iologist Vergil Ulam works for the California firm Genetron on its biochip project, attempting to fuse wet and silicon tech. But in his spare time, he's been using the company's facilities for a secret project all his own. Starting with a culture of his own lymphocytes, Vergil has genetically engineered something brand new: sentient cells, colonies of which approach or exceed human intelligence. When his transgressions are discovered, Vergil is ordered to destroy all his precious work or be fired. He commits most of his cultures to acid and fire, but saves a small colony of supercells. When, later, he is fired anyway, he discovers that the only way to remove his brainchildren from the secure facility is to inject them into his own body.
Thus begins the catastrophic chain of events that will eventually transform the surface of the entire planet.
Unemployed and adrift, Vergil becomes lovers with a woman named Candice. Unable to reveal his secrets to her, he visits his mother, but has no greater luck confiding to her. Returning home, Vergil finds his hand forced by eerie changes occuring in his body. Alternately bemused, frightened and thrilled, he contacts an old friend, Dr. Edward Milligan. Milligan discovers that the dwellers inside his pal have reconstructed Ulam's organs and skeleton and are about to start work on their inventor's brain. Unable to cope with the knowledge alone, Milligan reaches out to Michael Bernard, a rich and famous scientist-entrepreneur who shares information about Ulam's condition and wishes to exploit the discovery. But before either man can do anything, they realize that they too are now infected with Ulam's all-conquering supercells, or "noocytes." After reluctantly killing Ulam in a vain attempt to thwart the plague, Milligan returns home to undergo whatever transformations await him in the company of his equally infected wife. Meanwhile, Bernard journeys to Europe, where he manages to place himself in isolation at a lab without contaminating anyone else.
Now the thinking plague is loose across all of North America, flowering exponentially and unstoppably, and our attention shifts to new sets of characters. Suzy McKenzie is a young woman in New York who awakes one morning to find the whole city turned alien. She is apparently the only human untouched by the Ulam contagion, and she begins a weird hegira to the World Trade Center seeking help. Back in California, two uncontaminated brothers, John and Jerry, encounter Ulam's mother and begin their own search for answers. In Europe, Bernard serves as test subject in a vain attempt to stifle the plague, all the while learning from the tiny colonists within him. By the time all of North America is covered in a carpet of protoplasm, the human race seems doomed. And then the noocytes reveal their ultimate scheme.
A startling and unsurpassed masterpiece
Perhaps the most startling thing about Bear's masterpiece some 20 years after its 1985 publication (longer than that, if one counts the appearance of the 1983 novella version) is that it has never yet been surpassed. Despite some excellent subsequent exfoliations of this trope, such as Cory Doctorow's "0wnz0red," Bear's vision of the ultimate biological apocalypse remains as farseeing, horrific, stimulating and engrossing as when it first debuted. Any reader coming newly to this book in the 21st century will surely experience the same frissons as the awestruck young cyberpunks of 1985.
The enduring triumph of this novel stems from many factors. First, Bear creates empathy-inducing characters who are all-too-believably flawed and familiar. No supermen, no ass-kicking female ninjas, no stern-jawed politicians. Just working stiffs (even if they happen to be wonky, Rudy-Ruckerish geniuses such as Vergil) and money-hungry businessmen. The introduction of Suzy McKenzie, a somewhat "slow-witted" teenager, as the main point-of-view character was a key move in making the disaster comprehensible. Second, Bear mixes high and low art in a perfect ratio. There's just enough Blob-style B-movie horror stuff to complement the High Ballardian anomie. Like Vergil and Bernard, the book itself is torn between reviling the noocytes and finding them ultimately seductive. Third is the smooth, carefully wrought prose Bear employs. There are no histrionics or grandiose melodrama. While not coldly clinical or totally unemotional, the book certainly privileges rationality over hysteria. And Bear's elegant foreshadowing (female/mother imagery is attached to Vergil right from the beginning, to hint at his status as "supermother" to a new species) is something not many SF writers bother with. Finally, Bear does not merely pursue all the most obvious ramifications of the noocytes, as a good but lesser SF writer might do, but he also kicks his plot up to 11 just when you think it's reached a climax.
The book does feature a few details rendered archaic by the passage of two decades, not the least of which is the climax at the WTC. Yet even that impossibility now looks eerily prophetic. But characters also rely on dial phones and bulky "VDTs" that seem suspiciously mainframe-dependent. Yet these trivial intrusions of yesterday's tech will dwindle to insignificance in the onrush of the noocyte conquest.
