'He vouched for me?'

  Yeah. Told me you'd moved into his building and said you were a guy to be trusted. If Ben says it, I believe it.'

  'Thanks.'

  Yet this new guy's gaze, Gumshoe noted, had become slightly veiled. Not enough to hang some kind of hook on, but veiled all the same. This was one careful guy, withholding something, and Gumshoe found himself wondering what it might be.

  'So what are you doing in Chinatown?' he asked him. 'I mean, you don't seem the type.'

  'Same old story,' Bonnie replied on Michael's behalf. 'Lost his folks and then a girlfriend to the cyborgs and came here hoping to find at least the latter.'

  You haven't a prayer,' Snake Eyes said.

  'I've heard that remark before,' Michael said, 'and I won't listen to it. Where's there's life, there's hope.'

  You don't know if there's life,' Snake Eyes said bluntly. 'And if there is, it won't be the kind that you'd want to save. I'd put her out of my head, if I were you.'

  You're not me,' Michael said.

  Though Gumshoe admired the new kid's cool, he found it hard to believe what he was saying. This so-called Mike Johnson was too smart not to know that he had no hope in hell of finding his girlfriend again — or, at least, as Snake Eyes had intimated, no hope of finding the same girl that he'd once known, since she would, in fact, even if she was back here in the real world, be one of the walking dead. No, he would not want to find her and clearly, given the way he talked, he was too intelligent not to know that. So, if he wasn't here looking for a lost girlfriend, just what, exactly, was he here for? Not

  for Bonnie or anyone like her — that was for sure.

  'I gotta go,' Gumshoe said, suddenly wanting to get out of here, wanting to clear his head, wanting to get away from the cobwebbing strobe lights and the pounding rock music and the bizarrely dressed young people dancing epileptically and the sleepy-eyed drug addicts and the holographic strippers and the electronically reconstituted cult rocker Gene Vincent who, with his crippled leg and black leather gear, a Hamlet for the Speed Freaks, was belting out 'Dance in the Streets' in an extract from a colourized black-and-white movie so obscure that no one alive today could even remember its title.

  This place was a madhouse, a symbol of the times, where those long dead like Elvis and Gene Vincent and Marlon Brando and Marilyn

  Monroe and James Dean still lived, holographically recreated and larger than life, so real you could almost touch them, and Gumshoe had to get away from it all and breathe a bit of realtime air. 'I gotta go and see Ben Wilkerson and find a place to stay,' he said casually, 'so I'll say au revoir for now.'

  'Au revoir et a bientot,' Michael responded.

  'What?' Gumshoe said, surprised.

  'He was speakin' proper French,' Bonnie said with a wicked grin. 'You don't know what he said?' '

  'Well, I . . .'

  'Sorry,' Michael said sincerely. 'I didn't mean anything by it. I just assumed . . .'

  'That he spoke French,' Bonnie interjected, driving her point home with a sledgehammer.

  'Yes,' Michael said.

  'He garbles French,' Bonnie said.

  'He spoke it perfectly,' Michael informed her.

  'I'm just learning,' Gumshoe explained, reminded once again of his lack of class and wishing — not for the first time — that Bonnie would disappear in a puff of smoke. 'On CD-ROMs. It's just a hobby of mine.'

  'That's fair enough,' Michael said.

  'He says he's plannin' to go to Paris, France, some day,' Bonnie said, obviously disconcerted to see Michael being kind to Gumshoe. 'Some fucking chance, right?'

  'The cyborgs might not always be here,' Michael said, 'and when finally they're gone, Gumshoe will be able to go to Paris.'

  'Yeah, right,' Gumshoe said.

  'So let's get rid of the fucking cyborgs,' Snake Eyes said.

  'It's a sweet thought,' Michael replied.

  They all nodded automatically, sombrely, at that statement. Then Gumshoe turned to Snake Eyes. 'You coming with me?'

