The Eighth Day (38 page)

“What people don’t understand,” Manziger explained, “is that in the early stages of an exponential progression, the rate of acceleration is practically invisible.” He pointed to the beginning of the curve, where the blade met the shaft of the stick. “It’s almost horizontal. But as you can see”—his finger followed the curve up the shaft—“once things get rolling, the line veers toward the vertical.”

“Okay, but—”

Manziger held out a hand. “Hear me out. And don’t worry, because I’ve got a great fable for you.”

Danny drained his beer and raised his empty glass to the waif.
How,
he wondered,
did I get here? To this exact point? Sitting in the Blue Potato, listening to this admittedly intelligent slob talk about exponential curves as a way of explicating something about gray goo. And now a “fable.” What happened to my life? What’s wrong with this picture?

Something of this must have shown on his face, because Unger frowned at him from beneath his peaked eyebrows. “Are you all right, Dan?”

Danny shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m fine. I’m just not sure where this is going.”

“Trust me,” Manziger said. “You need to hear this fable. And then everything will be clear. If it’s just numbers, you won’t understand it.”

Danny said nothing.

“Go ahead, Harry,” Unger insisted, giving him an encouraging look and throwing a sort of buck-up nod in Danny’s direction.

“Okay,” Manziger said, pressing his chubby hands together. “Here’s how it goes.” He paused. “You play chess?” he asked.

“Almost never,” Danny told him. He thought, for a moment, of his time back in Barzan’s hideout and the things he’d been making with the crimping tool. And Layla. He thought of her and felt this pressure in his chest. Sadness.
This one,
she’d said, holding the biggest of the pieces up to the sun,
is kink?

“Well, this is about chess.

“The
invention
of chess. Which was a Chinese thing. And the Chinese emperor is so delighted by the game that he wants to reward its inventor. One of the court mathematicians. So the emperor tells the inventor he can have anything he wants. ‘You name it,’ he says. And the inventor, a real smart-ass, points to the chessboard. The only thing he wants is a grain of rice on the first square, then two grains on the second . . . and so on, doubling the number of grains on every subsequent square.”

Manziger was animated, completely in his element, his face alive with storytelling. While Danny sat in his chair, half listening, sinking into depression.

“So the emperor’s thrilled,” Manziger continued. “He’s gettin’ off cheap!”

Danny was thinking,
I’m probably wanted for murder in Turkey. . . . .

“And, at first, that’s the way it looks. Because the progression starts slowly. One, two, four, eight . . . they’re counting the grains from a teaspoon of rice.”

My girlfriend hates me. . . .

“But
then
, they need a tablespoon, a cup, a bowl, a barrel. And it keeps going.” Manziger looked at him. “You with me?”

Danny nodded.

Manziger rolled his hand through the air. “By this time, the emperor sees he’s in trouble. They’re only halfway across the board, and already they need an oxcart! Two or three more squares, and they’re gonna need a silo!” Manziger laughed and fell back in his chair with a look of contentment.

“But what happened to the inventor?” Unger asked.

“They cut his head off,” Manziger answered. “What else were they going to do? The guy was asking for something like eighteen million trillion grains of rice! That’s . . . that’s—”

“—more than all the rice in China,” Danny suggested.

Manziger exploded in a nasal
hee-hee-hee
. “Exactly! More, in fact, than all the rice fields on earth could produce. That’s why the emperor killed the little smart-ass.”

“What does this have to do with gray goo?” Danny asked.

“The assemblers would replicate exponentially, just like the rice,” Unger said. “You start with one. . . .”

Manziger snapped his finger at Unger. “Bingo! And you wouldn’t even see it happen. Not at first. After twenty minutes or so, you’ve got two assemblers. Another twenty minutes, and you’ve got eight. Four hours later, you’ve got something like one hundred and twenty-eight thousand—but you still can’t see ’em! You need a scanning, tunneling microscope to get a look at them. But, after ten hours or so, you’ve got about sixty-eight billion assemblers!
Now
you can see ’em! That’s a lot of biomass. And then—and only then—it goes turbo! It’s only the first day and already you’re onto the vertical part of the curve I was talking about.” He licked the tip of his finger and redrew the hockey stick. “Right there,” he said, pointing to a spot just above the blade.

