Micro

by Michael Crichton

  Makele ushered Watanabe into his office. Windowless. Watanabe noticed a photograph of a woman, must be the guy’s wife. Two children, just keiki s. He noticed a plaque on the wall. U.S. Marine Corps.

  Watanabe sat on a chair. “Nice kids.”

  “I love ’em to death,” Makele said.

  “You served in the Marines?”

  “Intel.”

  “That’s cool.” Chitchat never hurts, and you can pick up things. “We found your vice president, Alyson Bender—” he began.

  “We know. She was very depressed.”

  “What got her depressed?”

  “She’d lost her boyfriend, Eric Jansen. Who drowned.”

  “So Ms. Bender and Mr. Jansen were romantically connected, I take it,” Watanabe said. He could feel the uneasiness of the man under the surface. Cop instinct. He went on: “It’s actually pretty hard for seven people to vanish in these islands. I’ve called around to see if the students showed up anywhere. Like Molokai. Everybody on Molokai knows everybody else on Molokai. If seven kids from Massachusetts showed up there, the Molokai folks would be talking about it.”

  “Don’t I know. I was born on Moloka‘i,” Makele said.

  Watanabe noticed that he pronounced the name of the island in the old way. Moloka‘i. With the glottal stop. It made him wonder if Makele spoke any Hawaiian. People born on Molokai sometimes did speak Hawaiian; they learned it from their grandparents or from “uncles”—traditional teachers. “Molokai is a beautiful place,” Watanabe remarked.

  “It’s the old Hawai‘i. What’s left of it.”

  Watanabe changed the subject. “Do you know a gentleman named Marcos Rodriguez?”

  Makele looked blank. “No.”

  “How about Willy Fong. A lawyer up north of the freeway.” Watanabe did not mention they were dead.

  Makele picked it up anyway. “Sure—” He squinted, looked puzzled. “The guys who got stabbed, right?”

  “Yes, in Fong’s office. Fong, Rodriguez, and another man, still unidentified.”

  Makele seemed confused. He spread his hands out and said, “What am I missing, lieutenant?”

  “I don’t know.” Watanabe watched Makele to see his reaction to that.

  Makele seemed surprised and irritated, but he stayed calm. Watanabe was pleased to see that the security chief fidgeted in his chair. He’s nervous, Watanabe thought.

  “What I know about those murders,” Don Makele went on, “is what I saw on the news.”

  “What makes you think they were murders?”

  “It’s what they said on the news.” Makele paused.

  “Actually they said it was suicide,” Watanabe said. “Did you think it was murder?”

  Makele didn’t take it casually. “Lieutenant, is there some reason why you want to talk to me about this—?”

  “Fong or Rodriguez weren’t doing any work for Nanigen, were they?”

  “Are you kidding? Nanigen would never hire losers like that,” Makele answered.

  Don Makele knew very well what had happened to Fong and Rodriguez. Nineteen security bots had disappeared on the night of the break-in. They had swarmed onto an intruder, cut into his body, and circulated in the man’s bloodstream, slicing open arteries from the inside. But the bots weren’t supposed to do this. They weren’t programmed to kill anybody. They were supposed to photograph the intruder and cut the skin lightly, making the intruder bleed and thus leave a blood trace behind—and they were supposed to trigger a silent alarm. That was all. Nothing dangerous, certainly not lethal. But somebody had programmed the bots to kill. Vin Drake did it, Makele thought. The bots had sliced he intruder to ribbons, then had cut their way out of the man’s body, and jumped from that man to the next man like fleas. Bloodthirsty, lethal fleas. A burglar and his friends had gotten themselves killed. Accidents happen more often to assholes. But what did this detective know? Makele wasn’t sure, and it made him nervous.

  He decided to get tough. He leaned forward and put his voice into Official Mode and said, “Is this company or any of its employees the subject of a criminal investigation?”

  Watanabe let a signficant silence elapse. “No,” he finally answered. Not at this time.

