Little Deadly Things (26 page)

FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO

I
was almost nine when my parents bought a home in Pill Hill, an upscale Boston suburb, named for its proximity to a cluster of hospitals. My father cycled to work, weather permitting, or rode with my mother in a P-car, a semi-private driverless automobile. Our house backed up against a ribbon of parkland called the Emerald Necklace. That was my western frontier, my Sherwood Forest, my mystical kingdom. If I wanted to meet Robin Hood’s Merry Men, cowboys, or elves, I had merely to walk out the door and into my backyard imagination.

My mother showed me plants in the parkland that were edible or medicinal. Today, when I walk through the parkland along the Muddy River, I can still spot trillium, wild asparagus, leeks, and Solomon’s seal.

My childhood was as ordinary as anyone raised by one of the greatest scientists of her age and tutored by another. I liked to listen to music, to play games—things adolescents have done for centuries—although sports never caught my fancy. I tried to play soccer a few times, and lacrosse just once. Evidently, an easy-going personality doesn’t match up well against big-boned bloodlust.

My playmates were more inclined to fantasy than to football. We found our castles, battlefields, and alien landscapes along the Muddy River. The fens and woodlands were forests and jungles inhabited by wild creatures. What courage, what daring we displayed.

I made friends with children of other scientists at NMech, explorers all. We hunted for treasure and found it, right there at NMech—ancient sensors, induction coils, spectrometers, rheostats, and voltmeters. I doubt that another school, private or corporate, boasted a scanning tunneling microscope, capable of nanoscale resolution, right alongside a considerable pile of building blocks, board games and baseballs.

Eva Rozen took an interest in my adventures. She listened to my tales of gallantry and adventure without once censoring me. I didn’t realize that she thought made-up stories were a fool’s task until I was much older.

Our family life was much like that of other families. I got along with my mother and father, debates over household chores notwithstanding. After my mother became a major stockholder at NMech and she hired the housekeeper I’d lobbied for, we found other duties over which to disagree.

I also lobbied for a dog, but my father surprised me and refused. He said that we’d be away from home too much. When I reminded him that we could take a dog with us to NMech since we owned part of the company, he smiled and said, “I’ll think about it”—the universal parent code for “no.” I think that after Ringer, he decided not to face the certain prospect of loss with another dog. Instead, he poured the part of him that craved primal connections with canines into his devotion to the dogs at Haven, and to my mother and me.

Schoolwork was easy until my parents decided to take over my education. Homeschooling was harder, but more enjoyable. My father, my mother, and Eva were my main teachers. Life sciences, like biology and botany and medicine, how the body works, how nature works was my mother’s area. I learned about the Taíno, about Abuela, but I wasn’t to meet her for a few years.

My father tried to teach me social sciences, but he’d ignored those subjects in high school. So it was up to me to learn at my own pace. Instead, we tackled literature and the arts together. We read a lot of the old mystery and science fiction stories—Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, Raymond Chandler, Asimov, Bradbury, Frank Herbert, and Julian May, for example—and called these the “Classics” to satisfy one of my educational requirements. He taught me what he called the people sciences: how to read body language and predict what people would do, how to pick up clues from their habits and grooming that would tell me about their lives.

My parents could monitor me when I was home or at school through the ever-present commpatch—until Eva showed me how to jack the patch so that I could choose background sounds for them to hear. Then I had a great deal more freedom.

During the years before the Great Washout, Eva was as much a mentor as my mother. I studied chemistry, physical sciences, and computer science with Eva. I thought it was the most natural thing that the soon-to-be-richest woman in the world spent time nearly every week with the juvenile son of her business partner and scientific colleague. Our studies went a bit beyond the traditional sciences. Again, I thought it perfectly natural for my extracurricular activities to be preceded by the warning, “Don’t tell anyone”.

It was always “Eva.” She had said, “You’re like family for me, but don’t give me any ‘auntie’ or ‘sister’ or ‘Mama Eva’ crap. I’m just Eva. Got it? Maybe someday that will change. Maybe I’ll adopt you,” she laughed, “and then one day all this will be yours.” That was a running joke with us, especially when an experiment or a project failed.

So I called her Eva, as if she were an equal, not a teacher, and without realizing that laughter was a rare display and a precious commodity for her. I think she wanted a playmate, a child who could understand her and get excited by the things that made her excited. I can’t imagine her playing with other little girls when she was young. Dolls or tea parties would not have been within her repertoire. I doubt other children were interested in the periodic table of the elements or the Standard Model of particle physics.

I once asked Eva why she liked to play with kids—meaning me. She told me that when we spent time together her mind was quiet. Even so, there’d be times when she’d be distant, mute, and seemed to move under a terrible weight. I imagined that a giant hand pushed down on her. At first, I thought that’s why she was so short.

She was an exciting teacher and companion. She taught by telling the stories of scientific advancement, which was strange because she considered storytelling to be “worthless nonsense.”

The first story she told me was about Richard Feynman, the physicist who started people thinking about what would come to be known as nanotechnology. In December of 1959, he made a famous speech at Caltech and offered a prize of $1000 to anyone who could reduce a line of text to 1/25,000 of its original size. The scale was an inside joke: that was the reduction needed to be able to fit something called an encyclopedia on the head of something called a pin. I think that the encyclopedia was some kind of book of knowledge, or maybe it was several books. A pin was a fastener with a sharp point. I didn’t quite get the connection, but it was well-understood nearly a century ago when Dr. Feynman issued his challenge.

