Nano

CHAPTER 3

“So the company you work for is called Nano. What’s the main guy’s name again?” George shouted to make himself heard above the sound of the wind and raspy growl of the VW’s engine. It was a fire-engine red VW GTI. He didn’t even know Pia could drive, let alone like this. He gripped the edges of his bucket seat and nervously watched the winding road as Pia slalomed along.

Every time they turned, he reflexively pressed his left foot against the floor pan as if he could influence what the car might do with an imaginary foot brake. The last thing he wanted was for the vehicle to spin out on one of the hairpin turns. They were heading up into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that cascaded down onto Boulder like an angry sea. The aspens were still leafless despite the fact that it was almost May, and their spidery branches, in contrast to the dark evergreens, looked yellow. On straightaways, where he felt he could release his life-or-death grip on the seat, George wrapped his arms around himself. Coming from Los Angeles, he thought the place was damned cold. Pia seemed immune. She was still dressed in her jogging clothes and a sweatshirt thrown over her shoulders.

“Berman. Zachary Berman,” Pia yelled back. The car’s windows were down, and the wind was whipping around her jet-black, nearly shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a pair of cycling sunglasses that curved around the side of her head. When George hazarded a glance in her direction, he saw a distorted reflected image of himself. His hair was standing on end and his face was twisted horizontally.

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know much about him,” said Pia, telling a white lie. Despite what she wasn’t telling George, Pia didn’t know a huge amount about Berman above and beyond what was in the press. He was a kind of international playboy in the mold of a few other more famous, relatively young, highly successful business entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Larry Ellison. But she did know that although he was married with kids, it was, in his words, an open marriage.

The reality was that Zachary Berman had happened upon Pia in one of Nano’s several cafeterias and was actively pursuing her. At first Pia had allowed herself to have a few casual dates with the man because she was truly impressed with what he was accomplishing in nanotechnology and the promise he represented in medical nanotechnology. But when he started to get personal, and she learned about the Berman family in New York, she put an end to it, to Zachary’s chagrin.

Then it became a problem. As a man unaccustomed to hearing the word no from a woman, he’d become a pest, as far as Pia was concerned. Even if he hadn’t been married, she wouldn’t have been all that interested in any kind of a relationship. She was in Boulder to work and recover from the emotional trauma she’d experienced in New York City. Besides, she didn’t even know if she was capable of a relationship even if he was not the driven, selfish man she thought he was. Over the years, Pia had become quite knowledgeable about her social limitations.

“Is he single?” George continued.

“No, he’s married with two kids,” Pia shouted back without elaboration, hoping the topic would end there. She didn’t want to trouble George with the information that Berman was attracted to her and that his attentions had gotten to the point of being bothersome. Also in the back of her mind was the gnawing discomfort that Berman was due back that very day from an important business trip that had thankfully taken him away for almost two weeks.

“How old is he?” George persisted.

“Late forties, something like that.” Pia clenched her teeth. George could be tedious about such things.

“I think I saw a picture of him,” George said. “It was in People magazine, taken at the last Cannes Film Festival. He has one of those big yachts.”

“Really?” Pia responded vaguely, as if she weren’t interested, and she wasn’t.

“Was he involved when the company, as you said, gave you this car?”

Pia massaged the leather steering wheel. She didn’t like where the conversation was going but didn’t know how to prevent it, short of saying she didn’t want to talk about Zachary Berman, which would have conveyed the message she was trying to avoid. George was behaving exactly as she remembered he did — he was always full of questions that probed her private life. He had fussed around Pia’s apartment for twenty minutes before she could get him to leave, with his litany of questions about whether or not she was looking after herself properly with no appropriate food in her refrigerator, suggesting that perhaps she wasn’t actually living there. Pia knew George was trying to find out if Pia was seeing someone.

“Actually, he was involved. He had found out that I had been cycling to work and wanted me to have one of the company cars. He said it was too dangerous on the mountain roads, especially at night when I have to go in to check on some of my experiments.”

“It looks brand new,” George said, glancing around the interior.

“Guess I got lucky,” Pia responded, looking over at George. George was annoying her, but maybe his showing up like this might actually serve a positive purpose. Perhaps it was a way to discourage Berman from pestering her.

“Pia!” George yelled.

She looked back at the road and something flashed in front of the car. There was a dull thump.

“We hit something,” said George, and he turned around to look behind. Pia slowed the car, stopped, and flipped into reverse. She then backed up the road faster than George would have preferred. Pia stopped and jumped out of the car, the engine still running. Before George could get out, she came around to his side of the car, holding something in her hand. George got to his feet to see what it was.

