The Eighth Day (36 page)

Finally, he left Nexis and moved to a different computer, surfing the Web for articles about nanotech. Using the Google search engine, he punched in “nanotechnology” and was immediately rewarded with nearly half a million hits. He went from one to another for more than an hour, finally printing out a dozen articles on the subject.

Then he tapped his accumulated take into a tidy stack and went out for something to eat. Stopping at the Staples on M Street, he bought a Kraft-colored accordion file to hold the printouts. Then he crossed the street to a pizza place and took a table in the corner, away from the windows. While he waited for his food, he took a second look at some of the pages he’d printed out.

An hour later, the pizza was history, he was on his second cup of coffee, and he knew quite a bit more about Jason Patel and his murder. The official obituary was in the
Cupertino Courier
. It noted that Patel was a graduate of UC Berkeley and Caltech, with advanced degrees in computer science and molecular biology. He’d done postdoctoral work at M.I.T., published widely, and received the Sidran Prize for research on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). He was forty-two years old at the time of his death. Survivors included a sister, Indira, of Delhi, and a “life partner,” Glenn Unger, of Cupertino.

The earliest stories about the death hinted that foul play was suspected. By the second day, however, it was murder, and it was page one. Vague statements from police spokesmen about “substantive leads” and allusions to the murder as a suspected “crime of passion” were buried in the gruesome details, most of them provided by shaken members of the Interior Department team that had stumbled upon Patel’s corpse in the desert.

There was an interesting interview with an archaeologist who theorized that the manner in which Patel was left exposed perfectly mimicked the ancient burial practices of certain Amerindian tribes. It was called excarnation—bodies left so that birds would take the flesh. The professor spieled on about how very old the practice was, about how it was still followed by sects in parts of the Middle East, about its connection to the Prometheus myth. In the Patel murder, there were also, the professor opined, resonances with the central event of the Christian faith. The tribes and sects practicing excarnation used it as a ritual after death, building burial grounds or platforms where bodies were left to the birds. Patel, however, had been alive when his body was pierced by dozens of cholla spines, alive when he was strung up on the cross-shaped Joshua tree.

Crucified.

TWENTY

Back in the library, Danny clicked through cyberspace, looking for cheap flights to San Francisco. He had to get out of D.C. anyway, and California beckoned because the more he learned, the clearer it became that Very Small Systems was the key to everything.

Not that he was planning to ask for a tour of the facilities. The idea was to start by doorstepping Patel’s friend, Glenn Unger.

A pop-up ad from Hertz launched an unhappy thought. You pretty much
had
to have wheels in California, and Danny had been intending to rent a car at the airport. But as the yellow Hertz logo blinked on his screen, he realized that there was a problem. He didn’t have a driver’s license.

Could he take a taxi to Glenn Unger’s doorstep? Where
was
Cupertino from the airport anyway? What about San Jose? Could he fly there? By the time he got the answer from MapQuest, he decided a car was essential. He’d have to hit the DMV and replace his license.

But he only had an hour to book the great fare he’d found on Hotwire, so he might as well do that first. Halfway through the process, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to use his card for the flight if he could help it. Zebek might not have access to credit card transactions, but then again, Danny wouldn’t bet on it. There was no reason to advertise his itinerary if he could avoid it. The Yankee Pasha bankroll wasn’t going to take him very far, but he could use the platinum card to get a cash advance at a bank.

Before logging off the library’s computer, he checked the Virginia DMV Web site. He’d kept his Virginia license and registered the Olds at his parents’ address. The insurance was cheaper. The Web site listed a branch in Rosslyn, right across the river. He left the library, walked through a wall of heat to the Riggs bank on Wisconsin and M, and came out the door a few minutes later with twenty-five hundred dollars, his cash advance limit.

After a twenty-minute walk to the DMV, he stood in line to get a number. Waiting his turn, he tried to guess the languages he was hearing—Spanish, of course, but Arabic, too. German and Chinese. Vietnamese or Thai—he couldn’t tell the difference. Something else. Russian or Czech.

What a country. . . .

Finally, his number was called. He explained to the woman at the counter that he’d lost his wallet sailing.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“I was hiking out.”

“ ‘Hiking out’?” She made a face. “I thought you said
sailing
.”

“It’s when you hang out over the side of the boat,” he explained, “so the boat can go faster.”

“Then why don’t you just get a
motor
?” she wondered with a little smile.

“Because
then
,” he replied, “it wouldn’t be sailing.”

She gave a good-natured shake of the head, tapped something into her computer, and sent him on his way. He soon found himself seated on a stool in front of a walleyed woman with talonlike fingernails. “Say ‘queso’!” she ordered.

He smiled weakly.

