BZRK

cluttered table. “Your babies are in here. They’re warming to room temperature. When I open this box, they’ll see light, which means you’ll see through their eyes.”
    Both Sadie and Keats looked nervously at the box.
    “Each of you has two biots. Each of those biots has two types of eye. A compound insect eye that is very good at detecting motion, and a quasi-human eye that is somewhat better at color and definition. But the human brain is not well suited for making sense of these disparate visuals. So each of you has been altered.”
    “Say what?” Keats snapped.
    “When we sent our biots in, we brought a package of altered stem cells and planted them in your visual cortexes. It’s not strictly necessary—a biot runner can see without them—but they’ll see the actual, not the enhanced, visuals. See, down at the nano level there’s no real color. Pigmentation is too spread out, not sufficiently concentrated to be seen. So with bare visual you’ll see shapes and edges, but all gray scale. With enhanced visual you get color as well.”
    “Do we want to see what’s down there in color?” Plath asked.
    “In a battle it’s very, very helpful.”
    “I guess we’ll just move right past the fact that you have no right to be planting anything in our brains,” Plath snapped.
    “Yes, we will,” Ophelia said. “We don’t have a lot of time. So let’s get to it, shall we? We’re going to activate one biot for each of you, and then place them. Down in the meat, as we say. I’ll have one of my own biots accompany yours, Keats. A guide.”
    “Wait. What? Now?” Keats asked.
    “Plath, you have the simpler task. Yours is a simple tour. But our friend Keats here is needed to take on an important job almost immediately.”
    “Important job? What job?” Keats demanded, as Plath tried to avoid feeling like she was being slighted.
    “Plath,” Ophelia said. “I have three biots working at the site of your aneurysm. The Teflon weave was dangerously weakened by multiple traumas last night. I’m like the boy in the story, the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. I’m holding it together, but I have other duties. And we need someone who can remain close to you.”
    Plath hated the look of shocked concern on Keats’s face. It looked a lot like pity.
    “And Wilkes will walk you through your own tour, Plath,” Ophelia said. “If she ever gets here.”
    “I’m here.” Wilkes climbed out from a dark corner, rubbed sleep from her eyes, did a simultaneous smile and yawn, stretched and said, “Just have to pee first.” They heard her clattering down the stairs.
    “Now listen to me, both of you,” Ophelia said, leaning into them, clasping her hands like she was considering a prayer. “You’re going into a very, very strange world. What you see can be quite disturbing.”
    “I’m already disturbed,” Plath said. “I can feel that . . . that thing . . . in my head again.” Then seeing that Keats had misinterpreted her, she snapped, “No, not the damned aneurysm. The biot. Mine. My biot.”
    As though Sadie had said nothing, Ophelia continued. “We all have this view of ourselves as a body and a mind. We think of our mind as a sort of thing outside ourselves, like a soul, a sort of essence of us. What it is, is a computer made out of synapses. A staggeringly sophisticated computer, but still in the end just a few pounds of slimy pink-and-gray tissue kept alive by oxygen and nitrogen carried there by superhighways of pumping blood.”
    “You don’t believe in a soul?” Keats asked.
    “I believe science is in this hand,” she held out her right, palm up, “and religion is in this hand.” She held out her left, but curled it to conceal the palm.
    “I’ve seen too many MRIs of my brain to doubt that it’s just an organ,” Plath said.
    “The greater surprise is the rest of the body,” Ophelia said. “We think of it as a body. A singular thing. Skin over organs and bones, but all of it
ours
. Human.” She shook her head slowly, dark brown eyes glowing. “We are not
all
human. We are closer to being an ecosystem. Like the rain forest. We are the home to thousands of life-forms. They live in us and on us. Like jaguars and frogs in the rain forest. In the human ecosystem there are viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites.
    “And we, even our human parts, the things that are us, often appear as if they are separate living things: and they are. Each blood cell is alive, independent