When a scientist tried to claim the prize, Feynman almost couldn’t pay. He didn’t expect anyone to succeed for years and was hard-pressed for the funds. “But that’s science,” Eva explained. “It moves a lot faster than people expect. Tell a well-educated idiot what science can do right now and he’ll call it science fiction.”

Not only was it hard for Feynman to pay, it was tough for the winner to claim his prize, because the text was so tiny compared to the relative size of the pin that the scientists had to search to find it. “If you ever want to hide something,” Eva told me, “you can leave it right out in the open. In fact, it’s harder to spot in the open. Just make it very, very small—nano-size.”

Eva told me the story of Feynman’s challenge many times and the lesson stuck with me. I liked the idea of hiding in plain sight. As it happened, this lesson mirrored another. My father and I had just read Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Purloined Letter.” Poe’s detective, Dupin, finds a letter that several people searched for but missed. The letter was left in plain sight, and overlooked, instead of in a hidey-hole that would have been searched. My father, with his ability to read people and the tiny details surrounding them was like Dupin, or Sherlock Holmes, who solved mysteries with the tiniest clues that nobody else could see until he pointed them out.

The lessons about hiding in plain sight would prove fortunate.

Eva was at her most exciting when she was ghosting—I think that the old term was hacking. She travelled through private cloud data like a hungry barracuda swims through a school of minnows and she was just as dangerous. I’d seen her track people she thought had insulted her and play havoc with their pillar or sleeve. I was a willing pupil and occasional accomplice—I enjoyed mischief as much as any kid does—but she could be mean. I didn’t like being with her then. The ways she got even were amazing, but if you were the target, you wouldn’t like it one bit.

Eva also taught me to keep a journal of what I learned. She kept one and told me that every good scientist keeps a journal. If you found her journal, you could read it—if you had good jacking skills. But you would have to know about advanced chemistry and nanotechnology just to understand it. And you would need a great deal of imagination to visualize one of her plans, and even more courage to contemplate it.

___________________________________________

COUNTERPOINT

FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO

L
ate one summer afternoon, Eva surprised us when she displayed a genuine smile and announced, “I’m going to take you out to dinner.”

My mother’s hair was drawn back in a loose ponytail. I could see her face register mild surprise and then incomprehension. Her eyes widened and her eyebrows arched to a peak well above the midline of her broad Taíno forehead.

“Why?” my mother asked.

Eva did the unthinkable. She smiled again. “No agenda,” she said quietly. “Hungry, maybe?”

“Oh, boy,” my father grinned and rubbed his hands together like a child rolling strands of clay spaghetti.
“Merci,
Dr. Rozen,
mon amie,”
he said with a contrived French accent. “Where are we going?” He sounded like a cross between a poodle and a Chihuahua with phlegm in its throat.

“North Shore. Company car and driver’s waiting. Come on, Marta, relax. When was the last time we had a friendly outing?”

“Not in a long time,” my mother conceded. “If ever,” she added under her breath.

If I heard her, then Eva did, too.

Eva snorted. “Oh, you kidder,” she deadpanned though her smile remained. “How about you let down your hair tonight?”

My mother looked startled and was about to reply when my father stepped between them, turned to Eva, and said, “Sounds great. You buying?” Eva nodded, with a brief roll of her eyes. “Then let’s go,” my father said. He turned to my mother with a smile, offered his arm, and said,
“Mademoiselle?”
This act of exaggerated gallantry defused the tension. Or maybe it was the ludicrous attempt at dialect. My mother took his arm and smiled at Eva. Her arched eyebrows settled first into the facial equivalent of parade rest, then, at ease. Eva’s face returned to expressionlessness. The strain that normally bound the two abated. She took Eva’s hand.

They were warily rebuilding their friendship. There were clumsy moments, like a musician stumbling over a difficult passage in a work that had lain unpracticed and the muscle memory lost. They were still friends when they moved from Los Angeles to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study at Harvard University. Maternity and a crushing pre-med courseload demanded all of my mother’s strength. Eva seemed to skate through her courses, a facility that likely nettled my mother. Perhaps it contributed to their falling out.

The driver opened the door for us and we piled in. My father got in the car and bounced on the resilient car seat a few times after the driver closed the door. He rubbed the seat covering and murmured, “Ooh. Could this be this real leather?” Then to the driver, “Are we sitting on cows?”

“No, Mr. Ecco, nanofabrics.”

“I wonder how many atoms had to die for us to have this luxurious ride.”

“And I wonder how many times I have to hear that tired old joke,” my mother said. She smiled and accepted the festive character of the day.

My father played with the various passenger controls. The air flow stuttered on and off, while the music alternated among disparate genres.

“Jim, will you please sit still? You’re worse than a child.” She looked at me and said, “Tell me you’re not going to grow up like that.”

He just smiled and continued to play. The many gizmos he now had at his disposal at NMech seemed to help him compensate for the rigors of New England life. He had been raised in Southern California shirtsleeves and never adjusted to the extended cold of northern winters. He complained every time he offered a friendly greeting to a passerby and was met by downturned eyes. A hidebound Puritan legacy had gripped Boston for four hundred years: “Keep your eyes down, mouth shut, and thoughts hidden.”