By the light of the moon

Dylan promised his brother.
    'Cheez-Its,' Shep said without looking up from his open
palms.
    'We'll get something better than Cheez-Its, buddy.'
    'Shep likes Cheez-Its.'
    'I know you do, buddy.' To Jilly, Dylan said, 'They're a nice
square snack.'
    'What would he do if you gave him those little cheese-cracker
fish – what're they called, Goldfish?' she wondered.
    'Shep hates Goldfish,' the kid said at once. 'They're
shapey. They're all round and shapey. Goldfish suck. They're too
shapey. They're disgusting . Goldfish stink. They suck, suck,
suck.'
    'You've hit on a sore point,' Dylan told Jilly.
    'No Goldfish,' she promised Shep.
    'Goldfish suck.'
    'You're absolutely right, sweetie. They're totally too shapey,'
Jilly said.
    ' Disgusting .'
    'Yes, sweetie, totally disgusting.'
    'Cheez-Its,' Shep insisted.
    Jilly would have spent the rest of the day talking about the
shapes of snack foods if that would have prevented Dylan from
telling her more than she could bear to know about what those
nanomachines might be doing inside her body right this very minute,
but before she could mention Wheat Thins, he returned to the
dreaded subject.
    'In that interview,' Dylan said, 'Proctor even claims that one
day millions of psychotropic nanomachines—'
    Jilly winced. 'Psychotropic.'
    '—might be injected into the human body—'
    'Injected. Here we go.'
    '—travel with the blood supply to the brain—'
    She shuddered. 'Machines in the brain.'
    '—and colonize the brain stem, cerebellum, and
cerebrum.'
    'Colonize the brain.'
    'Disgusting,' Shep said, though he was most likely still talking
about Goldfish.
    Dylan said, 'Proctor envisions a forced evolution of the brain
conducted by nanomachines and nanocomputers.'
    'Why didn't somebody kill the son of a bitch years ago?'
    'He says these nanomachines could be programmed to analyze the
structure of the brain at a cellular level, firsthand, and find
ways to improve the design.'
    'I guess I failed to vote when Lincoln Proctor was elected to be
the new god.'
    Taking her hands out of her armpits, Jilly opened her fists and
looked at her palms. She was glad that she didn't know how to read
them.
    Dylan said, 'These colonies of nanomachines might be able to
create new connections between various lobes of the brain, new
neural pathways—'
    She resisted the impulse to put her hands to her head, for fear
that she would feel some faint strange vibration through her skull,
evidence of a horde of nanomachines busily changing her from
within.
    '—better synapses. Synapses are the points of contact
between neurons in a neural pathway inside the brain, and
apparently they become fatigued when we think or just when we stay
awake too long. When they're fatigued they slow down our thought
processes.'
    Dead serious, not reaching for a wisecrack, she said, 'I could
use a little synapse fatigue right now. My thoughts are spinning
way too fast.'
    'There's more in the interview,' Dylan said, pointing again at
the laptop screen. 'I skimmed some of it, and there was a lot that
I just didn't understand, a lot of fumfuddle about something called
the precentral gyrus, and the postcentral gyrus, Purkinje cells...
on and on with the arcane words. But I understood enough to realize
what a hole we're in.'
    No longer able to resist pressing her fingertips to her temples,
Jilly felt no vibrations. Nevertheless, she said, 'God, it doesn't
bear thinking about. Millions of tiny nanomachines and
nanocomputers salted through your head, squirming around in there
like so many bees, busy ants, making changes... It's not tolerable,
is it?'
    Dylan's face had gone gray enough to suggest that if his usual
optimism had not burned out, at least it had for the moment grown
as dim as banked coals. 'It's got to be tolerable. We don't have
any choice but to think about it. Unless we take the Shep option.
But then who would cut our food into squares and
rectangles?'
    Indeed, Jilly couldn't decide whether talking about this machine
infection or not talking about it would lead more surely and
quickly to full-blown panic. She felt a dark winged terror perched
within her, its feathers fluttering agitatedly, and she knew that
if she didn't control it, didn't keep it firmly on its perch, if
she allowed it to take flight, she might never bring it to roost
again; and she knew that once it had flown long enough, frantically
battering its pinions against the walls of every chamber in the
mansion of her mind, her sanity would take flight with