her satchel and retrieves his notebook. The kite program for his father. “This belongs to you. I should never . . .”
He’s so happy he doesn’t even hear the words she keeps on mouthing. He thought the notebook was gone forever, another thing he’d never get back from his life before the tree dropped him.
“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!”
A moan comes out of her. When he looks up, she turns and runs. Distress lasts only until he opens the notebook. Then he lies flipping through the recovered pages, remembering everything. So much work, so many good ideas—saved.
Six years pass. Puberty transforms Neelay Mehta. The boy shoots up into a fantastic creature: Seventeen years old, six-foot-six, 150 pounds, and fused to his wheelchair. His torso stretches out. Even his legs, shriveled to thick twigs, grow stupidly long. His cheeks shift like continental plates and his face spawns shoals of pimples. Black wires sprout from his once-pristine privates. He drops from soprano to high tenor. His hair grows as long as a Kesh-practicing Sikh’s, though he doesn’t tie it up into a rishi knot. He lets it flow in thick vines that fall all around his elongated face and down his bony shoulders.
He lives in his rolling metal rig—captain’s chair on a starship forever voyaging through strange regions of thought. Some people who can no longer walk grow fat. But those people eat. He gets through the day on fifty cents of sunflower seeds and two caffeinated sodas. Of course, he rarely spends a pointless calorie. Once he rolls up to his custom desk in the morning, his CPU tower and CRT need more power than he does. His fingers graze the keyboard and his eyes scan the screen, but his brain burns considerable glucose as he fashions his prototype creations, in eighteen-hour increments, command by careful command.
Stanford accepts him, two years early. The campus is just up El Camino. Its CS department flourishes, fertilized by extravagant gifts from the founders of his father’s company. Neelay has haunted the campus since the age of twelve. Long before he starts school as an official freshman, he’s a de facto mascot of the computer science set. You know: the ectomorph Indian kid, in the fancy chair.
Something is being born in the bowels of half a dozen different buildings across the Farm. Magic beanstalks erupt everywhere, overnight. It comes up in conversation with friends, in the basement computer lab where Neelay hangs out and codes. They can be a taciturn bunch, but on Sunday nights, the coders lift their heads from their do-loops long enough to dole out the liter soda bottles and break pizza crusts together, while shooting a little philosophical shit.
Someone says, “We’re evolution’s third act.” Sauce dribbles from his gaping mouth.
It’s like they all have the idea together. Biology was phase one, unfolding over epochs. Then culture throttled up the rate of transformation to mere centuries. Now there’s another digital generation every twenty weeks, each subroutine speeding up the next.
“Chips doubling their transistor count every eighteen months . . . ? I mean, take Moore’s law seriously, man.”
“Say it holds for the rest of our lives. We could live another sixty years.”
A giggle passes through them at the insane math. Forty doubling periods. Stratosphere-high piles of rice on the fabled chessboard.
“A trillionfold increase. Programs a million million times deeper and richer than the best thing anybody’s yet written.”
They pause for sober marveling. Neelay hangs his head over his untouched pizza, staring at the wedge as if it’s a problem in analytic geometry. “Living things,” he says, almost to himself. “Self-learning. Self-creating.” The whole room laughs, but he doubles down. “So fast, they’ll think we’re not even here.”
AT FIRST, the point of coding is to give everything away. Pure philanthropy. He’ll find a marvelous seed program in the public domain. Then he’ll flesh it out, add new features, switch on his 1,200-baud modem, dial in to a local bulletin board, and upload the source for anyone who wants to grow it some more. Soon his creatures propagate on hosts across the planet. Every day people around the globe add new species to the repositories. It’s the Cambrian Explosion all over again, only a billion times faster.
Neelay gives away his first masterpiece, a turn-based romp where you play a Japanese movie monster eating its way across the world’s metropolises. Hundreds of people in a dozen countries grab it, even at forty-five minutes per download. So what if playing it does to your