“It’s a prairie dog,” she said. “Must have barely clipped it; at least I hope that was the case. It’s alive, I think. Damn, I hate this kind of thing.”

Pia cradled a small fur ball in her two hands. George could see a creature like a fat squirrel. It didn’t look like it was moving too much.

“They’re all over the place farther down the mountain,” said Pia. “What are you doing up here, little guy?” Her voice was quiet and kind, and awakened in George a confusion he’d harbored about Pia. He knew she could be remarkably dismissive of people, himself included, as if she thought others had no feelings. But with animals, she couldn’t be more caring. In physiology lab during the first year of medical school, Pia had refused to take any part in elaborate experiments using dogs, because the animals were euthanized at the end. Even stray cats around the med school dorm never failed to get her attention in some form or another.

“Here, you take him!” That was more like Pia, George thought. She handed him the small, still-warm bundle. “There’s a vet in town that’s open on weekends. We’re making an emergency detour.”

George held the animal as they drove in silence back into Boulder proper. George thought the creature was dead, but Pia intently stared ahead, a woman on a mission. Over the next half hour, they visited the vet clinic and determined that, yes, the animal was dead, most likely of a broken neck. Pia was as upset as George had ever seen her, her eyes even watery. For George that was definitely a first.

Leaving the vet, George was pleased when Pia pulled into a nearby Burger King. They didn’t talk until they’d gotten their food.

“Sorry about the little guy,” George offered to break the silence.

“Thank you,” Pia said. She took a fortifying breath. “It’s the second time it’s happened. The last time I had trouble sleeping for days.”

Wanting to change the subject, George said, “Back at your apartment, when you were explaining that Will’s infection influenced your coming here to investigate nanotechnology as a possible cure, it reminded me of Rothman, and his death. I know you didn’t want to talk about it back then, but I’d love to know what really happened. I know those finance guys in Connecticut were involved, but who actually did the killing? Do you know?”

Pia put down her burger and stared hard at George with dark pupils so huge that George thought he could drown in them. Her full lips narrowed. She looked as if she were about to combust. George put down his burger, afraid of what was coming. He leaned back in his chair to create a little distance.

“I’ve said this once and I’m not going to say it again,” Pia hissed, leaning forward with narrowed eyes. “Time is not going to change the way I feel. I’m not going to talk with you or anyone else about Rothman’s death. Not now, not ever! Just understand that the people who ordered it are gone. That’s enough. Although I know it was done with polonium-210, I don’t know exactly how it was carried out, nor exactly who did it, but I do know that if I talk about it, I will be killed. And if I were to tell you what I do know, you’d be killed.”

“Okay, okay!” George managed. He could see fire in Pia’s eyes. “I won’t ask again.”

Pia’s face relaxed. She did know that Rothman’s and his colleague’s murders were carried out by an Albanian gang that was a rival to one in which her long-estranged father was a high-ranking member. What she had been told was that if she talked about what little she knew, it would not only lead to her and George’s deaths, but would excite a blood feud between the two rival gangs, with scores of people probably ending up in the ground. It was a lose-lose situation and a responsibility that Pia could not bear.

Pia and George finished their lunch in silence. It wasn’t until they drove within sight of Nano, LLC, that they talked.

“This place is impressive,” George said, gazing at the institution as they pulled up to a vehicular gate. The landscaped complex was far larger than he would have imagined, comprising multiple modern buildings, some as high as five stories tall, that stretched off into dense clumps of huge evergreen trees. The whole area was surrounded by a towering chain-link fence topped with razor-encrusted concertina wire. It appeared more like a military base than a commercial establishment. “Looks like they take security very seriously here.” The people inside the booth were all dressed in smart, military-style uniforms.

“You got that right. As fast as nanotechnology is expanding, the competition is fierce and contentious. Nano has its own legal department with a number of very busy patent attorneys.” Pia waited as one of the security men slid open a door and stepped out of the booth.

Pia handed over her identification, which the guard examined carefully. He then looked over at George expectantly.

“He’s with me,” Pia said. “He’s a guest of mine.”

“You’ll have to head over to the central security office and talk to a supervisor,” the guard said. His tone wasn’t friendly, but it wasn’t unfriendly, either; just professional.

As the gate lifted and Pia drove forward, she said, “I’ve never brought a visitor here. It’s not really encouraged.”

“Is it going to be a problem?”

“Let’s see what they say at the central office. I can’t imagine they’re not going to let you come in, at least to the building where I work. I see FedEx people and the like there every day, so it is not as if it is off-limits to outsiders.”

