Phase Two: Cell (Part 5)

"I'm a computer geek," Jordan said over his mug of hot chocolate. Clay found the child's glum

assurance oddly charming. "A total McNerd. Been on em my whole life, just about. Those things're

rebooting, all right. They might as well have software installation, please stand by blinking on their

foreheads."

"I don't understand you," Tom said.

"I do," Alice said. "Jordan, you think the Pulse really

it. . . they got their hard drives wiped."

"Well,

was a Pulse, don't you? Everyone who heardyeah," Jordan said. He was too polite to say Well, duh.

Tom looked at Alice, perplexed. Only Clay knew Tom wasn't dumb, and he didn't believe Tom was

that slow.

"You had a computer," Alice said. "I saw it in your little office."

"Yes—"

"And you've installed software, right?"

"Sure, but—" Tom stopped, looking at Alice fixedly. She looked back. "Their

brains'? You mean their

brains'?"

"What do you think a brain is?" Jordan said. "A big old hard drive. Organic circuitry. No one knows

how many bytes. Say giga to the power of a googolplex. An infinity of bytes." He put his hands to his

ears, which were small and neatly made. "Right in between here." (PDF pg. 98)

    Cell provides an interesting analogy (though most likely incorrect) between a computer and the human brain. The Pulse was the signal that turned anybody using a cell phone into a zombie.

    Anyway, the thing that really interests me about the quote isn't the theory, but its implications.

    While Jordan (the kids they find later on) talks about the Pulse becoming a reboot signal, the initial reaction to the Pulse was somewhat odd. Instead of everybody dropping like flies, they all try to kill each other or commit suicide.

    Stephen King believes that a human's first instinct is to kill all competition around: Evolution at its finest!

He's a cold-hearted killer and he wants your blood.

    From a certain stand-point, I kinda see where King was going with this. I would have originally thought that a human's first instinct would be to find life's essentials: food, water, shelter, etc. However, King believes that a human's first instinct is safety, which, in this case, means killing everybody until your the only one left, eliminating any potential threats.

    Then again, if you're in an urban environment like downtown Boston, there's no real foliage of any sort, so "roughing it" is out of the question. This leaves only one other possibility....HUMAN MEAT!!! (Yeah, you thought it wasn't possible, but I just carried that meme over to a second book).

    It's a dog eat dog world out there - literally.