My extensive reading into apocalyptic fiction (three massive short story collections edited by John Joseph Adams and one novel – Station Eleven – all read over the course of fifteen months) shows that when it comes to ways for the world to end, accidentally-engineered plagues outnumber alien invasions, but only just slightly.
But what about an apocalypse that’s both?
First released as a short story, Greg Bear’s classic 1985 book Blood Music shows the Earth being destroyed not by aliens, but by trillions upon trillions of microscopic beings that were engineered from our own blood cells, but which have become something so far beyond humanity that they might as well have come from another planet. It’s an apocalypse that’s horrifying, sometimes beautiful, completely beyond humanity’s control, and very very far over my head in quite a few places.
“You tell me you’ve made intelligent germs, and I’ll tell you right now…Anyone who’s ever sanitized a toilet or cleaned a diaper pail would cringe at the idea of germs that think.”
Like any other hard sci-fi novel, understanding at least a little bit of the science involved is essential to the plot. And a lot of the science here is going to be incomprehensible to most readers.The author is obviously aware of this, so he plays things out very slowly, explaining as much as he can without bogging the story down. Much.
We start with Vergil Ulam, a socially-inept scientist working for a company that’s developing biochips: molecular biology and silicon electronics combined to form miniscule computers. Not satisfied with this, Vergil has been doing his own work on the side by combining mammalian cells with viruses and bacterium, creating an entirely biological computer that can reproduce itself and, shockingly, learn.
Vergil trains the noocytes, as he calls them, to run mazes, watches as they appear to form their own societies…and then gets fired for performing stupidly dangerous experiments on bio-hazardous materials that his lab doesn’t have safeguards for. Ordered to destroy the results, Vergil does what any single-minded genius scientist would do: he smuggles the noocytes out of the lab by injecting them into his own bloodstream.
I’m sure you can already figure out how well that’s going to go.
To be fair, Vergil thinks his own immune system will eventually destroy the engineered cells; his plan is to separate some of the cells from his blood and then continue the experiment. But that doesn’t excuse how flat-out placid he is when it becomes obvious that his allergies have disappeared, his eyesight is now 20/20, his skin is forming ridges that remind him of circuitry, and his freaking vertebrae have been reshaped into a stack of interlocking triangles. Everything works better than before, and soon he’s somehow communicating with the microscopic creatures that are organizing themselves in his body. One of Vergil’s friends – who’s exactly as terrified as a normal human would be – finally takes drastic steps to shut all of this down. Unfortunately by this point it’s far too late, and infected humans start to…dissolve.
Now things gets really strange.
The store breaks into three separate narratives at this point, from three people who for one reason or another aren’t incorporated into the new life form. There’s Suzy, a developmentally-challenged teenager whose family turned into a scattering of human-circuitry on the floor before disappearing, and who’s trying to get to the top of the World Trade Tower because…well, what else is there to do? Then there’s John and his twin brother Jerry, who are left to explore a world that’s quickly being reshaped (this was the weakest section of the book for me; their story doesn’t offer much that you don’t already get from Suzy’s point of view). And finally we have Michael Bernard, a brain surgeon infected early on who has the resources to get himself safely quarantined in a medical lab so he and other scientists can study the epidemic from the inside out as the noocytes slowly transform him into…something else.
The way the noocytes change the world around them reminded me of the morphing landscape of Stanislaw Lem’s book Solaris. The noocytes absorb all biological life and reshape it into swathes of material that cover skyscrapers, or many-legged geometric shapes that wander through the streets, or stationary tornadoes, or multi-colored haze.
A hill was crossing the highway.
It’s beautiful imagery in places, and terrifying in others (Suzy is chased up the stairs by a miles-long brown sheet crawling up the walls, and she constantly stumbles over small piles of clothes left behind by people who just dissolved where they were standing). The rest of the world freaks out in every direction: riots, sabre rattling, and there’s a very effective chapter set from the viewpoint of a helicopter crew flying over what used to be North America. Things get even more confusing when the Weak Anthropic Principle comes into play. (Still not entirely sure I understand that one. I think it’s like Schrodinger’s Cat, only it’s not just that the observer determines the result, but the way the observer understands the physics involved determines the reality of the universe. Then multiply that by trillions and billions of intelligent life all simultaneously understanding physics differently from how human scientists understand it now.)
We gradually see Bernard becoming something more than human, and the noocytes progress further and further from human understanding until the last few chapters step from sci-fi to fantasy almost seamlessly. And the ending is the same mix of beautiful and terrifying as the rest of the story. And also frustrating, because so much of it is deliberately outside of what humans can understand. Don’t look for a moral here, or a statement about the dangers of hubris. Greg Bear wasn’t writing a cautionary tale so much as he was pushing the boundaries of what we accept of things like “intelligence” and “memory”. And most important: “reality”.