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The new strain added to this list. It modified stem cells to produce tiny, free-floating strands of a strong, flexible micromuscle fiber. These fibers would self-a.s.semble, binding together in specific, collective patterns. While Bobby Jewells body dealt with the activities of reader-b.a.l.l.s, builders and herders, his daughter, brother and niece would have to deal with the newest microorganism.
Chelsea, Donald and Betty would feel the effects of the crawlers.
CRAWL
Perry Dawseys seeds had come from batch thirteen. His triangles hatched in seven days. Due to constant design improvements, the seeds of batch seventeen needed only five.
Five days is an engineering marvel of self-organization, a testament to some seriously advanced technology. Consider it an upgrade to the old strain.
For the new strain, however, five days seemed like an eternity. Whereas Perrys structures had to build many complex parts, the new structures produced only one thing.
Microscopic strands of modified human muscle.
Hacked muscle.
Each strand contained muscle cells, of course, but also tiny neurotransmitter secretors and a complex crystalline set of molecules capable of both sending and receiving rudimentary signals.
A hacked strand by itself was worthless. It could wiggle . . . and thats about it. It could also send and receive I am here signals, which was key because the strands werent designed to work by themselves.
The I am here signals drew them together, almost like the last individual bits of cereal floating on top of your milk. The bits just float there, until they get close, and then surface tension yanks them together. When a strand detected an I am here signal from another strand, it wiggled toward it. The wiggling strands reached out to each other, touched and intertwined. Now their signal was twice as strong, drawing more strands, and so on.
A normal human muscle cell by itself is useless. Many cells working in unison, however, produce complex movement. The hacked strands followed a similar logicthe whole proved greater than the sum of the parts. When the hacked-strand collections reached a certain size, about five hundred microns wide, the I am here signal shut off.
A micron is one one-millionth of a meter. Five hundred microns is five ten-thousandths of a meter, or about two-hundredths of an inch. d.a.m.n small, but you can still see something like that with the naked eye.
If you could have looked inside the bodies of Chelsea Jewell, Donald Jewell and Betty Jewell, you would have seen something rather disturbing, something that looked very much like a human nerve cell. On one end, a long, thin axon. On the other end, branching dendrites spreading out like the tributaries of a river.
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