Page 133 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Cerebronauts

rein to your cerebronauts once they get inside the memory palace.
Nevertheless, their passage to the inner sanctum might be
prevented by something implanted earlier as a fail-safe mechanism.
In addition to the blood-brain barrier, there could be a novel
immune reaction against the alien entities, engulfing and interdicting
them from any closer approach. Thus the inaccessible data turns
out to have a sort of firewall protecting it: that would have to be
hacked to penetrate, and there might not be time. Maybe a vaccine
against nanobots! But it could be even more dramatic: taking a cue
from genetically-modified seeds, the equivalent of a suicide gene
could have been inserted in synapses surrounding the hidden code:
once they touch these land-mine tripwires, the nanobots could
unintentionally trigger programmed cell death: the end.”
No one seemed inclined to say anything further on the topic.
People were looking at their watches.

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