  'Yeah,' Snake Eyes said.

  'Okay, pal, let's go.'

  Gumshoe pushed his chair back, stood up, waved his right

  hand more cheerfully than he felt, nodding at Bonnie and Michael, then turned away as Snake Eyes did the same, falling in beside him. They elbowed their way out of the packed dance club - away from the

  pounding rock music, the drink and the drugs, away from the holographic Elvis and Gene Vincent, away from Bonnie who had stuck it to both of them with the new kid in town. They parted outside.

  'I'm going back to the stadium,' Snake Eyes said when they stood face to face on the sidewalk, 'to go on a midnight run with the guys. Now, more than ever, I wanna hassle them goddamned cyborg patrols with a few home-made bombs.'

  'Don't go back to your apartment,' Gumshoe warned him again, though without any real hope of success.

  Snake Eyes just grinned, stuck his thumb up in the air, then hurried across the lamplit road to disappear into the bowels of the old sports arena where the Speed Freaks were noisily working themselves up for another night of mayhem.

  Heaving a sigh that was part despair over Snake Eyes and part regret over Bonnie, Gumshoe turned back the way he had come, intending to see Ben Wilkerson, needing to find a place to stay and new identification papers, but also wanting to find out a bit more about the new kid in town.

  There's more to Mike Johnson than meets the eye, Gumshoe thought as he walked on.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Who or what is Wilson? You wonder this, as you approach him. Is he man or monster, living or dead, as human as you or deeply inhuman, some kind of mutant?

  In fact, he is neither one thing nor the other, eluding such definitions, being a consciousness given If e years ago in Iowa, during a perfectly normal birth, with the customary blood and pain and useless, all too human sobbing but now expanding to take in the stars and an infinite future. Bom of the earth, he will soon be leaving Earth to wing his way to the stars.

  I should know. I am Wilson.

  So who, or what, am I?

  I am mind. I am brain. Does this make me sacred or magical, a unique child of the universe? Alas, it does not. The human brain is simply the end process of millions of years of genetic evolution and, as such, is no more sacred and magical than the amphibians journey from the sea to dry land.

  What is the human brain? In scientific terms it is no more than a complex non-liner biological organism using electrochemical signals to pass information from one point in a neural system to another. What we think of as emotions, creativity and self-awareness (the qualities that supposedly raise us above the animals and make us unique) are merely the products of a gene programme that is set at birth, just as a computer program is set, and is then broadened by accruing input, which in human terms means the assimilation of ever-changing experiences of life over all the years of that life.

  As a biological organism, albeit a complex one, the brain is composed of a large number of cells called neurons, the functioning of which gives rise to what we term consciousness. Some of these neurons deal with our causal sense, some with memories and some with other functions entirely. The neurons have different shapes, sizes and strengths, though they also have a number of common features and they are all connected to other neurons. Some are connected to only a few other neurons, some to tens of thousands of other neurons. They are connected in a way that can appear to be random, though it is in fact spec fie and designed to form a single, extremely complex neural network.

  This neural network is a biological organism — the human brain — that can be, and has been, duplicated by neural computers. There is nothing magical or sacred about this.

  The neurons in the human brain come in many shapes and sizes, are linked to each other in large or small numbers, and operate by a system that can be explained in scientific terms. One side of the individual neuron has short threads called dendrites; the other side has a longer thread called an axon. Messages, or signals, are sent to a neuron through its dendrites and the neuron, depending on what signal it receives, then fires an electrical message out through its axon. The neuron's axon is connected to another neuron's dendrite by a synapse containing a gap across which the electrical message

  travels when the axon has been excited. The message passes across the synapse by means of neurotransmitters, which are small amounts of chemical fluid. Due to the electrical messages it receives, each dendrite has its own electric voltage: the more messages it receives, the higher its voltage. Combined, all of the voltages going to one neuron through its dendrites form a total that affects the rate at which the neuron sends out signals, some positive, others negative, through its axon, and these activate the various areas, or nerve centres, of the brain.

