Free The Rendering by Joel Naftali Page B

they’d activate around
any
sufficient amount of technology. So Doug, for once, had the right idea—as long as you were willing to accept some uncontrollable chaos.
    And by
chaos
, I mean
insanity
.
    One more thing: Do you know the difference between digital information and physical
stuff
at the subatomic level? Between a software program and an elephant? Between a million lines of code and a strawberry smoothie?
    Nothing. If you look closely enough, there’s no difference at all. Life emerges from things that aren’t alive. From molecules, from atoms, from quarks, from membranes vibrating in sixteen-dimensional space.
    Bug:           B ORING , JJ …
    damselfly:  W HAT NOW?
    Bug:           N OBODY WANTS TO READ ABOUT SIXTEEN-DIMENSIONAL SPACE .
    damselfly:  H EY , I DIDN’T INTERRUPT WHEN YOU WERE GETTING BORING .
    Bug:           Y OU’VE BEEN IM ING COMPLAINTS THIS WHOLE TIME!
    damselfly:  O NLY BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ITS AND IT’S .
    Bug:           I DO TOO .
    damselfly:  T HEN WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
    Bug:           T HE DIFFERENCE IS, SHUT UP . A ND STOP TALKING ABOUT QUARKS AND MOLECULES .
    damselfly:  F INE .
    Bug:           J UST TELL THEM WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW .
    damselfly:  F INE .
    Bug:           F INE .
    damselfly:  F INE .
    Sorry about that. Try to ignore the trolls.
    In any case, at the subatomic level, everything is made of the same stuff.
Everything
. And with the Protocol and the stem seeds, you could translate digital information to physical reality and back again.
    A chunk of “steak” could unzip into a polar bear or a toasteroven, then vanish into a flash of electrons and stream into a computer as pure software.
    You know exactly where this is going, don’t you?
    Start with the BattleArmor, the combat simulator, and the video game. Add the new Awareness that Bug mentioned, which had been hiding, waiting, watching—and which overrode the normal safeguards to output the three skunks.
    Larkspur: routed through the Quantuum 19 BattleArmor.
    Cosmo: routed through the virtual reality combat simulator.
    Poppy: routed through the
Street Gang
video game.
    A walking tank, an elite commando, and a kung fu biker chick.
    Yeah, and skunks.
    Except not
entirely
skunks.
    Remember back when that “snake fridge” told Doug about “six thousand iterations”? That just means doing something six thousand times, like running a test over and over, or pressing Next six thousand times in a row.
    And the skunks had lived and learned and evolved through millions of iterations, drawing on the knowledge of the Center, on databases of human biology and old movies and joke-a-day calendars and—
    Wait. How’d I get stuck with the boring explanations again?
APPRENTICED LIKE A DENTIST
    Doug here.
    As the countdown continued, I pounded on the Fire button, and on the video screen, my Hog Stomper swung his motorcycle twice around his head and—
    BOOM
    The game exploded. But not in fire or lightning or shrapnel; that would’ve killed me.
    No, it was an explosion of goo, of flesh. Of … steak.
    Strictly speaking, Douglas, you were impacted by self-extracting nanocellular matter, not flesh. Flesh is the soft tissue of the body of a vertebrate, whereas—
    Marshmallow, then.
    Imagine an 18-wheeler made of marshmallow hitting you at sixty miles an hour. Apparently, plugging that steak into the video game made it available to the new Awareness, which was searching for ways to output the skunks.
    The bad news: I got slammed across the room while the speakers broadcast, “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in nine minutes.”
    The good news: because I hooked the steak up to Street Fighter, the Awareness was able to output Poppy.
    When my vision returned, I stared at the video machines, which were now completely engulfed by a bubbling mound of goop. Then I looked higher, toward the ceiling.
    At the digital