“Maybe you should go in alone and do your thing. I could always just hang out in the car beyond the fence until you’re finished.”

“Oh, come on, George. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

George fought back the timidity that overtook him whenever Pia was taking him somewhere he thought he wouldn’t be welcome. In medical school she’d come close to getting them both kicked out when she became hell-bent on investigating the deaths in the laboratory where she was doing an elective, despite the administration’s very specific warnings against it. But this was a scientific lab. What would they have to hide from him? He was a radiology resident, for chrissake.

In the ultramodern, spacious lobby, Pia went directly to the security office and asked for a supervisor. As they waited, they looked at the banks of closed-circuit monitors watched by attentive staff. Scenes of labs, corridors, and common areas throughout the complex changed rapidly on the screens.

When the supervisor appeared, she examined George’s driver’s license and hospital ID, interviewed him briefly, had him sit in front of an iris-recognition recorder, then wordlessly disappeared back into the bowels of the department. After more than twenty minutes, she emerged, handed George’s IDs back to him, and then gave Pia his pass.

“He’s your responsibility while he visits here,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Let’s go, we’re all set,” Pia said.

“What do you think took so long?” George asked as he followed Pia back out into the lobby.

“I’m sure they ran a background check on you. They must be relieved you’re a radiology resident at UCLA, since there’s little chance of your being some kind of industrial spy. My sense is that’s what they’re paranoid about.”

Before accessing the elevators, Pia and George had to swipe their passes and then peer through the iris scanner. Green lights showed all was in order. George had seen security like this before, but only in movies.

“So what’s in this building besides your lab?” George asked as the elevator rose to the fourth floor.

“This building houses all the general biology laboratories. There’s a lot of biology research going on because the powers that be at Nano are convinced that the real future of nanotechnology is going to be in medicine.”

“The complex is huge. What goes on in all the other buildings?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Pia said.

“You’re not curious?”

“Somewhat, I suppose. But not really. Most current nanotechnology applications are concerned with paints, lightweight materials, energy generation and storage, fabrics, and informational technology — nonmedical uses like that, which doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I do know that Nano has some medical diagnostic products on the market, like sensors and DNA arrays for in vitro testing and sequencing. That I would find more interesting, but not the other commercial stuff. All I’m really interested in is their nanorobot microbivores, the ones I’m working with.”

The elevator stopped and the doors silently opened into a blindingly white, fluorescent-lit corridor. Pia strode off with George tagging along behind, squinting. He moved his sunglasses down from their perch on top of his head to shield his eyes.

“As I mentioned back at the apartment,” Pia continued, “Nano has made major strides in molecular manufacturing so they can build complex devices here atom by atom, such as the microbivores.”

All of a sudden Pia stopped, and George stopped, too. “Does it sound like I’m giving you a lecture? Maybe you don’t want to hear all this. You can just tell me to shut up. I’m really excited about what I’m doing here. I might have come to Colorado mainly to get away from New York and my father, to deal with my guilt about Will, and to clear my mind career-wise, but work here has taken me over. I find it as engaging as what I had been doing back with Rothman before he died.”

“I want to hear about it,” George said, eager to keep Pia talking. “Really, I do.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, because I think you’re going to be intrigued, provided you listen instead of zoning out like you did in the apartment.”

“I’m listening!”

Pia started walking again, gesturing with her hands as if she were fully Italian rather than just half. George followed, keeping up with her, watching. In truth he was only half-interested in the details of what she was saying. The other half was just enjoying her company, her excitement, and her remarkable physiognomy, with her almond-shaped eyes; incredibly long, dark eyelashes; delicately sculpted nose; and absolutely flawless skin. George would be happy to follow her anywhere. He was a basket case, but so be it, even if he had little understanding of why.

Pia took George at his word and kept talking: “Each individual microbivore has more than six hundred billion atoms arranged in its elaborate structure. It’s actually a bit more than six hundred billion, but what’s a few billion here or there?” She laughed at her own humor. “They are tiny, functioning robots with movable arms that seek out and grab pathogenic microbes and guide them into a digestion chamber, where they’re eliminated. It’s incredible. Okay, here we are.”

Pia stopped in front of a blank door protected by another iris scanner. She positioned herself, mostly her head, so that the sensor could scan her iris. A light over the door clicked green. George was about to follow suit when she restrained him. “You don’t have to do anything. This scanner is just to get the door open.”

Once inside, George immediately thought of Professor Rothman’s lab back at Columbia, but this was larger and more modern. He heard the familiar low hum from the vent hoods and from the array of medical machinery dotted around the room.

