Micro

Chapter 8

Kalikimaki Industrial Park 28 October, 6:00 p.m.

On the way back to the Nanigen headquarters, Karen King drove the Bentley convertible and the other students crammed themselves into it, while Alyson Bender and Vin Drake went in the sports car. They hadn’t gone far when Danny Minot, the science studies student, cleared his throat. “I think,” Minot said, speaking above the rush of the wind, “that Drake’s arguments about poisonous plants are subject to dispute.”

“Subject to dispute” was one of Minot’s favorite phrases.

“Oh? How’s that?” Amar said. Amar in particular loathed Minot.

“Well, this notion of poison is slippery, isn’t it,” Minot said. “Poison is what we call any compound that does us harm. Or we think does us harm. Because it may not, in reality, be so harmful. After all, strychnine was once dispensed as a patent medicine in the 1800s. It was thought to be a restorative. And it’s still administered for acute alcohol poisoning, I believe. And the tree wouldn’t go to the trouble of making strychnine unless it had some purpose, self-defense most likely. Other plants make strychnine, like nightshade. There must be a purpose.”

“Yes,” Jenny Linn said, “to keep from being eaten.”

“That’s the plant’s view.”

“It’s our view, too, because we don’t eat it either.”

“But for humans,” Amar said to Minot, “are you arguing that strychnine is not harmful? Not really a poison?”

“That’s right. As a concept, it’s slippery. One might even say it’s indeterminate. The term ‘poison’ doesn’t really refer to anything fixed or specific at all.”

This brought groans throughout the car.

“Can we change the subject?” Erika said.

“I’m simply saying the idea of what is poison is subject to dispute.”

“Danny, with you everything is subject to dispute.”

“In essence, yes,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Because I have not adopted the scientific worldview of fixed verities and immutable truths.”

“Neither have we,” Erika said. “But some things are repeatedly verifiable and therefore justify our belief in them.”

“Wouldn’t it be pleasant to think so? But that’s just a self-serving fantasy that most scientists have about themselves. In reality, it’s all power structures,” Minot said. “And you know it. Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought. Scientists fall in line with the dominant power structure. They have to, because the power structure pays the bills. You don’t play ball with the power structure, you don’t get money for research, you don’t get an appointment, you don’t get published, in short you don’t count anymore. You’re out. You might as well be dead.”

There was silence in the car.

“You know I’m right,” Minot said. “You just don’t like it.”

“Speaking of playing ball with power,” Rick Hutter said, “look over there. I think we’re coming to the Kalikimaki Industrial Park, and Nanigen headquarters.”

Jenny Linn took a small insulated Gore-Tex case the size of her hand and carefully clipped it to her belt. Karen King said, “What’s that, show and tell?”

“Yes,” Jenny said. “If they’re really going to offer us jobs, well, I thought…” She shrugged. “These are all of my extracted and purified volatiles. What did you bring?”

“Benzos, baby,” Karen said. “Benzoquinones in a spray container. Blister the skin, burn your eyes—it may come from beetles, but it’s the ideal personal-defense chemical. Safe, short-lasting, organic. It’ll make an excellent product.”

“Of course, you would bring a commercial product,” Rick Hutter said to Karen.

“That’s because I just don’t have your scruples, Rick,” Karen said. “Why? You going to tell us you didn’t bring anything?”

“No, no.”

“Liar.”

“Well, okay.” He tapped his shirt pocket. “There’s a latex extract from my tree. You daub it on and it kills any burrowing parasites under your skin.”

“Sounds like a product to me,” Karen said, swinging the wheel, and the Bentley slipped around a hairpin turn, glued to the road. “Maybe you’ll make a billion dollars from it, Rick.” She took her eyes off the road for a second and flashed him a wicked smile.

“No, no, I’m just studying the underlying biochemical mechanism—”

“Tell it to the venture capitalists.” Karen glanced at Peter, who sat in the front seat beside her. “And what about you? You’ve got a lot on your mind. Did you bring something?”

“Actually,” Peter said, “I did.”

Fingering the CD in his jacket pocket, Peter Jansen felt a nervous shiver pass through his body. Now that he was going into the Nanigen building, he realized he hadn’t fully worked out his plan. Somehow he had to get Bender and Drake to confess in front of the group, and playing Jorge’s recording of the phone call between Alyson Bender and Vin Drake would provoke that, he hoped. And if all the graduate students heard a confession, then Drake would be unable to retaliate. There were seven of them; he couldn’t attack them all at once.

At least that was the idea.

Lost in his thoughts, Peter stayed with the group as they moved into the building, led by Alyson Bender. “This way, please, and ladies and gentlemen…” They stopped first at the elegant black-leather reception area. “I will need your cell phones, your cameras, and any other recording devices in your possession. You will leave those here, to pick up when you depart. And please sign nondisclosure agreements at this time.”

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.”