“What you were saying about the blue poly before,” said Hector, trailing behind him, “it didn’t make much sense.”

“The stuff bonds with electrical circuitry — becomes it actually,” said Slatermeyer, twisting the knobs of the shower. The rushing water nearly drowning him out. “It must be the bonding and propagation qualities. The camera worked just like it should, but all of its wiring had been replaced by the blue poly,”

shouted Slatermeyer over the hissing spray.

Hector leaned against the frame of the doorway, his mind reeling. “How does it handle the current?

Electrical signals in biological systems are minuscule compared to those in electronics.”

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Slatermeyer yelled. “It takes less energy to transmit a signal through the poly. I’m thinking it may use the excess to drive cell division. But we’re all going to find out first hand what this stuff can do, any minute now. Those women, the tetra and the other one, they put it in a junction box. No telling how fast it might spread.”

Shaking his head in awe and horror, Hector walked back into the living room and took another drink of whiskey. The multi-processor brains were organic computers trapped in an electrical and fiber optic network. They required neurotranslators to process input from those lines. If Slatermeyer was right about the blue poly and its ability to transmute electrical lines into electrolytic lines, without loss of function, then there would be no longer be any interface between the signal and the mind that perceived it. He suppressed a shudder of shocked delight at the prospect and set his glass back down on the table. He turned on his transceiver and examined his own multiprocessor’s systems, calling up graphs and status codes for the brain’s electrolytic transmissions and its neurochemical composition. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people accessed, but it was there. Glutamic acid and histamine levels were stable. Norepinephrine production was down, which was to be expected, he hadn’t used the multi-processor much today. All in all, everything looked normal.

Using the access Lilith had given him, he called up systems monitoring for the building, and requested a biochemical schema of the whole network.

He stared at the brightly colored webwork, intricate in its structure and varied in the patterns of its chemistry. The network echoed the shape of the GeneSys Building itself, and in the region just below and to the west of where he stood, bright orange serotonin levels blazed like solar flares. There was a shot from the bathroom. Hector stood stock still, staring at the display, the gunshot echoing in his ears. He nearly called out to Slatermeyer, and then he turned for the door and ran. Chapter 21 — Ants and Cousins

As the tower rose, it got narrower, and the crawl spaces and access ways became fewer and ever more cramped. At last Chango and Helix were forced into an elevator shaft. They were at the thirtieth floor, the top of the gold top castle.

There was no more up to go, the shaft ended just above the elevator doors. Chango crawled up on the lip of the floor, resting her back against the doors.

“There used to be an exclusive men’s dining room up here, the Recess Club,” said Chango. “My mother told a story about a party her mother attended there as a child. A fabulous New Year’s buffet with a champaign fountain in the center and lobster tails arrayed all around. Everything was glittering and opulent, like a jewel.”

Helix was looking hopelessly around the elevator shaft. “We’re close,” she said.

“It was here, on the top floor. Let’s go take a look at it,” said Chango, twisting around to pry open the elevator doors.

The elevator lobby was disappointing. Dark red carpeting, faded with age and dust, covered the floor and the rich oak trim was cheapened by the dusky rose paint job. But at the far end was a massive pair of carved oak doors, their panels chased with curving leaves and acorns. Chango, her grandmother’s memory sparkling in her mind, stepped up to them and took the doorknobs in her hands. But when she tried to turn them they wouldn’t budge. She gave the doors an experimental shove, but they were as resistant as iron. She could batter herself against them until she knocked herself out. They were stronger than she was, and they were locked.

“Chango, come on,” Helix said. She turned to see her standing in the doorway to a maintenance stairway. “It’s open.”

Chango followed Helix up the stairway, which was narrow and painted industrial grey. Above the thirtieth floor it wasn’t painted at all, just unfinished cinderblock ending at a forbidding metal door. Helix opened it and the stepped onto a narrow landing around a wire-grid cage. Behind the cage was an enormous column of cables, all twisting around one another like bloodvessels around a heart. An open rung staircase led up around the cage to a door of the same material, standing open in invitation. Beyond it was another set of stairs, these ones wood and obviously ancient. They came right up through the floor of the room above. Chango had got ahead of Helix somehow, and she stood halfway up the staircase, her eyes level with the floor. There was someone up here. Above the hum of the metal flanked exhaust fans that hulked along the walls she heard an arrhythmic clicking that could only be produced by a human being fiddling around with something. It was not a noise a machine would make. She scanned the floor for feet, but all she found were the metal brackets which supported the exhaust fans an inch above the floor.

As she emerged through the hole in the floor she had an acute and exquisite sense of being someplace she was not supposed to be. Her skin tingled all over, making her hyper-aware of the air touching her, of her position in space. This was a bigger thrill than even seeing the Recess Club would have been. She kept constant watch for the clicker, but her view was blocked by the column of cables rising through the floor. The clicking sounds came from behind the cable. Chango circled around it slowly, careful to lay her feet down in silence. A folding chair stood empty, a soda can abandoned on the floor beside it. Chango froze, expecting someone to come and sit back down at any moment, but nobody did, and the clacking went on.

“Do you hear that noise?” said Helix beside her, making her jump. Helix pointed up to where the column terminated in a large metal ring set into the ceiling. “It’s the neurotranslator.”

A complicated series of metal rods ran from one edge of the ring down along the cable to a series of brackets on the floor. The rods were moving, sliding into different positions in the brackets and clicking against them as they did so.

“Hector told me about it. How without it the brains are useless because they can’t be hooked up directly to electrical systems. Soon I guess it’ll be obsolete.”

“What are the rods for?”

Helix shrugged. “How should I know?”

On the other side of the cable, near the stairs, a metal ladder ran up through a hole in the ceiling, straight to the canted roof of the tower. She and Helix climbed it to the uppermost floor of the tower. This room was even smaller than the one below. A strip of floor just three feet wide ran between the bulging ducts from the exhaust fans below and the translucent walls of the round tank which housed the brain. Light from windows set in dormers in the slanting metal roof reflected off the tank, bathing the dirty grey walls with lambent radiance. The reflections undulated with the movement of the growth medium. It was the brain that caused the ripples on the surface of the tank. It was much larger than an ordinary multi-processor brain. It was nearly as big as she was, and it bobbed gently in the fluid, tethered by its brainstem which trailed to the bottom of the tank and into the neurotranslator below. oOo