, and that means it has to have a way of storing data. And since this computer is so much faster and more powerful than any other computer ever created, it of course requires storage space of corresponding magnitude, storage space vastly greater than conventional media can provide."

Again, he turned to the blackboard and began sketching.

"In the conventional computer, information is usually stored on the hard disk. Most of you know the basic principle by which a hard disk operates. It consists of one or more platters, disks that are constantly spinning around their centers, like records on a turntable. A form of energy--magnetic in conventional hard disks, light in the newer optical models--is used to make selective changes in tiny, discrete areas of the hard disk as it spins by. Any particular piece of information is thus stored as this tiny change in the surface of the hard disk--as, for example, a portion that has now become magnetized. When we want to read out that information again, we simply return to that tiny area with a sensor that can pick up this new, magnetized property."

He now indicated with his hand the sketch he had drawn earlier of a molecular switch moving back and forth between two conformations.

"A conventional hard disk can store what seems like vast amounts of information, but again, when we move to the molecular scale, we can achieve an almost incomprehensibly larger increase. For in our biocomputer, ladies and gentlemen, each piece of information is stored in one single protein molecule, the ultimate in miniaturization. To accomplish this, we again take advantage of the ability of certain molecules to change their shape, to flip from one conformation to another under certain circumstances. In this case, light is used to trigger this change. When exposed to one wavelength of light, the molecules will flip into one state; when they're exposed to a different wavelength, they flip back into their orginal state. In our biocomputer, the hard disk is basically a thin film containing literally millions of these protein molecules. Every one of these molecules can store a bit of information."

He glanced around the group, trying to play the teacher.

"And where does this molecule come from?" he asked.

"From a gene built into the DNA," several people responded, so nearly in unison that everyone else in the room laughed.

"Yes, and now you can understand the basic structure of the biocomputer. To recap, we start with DNA molecules, which form the skeleton upon which the biotransistor will be built. And every other component of the computer--the molecular wires carrying the current through the transistor, and the insulating tubes surrounding them; the molecular diodes that regulate passage of electricity through these molecular wires; and the protein molecules that store data in the hard disk; are synthesized by the DNA. Our entire biocomputer, ladies and gentlemen, consists of a microscopic droplet smaller than a living cell, yet has the computational and information storage power of a desk-top computer. That prototype that Rob showed you contains in fact thousands of such biocomputers, all housed in a single unit."

Warren paused to let this sink in. The three principal Bootstrap representatives, along with Cristina Palade-Moran, were talking among themselves again, asking each other questions, sharing notes and their own specialized knowledge, drawing their own versions of the diagrams that were before them on the electronic blackboard. More questions were asked, about the source of light used for the hard disk, and the construction of the molecular monitor.

By this time, all the members of Bootstrap were decidedly impressed if not necessarily totally convinced, and were freely talking and interrupting each other and Warren. Vernon Chao had gotten out of his chair, gone up to the blackboard, and began going over the figures to make sure that he understood it all. All pretense to formality had dissolved; the two research groups now seemed one. But Dewey Warren and Intron had saved the best for last. If there were any remaining doubts about what the company had achieved, they would be dissipated, he felt, when Intron's suitors were able to abandon this abstract discussion and meet a biochip, face-to-face.

"We have a model of the biochip on the computer," Warren continued, pointing to the enormous flat panel display at the opposite end of the room, "which says it all much better than I can."

Everyone now turned to look at the screen, emitting a collective gasp at the image of the biochip that confronted them. For it appeared to be far more than an image on a screen; it was the real thing, floating there in space in front of them. To begin with, the life-like appearance of the biochip had been enhanced by the use of volume-rendering software, which permitted the viewer to see into multiple layers of a three-dimensional object simultaneously. Different layers of the biochip were in effect depicted on different screens, or windows, of the computer. These screens could be made transparent, so that when they were stacked one upon another, the viewer could see all of them at once. The result was a stunningly immediate view of the entire contents of the biochip.

But the computer wizardry went even beyond this, for the screen itself seemed to dissolve, along with the wall behind it; everyone there would have sworn that they were looking into another room beyond that wall, in the middle of which was the freely-floating biochip. Edwin Land, inventor of the polaroid camera, had first suggested that what we perceive depends on the reflectance of objects in our environment, that is, how much light of long and short wavelengths is reflected by these objects. By making use of this principle, the screen could be made to display any scene or object or image exactly as one would perceive it in a three dimensional existence. The human eye could not tell the difference.

