Titans of Chaos

I took out my cell phone and explained my idea to Victor. The original molecular engine made byDr. Fell, which I had turned into a living being, Victor could make inside his bone marrow withthe molecular factories he now had there. He had the blueprints for the repair creature. I couldstart changing them into self-motivated things as soon as he made them.

Victor, his voice tiny over the cell phone, said, "It sounds like a bad idea, Amelia. If you giverandom programs to the atoms in my body, they will act randomly. I do not see the advantage."

"I am not talking about random! I am talking about giving them free will."

"Free will means random. The concepts are one and the same."

I opened my mouth to explain about self-organizing systems, such as evolution or free-marketforces, which create purposeful action in concert, in spite of any separate purposes of theindividual actors, but then I stopped. The concept was not in his paradigm. For him, logic was amechanical thing, not an organic self-correcting dialogue. There was no Godelian incompletenessin Victor's universe. It was all clean and sterile and perfect Inanimate.

No creative initiative for the atoms in Victor's universe. No surprises.

Well, this was going to be a surprise. I reached out and down with an energy-tendril, and out andover with another. I located the living molecular creature inside Quentin's body, plucked it out ofthe middle of him, and rotated it across four-space (without crossing the intervening distance) todeposit it inside Victor. As I moved it, I passed the creature through a field of force spreadingfrom my wings in the upper dimensions, which oriented it to its repair-purpose. I pointed it in thedirection of Final Cause and gave it a little bit of thickness in that direction.

Into Victor it went-and it multiplied. Its essence spread to everything like it. I saw his bloodstreamlight up with entelechy. Suddenly it was not just a stream of atoms forming inanimate carbonmolecules in his blood anymore. The atoms had a purpose. They existed for the sake of curingVictor. That was their final cause.