She passed out the legal documents; Peter signed absently, not bothering to read it. “Anybody doesn’t want to sign, you can wait here until the tour is over. No? Everybody wants to go? Very well then. Follow me.”
She led them down a corridor to a series of biological laboratories, where Vin Drake was waiting. The glass-walled labs ran along both sides of a central corridor, and they were up-to-date in the extreme. Peter noticed that several of the labs contained a surprising amount of electronic equipment, almost like an engineering laboratory. It was quiet at Nanigen, the end of the work day, and most of the labs had emptied out, though a few researchers remained, doing work that would run on into the night.
Walking down the hallway, Vin Drake rattled off bits of information about each lab: “Proteomics and genomics…chemical ecology…Phytopathology, including plant viruses…stochastic biology…electrical signaling in plants…insect ultrasound lab…phytoneurology, that’s plant neurotransmitters…Peter, here’s venoms and toxins…Arachnid and coleoptid volatiles…behavioral physiology, that’s exocrine secretion and social regulation, ants primarily…”
“What’re all the electronics for?” someone asked.
“For the robots,” Drake said. “They need to be reprogrammed or repaired, after each trip in the field.” He paused, looked at the group. “I see a lot of puzzled faces. Here, come inside, let’s take a closer look.”
They filed into the laboratory to the right. It smelled faintly of earth, decaying plant matter, desiccated leaves. Drake led them to a table where several foot-square flats of earth were laid out. Above each square was a suspended video camera on a jointed arm. “Here are examples of the material we bring back from the rain forest,” he said. “We are working on different projects for each, but in every case the robots are at work.”
“Where?” Erika asked. “I don’t see—”
Drake adjusted the light, and the video camera. On side monitors, they saw a tiny white object in the soil, magnified many times. “As you see, it’s a burrowing and collecting machine, working on a microscopic scale,” Drake said. “And it has much to do, because a flat of soil like this holds a vast and interconnected world that is yet unknown to man. There’s trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of species of bacteria and protozoa, nearly all of them uncatalogued. There can be thousands of miles of wispy fungal hyphae threads in a patch of soil this big. There can be a million microscopic arthropods and other tiny insects, too small for the naked eye to see. There are dozens of earthworms of various sizes. In fact, there are more small living things in this little square of earth than there are large living things on the entire surface of our planet. Think about it. We humans live on the surface. We think that’s where the life is. We think in terms of people and elephants and sharks and forests of trees. But our perceptions are wrong. The truth of life on our planet is very different. The real bedrock fundamental life-teeming, burrowing, breeding, continuously active—is down here, at this level. And this is where the discoveries are going to be made.”
It was an impressive speech; Drake had given it before, and audiences were always awed into silence. But not this group; Rick Hutter immediately said, “And what’s this particular robot discovering?”
“Nematodes,” Vin Drake said. “Microscopic roundworms that we think have important biological properties. In a flat of soil like this, there are about four billion nematodes, but we want to collect only those which have not yet been discovered.”
Drake had turned to a line of windows that looked into a laboratory where a handful of researchers were working at banks of machines. Complicated machines. “What we’re doing in that room,” Drake said, “is screening. We’re screening thousands of compounds, very rapidly, using high-speed fractionation and mass spectrometry—those are the machines you see. We’ve already found dozens of totally new drug candidates. And they’re natural. Mother Nature’s best.”
Amar Singh had been quite impressed by the technology, but there were still things he didn’t understand. One of them was the robots. The robots were really small. Too small, he thought, to have much of a computer in them. Amar said, “How can those robots sort through the worms and pick them out?”
“Oh, they do it easily,” Drake said.
“How?”
“The robot has the intelligence to do it.”
“But how?” Amar indicated a flat of soil, where a tiny robot was rooting feverishly in the dirt. “This machine can’t be more than eight or nine millimeters in length,” Amar said. “It’s the size of my little fingernail. You can’t put any computing power in such a small dimension.”
“Actually, you can.”
“How?”
“Let’s go to the conference room.”
Four huge flat-panel screens glowed behind Vin Drake. The screens showed images in deep blue and purple that looked rather like waves on the ocean, as seen from an airplane. Drake paced in front of the screens, his voice amplified by the lapel microphone clipped to his jacket. He gestured to the purple screens. “What you are looking at,” he said, “are convection patterns in magnetic fields approaching sixty Tesla in strength. These are the highest magnetic fields generated by man. To give you some perspective, a sixty Tesla magnetic field is two million times greater than the strength of the earth’s own magnetic field. These fields are created by cryogenic superconduction using niobium-based composite materials.”
He paused to let this sink in. “It’s been known for fifty years that magnetic fields affect animal tissues in various ways. You’re all familiar with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs. You also know that magnetic fields can promote bone healing, inhibit parasites, change platelet behavior, and so on. But it turns out that those are all minor effects arising from exposure to low-intensity fields. The situation is entirely different under extremely high field strengths of the kind we have only recently been able to generate—and until recently nobody had any knowledge of what happened under those conditions. We call such magnetic fields tensor fields, to distinguish them from ordinary magnetic fields. Tensor fields have ultra-high field strengths. In a tensor field, dimensional changes can become evident in matter.
