I invited Burnofsky to dinner.
“Birgid, you are looking beautiful,” Burnofsky said. He took her hand and kissed it, old school, and he made it work. He was a wreck of a human being, but he could elevate his game on occasion. And he liked Birgid. He was jealous of our happiness, but not in any malicious way.
Birgid took his coat. If I remember, this would have been December, just before Christmas. Stone and Sadie had gone to visit their grandparents for a few days.
Carla was not with Karl. I asked after her.
“Oh, she’s actually got a job, believe it or not.”
“A job? She’s just a teenager, isn’t she?” Birgid asked.
“Oh, it’s a little internship sort of thing at Armstrong.”
“Making snow globes?” I asked, trying to sound witty but ending up seeming churlish.
“Something like that,” Karl said. “What smells good?”
Birgid smiled. She had not lost her smile. At this point she’d been through two surgeries and one round of chemo. So her blonde hair was short, having just started to grow back. A close observer would have noticed a hollowness around her eyes. A very close observer might have noticed that she moved with more care than she once had, a physical caution. She was a woman who had learned that the world is not a soft and welcoming place, but a place of sharp edges and petty humiliations.
But still, she smiled.
“I made something I found in a Gordon Ramsay cookbook,” she said. “It’s a sort of shepherd’s pie. Comfort food. As cold as it is, I felt something comforting would be …” She faltered, shrugged, and finished with “… comforting.”
There was a flicker of sympathy in Burnofsky’s rheumy eyes. He knew, of course, that she had cancer. And he knew that I was desperate to use my biots to save her.
We drank some wine. We ate. We talked banalities of politics and sports and some show at the Met and some lecture at the Y. Birgid told a story about how Sadie had fought for the right to say “crap” at school. (Sadie won the point; she usually does.)
Then Birgid grew tired. Her endurance was coming back, but she was still very easily tired. She left the “gentlemen” to our whiskey, like something out of Downton Abbey.
“Why a kilometer, Karl?” I asked.
He nodded. “I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”
“You’re weaponizing nanotechnology,” I accused him bluntly.
He didn’t deny it. He didn’t admit it. He just said, “And you’re violating at least three separate laws, Grey.”
“You know why,” I said. “What you’re doing—”
“Is dangerous?” he supplied. “But creating new life-forms isn’t?”
“They’re neutered, incapable of reproduction,” I pointed out.
“The gray-goo scenario isn’t the only danger,” he countered. The gray-goo scenario was the nightmare scare story of nanotechnology: What if nanotech biots or nanobots were capable of reproducing? Their numbers would grow quickly from a handful to thousands to millions to billions. They would obliterate the planet.
“No, it isn’t the only danger,” I said. “Have you considered the possibility that these things could be used to kill?”
“Crude,” he sniffed.
“Or they could be used to …” I hesitated, seeing anticipation in his eyes. He wanted me to guess.
I frowned. What was he thinking of? What was Armstrong up to? But I came up with nothing and fell back on assassination.
“You can’t let your research be turned into a weapon,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s wrong. Because in the wrong hands it could create chaos. Paranoia.” I waved my hand in the air in a gesture meant to suggest chaos.
“Are mine the wrong hands?” He held out his hands, bony fingers covered in loose parchment skin.
“No one should have that power,” I said, sounding self-righteous.
He leaned forward, and I saw something hard and pitiless in his eyes that I don’t think I had ever noticed before. “Don’t be naïve, Grey. Don’t be a goddamn child, you’re too intelligent for that. No technology stays secret, and anything that can be weaponized is weaponized. Just as your little creations will be.”
“No. They don’t even have the potential for that.” But of course I was already thinking of how we’d given the biots the capacity to deliver drugs on-site. Was there anything stopping us from filling that venom sac with some sort of poisonous biological agent?
My God, we could deliver resistant bacteria … viruses … radioactive isotopes.…
My thoughts, dark and terrible thoughts, must have shown on my face.
“And thus the veil is torn from the eyes of the great idealist,” Burnofsky mocked me.
After that we exchanged the occasional e-mail. But we have met only once after.
THREE
What I carefully did not tell Burnofsky was that while he struggled with his efforts to achieve long-distance nanobot communications, we had accidentally solved the problem.
“Dr. McLure.”
“Yes?”
“Dr. McLure.” Donna. She’d been with me forever, since we were study partners back at Stanford. She was an active type, unlike me, she loved surfing and go-cart racing and even skydived on occasion. She was a perpetually tan, smiling, bright-eyed woman with a first-class mind. She insisted on calling me by my full title and also on my calling her by her first name, as if to emphasize that I was her employer. It made me uncomfortable.
She was an unnatural white that day, though. Her eyes seemed glazed, as if she was drunk, and for a moment I thought she must be. She was panting, as if out of breath.
“I did something I … It was a … Oh, God.”
I had been leaning over to read from a data table on my monitor. I turned to her now, giving her all my attention. “What’s the matter?”
She made a strange face then, somewhere between pride and tears. She was afraid, but not sure if she should be. “I supplied donor cells.”
We were only using donor cells for one thing: as the raw material for biots. Since the human genome was so well mapped, it could now be treated almost as a sort of circuit board—plug in something new, turn off something old.