  “I’m glad to hear that, lieutenant. Because this company is highly ethical. The founder, Vincent Drake, is known for putting his own money into cures for orphan diseases, diseases that nobody else bothers to cure because they aren’t profitable. Mr. Drake is a good man who puts his heart where his money is.”

  Lieutenant Dan Watanabe listened to this with a neutral face. “You mean, he puts his money where his heart is.”

  “That’s what I said,” Makele answered, gazing back at Watanabe.

  Watanabe placed his card on the security man’s desk, and wrote a phone number on it with his pen. “That’s my cell. Call it any time if anything comes up. I think Mr. Drake is expecting me.”

  Vin Drake sat behind his desk, leaning back in an executive chair. An Oriental rug covered the floor, an antique. The air held a pleasant aroma of cigar. Given the pleasance of the aroma, Watanabe concluded that the cigar had cost more than ten dollars. The office had no windows. Soft panel lighting. He noticed, through a side door, a private bathroom with marble fixtures. Interesting to see that inside a warehouse. The guy took care of himself.

  “We’re very distressed by the recent events,” Drake said. “We’ve been hoping you could help us.”

  “We’re doing our best,” Watanabe said. “I just wanted to get more background on the disappearances.”

  “Sure.”

  Watanabe had been enjoying the portrait of Drake on the wall behind him. It wasn’t bad. Maybe a little pretentious, but lively. “Can you tell me what your company does?”

  “Basically we make small robots and use them to explore nature, as a way of discovering new drugs to save human lives.”

  “How small?”

  Drake shrugged and put his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart.

  Watanabe squinted. “You mean half an inch? Like the size of a peanut?”

  “Maybe a little smaller,” Drake answered.

  “How much smaller?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “One millimeter, say?”

  Drake gave a crisp smile. “That’s barely feasible.”

  “But have you done it?”

  “Done what?”

  “Made robots one millimeter in size.”

  “We’re getting into proprietary areas.” Drake leaned back.

  “Have you had any industrial accidents with your robots?”

  “Accidents?” Drake frowned, and then broke into a chuckle. “Yes—frequently.”

  “Anybody get hurt?”

  “It’s the other way around.” Drake laughed. “People step on the robots by accident. The robots always lose.” He sighed and looked at his watch. “I have a meeting.”

  “Sure. Just one thing.” Watanabe would describe what he’d seen in the microscope, but he would not show Drake a photograph of the device, because a photo was evidence, and you don’t flash evidence. So he kept things vague. “We’ve become aware of a device, pretty small, that appears to have what might be a propeller and cutting blades. It might be able to fly, or swim in somebody’s bloodstream. Is this a Nanigen product?”

  Drake took a moment to reply; Watanabe thought the moment lasted a beat too long. “No,” Drake answered. “We don’t make robots like that.”

  “Does anybody make them?”

  Drake gave Watanabe a careful look. Where was this cop going? “I think you’re describing a theoretical device.”

  “What kind?”

  “Well, it would be a surgical micro-robot.”

  “A what?”

  “A surgical micro-bot. Also called a surgibot. It’s a very small robot used for medical procedures. In theory, a surgibot could be made small enough to circulate in a patient’s bloodstream. Equipped with scalpels, a swarm of surgibots could perform microsurgery. They could be i
njected into a patient, and the surgibots would swim through the bloodstream to the target tissue. Surgibots could cut arterial plaques from the inside of an artery, for example. Or a swarm of surgibots could hunt down metastasized cancer cells. The surgibots would kill the cancer cells one at a time, thus defeating the cancer. But as of now, surgibots are a dream, not a reality.”

  “So you’re not actually building these…what you call…surgibots?”

  “Not like that, no.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Watanabe said.

  Drake sighed. “We’re getting into an area that’s very sensitive.”

  “Why?”

  “Nanigen is doing research…for you.”

  “For me?” Watanabe said, looking mystified.

  “You pay taxes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Nanigen is working for you.”

  “Oh, so you’re doing government—?”

  “We can’t go there, lieutenant.”