“But we did have a hint—a clue, if you will. It came from research conducted in the 1960s by a company called Nuclear Medical Data, which studied the health of workers at nuclear facilities. The company found workers were generally in good health, but they also noted that over a ten-year period workers exposed to high magnetic fields lost a quarter of an inch in height. This conclusion was considered a statistical artifact, and ignored.”
Drake paused again, waiting to see if the assembled students understood where this was going. They didn’t yet seem to suspect. “It turns out that it was not a statistical artifact. A French study in 1970 found that French workers in a high magnetic field area lost about eight millimeters in height. But the French study also discarded the finding, calling it ‘trivial.’
“However, we now know that it was nothing of the sort. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, took an interest in these studies and apparently tested small dogs under high strength fields—the strongest that could be generated at that time, at a secret lab in Huntsville, Alabama. There are no official records of these tests, except for some faded Xeroxes of faxes, which make reference to a Pekingese dog the size of a pencil eraser.”
That caused a stir. Some of the students shifted in their chairs. They glanced at one another.
“It seems,” Drake continued, “that the dog squeaked pitifully and died after a few hours, exsanguinating with a tiny drop of blood. In general the results were unstable and inconclusive, and the project was abandoned by order of then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.”
“Why?” one of the students asked.
“He was worried about destabilizing U.S.-Soviet relations,” Drake said.
“Why would it do that?”
“That will be clear in a minute,” Drake said. “The important point is that we
can now generate extremely high magnetic field strengths, these so-called tensor fields. And we now know that under the influence of a tensor field, both organic and inorganic matter undergo something analogous to a phase change. The result is that material in the field experiences rapid compression by a factor of ten to the minus one to ten to the minus three. Quantum interactions remain symmetrical and invariant, for the most part, so that shrunken matter interacts in a normal way with regular matter, at least most of the time. The transformation is metastable and reversible under inverse field conditions. Are you with me so far?”
The students were paying close attention, but their faces registered a wide range of reactions: skepticism, outright disbelief, fascination, even some confusion. Drake was talking about quantum physics—not biology.
Rick folded his arms and shook his head. “So what are you getting at?” he said quite loudly.
Unruffled, Drake answered, “It’s good you asked, Mr. Hutter. It’s time you see for yourselves.” The giant screens behind Drake went dark, then the central panel lit up. They were watching an HD video.
It showed an egg.
The egg sat on a flat black surface. Behind the egg there was a folded yellow backdrop, like a curtain.
The egg moved. It was hatching. A small beak poked through the eggshell; a crack lengthened; the top of the egg broke off. A baby chicken struggled out, cheeping, and stood up, wobbly, and flapped its little stubby wings.
The camera began to pull back.
As the scene widened, the chick’s surroundings came into view. The yellow backdrop, it turned out, was actually the huge, clawed foot of a bird. The foot of a chicken. The baby chick now tottered by a monstrously large chicken foot. As the camera drew back farther, the entire adult chicken became visible—it seemed gigantic. As the camera pulled fully back, however, the chick and the pieces of eggshell became nothing but specks of dirt under the grown bird.
“Get out…” Rick began, then stopped. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“This,” Drake said, “is Nanigen’s technology.”
“The transformation—” Amar began.
“Can be done to living organisms. Yes, we shrank that egg in a tensor field. The chicken fetus inside the egg wasn’t affected by the dimensional change. It hatched normally, as you can see. This proves that even highly complex biological systems can be compressed in a tensor field and still carry on the normal functions of life.”
“What are those other things in the picture?” Karen asked.
In the video, the floor under the giant chicken appeared to be splattered with tiny dots. Some of the dots were moving, some not.
“Those are the other chicks. We dimensionally shifted the whole brood,” Drake said. “Unfortunately they’re so small the mother has stepped on some of her babies without knowing it.”
There was a brief silence. Amar was the first to speak. “You’ve done this to other organisms?”
“Of course,” Drake answered.
“That means…people?” Amar said.
“Yes.”
“Those little robot diggers we saw in the arboretum,” Amar went on. “You’re telling us you don’t actually program intelligence into them.”
“We don’t need to.”
“Because you have human beings run them.”
“Yes.”
“Human beings who have undergone a dimensional change.”
“Holy shit,” Danny Minot burst out. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No,” Drake said.
Somebody burst out laughing. It was Rick Hutter. “Scam,” Rick muttered. “Guy’s selling worthless stock to fools.”
Karen King didn’t believe it, either. She said, “This is bullshit hype. No way. You can do anything with video.”
“It’s existing technology,” Drake said calmly.
Amar Singh said, “So you’re saying you can cause a dimensional change in a human being as great as ten to the minus three.”
“Yes.”
“Which means that someone six feet tall would be, uh, seventy-two inches…seven-hundredths of an inch tall.”
“That’s correct,” Drake said. “Slightly less than two-tenths of a millimeter.”
“Jesus,” Rick Hutter said.
“And at ten to the minus two,” Drake said, “the person is approximately half an inch tall. Twelve millimeters.”