The donor cells we’d used were all from a tissue lab. The samples came from … well, at that point we didn’t know where the cells had come from. They were just something you ordered, no different than ordering office supplies.
“You used one of your own cells?” I frowned. It was a violation of protocol, but shouldn’t really be an issue. “Why?”
“It was … a hunch. Just a hunch. I wanted to … and, oh, God, it worked!” She bit her lip, looked right at me, and then right through me. “I can see. I can see through its eyes. I’m seeing right now.”
“Are you saying—”
“It’s like picture in picture, but the edges are indistinct. At first I didn’t understand. Then I realized what I was seeing: glass, in extreme magnification. I was seeing through the biot’s eyes.”
I just froze. Part of me was arguing that as her boss, as the one responsible for this company, for this research, for this desperate search for a means to save Birgid, that I should be yelling or disciplining.
But I was never much of a boss. I am a scientist. I have spent my life looking for answers. Well, here was a possible answer. A breakthrough of truly epic proportions.
And part of me guessed that Donna would never have broken protocol except for her desperation to help me save Birgid.
So all I said was, “Show me.”
We ran across the lab, a fact that drew others behind us like the tail of a comet. Donna had the biot isolated and ready to go under the scanning electron microscope.
“We need a test,” I said, looking around me, as if the answer were scrawled on a wall or tabletop somewhere. “We place something in the dish with the biot. Some kind of sample. Something … And we don’t tell you, Donna. A quick-and-dirty single blind. Step out
of the room. Go to your office.”
She went, and the rest of the team and I decided to place a bit of tissue sample on the glass dish in close proximity to the biot. This took a while. But finally, we were ready. I dialed Donna’s phone and said, “Okay, we’ve placed an—”
“Mesothelial cells,” Donna said without hesitation. “My God, you would not believe it. You would not believe it.”
We ran to Donna’s office. She was staring into middle space, smiling. Smiling at something none of us could see.
“It’s monochromatic. Just like an SEM. But I can see everything. I can see the clearly delineated cell wall, the nucleus … One of them is in the beginning stage of mitosis. I can see the mitochondria.”
She went on like that for a while, naming parts of the cell as if we were a high school biology class.
“She might have guessed we’d use a tissue sample,” one of the staff, Prim—Dr. Primyantha—said.
“What, I’m cheating?” Donna demanded.
“No, no, no, of course not. But Dr. Prim is right: Let’s try something else, just to confirm for skeptical minds.”
So Dr. Prim went to find something unexpected to place in the dish with Donna’s biot while the rest of us sat or perched and chatted excitedly.
“Jesus Christ!” Donna yelled suddenly, and shot up out of her chair. “Goddamn it! Prim!”
Dr. Prim returned to Donna’s office, and Donna threw the remains of a muffin at him.
“What?” he demanded.
“It’s a fly’s head,” Donna said disgustedly. “It’s as big as a goddamn house, Prim. Have you ever seen a fly face-to-face? It’s the size of a fucking whale!”
“Describe it for the record,” I said.
“I’m not looking at it,” she said.
“Wait. What do you mean, you’re not looking at it? Biot eyes are fixed forward.”
And that was how we discovered that we could do more than see through biot eyes. We could move them. In fact, we could control a biot’s movement as easily as we could move a finger.
In the next week we created two new biots. Dr. Prim had one and his graduate student, Mitch McGovern, another.
Mitch had the same experience Donna described. He had a sort of picture-in-picture view through the biot’s eyes. He could move the biot as easily as he could move his own feet.
We began to test the biot’s capabilities. Its speed and endurance. Its range.
If we had been following a normal protocol, this stage would have consumed months if not years. But I didn’t have a lot of time. Birgid’s health was failing. The cancer was metastasizing, popping up not just in her lungs now but in her esophagus and brain.
The surgeons could remove some of these new tumors, but until the monster in her lungs was killed, the cancer would just keep coming back.
Time was short.
So Mitch’s biot was placed in a human body. We were looking for ways in. Looking for ways to enter the human body safely. Eyes, ears, nose, throat, urinary tract were all suggested. But the most obvious solution was injection close to the site of the tumor.
But first, a human trial, however truncated. One of the lab techs volunteered to be the test body, so to speak. She would have the biot injected into her bloodstream, with hopes that our biot astronaut would be able to navigate to the lungs.
Mitch’s biot was tagged with a radioactive isotope, placed in a sterile solution, and drawn up into a hypodermic needle. Mitch is a funny guy, and a voluble one, so he gave us a running commentary. It was all very strange. He sat on a high stool at one of the lab tables and described what was happening to his biot one floor down.
But very soon the witty banter got a bit strained. It was obvious that the experience was disturbing to him. A ring of sweat spread from his armpits. The description became more disjointed and repetitive.
“It’s like … Fired out of a cannon. Jesus. You feel … Okay, let me try to organize my observations a little better. What I am seeing is a … I don’t know. The context is all, I mean, it’s hard without a sense of scale.”
I didn’t want to press him. I figured he would calm down after a while and become more objective.
