The petting zoo was a success, but the rest of the project wasn’t. Most of the people that Steven dealt with that week after the zoo trip were up to the usual things of life, ordinary things really. Combing one’s hair or just going to work. Or just having coffee with a neighbor, over some ham and eggs with a hefty smattering of complaints about relatives and the weather. Traffic was a favorite topic, combined with a long round of disbelief about venial politicians and why nothing works the way it used to.

Even Steven himself—he was part of the great masses, moving about with normal things to do as well. But none of his days had been very ordinary the last few weeks. He looked like an average guy with his blue shirts and khaki pants. His appearance was fine, albeit a little absentminded. And he realized that it was really true; he was becoming very absentminded.

A person can get that way wandering around in his own head. For weeks, Steven had been making connections that he had not thought about before. Connections that everyone else he had ever read or talked with had not made before. Not just the chemical details of what the world was, but rather what it was going to become. What he was going to make it become.

His mood was good, but it shocked him a little to realize what was happening. His work always showed the same thing: The life force is multidimensional, not just philosophically but mathematically. Whatever life is, it is not just about flowers growing in the rain. Life is also about the way the math feeds on itself and makes his equations come to life. The dissertation still didn’t interest him much, but the equations in it now interested him intensely.

Life is a result. It is the solution to the set of life’s equations. People search for it so hard, wanting to know its essence, and tear at life with tools to see how it works, as though the machines of life—its cells, molecules, and chemicals—are life or could ever reveal what it really consists of, or how it could be managed. What people pursued with relentless curiosity, Steven was finding, blew through them like the solar wind, erupting unstoppably from rocks or rain. Yes, he kept thinking, unstoppably. It is not going to be for us to say what is going to be alive or what that life is going to do in the future. Or when coefficients in the equations are going to demand a new form of life emerge. But we could find the equations—seeing the equations, we could see our lives, and, as well, we could see the limits.

Steven could take the limit of the functions and see life at its limits. His equations were going to create new life.

Everything mankind had ever done created some kind of new life. People just didn’t see it happening because they weren’t looking for it. Of course, they saw it in what they called the environment. There, anything that makes nature spout a new kind of life put chills in humans. Or, even worse, when people deliberately created new kinds of life and put them into the environment, it was made a crime. But what was happening?

Every time we altered the world around us, we were just farmers stirring up the soil in the field. We were evolution’s agent.

And it was done again. Steven was doing it. He was bringing on a new evolution by letting the equations of life find digital solutions in electronic ether. Nature was going to see a new species of life in the garden of all living things. Steven was beginning to realize it.

It was a big insight for Steven—he was a farmer after all, tilling up Eden. But maybe he had known that all along. It’s just that he was making a whole bunch of Edens erupt on the inside of his computer, with his math and databases as tools. They were real ones, or at least as real as any other Eden. And Steven found this realization really cool.

Of course, being nature’s little earthworm turning over the soil of life was a little unromantic even for Steven, so he began thinking about how discoveries are made. His mind was consumed again by thoughts about the adventurers who had come before, and their ships and their trains or whatever it had taken to get them there. Square Roman sails, tall-masted ships. Or laboratories?

Yes, thinking about it put him in a good mood as he drove to school with the car in manual mode. He felt anxious but happy. He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to exactly what he had done since he had awakened that day. He did know that he was late, but he had determined that when he was done with his various tasks, he was going to take the rest of the day off. Thinking like that was a kind of fertilizer for his mind.

That’s what Steven did when he was stuck on a problem. He may be a farmer, but right now he needed a new plow. He had a great overall plan, but he owed Bennie a solution—a real set of code—and pretty soon at that. The glitch at this point was such that he had no idea how he was going to deliver. The original proposition had seemed simple enough: write a computer program that would act the right way. He had the core code because he had the basic equations, but the model had to be tuned up. He needed to find the numerical value of a lot of coefficients to get the specific result he needed (i.e., a bunny).

Okay, so he needed to give Bennie a math program, which was a bunch of computer code. His equations could guide the program development, but Bennie’s program was going to mainly be developed by just trial and error. After succeeding with the toy bunny, he could use his equations to make a real-life living bunny—for Eli. And maybe more.

But Bennie’s project was first. Steven thought of it as a kind of game. All he had to do was program some machine to learn about how to behave the appropriate way. Little pieces of that problem had been done a thousand times before him and had been published in the academic press. He was going to put it all together by letting the program fit the pieces into one whole picture. The program would get one point if it did the correct thing and minus one point if it failed. Steven would write a program that would further write a billion programs. The program that accumulated the most points would live, and all the other ones would die. It was a little harsh, but it would work.

It wasn’t going to be as simple as he’d hoped, though. Steven had a data problem. If he really wanted to build the cuddly little thing Bennie had proposed, he was going to have to know what was happening inside the animal, such as what happened inside the tiny brown bunny while Eli was cooing over it at the zoo.

