'All I really want to know is how to make audiences laugh until they puke,' she lamented.

'Then there were breakthroughs in… X-ray lithography, I think he called it.'

'Call it gobbledegook or fumfuddle if you want. It'll mean as much to me.'

'Anyway, some fumfuddle breakthrough made it possible to print one billion circuits on a chip, with features one thousandth the width of a human hair. Then two billion. And this was years ago.'

'Yeah, but while all these hotshot scientists were making their breakthroughs, I memorized one hundred and eighteen jokes about big butts. Let's see who gets more laughs at a party.'

The idea of nanomachines and nanocomputers swarming through her blood creeped her out no less than the idea of an extraterrestrial bug gestating in her chest a la Aliens.

'By shrinking dimensions,' Dylan explained, 'chip designers gain computer speed, function, and capacity. Proctor talked about multi-atom nanomachines driven by nanocomputers made from a single atom.'

'Computers no bigger than a single atom, huh? Listen, what the world really needs is a good portable washing machine the size of a radish.'

To Jilly, these minuscule, biologically interactive machines began to seem like fate in a syringe. Fate didn't need to sneak up on her with a club; it was already inside her and busily at work, courtesy of Lincoln Proctor.

Dylan continued: 'Proctor says the protons and electrons in one atom could be used as positive and negative switches, with millions of circuits actually etched onto the neutrons, so a single atom in a nanomachine could be the powerful computer that controls it.'

'Personally,' Jilly said, 'I'd rush out to Costco the moment I heard they were selling a reasonably priced teeny-tiny microwave oven that could double as a bellybutton ornament.'

Sitting here with her arms crossed and her hands in her armpits, she could barely make herself listen to Dylan because she knew where all this information was leading, and where it was leading scared the sweat out of her. She felt her armpits growing damp.

'You're scared,' he said.

'I'm all right.'

'You're not all right.'

'Yeah. What am I thinking? Who am I to know whether I'm all right or not all right? You're the expert on me, huh?'

'When you're scared, your wisecracks have a desperate quality.'

'If you'll search your memory,' she said, 'you'll discover that I didn't appreciate your amateur psychoanalysis in the past.'

'Because it was on target. Listen, you're scared, I'm scared, Shep is scared, we're all scared, and that's okay. We-'

'Shep is hungry,' said Shepherd.

They had missed breakfast. The lunch hour was drawing near.

'We'll get lunch soon,' Dylan promised his brother.

'Cheez-Its,' Shep said without looking up from his open palms.

'We'll get something better than Cheez-Its, buddy.'

'Shep likes Cheez-Its.'

'I know you do, buddy.' To Jilly, Dylan said, 'They're a nice square snack.'

'What would he do if you gave him those little cheese-cracker fish – what're they called, Goldfish?' she wondered.

'Shep hates Goldfish,' the kid said at once. 'They're shapey. They're all round and shapey. Goldfish suck. They're too shapey. They're disgusting. Goldfish stink. They suck, suck, suck.'

'You've hit on a sore point,' Dylan told Jilly.

'No Goldfish,' she promised Shep.

'Goldfish suck.'

'You're absolutely right, sweetie. They're totally too shapey,' Jilly said.

'Disgusting.'

'Yes, sweetie, totally disgusting.'

'Cheez-Its,' Shep insisted.

Jilly would have spent the rest of the day talking about the shapes of snack foods if that would have prevented Dylan from telling her more than she could bear to know about what those nanomachines might be doing inside her body right this very minute, but before she could mention Wheat Thins, he returned to the dreaded subject.

'In that interview,' Dylan said, 'Proctor even claims that one day millions of psychotropic nanomachines-'

Jilly winced. 'Psychotropic.'

'-might be injected into the human body-'

'Injected. Here we go.'

'-travel with the blood supply to the brain-'

She shuddered. 'Machines in the brain.'

'-and colonize the brain stem, cerebellum, and cerebrum.'

'Colonize the brain.'

'Disgusting,' Shep said, though he was most likely still talking about Goldfish.

Dylan said, 'Proctor envisions a forced evolution of the brain conducted by nanomachines and nanocomputers.'

'Why didn't somebody kill the son of a bitch years ago?'

'He says these nanomachines could be programmed to analyze the structure of the brain at a cellular level, firsthand, and find ways to improve the design.'

'I guess I failed to vote when Lincoln Proctor was elected to be the new god.'

Taking her hands out of her armpits, Jilly opened her fists and looked at her palms. She was glad that she didn't know how to read them.

Dylan said, 'These colonies of nanomachines might be able to create new connections between various lobes of the brain, new neural pathways-'

She resisted the impulse to put her hands to her head, for fear that she would feel some faint strange vibration through her skull, evidence of a horde of nanomachines busily changing her from within.

'-better synapses. Synapses are the points of contact between neurons in a neural pathway inside the brain, and apparently they become fatigued when we think or just when we stay awake too long. When they're fatigued they slow down our thought processes.'

Dead serious, not reaching for a wisecrack, she said, 'I could use a little synapse fatigue right now. My thoughts are spinning way too fast.'

'There's more in the interview,' Dylan said, pointing again at the laptop screen. 'I skimmed some of it, and there was a lot that I just didn't understand, a lot of fumfuddle about something called the precentral gyrus, and the postcentral gyrus, Purkinje cells… on and on with the arcane words. But I understood enough to realize what a hole we're in.'

No longer able to resist pressing her fingertips to her temples, Jilly felt no vibrations. Nevertheless, she said, 'God, it doesn't bear thinking about. Millions of tiny nanomachines and nanocomputers salted through your head, squirming around in there like so many bees, busy ants, making changes… It's not tolerable, is it?'

Dylan's face had gone gray enough to suggest that if his usual optimism had not burned out, at least it had for the moment grown as dim as banked coals. 'It's got to be tolerable. We don't have any choice but to think about it. Unless we take the Shep option. But then who would cut our food into squares and rectangles?'

Indeed, Jilly couldn't decide whether talking about this machine infection or not talking about it would lead more surely and quickly to full-blown panic. She felt a dark winged terror perched within her, its feathers fluttering agitatedly, and she knew that if she didn't control it, didn't keep it firmly on its perch, if she allowed it to take flight, she might never bring it to roost again; and she knew that once it had flown long enough, frantically battering its pinions against the walls of every chamber in the mansion of her mind, her sanity would take flight with it.

She said, 'It's like being told you've got mad cow disease or brain parasites.'

'Except it's intended to be a boon to humanity.'

'Boon, huh? I'll bet somewhere in that interview, the nutcase used the term master race or super race, or something like it.'

'Wait'll you hear. From the day Proctor first conceived of using nanotechnology for the forced evolution of the brain, he knew exactly what the people who underwent it should be called. Proctorians.'

A thunderous bolt of anger was the ideal thing to distract Jilly from her terror and to keep it caged. 'What an egotistical, self-satisfied freak!'