“Impressive,” George said.

“It is. My boss keeps telling me there’s fifty million dollars’ worth of equipment in this lab alone.”

“Your boss, this Zachary Berman guy?”

“No, he’s the big boss. My direct boss is a woman named Mariel Spallek, who’s not my favorite person in the world.” Pia didn’t elaborate. She put down her backpack, picked up a ledger, and moved over to a central display console with readouts from all the biotech equipment. With a pencil Pia ticked off some boxes in the ledger and wrote in others.

“Everything okay?”

“Looks that way. My iPhone would have alerted me if something was amiss. But things are looking good. Until this series of experiments, we’d been having biocompatibility issues with the microbivores. Back when we first introduced them into our animal models, we were surprised to see some allergic reactions. Not a lot, but enough to be troublesome. When it comes to the mammals, especially the primates and humans, there cannot be any reaction. Initially we found that our subjects’ immune system could occasionally treat the microbivores as foreign invaders, which, of course, they are. Why we were surprised is because the surface of the microbivores is of diamondoid carbon, which is about as nonreactive and as smooth as can be. Are you following me?”

“Yes, sure,” George said almost too quickly. Nonetheless, Pia kept talking.

“What we deduced was that some molecules had adhered to the microbivore’s surface despite its presumed nonreactivity, leading to some level of immune response. I assume you remember all this from immunology in med school. Do you?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course!” George said, hoping to hide the fact that he remembered little of what Pia was talking about. Pia’s retention of such minutiae always impressed him. Whenever she spoke about science, her face radiated a kind of passion. She also had no trouble maintaining eye contact, which she could not do in general conversation, especially conversation involving anything personal, like emotions.

George nodded enthusiastically. He tried to think of an intelligent question, which wasn’t easy as close as they were standing together. He could smell her wonderful aroma. It was erotically intoxicating thanks to his memory of the few times they had had sex. “What kind of animals are you using as subjects for these studies?” he managed, even though his voice cracked.

“A type of roundworm, but we will soon be moving to mammals, provided these subjects show no immune response, which so far seems to be the case. I’m not looking forward to working with mammals, as you can well imagine. I’m sure you remember my feelings about that.”

George nodded again, knowingly.

“If and when you get to injecting these microbivores into human subjects — into Will McKinley, for instance — how many microbivores would be involved?”

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred billion, about the same number of stars in the Milky Way.”

George whistled. “How big a bolus would that be?”

“It wouldn’t be big at all. About one cubic centimeter diluted in about five ccs of saline. It gives you another appreciation of how small these things are. Each one is less than half the size of a red blood cell.”

“So this is what you have been working on for the last eighteen months, the biocompatibility of these microbivores?”

“Yes. It’s the main thing I have been doing, and we’re making progress. There was a breakthrough of sorts when I suggested that some oligosaccharide polymers be incorporated into the microbivore’s diamondoid surface.”

George couldn’t keep himself from wincing at this comment. Pia was talking way over his head. He vaguely remembered the word oligosaccharide from first-year biochemistry — something about complex sugars — but that was about all. To divert attention from his ignorance, he quickly said, “You mentioned back in the apartment having some scanning electron microscope images of these microbivores. Can I see them so that I have an idea of what we’re talking about?”

“Good idea,” Pia said with enthusiasm. She led George to a nearby computer terminal, and with a few clicks she brought up an image. She stood aside and proudly gestured toward the screen. The image was in black-and-white, showing multiple, dark, shiny microbivores in the presence of a larger donut-shaped object. Pia pointed toward the object. “That’s a red blood cell. The rest are the microbivores.”

George stepped closer for a good view. What he saw amazed him. “They look like spaceships with a big mouth.”

“I never thought of it that way, but I see your point.”

“What are all these circular objects arranged around the hull?”

“Those are the sensors that detect the targeted microorganism or protein, as the case may be. They also contain reversal binding sites to cause the target to stick. The very tiny circles surrounding each sensor are the grapplers that come out to move the target along the microbivore in a kind of bucket-brigade fashion before pulling it into the digestion chamber.”

“Is that what this hole is?”

“That’s right. Once the target has been swallowed, so to speak, it is enzymatically digested into harmless by-products, which are then pushed back out into the bloodstream.”

“And this whole thing is six times smaller than the width of a human hair? It seems incredible.”

“It’s got to be that small to get through the smallest capillary, which is about four microns in diameter.”

George straightened up and looked at Pia. She was still doing well with maintaining eye contact with him. “How does this miniature robot know what to do and when to do it?”