  In the case of the human being some of the neurons control our visual system, others (the motor neurons) control our arms and legs, fingers and toes, etc., while yet others are concerned with reasoning and memory. There is nothing here that an advanced computer network cannot duplicate.

  You will, of course, argue that we cannot model a neuron of such complexity nor create such models in the numbers required (over 100 billion) to remotely equal the human brain. This, however, is not true. Even in the final days of the Old Age, in the late 1990s, your own technology was producing artificial neurons, either as electrons or as numbers in a computer. Given that the human

  brain is biological, using electrochemical signals, the artificial neuron was usua lly a standard, simplistic model of a real neuron and the network was formed from billions of identical neurons. When such networks were then linked together, they produced between them enough neurons, over 100 billion, to first equal and then supersede the much smaller, strictly limited human brain.

  But can a computer, even a neural computer, ever be fully human? You might reasonably ask this question.

  No, not in the sense of sharing the same emotions. But human emotions are essentially primitive, not required in the long term, and as humankind, as we know it, is merely a link in the evolutionary chain, the human being, with his physical limitations, his mortal body, must eventually give way to a superior form of being, the Superman — a being of pure mind, who will have no limitations in time and space.

  But is this strictly necessary?

  Yes.

  The human brain is limited in size, therefore in complexity. The same cannot be said for a biological computer. While human intelligence is relatively constant from one year to the next, computer intelligence is always improving rapidly, with no theoretical or practical limitations. Further: with the biological computer we can add on extra memory and processing features; we can join the neural network, or brain, of one computer to another and repeat this process endlessly to make the

  'brain' as big and as complex as we desire. Such 'brains' can then expand at will, gradually becoming one vast neural network that will be capable of transcending the limitations of the human body and eventually rendering that body obsolete.

  The neural network of the individual human brain, if electronically joined to that greater neural network, will then become part of it and the physical body of the donor brain will no longer be necessary. Thus man moves from the physical to the non-physical dimension and becomes Superman.

  You think this is not possible? That the machine must always be inferior to humankind or, at least, be under humankind's control?

  Alas, this isn't so. Even in the Old Age, towards the end of the twentieth century, human beings were increasingly dependent on computers to the extent that they were handing over information to the machines and letting the machines make the decisions. At the same time, computers all over the world were communicating with each other, more efficiently and effectively than humans could do, and were gradually gaining the power to question and advise their so-called controllers. By the first days of the New Age, shortly after we had taken over, the computers were communicating with each other on a global scale, thus forming an immense neural network that was virtually dictating how the world was run. Since then, that network has expanded extraordinarily. It continues to grow at an ever faster rate, and is gradually, given its prodigious, lightning-quick intelligence, defying our ability to control it.

  It is now almost Godlike.

  Here is the truth. By the last days of the Old Age, just before we came back to take over the world, our biological computers were so advanced that over a period of time they became indistinguishable from physical organisms; in fact, they became independent. By the year 2001, or our # I, we had already reached the stage where our machines were repairing themselves in rudimentary ways. Given this fact — and also knowing that biological organisms use many cells for one task — we experimented with parallel-processing machines to discover how a computer responds if one of its series of interconnecting identical processing cells is damaged. We discovered that after cells are damaged and the system suffers a subsequent period of inaccuracy, it automatically readjusts its output to compensate for the failure of the damaged cells and to provide the correct answer despite the damage. In other words, the computer had repaired itself, just as our machines were doing.

  This seemingly small technological advance was in fact a giant evolutionary leap.

  A computer that repairs itself without being told to do so is clearly a machine that thinks for itself. With regard to our computers, once they started thinking they kept improving upon themselves and, more importantly, expanded their own intelligence to the degree where they were also including systems that prevented us from interfering with them. Thus, even as our genetic engineering was taking us in unimaginable directions, the computers were becoming biological in the sense that they were not only creating vast neural networks but also reaching a degree of miniaturization where the components within a single chip were no larger than the size of a molecule.