“I would actually like to see this for real,” Danny Minot said.
“Of course,” Drake said. “And you will.”
Chapter 9
Nanigen Headquarters 28 October, 7:30 p.m.
W hile Drake was talking with the students, Peter Jansen had taken Alyson Bender aside. “Some of us brought samples and compounds to show Mr. Drake.”
“That’s good,” Alyson said to him.
“I’ve got a CD with some of my, uh, research on it,” Peter said. She nodded in response. “It’s a recording. It involves my brother,” Peter added. He hoped to start winding her up, making her nervous. She nodded again and left the conference room; did he see a flicker of alarm in her eyes?
After she’d left, while Drake was still talking, Peter slipped behind the service door and went to the audio panel. He needed some equipment; something to magnify his voice; he did not want Drake or anyone to be able to shut him up or shout him down. Behind the service door there were some drawers; he began opening them, and he found what he wanted. It was a lavalier, a wireless microphone device that would transmit his voice to a loudspeaker. The lavalier was identical to a unit Drake had used during his slide show and talk. The device consisted of a transmitter unit and a throat mike with a wire that ran to the transmitter. He slipped the transmitter into his pants pocket, stuffed the wire and mike in after it.
Drake concluded his presentation on the screens, and the lights went up in the meeting room. “Some of you have brought things to show us,” Drake said, “and we are very eager to see them. Now if—yes, what is it?”
Alyson Bender had come back into the room. She leaned close to Drake, whispered in his ear. Drake stared at Peter as he listened, then looked away. He nodded twice, but said nothing. Finally he turned back to Peter.
“Peter, you have a recording?”
“A CD, yes.”
“What is on that recording, Peter?” Drake didn’t seem upset at all.
“Something that will interest you.” Peter’s heart was pounding.
“Related to your brother?”
“Yes.”
Drake seemed unruffled. “I know this is a difficult matter for you,” he said, placing his hand on Peter’s shoulder. Gently, he added, “Wouldn’t it be easier to talk privately?”
Drake wanted to get him off alone, where nobody could hear what was said. Peter balked. “We can talk here,” he answered. In the conference room with everybody else.
Drake looked concerned. “If I might have a private word with you Peter—Eric was a friend of mine, too. I’ve suffered a loss myself. Let’s step into the next room.”
Peter shrugged and got up, and walked with Vin Drake and Alyson Bender into a smaller adjacent room—it was a prep booth for the conference room. Drake closed the door behind them and with a smooth gesture flipped the door’s lock. Then he spun around, and in the blink of an eye his face had been transformed: it was contorted with rage. He viciously clamped his hand around Peter’s throat and slammed him against the wall. With his other hand, he took Peter’s arm and bent it, holding it in a lock. “I don’t know what your game is, you little bastard—”
“No game—”
“The police aren’t looking for a phone on the boat—”
“No?”
“No, you little bastard. Because they haven’t been to the boat yard all day.”
Peter’s mind was racing. “The police didn’t need to go to the boat yard,” he said, “because they can find the phone just by looking at the GPS tracking signal—”
“No they can’t!” Drake let go of his arm a
nd punched him in the stomach, hard. Peter gasped and doubled over, and Drake grabbed his arm and bent it behind him, and got Peter in a neck lock, immobilizing him. “Don’t lie to me. They can’t, because I disabled the GPS before I ever put that phone on the boat.”
Alyson said nervously, “Vin…”
“Shut up.”
“So,” Peter said, “you disabled the GPS and rigged up the phone to clog my brother’s gas line?”
“No. To kill the fuel pump, you little asshole…I killed the radio, too…”
Alyson: “Vin, listen…”
“Alyson, keep out of this—”
“Why’d you do it?” Peter said, coughing, pulling at Drake’s fingers. Drake’s grip was strong on his throat. “Why?”
“Your brother was a fool. You know what he wanted? He wanted to sell this technology. Turns out there’s some legal issue about ownership, who really owned it. So Eric thought we should sell. Can you imagine: sell this technology. Eric betrayed Nanigen. He betrayed me personally.”
“Vin, for God’s sake—”
“Shut up—”
“Your mike!” Alyson pointed to the lavalier microphone on Drake’s lapel. “It’s on.”
“Ah, shit,” Vin Drake hissed. He punched Peter brutally hard in the solar plexus, and let him crumple to the floor on his knees, gasping. Very deliberately, Drake pulled back his jacket, revealing the transmitter clipped to his belt. He tapped a switch: the light was off. “I’m not stupid.”
Peter knelt on the floor and retched and coughed, unable to get a breath. He realized that the small clip microphone had come out of his pocket, and dangled on its cord. Drake might see it. Groping around, he tried to stuff it back in his pocket, and his hand hit the transmitter. He heard a loud popping noise coming over the loudspeakers in the conference room.
Drake looked toward the conference room. He had heard the sound. His eyes followed Peter’s hand, and he saw the little microphone. He took a step backward and lashed out with his boot, kicked Peter on the side of the head. Peter collapsed. Drake tore the lavalier’s cord out of Peter’s pocket, disconnecting the mike, and tossed it away. Peter rolled on the floor and groaned.
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