“It has an onboard computer,” Pia said. “Thanks to nano circuitry and nano transistors, it has a computer with five million bits of code, twenty percent more than the Cassini spacecraft had in its onboard computer on its mission to Saturn.”

“It’s all hard to believe,” George said, and he meant it.

“Welcome to the future. When we get back to my apartment I’ll give you an article on microbivores written more than a decade ago by a futurist named Robert Freitas. He predicted all this back when molecular manufacturing was nothing but a pipe dream. It’s pretty exhaustive.”

“I bet that’s fun reading,” George said, unable to resist a bit of sarcasm. Luckily it went over Pia’s head, as she had returned her attention back to the microbivores image. From her expression and posture, he could tell how proud she was about what she was doing.

“I think you’ll find it fascinating.”

“So doing this is what the head-hunters brought you out here to Boulder for?”

“No. What brought me out here was that the CEO, Berman, had read about Rothman’s work on salmonella that I was involved with. You see, from an operational standpoint, microbivores are having a problem with bacteria that have a flagellum. You know, little whiplike tails, like salmonella has. When the microbivores ingest a salmonella, the flagellum doesn’t get into the digestion chamber but rather gets detached and floats off, and the flagellum can cause as much immunologic havoc as the intact bacteria. With my experience with salmonella in Rothman’s lab, they thought maybe I could help with this problem.”

“Were you able to help?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it and have done some work toward a solution. I do have an idea of how to solve it, but when I learned of the biocompatibility issue, I got more interested in that. The flagellum problem is mechanical, the biocompatibility is more intellectual. I find it more of a challenge.”

As Pia talked, George couldn’t help but ruminate again of how he had ended up at UCLA.

“When did Nano actually make you the offer?”

“The offer? I don’t know, late June, I guess, just before graduation? Why are you asking about that again?”

George’s frustration surged again — again being reminded that his whole move to Los Angeles had been a wild-goose chase. He should have stayed in New York. Luckily, before he could say anything, his attention was diverted. The door to the lab swung open, and a woman in a lab coat strode into the room. George regarded her. She was striking, athletic-looking, and taller than Pia, with light blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She had a decidedly imperious air, and her demeanor was not friendly as she looked first at Pia, then at George, and back to Pia. The blond woman referred to a clipboard she was carrying. George felt immediately uncomfortable.

“This is Mr. Wilson?”

“Yes, Mariel. Dr. Wilson, actually,” Pia said.

George stepped forward and stretched out a hand. “Nice to meet you. George Wilson.” He assumed this had to be the boss Pia had mentioned.

The woman merely nodded, and George withdrew his hand.

“Mr. Berman is on his way back. He may even have landed. He doesn’t like visitors to Nano, which is why they are not encouraged. I thought you understood this. I would hazard to guess that he will be especially displeased about young men coming to visit you, Pia. We are counting on your being productive here at Nano. You were recruited for very specific reasons.”

George looked over at Pia. What did she mean by that?

“George and I were med students together in New York. He’s a resident at UCLA, and he’s staying with me as a houseguest for a couple of days. I can’t imagine Mr. Berman would find that irregular in the slightest. It is not going to have any effect on my productivity.”

Houseguest? thought George. That was the first encouraging news about where he was going to stay, but he kept quiet. Tension sparked between these two women, and it was obviously related to Berman and Pia. Perhaps his intuition and vague fears had been justified, knowing what he did about Zachary Berman. Too often George had seen how a lot of men reacted to Pia, himself included. And a brand-new VW sports car seemed a bit beyond the pale for any casual boss-employee relationship.

“What exactly is Mr. Wilson doing here in the lab?”

“I’m just checking on several of my biocompatibility experiments that I started last night,” Pia said. “I just wanted to be sure they were running properly. I knew it would be quick. He’s merely accompanying me. We’re almost done.”

Mariel Spallek glanced at George and gave him a look that made the discomfort all the more intense. The situation reminded him that there was an unfortunate history of Pia’s ability to get him into trouble.

“I’ll be sure to let Mr. Berman know you’re around.” Mariel looked over at Pia as she left, but George wondered if she meant him.

“What was that about?” George questioned. “Or shouldn’t I ask? She seemed to be implying something about you and Berman or am I reading more into it than I should?”

“It’s probably better that you don’t ask,” Pia said without elaboration. She was pleased. Now she was certain that Berman would hear that she had a gentleman visitor. Perhaps, as she had hoped, it would cool Berman’s ardor. As far as what George might be thinking subsequent to this episode with Mariel, the issue didn’t even enter her mind.