There was a moment of awed silence as several of the Bootstrap team got up and walked over to the screen to inspect the image more closely. All of these software experts were aware of these optical tricks, but none of them had ever before seen them applied to an image as intricate as the biochip,which, like a living thing, was constantly changing its form before their eyes. The boundary of the conference room seemed to have dissolved; they were in two worlds at once, the macroscopic one of ordinary life and the cyberworld of the biochip.

"We can do everything except touch it," Vernon Chao joked after a moment.

Dewey nodded. "True. But in virtual reality, you can do even that. I now would like to invite all of you to climb in and shake hands with the biochip--literally."

Over the image of the biochip the following words now appeared, in large block letters, as though announcing the beginning of a science fiction movie: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. This was a well known in-joke among many hard-core computer users. Human interaction with artificial, computer-generated reality had by now passed into its third stage. The first stage, which had become well-established years ago, was visual and auditory; the user would don a head-set and appear to be immersed in the scene on the computer. The second stage, a more recent development, was physical; wearing a suit with appropriate connections to the body musculature, the person could actually walk about in virtual reality, even manipulate objects. The third stage, still in its experimental phase and available only at the most cutting-edge institutes such as Intron, was tactile; by means of sensors connected to points all over the skin, the person could actually feel the texture of objects, and even experience common sensations such as heat and cold, pressure and pain.

Dewey now went to a small cabinet at one side of the conference room and removed several virtual reality suits. Their entry into virtual reality actually was intended to impress the Bootstrap representatives in a second manner. Not only would they be able to examine the biochip close up, but in the process, they would see how its invention was revolutionizing virtual reality itself. For in contrast to the huge, clumsy astronaut-like suits loaded with relatively heavy wires and sensors that conventional virtual reality employed, Intron, making use of its molecular level technology, had designed a garment so light and natural-looking that it could have been worn on the street without evoking any stares. One could slip it on and off in a matter of a few seconds. Likewise, they had eliminated the need for heavy headsets, using what amounted to a pair of large, but still ordinary looking, wraparound glasses.

If the biochip had appeared totally realistic on the screen, it was, if possible, even more real in virtual realilty: an enormous globe-like structure the innards of which were clearly visible through a transparent, jelly-like medium that it contained.

"Try walking around it," Dewey Warren encouraged them. "Or walking through it. Touch it. Feel it. Hold it."

As they did so, all of them gushed with awe and respect.

"Those nanotubes don't leak a single electron, do they?" remarked Philippa.

"Those proteins flip on a dime," commented Cristina.

"Yecchh!" exclaimed Vernon Chao. "It's so slimy!"

Still, this was not a science fair, but a business deal. They enjoyed the technical fireworks, but money was the bottom line. So after the virtual reality demonstration, they returned to their places around the table, and Rob Sawyer, along with one of the other Intron officials, answered more practical questions, fired off by Chao and Bootstrap's chief financial officer: How long did it take to make one of these remarkable biocomputers? How many could Intron produce in a given period of time? How much did the raw materials cost: bacteria, enzymes, proteins, and all the other reagents involved?

Another key question, raised by Philippa LaTronica, was compatibility with current computer technology.

"Was it really necessary to design a whole new computer, with its own software, for these biochips?" she asked. "Would it be possible to use them in a conventional computer, just replacing the silicon transistors?"

"We're still working on that," Dewey replied. "We certainly hope we can make them compatible. If we can, then biochips will find very wide application. Major computer manufacturers like IBM and Macintosh will want to buy these transistors, and use them in their own computers. No matter what happens, of course, we will be marketing our own computer, and we expect it will do very well. After all, the biocomputer is far more powerful than anything else out there today. But the current powers that be will put up plenty of resistance. Seeing as we are a new and rather small start-up company, very much dependent on our shareholders' perceptions of our potential, I would much rather have the other computer manufacturers on our side from the beginning. If we can sell the transistors independent of the computers, so much the better for all of us."

Finally, the meeting was thrown open to miscellaneous questions of any nature. Philippa LaTronica asked some fairly detailed questions about the way the transistors were wired, and wanted to know how stable the biochips were, whether they were likely to change their performance characteristics over a period of time. Cris Palade-Moran had some questions about storage capacity, as well as processing speed. Chao speculated about the design of the biocomputers, how they would be housed and packaged. Finally, Amanda Iversen, who had been surprisingly silent throughout most of the technical explanation, spoke up. A hush immediately fell over the room as everyone turned towards the screen, for everyone understood she was the one person in attendance really competent to criticize what Dewey had done.