She waited, one eye on him, the other on the next guy in line.

Ten seconds later, he said, “Queso.”

She smiled, and the camera went nova.

Finally, he was summoned to the front counter, where a laminated driver’s license awaited him. He didn’t want to look, but . . .
Jesus
! It was even worse than the picture in the passport shot. He had that crazy-wasted-and-stunned look that you see in police photos—eyes neither open nor closed but caught in mid-blink, his mouth frozen on the brink of a smile. It was enough of a smile to reveal the gleam of the stainless steel cap, and this added a demented edge to his overall appearance. All this against a bright blue background.

But hey—at least, his hair was back (kind of).

The flight was direct via Salt Lake City. He had the middle seat near the back of the plane, wedged between a pair of elderly golfing buddies returning from a tour of the Scottish Highlands. No sooner were they airborne than one of them obtained a couple of plastic glasses from the flight attendant and began pouring shots of single-malt whiskey, decanting the golden liquid from a silver-plated hip flask.

“You golf?” someone asked.

Danny shook his head. “No, I—”

“Well, you’ll get around to it,” a second man said. “Everyone does, sooner or later.”

They told stories about their trip, Danny’s head moving back and forth as if he were watching a tennis match. Eventually the golfers drank themselves to sleep, leaving Danny free to read the articles that he’d printed out at Georgetown.

It was not a rational selection. He’d just clicked on entries that sounded interesting, with the result that he had a mish-mosh. Some of the material was impossibly technical, while other articles were so moony and gaga about
The Future
that they were useless. Still, by the time the plane crossed the Continental Divide, he’d read enough to know what nanotech was and what it promised.

The grandfather of the field was a guy named Eric Drexler, who’d written a book in the eighties called
Engines of Creation
. An M.I.T. research fellow, Drexler was considered a clear-eyed visionary by some and a delusional dreamer by others. The former declared that Drexler had found the key to the Promised Land, while the latter insisted that he’d hypothesized a science that couldn’t possibly work.

As Danny understood it, the basic idea was to manufacture things by rearranging matter with atomic precision. This would be accomplished by protein engineers (!) working with computer scientists to program and create self-replicating robots no larger than molecules. By arranging individual atoms these bots or “assemblers” could carry out an array of tasks, manufacturing everything from micron-thin diamond coatings to submicroscopic sprays capable of healing wounds in an instant. Within the body, other tiny bots would target cancer cells, destroying them one at a time, or might scrub arterial walls of plaque. As above, so below—as within, so without. The assemblers could be programmed to dismantle pollutants, to purify the air and water—
all
of it—constantly, globally. Eventually, enormous efficiencies would result, creating a world of absolute abundance. Poverty would become a thing of the past. The environment would be healed, and life prolonged.

Bots,
Danny thought. Like robots, only
not
robots—because they’d be made of DNA. Which meant they’d be alive. Tiny Frankensteins, then.

His two seatmates lurched off at the stop in Salt Lake, but Danny stayed put. He read a description of a hypothetical something called “utility fog.” This was a primordial
stuff
, a network of assemblers capable of being—literally—all things to all people. Engineered to assume the shape and characteristics of a house, utility fog could be programmed to change not only its texture and color but also its very state—and to do this on command. That is, it could be solid as a brick one moment and porous as air the next. With a wave of the hand, the occupant of such a house could walk through walls and extrude furniture from the floor, as needed, in whatever shape and material he desired.

In short, nanotechnology promised (or threatened) to devise a world so deeply embedded with possibilities—so flexible—that even the most ordinary activities would be indistinguishable from magic.

Once in the air again, Danny sipped a gin-and-tonic and resumed reading. But not without an effort. Some of the articles he’d downloaded were more than fifty pages long and, to him, incomprehensible. At some point or other, they lost him with references to things like “petaflops,” “extropians,” and “Knuth’s arrow notation.” The truth was, he didn’t have the background to understand a lot of what he was reading.

Still, by the time they began their descent into San Francisco he understood enough about nanotechnology to know that it was important, controversial—and, for the most part, still theoretical. The promise was so great that a ton of money was going into the field and it was being spent by some big names. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, companies like that. The government gave the field a big push during the Clinton administration, doubling its investment in nanotech to half a billion dollars.

A quote from the National Science and Technology Council in support of the increased funding put it this way:

Nanotechnology could impact the production of virtually every human-made object—everything from automobiles, tires, and computer circuits to advanced medicines and tissue replacements—and lead to the invention of objects yet to be imagined. . . . As the twenty-first century unfolds, nanotechnology’s impact on the health, wealth, and security of the world’s people is expected to be at least as significant as the combined influences in this century of antibiotics, the integrated circuit, and human-made polymers.

