Things start to get odd when he notices changes in his skin and, soon, his entire body, as the little buggers start working on him to "improve" his body. Then they start talking to him.
This is a great novel and a science fiction classic. My personal favorite from Bear. It starts the tradition of ending the world that Bear follows in at least three other novels, but does so in a more interesting manner than The Forge of God.
And his father went off to war, serving as a corpsman in Europe, moving with Patton's U.S. Third Army through the Ardennes and crossing the Rhine near Coblenz - sixty-five miles in three days - and his son watched what he could not possibly have seen. And then he watched what his father could not possibly have seen: A soldier in plus-fours stepping into the dark, dank hallway of a brothel in Paris; not his father, not anybody he knew - Very dim, but clear in outline, a woman rocking a child in orange sunlight coming through an isinglass window - A man fishing with cormorants in a gray early morning river - A child staring out of a barn loft at a circle of men in the yard below, slaughtering a huge black and white wide-eyed bullock - Men and women doffing their long white robes and swimming in a muddy river surrounded by red stone bluffs - A man standing on a cliff, horn bow in hand, watching a herd of antelopes cross a hazy grass plain - A woman giving birth in a dark underground place, lit by tallow lamps, watched by smeared, anxious faces - Two men arguing about impressed balls of clay in a circle drawn in sand - - I don't remember these things, they aren't me, I didn't experience them - He broke free of the flow of information. With both hands, he reached up to the red-glowing circles over his head, so warm and attractive. -Where did they come from? He touched the circles and felt the answer in his hundred-cell body. Not all memory comes from an individual's life. - Where, then? Memory is stored in neurons - interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells. The insight was almost agonizing in it's completeness and intensity. Symbiotic bacteria and transfer virus - naturally occurring in all animals and specific for each species - are implanted with molecular memory transcribed from the intron. They exit the individual and pass on to another individual, `infect', transfer the memory to somatic cells. Some of the memories are then returned to chemical storage status, and a few return to active memory. - Across generations? Across millennia.
"Don't count on it. They relish complexity, and I don't" Gogarty paused and sat absolutely still for several seconds. Paulsen-Fuchs glanced at him with fleeting anxiety. "Michael, I have amassed a great deal of theoretical structure which supports the following assertion." Deep breath. "Information processing - more strictly, observation - has an effect on events occurring within space-time. Conscious beings play an integral role in the universe; we fix its boundaries, to a great extent determine it's nature, just as it determines our nature. I have reason to believe - just an hypothesis so far - that we don't so much as discover physical laws as collaborate on them. Our theories are tested against past observations by both ourselves - and by the universe. If the universe agrees that past events are not contradicted by a theory, the theory becomes a template. The better the theory fits the facts, the longer it lasts - if it lasts at all. We then break the universe down into territories - our particular territory as human beings, being thus far quite distinct. No extraterrestrial contact, you know. If there are other intelligent beings beyond the Earth, they would occupy yet other territories of theory. We wouldn't expect major differences between the theories of different territories - the universe does, after all, play a major role - but minor differences might be expected. "The theories can't be effective forever. The universe is always changing; we can imagine regions of reality evolving until new theories are necessary. Thus far, the human race hasn't generated nearly the density or amount of information processing - computing, thinking, what have you - to manifest any truly obvious effects on space-time. We haven't created theories so complete that they pin down reality's evolution. But that has all changed, and quite recently." Listen closely to the GOGARTY. Bernard perked up and began to pay more attention. "If I only had time to present my mathematics, my correlations with formal information mechanics and quantum electrodynamics ...and if only you could understand!" "I'm listening. We're listening, Sean" Gogarty's eyes widened. "The... noocytes? Have they responded?" "You haven't given them much to respond to. Do go on, Proffessor." "Until now, the densest single unit of information processing on this planet was the human brain ... slight nod to cetaceans, perhaps, but nearly as much stimulis and processing going on, much more insular I'd say. Four, five billion of us, thinking every day. Small effects. Time stresses, little tremors as it were, not even measurable. Our powers of observation - our power to formulate effective theories - is not sufficiently intense to bring about the effects to I've discovered in my work. Nothing in the solar system, perhaps not even the galaxy!" "You are rambling Professor Gogarty," Paulsen-Fuchs said, Gogarty gave him an irritated nod and fastened his eyes on Bernard's, pleading with him. He speaks of interest. "He's getting to the point, Paul, don't rush him." "Thank you. Thank you very much, Michael. What I am saying is that we now have conditions sufficient to cause the effects I've described in my papers. Not just four, five billion individual cogitators, Michael, but trillions ... perhaps billions of trillions. Most of North America. Tiny, very dense, focusing their attention on all aspects of their surroundings, from the very very small to the very large. Observing everything in their environment, and theorizing about the things they do not observe. Observers and theorizers can fix the shape of events, of reality, in quite significant ways. There is nothing, Michael, but information. All particles, all energy, even space and time itself, are ultimately nothing but information. The very nature, the timbre of the universe can be altered, Michael, right now. By the noocytes." "Yes," Bernard said, "Still listening." Something not stated ... evidence ... "Two days ago," Gogarty said, becoming more animated, his face reddening with excitement, "the USSR apparently launched a full-scale nuclear strike on North America. Unlike the Panama strike, not one of the warheads went off."
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