"Dewey, all of this is, to say the least, extremely impressive. You have made some major breakthroughs in molecular biology that are almost beyond belief." Was she saying, he wondered, that she didn't believe him? "I have some technical questions that I want to ask you later, but right now, I would like to raise another possible area of concern." She paused, and the others could see her glancing down for a moment, apparently at some notes on her desk. When she began speaking again, her voice seemed to break a little, as if she were trying hard to suppress some emotion. The words came out slowly, one or a few at a time.

"Since these biochips contain biologically active DNA molecules, DNA that is actually capable of expressing itself"--here she used molecular biological lingo for the ability of DNA to synthesize a protein--"aren't you somewhat concerned about the possibility that they might begin to go out of control? For example, suppose the biochips developed the capacity to reproduce themselves?"

Dewey instantly felt a flush of both relief and astonishment at this question. Relief because she had not chosen, at least not here, to probe into any of the more tricky technical problems that they still encountered in making biochips with high and reproducible performance, problems that he was certain she could guess at. Yet he also felt astonishment that she had asked the question she had. For surely she was far too sophisticated a scientist to take it seriously.

"I think I made it clear earlier, Amanda," he replied, trying to show the surprise that he genuinely felt, "that these biochips have no potential at all to reproduce. They can only do what we have designed them to do." Speaking now more to her colleagues than to her, he added, "As you of course are well aware, reproduction in real, living cells is a very complex process which requires dozens of different enzymes, all of which have to be coordinated perfectly. The biochips lack these enzymes."

There was a long pause before Amanda answered, again slowly, a few measured words at a time.

"Yet to manufacture the chips in the first place, it was necessary to have the DNA reproducing itself like crazy."

"Yes, and when the biochip was formed, the synthetic enzymes needed to catalyze the duplication of the DNA molecules were inactivated. They are not part of the finished biochip."

"But surely you can't be certain that one hundred percent of the synthetic activity has been destroyed in every biochip. If even a trace of it remained, you could get further duplication."

Dewey threw up his hands in a gesture of nomchalance.

"So what? At worst, the duplication of DNA in that biochip would probably render its performance ineffective."

Amanda shook her head, her long dark hair framing a sharp, narrow face that suddenly seemed alive with concentration on the argument.

"I'm not so sure about that, Dewey. After all, these are pretty simple structures. They have only a few genes. Their reproductive requirements wouldn't be as complex as those of real cells."

Dewey was becoming a little flustered. He knew perfectly well that what she was saying was nonsense, and she had to know that, too. But her Bootstrap colleagues, who had very little understanding of DNA and cells, probably would not know. From their point of view, she might be raising a very serious problem, and the longer he dignified that problem by arguing with her, the harder it would be to convince them that it was not a problem at all.

He suddenly got up, walked down to the end of the conference room where the image of his antagonist floated eerily on the screen of the large terminal there, and gesturing to it with one hand, began speaking in an unnaturally loud, emphatic voice. "You know, I really wish these things could reproduce themselves, Amanda. I wish I could just put them in a test tube, and have them make millions more of themselves, just like bacteria. Because if they could do that, I could retire as a billionaire, couldn't I? I wouldn't have to run Intron any more. The biocomputers would just make themselves!"

Everybody laughed.

If anyone had told Ethan Tataki, just months earlier, that he would soon find himself working for the FBI, he would have considered the remark too far out to qualify even as a joke. He had nothing against federal agents as long as they kept their hands off the Internet, but that was just what they couldn't seem to do. First they had tried to regulate what kind of material could go online, according to standards that reflected, in his view, the values of the twenty or thirty million people remaining in the U.S. who would never learn to use a computer, anyway--those hopelessly archaic souls who still considered television to be their prime source of news and entertainment. Then, in a classic hegemonic move, the government had turned from quality to quantity, attempting to control the size of Web sites. Now, unsatisfied with even that, they were rumored to be considering--in the name of environmental necessity yet!--online time at peak hours.

But if law and order were the rock, e-world anarchy was becoming the hard place. In theory, it was easy enough to design protection from all but the cleverest of Web crimes, just as one could erect fences and station guards around one's home. But as had long ago happened in suburbia, the cure was becoming worse than the disease. What fun was the Internet if you had to have a separate password to enter every site, all communications were encrypted, and a new virus was on the loose every week? Better, Ethan had grudgingly decided, to let a few policemen into the neighborhood, in the hopes of scaring off these vandals. Maybe a few enlightened cops like himself could change the heads of the rest of them, ha-ha.

