In the armchair, Michael stares at the Pacific, where earlier Catalina had loomed in the distance and container ships had wallowed at anchor in the long lineup for the port of Long Beach. At the moment, all is formless—rushing rain, billowing mist, the ocean a gray amorphia of swells and swales and flung spume.
He is at all times linked to the internet by electromagnetic waves produced and managed by his own strangely altered physiology. Without need of a computer, he can for the most part reach into any website or digitized archives with which he is familiar, pore through its content, and access whatever information he needs in seconds, while remaining entirely aware of—and active in—the real world. In addition, if he plants a data trigger in a system, he’ll be instantly notified when the event that he has anticipated in fact occurs; the alert will come in the form of a brief text message he created with the trigger, appearing as neon-blue letters in his mind’s eye, as though he’s a clairvoyant receiving a vision.
Sometimes, when he is seeking to assemble and understand a complex chain of information, or when he knows what to seek but not quite where to seek it, he must enter the funhouse maze that mirrors this world in infinite fractal passageways, which is the internet and all linked computer systems, plunge into it rather than merely reach into it. In such a case, for the duration of his explorations, he loses all conscious awareness of the real place in which he exists.
He closes his eyes and prepares to enter the wonders of that alternate world built of ones and zeros, which can seem as fluid and chaotic as any moment of any storm. He has learned that negotiating its megacomplexity of channels is easier if he visualizes himself proceeding in a form of transport—such as a car quickening through a multilayered labyrinth of highways or a sleek cigarette boat speeding through a planet of endless Venetian canals. This time, he imagines himself behind the wheel of a self-driving Tesla, speeding toward the destination that he speaks aloud to its AI driver. His body remains relaxed in the armchair as the Tesla rockets him from the real to the virtual. Although he knows that his body reposes in the library, he can no longer see the room; he can neither hear nor see the storm-tossed ocean beyond the windows.
Because total immersion in an abstract world of coded data ferried on electromagnetic waves would confound the senses and be so disorienting that rampant panic might rapidly spiral into madness, the archaea-nano hybrid particles that have invaded Michael’s brain provide him with the ability to instantaneously translate that data into images that match the form of transportation that he has imagined. In this case, it’s a driverless Tesla on a highway system as fantastical as one that might be created if Christopher Nolan and George Lucas had collaborated on a science-fiction film based on an idea by Jorge Luis Borges. As he perceives them, the lanes are a wild ravelment snaking through a vast darkness, lighted by off-ramp signs glowing an eerie green. He flashes through underpasses, races upside down through barrel loops, takes corkscrew feeder lanes that drop him vertically through uncounted horizontal layers of freeways, and descends an exit ramp under the sign BEAUTIFICATION RESEARCH. Without any consequence of impact, he passes through a wall of the virtual version of the building in which he died, and he comes to a stop.
The information that he’s taken this mental voyage to discover appears herewith on the windshield of the Tesla, as if displayed on a computer screen. From the archived video provided by a multitude of high-definition security cameras, he reviews the activities of investigators who entered the facility after its decontamination. Some wear black jackets emblazoned with bold, white letters—ISA. Of the multitude of ISA agents swarming the building, one seems to be an outlier, never associating more than briefly with the others as he tours the premises. He spends time alone in Shelby Shrewsberry’s office and then proceeds to camp out in the office of Dr. Simon Bistoury. His head is shaved, his features bold, his profile like that on an ancient Roman coin.
From within the imaginary Tesla, through the medium of his avatar, Michael now watches archived video of Bistoury’s office in which the ISA agent watches earlier archived video of the cafeteria that had been converted into a temporary morgue. He rewinds and watches the video of the agent as the agent repeatedly rewinds and watches a sequence in the morgue. Resurrected Michael sees the agent discover the moment when the sheet over dead Michael rises and then slides to the floor.
Michael had awakened from death an hour before he rose from the posture of a corpse. For a few minutes, aware that he was himself but also more than he had been before, he lay there processing the impossible. He dared not move until he understood his condition. Initially, his heart had not been beating; neither had he been breathing. As he listened to the mortal stillness of his body, a double fear came over him—horror that darkness would take him again and forever, as well as dread of the future that might lie ahead of him and beyond all human knowing. If total terror had seized him, he would have thrust up from his makeshift catafalque at once. However, he knew much about the work being done at Beautification Research and understood that, even as dangerous as it was, good might come from it as easily as evil. He realized that the marriage of living archaea and nanobotics had succeeded in some way that neither the scientists on the bio team nor those on the tech team anticipated. The stasis from which his mind had first ascended now relinquished its hold on his body; three minutes after regaining consciousness, he had felt his heart resume beating, and he had breathed.
For fifty-seven minutes more, he’d remained motionless, in a wonder of self-discovery, reaching out into the world beyond this world, the coded world that is born of this world but is not patent or tangible, the world of the internet and the cloud and all that is virtual, a shadow of reality and yet with the power to shape the truth of which it is only a dark reflection. Soon he realized that he was no longer merely a user of the internet and all sites and systems linked by it, but also that he could be of it, not just as a fish is of the medium in which it swims, but rather as water itself is of the river. He had no need of a computer to plunge into the currents of data. In that chilly morgue, lying under a sheet, he had reviewed the security video and other archives of the facility to learn how the staff of Beautification Research became infected and to witness how rapidly they perished. He saw himself fall dead. He suspected he might be unique, the only one among the deceased to pull a Lazarus. If that proved to be the case, the government and the technology companies partnered in this enterprise would consider him to be a miraculously transformed lab rat that must be studied further, as a possible whistleblower who could expose them to public outrage and congressional investigation, as a likely litigant who might drain their bank accounts, and as a threat to their power by virtue of his own. One thing they would not consider him: a human being like them, with inalienable God-given rights and a heritage of freedom.
As he had at last risen from the cafeteria table and the sheet had slid off him, he had reached into the video stream flowing from the camera and replaced the pixels that composed his image. Second by second, as he made his way out of the room and then the building, he erased the visual record of his escape. He’d known that eventually they would discover that he had gone missing. He only hoped to gain time to better understand the power that had been given to him and how best to use it.