Read Online The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven, Matthew Joseph Harrington - Free Book Online Page B

an old DoD report. About reaching a conclusion and taking action. There’s a part of the brain that registers each of those—”
    Toby was nodding fast and often. “Right, I remember that from medical school. If the action site lights up before the decision registry, you’re about to do something you haven’t thought over. So … anger and pleasure at the same time as action?”
    “You can get that writing a letter. No. Fear and pleasure and action.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Bullies are cowards. —I guess the convulsions wouldn’t be that tricky.”
    “You’d be surprised. Psychiatrists have spent over a century trying to find ways to induce convulsions at will. Electricity and insulin just aren’t satisfactory.” He saw her expression and said, “There actually is a reason. For a while after a convulsion, hallucinations and delusions are difficult to sustain. Takes more effort than the brain can put out.”
    “I get that. It just sounds like something they’d only find out after they’d done it to a few people.”
    “Could be. A lot of the other med students gave me the creeps.”
    He was comically astonished when May turned and ran out of the kitchen.
    He’d supposed she had just thought of something awful and gone to throw up, but he found her at the screen again.
    “School dropouts,” she said. “Medical school, law school, business school, lots of dropouts. Also athletic scholarships forfeited. And education majors are quitting too.”
    “Eggs. Cold,” he said.
    “Oh. —I was going to look up Soylent legislation … it can wait,” she said, and signed off.
    Toby was dusting fresh-ground pepper onto his eggs when he suddenly sat up and shouted, “Norendorphin!”
    May stared at him for a moment before bursting out laughing.
    Toby tried to be annoyed, but it didn’t work out, and he laughed a little too. “The convulsions,” he said. “Nerve impulses have to be filtered or you get random muscle responses, like strychnine poisoning. Filter them too much and you get numbness and paralysis, so the body produces norendorphin to prevent that from happening. If the nanos make cells produce a lot of norendorphin, you get convulsions. Smaller amounts would produce chronic idiopathic neuralgia, which is doctorspeak for ‘I don’t know why you hurt so you’re imagining it.’ It’d explain the high suicide rate. You’re still laughing.”
    She wasn’t, much, but she nodded and said, “Most people just sneeze.”
    *   *   *
    He waited until they were done eating before he said, “I think he designed an eggshell. So the nano would survive for a while in open air. Saline inside it, and it wouldn’t open again unless it was immersed.”
    “Toby, how do the things know what not to eat?”
    “Fail-safe topology. Same system your immune defenses use, only with a lot more conditions before the device unlocks. Viruses would be easy, they’re housed in rigid protein—I bet antihistamine sales are down, pollen has the same kind of coating. Bacteria have single-walled cells, not too hard to check. Finding out if a eukaryotic cell is operating, though … they’d have to reach in and poke around, probably find the mitochondria and monitor them.”
    “With no bacteria, shouldn’t we be having trouble digesting food?”
    Toby focused on the macroscale world again. “Yes, we should. Unless the nanos can also produce vitamins to order. That would take serious energy—my God, Indians, of course! If the nanos are soaking up light, higher frequencies are better, so your skin turns dark and absorbs everything but red.”
    May inspected her hands in a conspicuous manner.
    Toby aimed his palms upward and shrugged. “Insufficient data.”
    “Maybe they’re getting by on the radioactive atoms that were in us?”
    “That shouldn’t be enough.”
    “You do make balanced meals. We might not be short yet.”
    “Maybe. But we’ve been using a lot of energy,” he said. May