He smoothed back his glorious lumbar-length hair, as iridescently dark as a starling, shrugged his thin, bony shoulders, and took another puff of his cigarette. He smoked too much even when he was where he wanted to be--alone yet not alone in cyberspace--and when he was reporting to his superior he couldn't restrain himself at all. Dell Fairbanks was not a bad guy--stolid, ponderous of movement, never seemed to get excited, a classic man-you-want-in-a crisis, and he knew computers too, had used them before Ethan and his generation's technology had been born. But Ethan still felt weird every time he walked into Fairbanks' San Francisco office, as though he were a traitor to that generation. It wasn't the law that made him uncomfortable, it was the order.

Their relationship had developed gradually. Fairbanks had first contacted Ethan several months ago, the latter having been recommended to him as an authority in tracing Internet traffic. With Ethan's help, the FBI had eventually apprehended a man running a novel Ponzi scheme that involved the selling of non-existent cyberspace. Since that time, Ethan had given the government useful advice in how to spot and track various other types of Web frauds, even presenting a seminar on the subject to a group of agents. He had to admit that he enjoyed it, except that he was growing tired of seeing the same kind of rather low-grade crimes committed over and over. It had been a long time, it occurred to him, since a hacker had done anything very original on the Web.

"It didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary at first," Fairbanks began. "My son, who surfs the Net quite a bit, couldn't get into his homepage one day. Got the usual message saying that it might be busy, so he should try later. Nothing strange about that, except that it had never happened before. His site doesn't get that many hits. So he called his local server to find out what was going on--wanted to see why he had become so popular all of a sudden. They checked it out, and it turned out that no one at all had accessed that site during that period of time. Furthermore, when they tried to get in, they had no problem at all. My son, who is very good, felt the whole thing was a little odd, but he quickly forgot all about it."

Ethan listened intently, constantly removing his cigarette from his mouth to tap it into an ashtray, an action he did with so much nervous movement that it seemed as though his fingers were on fire. Fairbanks was the type of man who took his time, which frequently irritated Ethan, who preferred cutting to the chase. He found himself wondering how Fairbanks would respond in a situation where he had to act quickly. Say some armed holdup man were running down the street, every step taking him further out of the reach of the law. Would Fairbanks pause and survey the situation before deciding what he would do? Would he...Oh, never mind.

"But then, about two days later, the same thing happened to one of my son's friends. He couldn't access some site he was interested in. Again, it was a site he was very familiar with, a site he had never had a problem accessing before. So it was checked out, and again, no problem. Very weird."

Fairbanks paused and glanced at his own terminal, sitting at one side of his desk, as though expecting to find more evidence of hanky-panky right there.

"My son began to get curious, so he started asking around among his friends and other people he knew. Turns out it was happening quite a bit--people couldn't get into some site on the Web. This does go on all the time, of course, but it seemed to be occurring much more frequently than it should have been, and in places where it shouldn't have been happening at all. But the problem was always very brief. Usually, by the time the administrator looked into it, the site was perfectly accessible."

Ethan nodded, his head bobbing up and down in impatient assent. Now that he thought about it, he had had the same experience himself several times during the past week. And yes, it had seemed to occur more often than it usually did. Still, no big deal, unless Fairbanks knew something more, which he presumably did. The FBI had not asked him to come in to tell him about some curious glitch on the Internet.

"So you think someone might be behind all this. You think someone might be hacking his way into these sites, changing the code to deny the owner access, then getting out before he can be discovered. A sort of game of musical chairs."

Fairbanks nodded, still refusing to be hurried in presenting his story.

"I did a little research. Called around to various servers. It turns out that the problem is very extensive. We're probably greatly underestimating it, because many people may not report it when it happens. Maybe they try once, figure the site is busy, and come back later. And of course, sometimes it really is busy, I fully concede that. Still, the rate of increase of this problem, in the places where I was able to document it, is remarkable. Taking everything into account, we seem to be talking about a sizeable fraction of the Web being affected."

"And when the problem site is accessed later, it's always untouched? No alterations have been made in it?"

Fairbanks nodded.