Danny stared at the little smear.

“After two days,” Manziger went on, “if you can’t stop the replication of assemblers, they’ll outweigh the earth. Four more hours, and they’ll exceed the mass of the sun and the planets. Four
more
hours and . . . well, if they can find the fuel and material, they go for the stars.” He drained his martini and set it down so hard that a diner at the next table turned to stare. “That’s the gray goo problem,” he said. “In a nutshell.”

“So why do they call it that?” Danny insisted, his mind coming to grips with the implications.
Is this real?
he wondered.
Or some kind of exercise?

Manziger held up a finger, gestured toward Unger’s remaining calamari, raised an eyebrow. Unger nodded, and the engineer dipped a ring of squid into the marinara sauce, popped it into his mouth, and chewed.

“I asked Jay the same thing,” Unger told Danny.

“Yeah?”

“He said it was ‘geek humor.’ ”

Danny nodded.
What’s that supposed to mean?

“Gray goo,” Manziger said. “No shape, no color. No nothing. See? It’s just . . . boring glop!”

“So . . . ?”

“So that’s the point!” Manziger continued. “Theoretically, the assemblers could eat the entire universe in three days—and yet nothing
interesting
would have happened.” He rubbed his hands together. “I mean, they could have been making toilet paper or soccer balls—and that would be it!
Armageddon.
The universe swallowed by . . . goo.”

Manziger was still chuckling when the waif approached them with their entrées, tottering toward them in a slow-mo ballet. Danny’s plate held a pile of vegetables heaped into a pyramid whose instability caused the waif problems. Danny almost applauded when she succeeded in setting it down intact. Unger peered suspiciously at the dish in front of him, a construction of sweet potatoes and shrimp. Manziger attacked his steak
frites
with gusto. Obviously, the prospect of Armageddon had no effect on his appetite.

“So,” Danny asked, “could this actually happen?”

“What? The end of the world?”

Danny nodded.

Manziger gave a dismissive shrug. “Theoretically? Yes. The assemblers are alive and they’re programmed to replicate. But in reality?” He shook his head no. “Look at it this way: You got a monster. But it does a lot of work. So what do you do? Do you kill it? No. You keep it in a cage. A
strong
cage.” He sawed away at his steak, reducing it to bite-sized pieces, which he prodded into a square. “Anything else and you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Jay used to talk about it all the time.” Out of nowhere, Manziger’s voice rose in what Danny guessed was an imitation of Jason Patel’s Indian accent. “ ‘It is not enough for nervous nellies to say, “Well, this might happen.” I’m a scientist. Show me the evidence. Give me a scenario! Otherwise . . .’ ” Unger shrugged and forked a piece of steak into his mouth. Grinned.

“So what kind of cage are we talking about?” Danny asked. “How do you keep the assemblers in lockdown?”

“Lots of ways,” Manziger replied.

“Like what?”

Manziger patted his fleshy lips, scratched at his tattoo. “Well, the first thing you’d do is, you’d program them to stop reproducing at a certain point—when you had enough of them. That’s how the system
works
. You program them to replicate and perform a particular task, and you program them to self-destruct when the job’s done.”

Danny thought about it. “So it’s like a software program.”

Manziger nodded.

“Like Windows,” Danny suggested.

Manziger nodded again.

Danny threw his hands up. “Well, I don’t know about
your
computer,” he said, “but mine crashes two or three times a week. I wouldn’t want to bet the planet on the nanotech equivalent of Windows 98.”

Manziger chuckled. “Good point. But you wouldn’t put all your eggs in the same basket. If you don’t trust the programmers to get it right—and we
don’t
—there are other precautions you can take to make it fail-safe.”

“Such as what?”

“Well, you can set it up so that the only way the assemblers can replicate is in a really weird environment. Something that doesn’t occur in nature.”

“Like what?” Danny asked.

Manziger didn’t hesitate. “A deep-freeze would be one way. Program the assemblers so they’re only capable of replicating in a certain temperature range. A lot of viruses work like that. As long as they’re within a couple of degrees of ninety-eight-point-six, they’re fine. The host gets a fever? They’re kaput. So, if you limit replication to environments colder than, say, twenty below zero—and your factory’s here in the Valley—that ought to take care of it then and there.”

