Second Nature

Chapter 61

62 

Along a lonely stretch of desert road in the military-restricted zone of the White Sands Missile Range, the Abundance had relived the biblical tale of Noah. 

A flood of rain drowned Noah's world. But Noah had prepared by building an ark to save himself and the creatures of his land. He could not save each beast, so aboard his ark he took breeding pairs from every species: sheep and wolves, antelopes and lions-all. And when the deluge covered the flocks and packs and herds and prides of the old world, the ark ferried the rescued pairs to a new world, where the animals were fruitful and multiplied. 

Inside a deep vault at ground zero, a flood of fire drowned the Abundance's world. But the Abundance had prepared by building an ark, to save itself and the essences of creatures it had absorbed. By the time the inferno erupted, the ark had already escaped.  

The ark contained Gen's genetic code and a perfect recording of her mind-all her memories, her personality, intact and safe. The ark was a spore, a seed-able now to replicate Gen's mind and body along with myriad other lifeforms. And all this precious cargo, stored as pure information at the quantum level, fit neatly inside the several hundred-thousand molecules of the ark-smaller than a sugar grain.  

A woven mesh of diamond threads formed the ark's tough hull. Thousands of whip-tailed flagella propelled it forward. The frigid environment slowed, but did not stop its journey. It swam through the icy slush of blood from the visual cortex at the back of Gen's brain, forward along the optic tract. It crossed the thalamus, passed the optic chiasma and traveled on to pierce the retina of her left eye; voyaged across the polar ocean of the vitreous humor to exit the pupil. There it paused, atop the curved world of the cornea. 

Then the ark engulfed a tiny bead of liquid nitrogen, forming around the droplet a chamber with an open nozzle. The chamber generated a burst of heat by rapidly oxidizing glucose. The nitrogen exploded into gas, driving the ark like a microscopic rocket through the frosty air of the Lucite vault.  

The ark reached a seam in the vault's walls, found a weakness in the seal and grew a cutting tool of a hundred diamond-toothed cilia to bore through the flaw, while chemical enzymes and dissemblers broke down the Lucite molecules.  

Moments later, the ark broke out of the vault and jetted like a self-propelled pollen speck to the cargo door of the Humvee, escaping through the gaping chasm of the door seams.  

Outside, the ark tumbled and bounced in the truck's slipstream, busily reconstructing itself. The ark grew much larger, its flagella morphed into wings that drove it upward through the air with a high-pitched whine. Now the size and shape of a mosquito, it buzzed toward a flitting river of screeching bats, seeking to hitch a ride with a temporary host. 

By the time the nuclear fireball had turned Gen's abandoned body into hot plasma and scattered its atoms, the ark that carried her genes and a copy of her mind was safely far away from the funeral pyre. It flitted over white sands in the gut of a free-tailed bat. 

Inside the creature, the ark disgorged its passengers. Go forth. Be fruitful and multiply. Mitobots spread through the bat's bloodstream. Replicating. Taking control of the animal's brain and muscles. 

Now the ark had become a mammal with strong, leathery wings and it made good headway through the pink dawn sky. The ark broke away from the swarm of other bats, no longer drawn to return to the shelter of a cave. 

The time had arrived at last for the Abundance to fulfill its mission. The bat flew on for many miles away from the bomb site. Then it alighted on the white gypsum sand and began the final change to reach the stars.