"Which raises the question, if someone is behind this, and we're pretty sure someone is, what's he trying to do? It's not a simple case of vandalism."

"Unless someone is planting something in these sites," Ethan pointed out. "A virus or a bomb or something that has a delayed effect."

Fairbanks shook his head.

"I can't say that in all cases, but after I told my son about this, he went over his site with a fine-tooth comb. Could find no evidence of any tinkering. Likewise with everyone else he knows."

Ethan thought about this for a moment, his cigarette temporarily suspended between his mouth and the ashtray, his long, saber-nailed fingers holding it as though he were afraid of crushing it.

"How big is your son's site? And how much of its space does he actually use?"

Fairbanks paused to consider this. "I'm not sure. Maybe a hundred megs or so. I don't think he uses very much of it."

Ethan nodded. "Most people don't. Despite what you cybercops think"--here he paused pointedly and almost glared at Fairbanks, and all he represented--"there's a lot of unused space out there on the Web. That could be what our mysterious friend, if he really exists, is after."

Fairbanks looked puzzled. "How so?" he asked.

"For some kind of program." Ethan took a long drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. "This kind of thing does go on legitimately, did you know. Say some professor wants to study global warming. He creates a model of the earth with ten thousand variables, changes them this way and that, and cranks out various scenarios. Some of these babies are too big even for a mainframe, so they borrow unused space on other people's computers or on the Web. With permission, of course. It's like renting out the unused rooms in your house." He took a deep, sucking breath, as he did periodically when he talked for very long. "This hypothetical person, I take it, was a very gracious guest. He stayed out of the occupied rooms, didn't touch anything that didn't belong to him. He just changed the keys, is all."

"That's very interesting," replied Fairbanks, "because in fact we have reason to believe that there may be some kind of massive file or program involved in this caper." He picked up a piece of paper from his desk. Ethan, in the process of lighting another cigarette, stopped abruptly, now all attention. "We know a little more about these people," continued Fairbanks. "There is more than one of them. Someone at one of the servers, alerted by us that a hacker might be entering sites unlawfully, managed to get enough information to finger the main man. Got an e-mail address--forged, of course, and only in use temporarily. But enough to come up with this." He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and handed it across to Ethan. The latter, at a glance, could see that it was encrypted.

"An extremely sophisticated code," Fairbanks explained, not disguising the admiration in his voice. "In fact, in theory, the code should have been impossible to crack. According to our experts back in Washington, it makes use of the principles of quantum physics. The key to the code is based on knowing the spin direction of subatomic particles, or something like that, and it can be designed so that only the sender and the receiver can possibly know this information. It can't be predicted by anyone else." He handed Ethan a second sheet of paper, containing the translation. "Fortunately, the quantum code is still theoretical at this point. What we have here is a very good try, but not yet good enough."

Ethan skimmed the message quickly, then reread it more slowly. It was fairly short, and at first glance, its general meaning very clear.

Ethan finally set the message down on the desk, though he continued to glance at it.

"Every File on earth," he muttered half to himself. "They want to destroy every file on earth."

Fairbanks nodded sympathetically.

"These people think big, give them credit for that." He put his chin in his hands and gazed down at his desk. "Seems pretty obvious what they're up to. This program of theirs, whatever it is, is going to go over the Web to every computer online at the time. It will destroy all the files on that computer, and at the same time set itself up to be transferred to other computers."

But to Fairbanks' surprise, Ethan slowly began to shake his head.

"Nuh-uh. I don't think so. I almost know not so." He took an uncharacteristically long drag on his cigarette, his dark, beautiful eyes commanding Fairbanks not to interrupt him.

"It's been done before, you know," he pointed out a moment later, tapping the end of his cigarette vibratingly quickly into the ashtray. "That's old hat now. If I understand anything at all about these people, they want to do something new, something that's never been done before. It's in their character"--he tapped the e-mail message with his finger--"and in their acts. You don't need a huge operation to stop the Internet, you know that. Someone almost pulled it off last year with a program that would have fit on a floppy."

"So what do you think they are up to?"

Ethan was uncharacteristically quiet for several moments, continuing to study the message. Every time he read it, he seemed to see more in it, and his respect for the author was growing by leaps and bounds. He had never seen anything quite like it.