“It’s a billion flat little rocks, like I’m in an avalanche. Blood cells. Fuck me!”
“Can you—”
“Like pulling onto a freeway and everyone’s driving ninety.” Then, “Jesus! What is that?”
“What are you seeing?” Donna asked, becoming impatient. “Just give—”
“It’s moving! It’s moving! I mean, under its own power. It’s like … I … It’s like some kind of monster. Hah. I know. But Jesus, if you were seeing it.”
“Mitch, you’re in no danger. Just tell us what you’re observing.”
“I am observing the hell out of something that looks like a very large wad of snot. And it’s moving. It, like, oozes out a string of snot and then starts reeling it back in, and it moves. Like a snail, but not as … Oh my God. It’s a lymphocyte.”
A white blood cell, though they aren’t strictly confined to the blood.
“It’s identified you as an invader,” I said.
“It’s going to kill me!”
“Is it fast enough to—”
“Screw you, snotwad. Hah! I’m way too fast. Something’s on me.”
“The lymphocyte?” Donna asked.
“No, it’s … Smaller stuff, like tiny little gray sponges. Much smaller. They’re like, touching me, then rolling off.”
“Immunoglobulin,” I said. “Antibodies. The immune system is attacking the biot.”
“Okay, now I’m seeing a different tissue. The walls are narrower around me, like a smaller tunnel, like, whoa. Whoa.”
I glanced at the monitor that showed the radioactive tag of the biot against a schematic of the human body.
“You should be approaching the lungs. You’ll be seeing the oxygen exchange. Amazing opportunity.” That from Donna. She was jealous.
But Mitch wasn’t listening. “One of them has me. I didn’t see it. It’s got me. Tendrils like snakes. I … I think it has me good. Shit, here’s another one.”
I bent lower and looked right into his eyes and said, “Hey. Don’t worry about it. We should have expected an immune response.”
“How do I make it stop?” he asked.
I laughed. “I think our human subject has a nice, robust immune system. I’m not sure we would want to stop it. Come on, let it go.”
Let it go.
I was a fool.
“How?” Mitch asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t turn it off, Dr. McLure. I can’t stop seeing. I can’t …”
A cold chill crawled up my spine.
“You’ll just have to discipline yourself not to notice,” I said, knowing it was the wrong answer.
“The lymphocytes may kill the biot, which would solve your problem,” Donna remarked.
That was about three o’clock in the afternoon.
At four the next morning Mitch McGovern leapt from the fifth-floor window of his apartment building in Brooklyn.
The EMTs found him still alive. His last words, as best they could make them out, were cryptic.
“Ripped me apart,” he said. “Oh, God.”
While that was happening, though, I was holding Birgid’s head as she choked over the toilet bowl. She was wracked by violent coughing. The water in the bowl was red.
The noise, or perhaps just some instinct, woke Sadie. She came in wearing a nightgown.
“Go to bed, sweetheart,” I said. “Go back to bed.”
There were tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t want her to see me cry. I didn’t want her to see her mother spraying blood like some horror-movie victim.
She ignored me. Sadie did that, back then. Nowadays, too. Instead of leaving she found a scrunchie and used it to gather her mother’s hair into a ponytail.
Then I left Sadie to hold her mother’s head. I went to my library and poured a
drink and swallowed it.
Time was running out.
FOUR
“Mommy is going to die soon,” Sadie said.
She had come to me in my library. She sat on my lap. I drank whiskey, moving my arm around her, and couldn’t help but bring the glass close to her face.
I wanted her to leave me alone. I was stressed. I thought I was as stressed as I could be without having a stroke. But at that point I didn’t even know that Mitch had killed himself.
“I’m doing my best, Sadie,” I said.
“I know,” she said. And she wanted more from me, some comfort, some sentiment. Some … She wanted me to tell her it wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t do that. Worse, I didn’t want to because I was suffering, and some dark part of me wanted everyone to suffer along with me.
These are not good things for me to remember. I don’t like the man who sat there drinking whiskey and barely paying attention to his distraught daughter. Ever since then I have tried to make up for that moment and others like it.
I think Sadie has forgiven me. I have not forgiven myself.
“Okay, Birgid, we’re going to give you twilight sedation. You’ll be conscious, though you may fall asleep.”
We did it in my lab. Donna and me, with Marty and Prim helping out. We needed to know if we could reach the tumor. Then we could figure out what to do about it. But step one was to see if we could reach it without being thwarted by the body’s immune response.
“I fall asleep a lot,” Birgid said. “But I’m interested, so … I’ll proba …” The drug hit her, and her eyes fluttered. She tried to say something but ended up just smiling a beautiful, bashful smile.
It tore a hole in me, that smile. I loved her. I didn’t want to live if she couldn’t.
“Did anyone ever hear from Mitch?” I asked.
“He hasn’t picked up,” Dr. Prim said. “He missed football night.”
“You mean soccer,” I said.
“Football,” Dr. Prim insisted. “It is properly called football in the civilized world.” It was an old joke between us.
“Let me send at least one of my biots with you,” Donna insisted.
“You shouldn’t even have biots,” I said, not angry, just making the point that she had gone outside of protocol. So had I, but I was the boss.