Which was saying something. The consensus seemed to be that most applications were at least a decade away. Certain innovations (creating vaccines, et cetera) might be closer, and there’d been a recent breakthrough in building a nanotransistor. This promised to transform microelectronics, allowing the manufacture of integrated circuits on an unimaginably tiny scale, stuff that would work at room temperature, that would not be as sensitive to dust and contamination as silicon and other materials.

To date, however, the most important advances seemed like parlor tricks. One scientist had built a nanoguitar; another had fashioned a pair of tweezers small enough to pick up single molecules. A molecular switch had been constructed, and a “quantum corral.” These modest achievements had required enormous efforts by teams of geniuses. Many scientists continued to believe that the technical problems of producing assemblers with workable “arms,” capable of manipulating matter at an atomic level, were insurmountable.

This was the crux of the anti-Drexlerian position: the devices required to make nanotech work were stipulated by computer scientists (for the most part), but the actual task of creating them would fall to biochemists, microbiologists, and molecular engineers—who, as often as not, did not have a clue as to how to make them.

For instance, the prevailing wisdom was that for raw material the assemblers would use air, water, and dirt. These materials would be deconstructed at the molecular level and reassembled according to specifications. But how would the assemblers be fueled? By the sun? Perhaps. But even if solar energy could be used, the process of taking apart and putting together molecules was certain to generate heat—and probably lots of it. What was to be done with it?

Moreover, while visionaries drew up cute cartoons of critters with nanotube arms capable of sundering and fusing molecular bonds, skeptics wondered how one created tools small enough to manipulate individual atoms. And what about the “arms” on the assemblers? How would they “hold” individual atoms so that they could be assembled according to plan? To the suggestion that chemical bonds might be used to cause the fragments to “stick,” skeptics replied that such bonds were often quite strong. How could the assemblers be made to release the atoms or fragments that they held?

Some of these questions would be answered. Perhaps all of them would. But it was going to take a while—probably quite a while.
So why,
Danny wondered,
why are people dying now?

It was a little after eight
P.M
. when his flight touched down at San Francisco Airport. A shuttle bus took him to the Alamo facility a couple of miles up the road, where a white Prism waited for him. He wanted to pay in cash, but because of insurance regulations, Alamo wouldn’t rent the car without putting the card number on the agreement. He told himself it was a
car
, after all, a moving target. Besides, although the card was being checked for authorization, there was no actual transaction yet. With luck, nothing would post up to his account until he returned the car. He signed on the dotted line.

He got lost for about an hour, heading off in the wrong direction, and by the time he recovered, driving to Cupertino that night seemed like a bad idea. So did showing up at Glenn Unger’s door at eleven or eleven-thirty. Passing a Doubletree Motel in Burlingame, he said the hell with it, cut a U-turn, and pulled in. Half an hour later, he was sound asleep, too tired to turn out the light on the nightstand beside the bed.

He’d expected to wake up early because by now his body had no idea what time zone it was in, but he slept for fourteen hours straight. He took his time over breakfast, anyway. Waiting for his Belgian waffle, he read a story in a magazine he’d taken from the plane.

He’d found it in the seat pocket during a break from his long session with the nanotechnology documents, an issue of the
National Geographic Traveler
. Leafing through, he’d spotted an article about Easter Island. And that’s why he took it. For the first time, looking at the photographs, he saw the monumental heads not just as remnants of a mysterious civilization but as
sculpture
. And as sculpture, they interested him.

Turned out, Easter Island was a cautionary tale. The original Polynesian travelers had stumbled into paradise. The island was bountiful, so full of natural resources—water, timber, fish, vast flocks of birds—that the population increased rapidly. As evidenced by the complex hieroglyphic writing and hundreds of massive stone figures left behind, the islanders developed a sophisticated civilization. Experts considered that quarrying, transporting, and erecting the huge stone figures would be difficult even today. The techniques used to accomplish the feat by “primitive” islanders were still in dispute.

After a thousand years, the bounty of the land had run out and Easter Island was an ecological disaster. The forests were completely gone, leaving the islanders without a means of building boats, either for escape or for offshore fishing (not big planners, Danny thought). The ground cover was history, too, probably eaten. With no trees to generate moisture, the springs dried up; the vast flocks of birds—with no place to roost and nothing to eat or drink——flew off and did not return. Warring factions dev-eloped around 1600. By the time the Dutch explorer who gave the place its name “discovered” the island on Easter Sunday in the year 1720, the islanders were literally eating their young. Cannibalism had become the major source of protein. Women and children were considered the most tasty, fingers and toes the choicest bits.
Nice
, Danny thought, glad he was a vegetarian.