BZRK ORIGINS (2 page)

Of course, she had lost her biot, and we didn’t know then what that meant.

Stern reported to me on what he’d found. Her carpeting had all been ripped up off the floor and tossed into her backyard. There was plastic over everything. There was Purell everywhere. She had a box of respirator masks and was wearing two, one on top of the other.

She had wrapped her hands in Ziploc bags secured with duct tape.

She had shaved all the hair off her head, face, and body.

By that point I understood. But it was too late to help her.

My financial angel invested a billion dollars in McLure Labs. They invested in me, in Meldcon, in a promising antiviral agent we were testing, and in the fact that I had attracted half of the best young minds in biotech and genetic engineering.

They knew nothing about the little side project I’d earlier hoped would get AFGC support. I had become fascinated by Karl’s work on miniaturized machines—nanobots. And I began to wonder if a biological solution might not be superior. Not a tiny machine, but a tiny creature.

Needless to say, I had to obscure what I was doing. It is illegal to create new life-forms, new species. And yet, that’s what I proposed to do. It would cost a fortune and take years just to get FDA approval even to begin such a venture, and the oversight and regulation might be crippling.

So I had gone ahead on my own. With every possible safeguard. The new species would be incapable of reproduction: that was the greatest safeguard. Each biot—that was the name I stuck with—had to be grown by man. Grown in a lab. I hoped to program them to perform limited functions—to move within the body and cut away blood clots, for example, or to attack tumors by delivering chemotherapy directly on-site.

I had no idea then what would happen. I will go to my grave saying that I had no idea the goddamned things would be linked to their creators. I had no idea of the madness that would follow.

When I learned of Birgid’s cancer diagnosis, I handled it admirably. I was sympathetic, of course. I made optimistic noises. I talked of fighting it with her. But I am a man of science, so I quickly researched the survival numbers for her particular lung cancer at this particular stage. And the fact is, she would be dead in a year.

She had access to those same numbers, Birgid, and she was not a fool.

“We need to plan,” Birgid said. “For when … The kids, we need to plan, you know.… It’s not fair to them.… Jesus, I never even smoked.”

She didn’t cry. I did.

“I may have a way,” I said. “My God, look what I do for a living, I have the resources.… I can try at least.”

“Try,” Birgid said. But she didn’t believe I could do it. She did not
believe I could defeat the tumor before it spread and killed her. She was always a practical person. She was … She was everything that mattered to me in the world.

Oh, that’s a lie, isn’t it? Everything that mattered? My children mattered. But my pride mattered, too, and I would be damned if I’d be beaten by some tumor. I was Grey McLure, young genius, rich, handsome, admired, and this kind of thing didn’t happen to men like me.

The next day I went to the lab and started. I assembled my best and brightest, pulled them off other projects, drafted them into my quest to perfect the ultimate cancer killer: the biot.

We had recently made significant advances in what we inelegantly called “Mix-n-Match DNA.” Using very sophisticated computer programs, we could predict with a great degree of accuracy the results of combining strands of DNA from different animals.

Our first thought experiment was called Merman. It was a reference to the classic movie
The Cabin in the Woods
. We were able to use Mix-n-Match to combine human DNA with elements of sturgeon and codfish. Of course we didn’t create an actual Merman, but we could have. With a few more tweaks we could have created an actual one, a human/fish hybrid with functioning gills and a fish’s tail. It could have survived in cold water. It would have been mentally impaired and be nearly blind, but still.…

We didn’t. But we thought about it. I remember an after-work
party, someone’s birthday, I suppose. I remember sitting at some bar with Donna, Jasmine, and Prim, and talking about it. About the whole playing God, Frankenstein thing. Another few beers and who knows?

Now, though, it was not fun and games. Now I was enlisting my people in a criminal enterprise. They couldn’t resist the lure of the research any more than I could, and the scientists who balked at crossing those lines? I gave them other work.

I was also defrauding my financial angel, who expected me to be doing useful work.

The biot would be useful, if it worked, but useless, too, since its very existence had to be concealed. If it worked, we would have a tool of amazing power … that no one could ever know about.

It was Jasmine who said, “Dr. McLure, could we not give the creature something analogous to a stinger, or snake’s tooth, some capacity to carry a drug or even an acid of some type to use against the tumor?”

And that’s why we brought in cobras to supply us with DNA.

It was then that a couple of things fell into place. Because of course I realized that if the biot could be designed in such a way as to deliver drugs, well, why not actual venom? Why not bacteria? The biot, in short, could be weaponized.

Which I realized in a flash was what Burnofsky must be doing with his nanobots. That was why he wanted a one-kilometer range. It wasn’t necessary if what you were doing was sending nanobots to kill
tumors. But it might be very useful if you were sending them to kill.

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.

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.”