  They were doing secret government work, classified, something with small robots. Drake was warning him off, hinting he’d have trouble with the government if he pursued this. Fine. Abruptly, Watanabe changed gears. “Why did your vice president jump off his boat?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Eric Jansen was an experienced boater. He knew to stay with his boat even in surf. He jumped into the surf for a reason. Why did he jump?”

  Drake stood up, his face flushed. “I have no idea what you’re getting at. We’ve asked you to find our missing students. You haven’t found anybody. We’ve lost two key executives. You haven’t given us a damn bit of help there, either.”

  Watanabe stood up. “Sir, we did find Ms. Bender. We’re still looking for Eric Jansen.” He took out his wallet and nudged out his business card.

  Drake took the card and sighed as he looked at it, and an unpleasant expression flitted across his face. “To be frank, we are disappointed with the Honolulu police.” He let the card flutter down to his desk. “One wonders what you actually do.”

  “Well, sir, the Honolulu Police Department is older than the New York Police Department—I didn’t know if you knew that. We’ll just keep working our cases like we always do, sir.”

  “We’ve got five more of them.” Dorothy Girt laid the photographs out for Watanabe on her lab bench. They showed the same devices, each with a propeller inside a housing and a gooseneck with blades. “I found them in the Asian John Doe. A smelly job.”

  “How did you find them, Dorothy? They’re really small.”

  Dorothy Girt flashed him a cool smile of triumph, and opened a drawer, and held up a heavy object. It was an industrial horseshoe magnet. “I swiped it over the wounds. Darned thing is heavy.”

  She put the magnet aside, then showed him a blowup photo of one of the robots. The bot had been split cleanly, in a perfect cutaway view. Incredibly small chips and circuitry were visible, and something that looked like a battery, a driveshaft, gears…

  “This thing is cut perfectly in half! How did you do that, Dorothy?”

  “It was simple. I mounted it in an epoxy block, just like a tissue sample. Then I sliced it with a microtome. Same thing you do with tissue samples.” Dorothy’s microtome, with an ultrasharp blade, had split the micro-bot right down the middle. “Note this feature, Dan.”

  He bent over the photo and followed her finger to a boxlike object in the guts of the robot. A small lowercase n was printed on the box.

  “So,” he said. “The CEO lied to me.” He wanted to slap Dorothy on the back, but stopped himself at the last moment. Dorothy Girt didn’t seem like a person who would welcome the gesture. Instead he offered her a slight nod of the head in the Japanese mode of respect—a family habit. “Excellent work, Dorothy.”

  “Hmp,” she snorted. Her work was never anything but excellent.

  Chapter 36

  Tantalus Crater 31 October, 1:00 p.m.

  Mother Fucking Nature,” Danny Minot muttered. “It’s nothing but monsters with insatiable appetites.” He was trudging along, dragging his grass-covered feet and holding his swollen arm protectively. His arm seemed to have gotten even bigger, to the point where his shirt sleeve was beginning to show small rips and tears. Rick Hutter and Karen King walked along next to Danny, Rick wearing the backpack, Karen holding a machete bared and ready for action. They were the last three survivors. They were stumbling across a vast, curving sweep of land, covered with sand and gravel. It was the lip of Tantalus Crater. The open land extended to a bushy line of bamboo in the distance, towering to an immense height. Through a gap in the bamboo, a boulder the size of a mountain lurked, moss-covered and furrowed with gullies. The boulder seemed to be miles distant, at least for people of their size.

  The sun beat down on them. No rain had passed over Tantalus in many hours. They were getting very thirsty. Their small bodies lost moisture fast.

  Karen felt exposed. They were targets. In motion across a wasteland, without cover. A bird passed overhead, and she cringed and clutched her machete. But it wasn’t a mynah, it was a hawk circling over Tantalus, and the humans were too small to make a decent meal for a hawk—or so she hoped.

  “Are you okay, Karen?” Rick asked.

  “Stop worrying about me.”

  “But—”

  “I’m fine. Check on Danny. He looks bad.”

  Danny had sat down on a stone and seemed unable to keep going. He was fondling his bad arm, adjusting the sling, and his face had gone white.

  “You okay, man?”

