“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.”