He tried his original plan, but it was a flop. He could mimic some of what was going on, but if he truly was going to do it, he was going to need to do more. He needed to know the exact chemistry of what was going on inside the rabbit. Steven had another problem, too: What he had done to date, Bennie could have done. It may have taken Bennie longer, but he could have done it—and that was reason enough to do more. Otherwise, Steven was going to end up making another fuzzy toy with a squeaky computer-generated voice like Bennie’s last one.

So right now he was thinking about adventurers. That was not what he was supposed to be thinking about, which was why he was thinking about it. He parked the car and walked across the quad on his way to hand in a physical draft of his dissertation. It wasn’t very large by dissertation standards, no more than two hundred pages of very dense mathematics. It irritated him to have to tote it in. Why anyone now required physical drafts was far beyond him, but it was the law of the university, however silly it seemed. Tradition was crap at this point as far as he was concerned.

He would have sent the thing in for a formal review a week ago if they would have officially accepted it. He sent it unofficially anyway to Professor Bernard, who was no fool. He had read it, which meant that Steven was likely to get some response today. He would endure it and then look in to see what Eli was up to.

His pager chip started to ring. He had forgotten to turn it off.

“Steven?”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Steven, how are you doing?”

“I’m fine. I’m on my way to hand in an official copy of my draft. Guess they want to make the students come to campus to get their degrees.”

“University rules always struck me as odd, too. But, Steven, the power company just sent me a copy of the power bill for the Farm. It’s pretty big. Are you building reactors out there? . . . I’m happy to help if you need the money, Son. I remember things being tight when I was a student, too.”

“No, Dad, it’s a one-time bill. I’ll pay it. Just an experiment.”

“I’m not concerned about the money, Son. It’s just that when we originally put in all that capacity, well, I never really expected that you would actually need it.”

“It’s just this experiment. It’s just for one time.”

“Steven, is everything all right?”

“Yes, Dad. I’m just a little fidgety about seeing Bernard.”

“Okay. But call me if you need anything.”

“I will, Dad.”

“All right. I’ve got a meeting. Good luck.”

Steven disconnected. Who else was going to notice that he was using enough power for a small city? He had to figure this thing out. And soon.

He swung by the biotech building and took the elevator to the fifth floor. The place was busy, but both Bernard and Eli were off somewhere with the rest of his staff. Steven took a deep breath. He was relieved but too ill at ease to celebrate. He dropped off the draft and snuck out, then he went over to the student center and got a cup of coffee. The place was crowded (students being the social animals they are), but he managed to find a small table in the corner. He used his pager chip to click into the learning Web and breezed over articles on rabbit physiology. His daydream hadn’t left him, though . . . he was thinking about ships, which made him think about the sun boats. Those great polished wooden ships, which he had seen as a kid in Egypt, were built five millennia ago, ships that took men to their destiny, or at least in the case of pharaohs to their afterlife.

Steven’s mind eventually came back to his problem. The mechanical stuff he could figure out, and the program itself seemed pretty capable of laying out the physiology, with the help of his dissertation. The problem came with the personality. Just photographing behavior as he had done with the home movies at the zoo wasn’t going to cut it. He needed something more radical, which cut into the actual chemistry of people and animals and how they felt toward each other.

He was getting nowhere. Something about this place really brought the zoo back to him. There were lots of rabbits in the world now; they used to be used widely in experiments, so their chemistry was well explored in the past, but with today’s advanced procedures they weren’t. As far as Steven knew, rabbit chemistry and biology hadn’t been of interest to scientists in a long time.

Except for talent for procreation, which comes naturally to a rabbit (and in spades) but can be one heck of a challenge to a lot of people, no one would care about investigating them. Now, some curious and greedy drug company might have been terribly interested in exactly how procreation happened in rabbits and why it was different from people—they might have paid real money to some researchers at a university to find out the chemistry and physics of rabbits at a very detailed level. The researchers would also likely publish a bunch of their results, because academics do not live by bread alone . . . they need publications, too.

Steven decided to investigate the existing research, and pretty soon he was discovering titles from the library about gene chip mapping during rabbit mating, etc. In one study, chemists had wanted to see what part of the DNA was turned on when the bunny was “turned on.” Steven may have gotten a chuckle out of it, but the researchers had been serious about the work. Perhaps it was the missing piece of Steven’s rabbit project. To get the type of rabbit they wanted, they would need to record everything about the rabbit, including what the critter was like at all sorts of times. Right down to how it grew its fur.