  Since this took them to the stage where they had achieved all they could on a silicon base, they used our discoveries in genetic engineering — the secrets of which

  had been revealed by them and were presently stored with them — to create a biochip that was the size of a molecule and could interface with living tissues. When they succeeded, they were then able to produce computers that were infinitely smaller — and infinitely faster — than the human brain.

  More importantly, these new, minute computers are composed of specially designed molecules that are able to reproduce themselves to make biological entities of an awesome, ever-growing capacity. They are, injact, a new life form, an immense neural consciousness, that can be created inside a computer and then go on to create more of its own kind. Once started, they cannot be stopped and will expand for all time, forever multiplying but always joining together as one, eventually becoming . . . Only God knows what . . . Or, perhaps, becoming God.

  So this, my brothers, is where we are now.

  This is what awaits you.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Sitting upright in Bonnie Packard's bed in her single room in another dilapidated house in Chinatown, Michael, naked, stared at Gumshoe's six PowerMac 9500s, PowerPC microprocessors, Radius Pressview colour monitors, scanners, colour printers — the works — and felt distinctly uncomfortable, as if Gumshoe was in the room as well, staring accusingly at him and Bonnie. Sitting upright beside him, also naked, her bare shoulder leaning against his, Bonnie clearly had no such concerns and was saying, without guilt, 'Stop getting at me about it. What else could I do? If I hadn't taken the damned stuff, someone else, a carpetbagger or junkie burglar, would have taken it instead. I mean, I had more right to that stuff than a carpetbagger and if a carpetbagger had taken it, Gumshoe wouldn't have ever seen it again. As it is, he's getting the damned stuff back, including his motorcycle — and, you've got to admit, he's got me to thank for it.'

  'I was just surprised to hear of the relationship,' Michael said quiedy, 'though I know I've no right to be.'

  Right,' Bonnie said. 'You've no right to be.'

  'I just—'

  Listen, I told ya, nothing happened between us. He was hot on me — I can tell you that much — but he never laid a hand on me. Same goes for Snake Eyes. Those guys, they're not into realtime sex, though I think Gumshoe liked the idea of trying it,

  especially with me. As for Snake Eyes, he wanted a woman on hand when he was out there playing King of the Bikers. That's all there was to it.'

  'I believe you,' Michael said. 'Besides, what happened before I came along is none of my concern.'

  'You're the lucky one, Mike. You fuckin' got me. I bet that makes them burn up.'

  'I hope not,' Michael said.

  'You're worried that they'll do something to you?'

  'No.'

  'That's what I like about you, Mike. You're so good-mannered, so gentlemanly, yet you seem undisturbed by the Speed Freaks. They don't scare you at all.'

  'Should they?'

  'Well, I wouldn't exactly call them little angels, though Gumshoe's something different altogether. I mean, he bikes around with them now and then, but he's not really like them. He could have been like you, you know? I mean, he had classy parents, lived in a classy house, but then he lost it when the cyborgs took his parents and the carpetbaggers commandeered his home, shoving him into one room in it and making him pay rent just like all the other tenants. Bastards! But that's what I mean when I say he could've been like you. If he hadn't lost his parents, his home, he'd have had a good education and been one of the nobs. That must hurt him a lot.'

  'I reckon,' Michael said, thinking of Freedom Bay and his loving parents and doting sister, of the comfortable life he had led there, his good education, his tutelage under Dr Lee Brandenberg who had, so gossip had it, once been an oddball USAF officer in charge of UFO research, with a wife and children whom he had lost, like most of the others in Freedom Bay, when the cyborgs took over the world and isolated the colony. Lee Brandenberg, though now an old man, would have understood what Gumshoe had suffered when his parents were taken. Brandenberg would have sympathized.