“I get it.”

“Another way is you could restrict the kind of raw material the assemblers use. I mean, you’d want them to use something cheap and plentiful—seawater or something—but you’d also want to throw in something extra. Something rare. Osmium, maybe, or even xenon. So if we get a cold snap and the assemblers go nuts, the little bastards still won’t work!”

Danny started to say something, but Manziger wasn’t finished.

“Another way,” the engineer said, “is you could program them to shut down if there were too many of them in the neighborhood. That’s the way bacteria work. They’re self-limiting.” The big man shoveled a clutch of fries into his mouth and chewed noisily.

“One way or another, it’s all Mother Nature,” Unger sighed.

Manziger agreed. Said: “Yup.”

Danny wasn’t so sure. “The thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why your friend changed his mind. I mean, for years, he wasn’t worried about it—and then all of a sudden he was. What happened?”

Unger bounced his eyebrows. “He was worried about shortcuts at the plant. That’s what he told
me
. There was a lot of pressure to cut corners.”

“ ‘Pressure’?” Manziger repeated. “We’re talking about curing cancer! Breast cancer, anyway. Do you know how many lives we’d save? Or what your options would be worth?” The idea made him snort. “Jay got cold feet over something so unlikely . . .” He shook his big head.

“And what
was
that?” Danny asked.

Manziger seemed to ignore the question. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s such a long process
anyway
. You want FDA approval, you have to jump through
hoops
. The safeguards Jason was talking about would have set us back a couple of
years
—and VSS doesn’t have the money for that. Not in this economy.” The idea was so upsetting, Manziger had begun to spray bits of french fry as he talked. “So we erred on the side of
science
, rather than . . . I don’t know what. Fear! Is that so bad?”

“So what changed Jason Patel’s mind?” Danny asked.

The waitress arrived to ask about dessert. Danny and Glenn Unger declined, while Manziger took a quick look. “I’ll have a crème brûlée and a decaf cap. And, uh . . . how about a Slippery Nipple?” The waitress glided away and Manziger turned back to Danny. “Jason was worried about mutation,” he said.

“Mutation?”

“Yeah. Something happened. In the lab. One of his nucleotide sequences changed from one generation to the next.”

“Jay freaked!” Unger remarked. “I’ve never seen him so upset.”

Manziger nodded. “It could have been anything. It’s a lab, you know? But Jay thought it was a mutation. And maybe it was. I mean, the assemblers—they’re alive. So theoretically, it could happen.”

“And that would be bad,” Danny suggested.

Manziger looked uncomfortable. “Oh, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “The nightmare scenario is—okay, suppose you program the bot so it can only replicate in the presence of rhodium or something?” He flapped his fingers dismissively. “Doesn’t matter what—but
some
restriction.”

“Whatever,” Danny said.

The waif brought dessert and Manziger fell silent until the treats were laid before him. Then he picked up where he’d left off. “Jay thought the assemblers might be like roaches—or bacteria or viral organisms. Maybe they’d develop a resistance. Maybe they’d
adapt
. Not all of them, of course. But that’s the point. You’d only need one.”

“And then the monster would be out of his cage,” Danny said.

Manziger gobbled his crème brûlée. “Right. Exactly.”

Danny sat back and exchanged glances with Unger.

“I always wondered,” Unger said, his voice a little hesitant, “why that doesn’t worry
you
, Harry?”

The big man shrugged. “Because I don’t believe there was a mutation. I think Jason fucked up. In his programming protocol, probably.”

“But that’s not what
he
thought,” Danny suggested.

“No. He swore it happened, but he couldn’t prove it. The original samples—the nucleotide sequences he started with—were destroyed. And that’s how paranoid he was. He thought—”

“Harry!” Unger protested.

Manziger regarded him blankly. “
What?”

“Jason isn’t here to defend himself,” Unger replied.

Manziger managed to look contrite, even as he shrugged—even as he finished the crème brûlée. “Jay claimed the samples were deliberately destroyed. Which was ridiculous.” Manziger ran his spoon around the ramekin, digging into the grooves for little bits of pudding that he’d missed.

“Ridiculous?” Danny asked.