The data Steven was pulling up on the library database was perfect. Whoever had paid for the research had let the researchers publish volumes of information. The researchers had needed to know what the lab technicians were doing to the animals, of course. In order to be published, the data needed to be as complete as possible, including the human side, such as the chemistry of the lab technicians. It was a huge volume of data. But Steven now knew where to get what he needed for background for the rabbit program. He started to relax and take in his surroundings more.

Rabbits. Eli and he never had to go to the zoo to see rabbits; this was a zoo, and a good piece of what was happening right in front of him was very rabbitlike. Well, adult rabbitlike, behavior Steven would not be able to include in any toy rabbits they would sell to children. But Steven figured that he had made some good progress on the toy rabbit problem, and he decided that he deserved to spend a recreational moment watching the mating rituals that he saw being practiced all over this place.

That line of thought didn’t help Steven when he saw Eli with her group. They were on the far side of the room, minus their usual lab gear. Three women and a male colleague whom Steven didn’t know. Probably a new member of the team. But there was no Bernard, which meant that pretty soon Steven was going to have to go back to look for him at his office. Still, observing the group was suddenly interesting. They were a team full of conspiracies and rivalries. Nothing serious, but amusing. And they had a host of friends wandering by to say hello, to Eli in particular. She seemed to know everyone.

Steven saw George and Larry come in. Maybe this was going to be more fun than he’d expected. He crouched a little behind a somewhat oversized freshman. Now, here was conspiracy hatching. They got food and sat a few feet from him, hotly debating something, and they seemed to be in no mood for crowd watching. Steven decided then and there that he would get coffee a lot more often. He was obviously missing out on way too much by keeping to his lab.

Steven couldn’t hear their exact words, but George seemed furious about something and kept pointing at Larry with an accusing finger. Then Steven saw the word form on George’s lips: military. This is a foreign word among graduate students in bio. Like bulldozer among the architecture students. It had the resonating sound of an atheist at an ordination. It did not belong. It was inappropriate and impious, although there wasn’t anything sacred happening here except for purely open discourse. And the students’ general collaboration in the creation and pursuit of some very alien future. The university was the hotbed of tomorrow, and here was this word military. From one of his own.

Steven thought about it. He was struck by the word, but maybe he was overreacting, he thought. Could George and Larry be plotting against the military? That had happened here before; well, not to overthrow, but to outwit. Challenging the military was the master game. When you got tired of defeating the other students in intellectual games, it was time to access the military’s computers and manipulate a little of their own programming to, let’s say, make the paymaster issue a check for a hundred million dollars to some four-star general. It could be a lot of fun, and George, he knew, had pulled a funny or two last year. None at Steven’s expense, fortunately. But this was such a heated exchange that others in the room began looking. Not cool. And suddenly George and Larry noticed and stopped cold.

Still red in the face and visibly disturbed, Larry left.

This was not funny. Something was wrong. Steven wanted a little time to ponder that but even more to look at Eli and at the same time avoid seeing his prof, so he sat, crouched like a cat in some weeds. Eli’s group recovered from the breach of etiquette; they were used to someone misbehaving periodically. Not unusual in that group, especially when hormones competed with consciousness, frequently producing some sort of dissent and confusion.

Steven thought about George and Larry. Both of them, but especially George, were always a little at odds with the group when they should have fit in easily. George’s problem was that he tried too hard, exaggerating his successes when he didn’t need to. It gave him an edge that rubbed the others the wrong way. He was talented enough for the program, but chafed under the tutelage he got in classes. And now he was brooding over something, rolling a glass of water in his hands while he worked his way through some problem. He painstakingly and methodically picked apart a sandwich with the precision of a surgeon, not looking up except to glance over in Eli’s direction once or twice. Finally, he finished half of the sandwich, pushed some crumbs into a pile, stood up, and headed very deliberately for Eli’s group.

Eli didn’t notice George for a minute. When she did, the smile left her face. He stood over her and spoke.

“So the old man’s giving his postdocs some time off these days. He must be getting soft,” George said in a raspy voice.

Eli looked up at him and then at the others. There was a pause. Then one of the other women said, “Well, George, we haven’t seen you in a while. Don’t you go to class anymore?”

“I took a week off and went skiing in Vail. Great powder.”

“It’s a little late for skiing, isn’t it?” Eli said, observing that George looked neither tanned nor windblown. If this guy had spent the week on the slopes, he hadn’t gotten anything for it.

Steven was watching, ready to come to the rescue, but it was apparent from across the room (even without the benefit of audio) that Eli and the group were up to a George challenge. In fact, they were up to a George challenge long before George knew how to be a challenge. There were ways to impress the women in the group. This approach was a tried and true failure, though. The conversation went on for a while, but it was time for Steven to get on with his tasks.

Slipping out the side door, he stepped into the sunshine and immediately decided to blow off his meeting on the dissertation and instead go back to his lab and start downloading bunny data.

Copyright 2003 P. J. Fischer