"Dunno," he conceded finally. "I keep asking myself that. I keep asking myself what more could a hacker do than shut down the Internet and try to destroy as many files as possible in the process. That's been the ultimate fantasy, the industry standard, as it were, but as I say, it's not new any more. It's like robbing a bank, did you know. It proves that you have the mind of a criminal, but it doesn't prove that you're a master criminal. It doesn't generate much respect any more even among the people who go in for that sort of thing." He stubbed out his cigarette, and surprisingly, did not immediately light a new one. His hands, unsure what to do with themselves, began to prance around in the air in front of him.

"Suppose--" he began, then abruptly stopped.

"Go on," Fairbanks encouraged him.

Ethan, his hair covering almost half his face, shot a shy smile out from under it. "I've got this crazy idea, you see. It's really far out. I don't even see how it's possible. But maybe these people think it is."

"I'm listening."

Ethan paused again, clearly reluctant to continue.

"Ask yourself this, Dell. What is the Internet composed of? Besides computers and their programs, I mean." He looked encouragingly at the older man. But Fairbanks was completely in the dark.

"Besides computers? Nothing, really. Modems, wires..." He stopped and looked helplessly at Ethan.

The latter leaned forward eagerly over Fairbanks' desk.

"People, Dell. You can't have an Internet without people, can you?"

Fairbanks did a double take.

"Well, no, of course not. But so what?"

"So suppose this pair's grand plan is to shut down not just computers, but the people who use them?"

Fairbanks' jaw dropped in astonishment at this bizarre, not to mention apparently unrealistic, suggestion.

"What the hell are you talking about, anyway?"

Ethan levered himself back from the desk into his chair.

"I don't really know," he admitted. "At least, I'm not sure enough of myself to say anything crazier than I already have." His hands, still groping around blindly, finally found a cigarette and began to light it. "But that's what I read in that message. The purpose of this program is not just to affect computers, but the people who use them. They want to do something to us, to all of us." He took a nervous drag on his cigarette, and pointed to the message. "Look at this phrase here: 'our goal is that absolutely no product of the human mind remain'." He looked up at Fairbanks, wide-eyed. "Dell, even if every computer on earth were destroyed, there would still be other products of the human mind around, wouldn't there? Like books and papers and...hell, the whole civilized world is a product of the human mind. Everything we've ever made or invented or thought about or..." He broke off as another point occurred to him. "They even refer to the time when the program goes out on the Internet as the end of the world."

Fairbanks shrugged.

"Could be just hyperbole."

"Maybe. "Ethan studied the e-mail some more. "But there's other strange things about this message. Like the word 'Files'; it's capitalized." He glanced up at Fairbanks again. "This is a correct translation, right?" Fairbanks nodded. "Okay," continued Ethan, "why did they capitalize that word? It's the only word in the entire body of the message that's capitalized. Why? I think they did it because they mean something special about it. It doesn't refer to file in the ordinary sense."

"What do you think it does refer to?"

Ethan shook his head. "I don't know," he muttered. "But it has to have significance. I just know it does."

Ethan fell silent, very thoughtful about what he had read, and a rather awkward moment ensued as Fairbanks struggled to understand what Ethan himself did not understand. The big FBI man waited a little uncertainly for Ethan to speak again, and when he didn't, Fairbanks shifted gears a little.

"Anyway, one thing that does seem clear from this message is that they're pulling off the Web. They've found another place to put their program."

Ethan nodded.

"And they're getting it off very fast," Fairbanks continued. "The number of these site break-ins has declined tremendously in the past few days. We think most of this library, whatever it is, has been transferred to a single computer by now. The computer they refer to."

Ethan's eyes glimmered as he considered this. He had been so absorbed with trying to understand what the author of the e-mail was planning to do, what his program was all about, that the implications of this transfer had been lost on him. Now he suddenly realized what it meant.

"Which raises the question, where is this computer? Our working hypothesis is that they have this huge program, a program so big that they apparently had to use space all over the Web to store it. What kind of computer could store all of this by itself?"

"Not any computer I'm aware of," replied Fairbanks. "If my estimates of the size of this file or program or whatever it is are anywhere near corrrect, there isn't a computer in the world that could hold it. Maybe not even a roomful of mainframes."

Again that eager light came into Ethan's eyes.

"Obviously they think they have one."

He studied the e-mail message for another moment, then picked it up and rose from his chair--it never would have occurred to him to ask Dell's permission to keep the highly confidential message. As he made his way to the door, there was a spring to his step that he had not felt for a long, long time. He could hardly wait to get back to his own computer, and begin the hunt.

"I think I know how to find these people, Dell. Catch you later."