  “What’s the meaning of that question?”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “There’s nothing wrong!” But now Danny was staring at his arm. A muscle in his arm spasmed, tensing against the cloth, relaxing, tensing again. It looked involuntary. Danny seemed to have lost control of the muscles.

  “Why is it doing that?” Rick asked, as the spasms moved in corrugated waves along Danny’s arm. The arm seemed to have a life of its own.

  “It’s not doing anything,” Danny insisted.

  “But Danny, it’s jerking—”

  “No!” Danny shouted, pushing him away, and he picked up his arm and moved it out of Rick’s reach, cradling it with his good hand and turning his back to Rick as if he were guarding a football. Rick began to suspect that Danny had lost all motor control of his arm.

  “Are you able to move your arm?”

  “I just did.”

  Suddenly there was a tearing, splitting sound. Danny started moaning, “No…no…” His shirt sleeve was finally coming apart. As the sleeve split, it revealed a horrible sight. The skin had become translucent, like oiled parchment. Beneath the skin, fat white ovoids rested, twitching slightly. They had a contented look.

  “The wasp laid eggs,” Rick said. “It was a parasite.”

  “No!” Danny screamed.

  The eggs had hatched. Into larvae. Grubs. They’d been feeding on the tissues in his arm. Danny stared at his arm, holding it and moaning. The popping sounds in his arm—those were the eggs hatching…the grubs were digging…chewing through his arm…he whimpered, and began screaming. “They’ll hatch!”

  Rick tried to calm him. “We’ll get you medical help. We’re nearly at Tantalus…”

  “I’m dying!”

  “They won’t kill you. They’re parasites. They want to keep you alive.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can keep feeding—”

  “Oh, God, oh, God…”

  Karen picked him up. “Come on. You gotta keep moving.”

  They resumed walking, but Danny was slowing them down. He kept stumbling and sitting down. He couldn’t take his eyes off his arm, as if the grubs had hypnotized him.

  Halfway across the ground they came to a round tube made of blobs of clay stuck together. The tube emerged from the ground, like a bent chimney.

  Karen said, “I wish Erika was here. She might have been able to tell us what made it.”

  They had to assume t
he mud chimney held something dangerous, probably some kind of insect. They gave the chimney a wide berth, ready to dash for cover if anything moved. As they passed it, the Great Boulder drew closer.

  She was a mother. Like a butterfly, she drank only the nectar of flowers for her sustenance. Even so, she was a predator. She hunted for her babies; they lived on meat. Like all predators she was intelligent, capable of learning, with an excellent memory. In fact, she had nine brains. They consisted of one master brain and eight minor brains, strung out along her spinal cord like beads on a string. Among insects, she was one of the smartest.

  She had mated once with her husband, who had dropped dead after having sex with her. She was a queen, who lived her entire life in isolation. She was a solitary wasp.

  She emerged from her chimney and looked at the sun. Her head came out first, followed by her body. Her wings normally lay folded and flat across her back, like a folded fan. She unfolded her wings and vibrated them, letting her muscles warm up in the sunlight.

  As the wasp climbed out of the chimney, the humans froze. She was truly enormous, with a jointed abdomen splashed with yellow and black stripes. The wasp unfolded its wings and beat them, thundering, and took off into the air, its legs dangling beneath it.

  “Get down!”

  “Lie flat!”

  The humans threw themselves to the ground and began crawling toward whatever sort of cover they could find, scraps of grass, pebbles.

  The wasp didn’t notice the humans at first. After she launched herself from her chimney, however, she began flying in a zigzag pattern, orienting herself for a hunting flight. During the orientation phase, she looked down at the ground, inspecting every detail. She kept a precise map of the terrain fixed in her memory.

  She saw something new.

  Three objects occupied the ground at the southeast quadrant away from her chimney. The objects were alive. They were crawling across the ground. They looked like prey.

  She immediately changed her flight path and swooped in.

  The wasp turned and dove down very fast. It chose Rick Hutter, and landed on him.

  He rolled over on his back, waving his machete, while the wasp straddled him with her legs. Her wings beat over him. She caught him lightly in her mandibles.