Infected Page 55

The lumpy noise probed at his brain.

what is a minute sonofab.i.t.c.h

“A minute. You know, sixty seconds.” It seemed so obvious it was difficult to explain. It was odd the Triangles wouldn’t know the concept of time. “Do you know what a second is? What time is?”

second no time yes

That reply came back fast, with only a touch of lumpy noise. They knew what time was. He’d have to ill.u.s.trate “a second.” He looked at the clock on the stove — if they could see that, it would be easy to explain.

“You can’t . . .” A chill washed over him, cutting off the question. Suddenly he wasn’t sure if he wanted an answer. “You can’t...see...

can you? See through my eyes?” He hadn’t given much thought to exactly what these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds could do. They could “read” his mind, in the literal sense, so could they pick up and read optical impulses from his brain? Pick them off in midstream?

no w e cannot see

The answer was a relief, but a short-lived relief, cut in half by the rest of the answer:

not yet

Not yet.

They were still growing. Maybe they were simply going to take over his mind, pus.h.i.+ng Perry’s own consciousness out of the way one step at a time. Maybe they were slowly choking out his brain, just as a gangly, fibrous weed in a garden methodically robs sustenance from a rose. The rose may be beautiful, glowing and soft, but the weed . . . the weed is the survivor, the one that grows in harsh soil, rocks, bad weather, low light. The one that faces impossible conditions and not only survives, but flourishes.

Perry was suddenly quite sure he knew what was happening — the Triangles were growing into him, taking over his body and his mind, keeping the sh.e.l.l, leaving the outside world none the wiser. Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers. It was the typical Hollywood script. And why not? It made sense. Why send armies and conquer the earth when you could slowly replace the human race? More efficient, more economic. Neater. Tidier. No messy bodies to clean up. Better even than the infamous neutron bomb that killed all the people and left the buildings standing.

Soon they’d tap in to his eyes. What next? His nose? h.e.l.l, maybe they were already smelling the rice simmering on the stove. Or maybe his mouth — they could speak to him through his own voice. Then what? His muscles? His very motions? Just how efficient were the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?

And how long were they going to be little? Maybe they weren’t separate at all. Maybe they were just different parts with different missions. Living jigsaw-puzzle pieces all planning on connecting in the swingingsingles Triangle bar known as Perry’s Place.

A warm flash of fuzzy noise interrupted his doom-and-gloom thoughts. ho w long is a second

ho w long is a minute

ho w long

Perry desperately wanted to avoid that mental screaming, that insistent chain saw of Triangle demand grinding through his thoughts.

“Okay, let’s figure this out.” He talked quickly, hoping to prevent any agitation. “See, a minute is sixty seconds, and a second is a very short piece of time.” The fuzzy noise seemed stuck on a high-pitched buzz — as he talked, they searched the database to keep up with the meaning of his words. “And a second is, like, this long . . . here, I’ll count to five using seconds. Pay attention to how long each count is, and that’s a second. One . . . two . . . three . . . four...five.”A flash of childhood memory reared to the surface, the jazzy counting song from the show The Electric Company (one-two-three four, five, six-seven-eight-nine-ten, eleven tweh-eh-eh-elve).

“That was five seconds, get it?” The high-pitched searching grew louder, followed only by the briefest buzz of a low pitch. second is shor t

minute is sixty

seconds hour is sixty

minutes correct

All inflection left the Starting Five’s voice. He could only a.s.sume that the word correct had been part of a question and not a statement, as there wasn’t even the smallest lilt in the words that echoed through his head. Whatever the reason for their brief digression into s.p.a.ced-out land, they had returned to their emotionless monotone.

“Correct.” He’d never mentioned the concept of an “hour.” They had pulled it out of his brain, probably based on its a.s.sociation with the minute and the second. Their ability to scan his brain grew faster and faster.

It hit him — quite suddenly, with the shuddering force of truth and revelation — that people were just complicated machines. They were no different than computers. The brain was simply a control center and a storage device; when you needed to remember something, the brain sent some kind of signal to recall stored data, exactly like telling a program to open a file. The command was sent, and another part of the computer

tw enty-four hours in a day

looked for data with code that matched the command, found it and sent that information to the processor where it was read and displayed on

the screen. The brain was exactly the same thing. Memories were stored in there somehow, some chemical process tied up in the cerebrum or cerebellum or what have you. With the right technology, you could read that stored data as easily as you could read the stored data in a hard drive, or the stored data on the pages of a book. They were all just mediums for keeping track of simple bits of information that

sev en days in a week

formed something more complex. But just like matter (compounds, then elements, then atoms, then protons and electrons), everything could be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.

It was looking more and more like the Triangles were constructed to read those little parts . . . to be able to fetch Perry’s stored memories off the hard drive he’d been carrying since before his birth: his brain. The sheer