NEAL STEPHENSON

371

“There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves-I’m not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses-viruses generated from within itself.

“At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human race and has been with us ever since The first thing it did was to spawn a whole Pandora’s box of DNA viruses-smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.

“That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general.”

“Perhaps,” Ng says, “there are only so many viruses that will work in the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them.”

“Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture-the society based on me-was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA.”

“Excuse me,” Mr. Lee says. “You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?”

“Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It’s a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don’t know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes ita virus. Sumei-ian culture-with its temples full of me-was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders.

“The Sumerian word for ‘mind,’ or ‘wisdom,’ is identical to the