Nano (5 page)

The elevator stopped and the doors silently opened into a blindingly white, fluorescent-lit corridor. Pia strode off with George tagging along behind, squinting. He moved his sunglasses down from their perch on top of his head to shield his eyes.

“As I mentioned back at the apartment,” Pia continued, “Nano has made major strides in molecular manufacturing so they can build complex devices here atom by atom, such as the microbivores.”

All of a sudden Pia stopped, and George stopped, too. “Does it sound like I’m giving you a lecture? Maybe you don’t want to hear all this. You can just tell me to shut up. I’m really excited about what I’m doing here. I might have come to Colorado mainly to get away from New York and my father, to deal with my guilt about Will, and to clear my mind career-wise, but work here has taken me over. I find it as engaging as what I had been doing back with Rothman before he died.”

“I want to hear about it,” George said, eager to keep Pia talking. “Really, I do.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, because I think you’re going to be intrigued, provided you listen instead of zoning out like you did in the apartment.”

“I’m listening!”

Pia started walking again, gesturing with her hands as if she were fully Italian rather than just half. George followed, keeping up with her, watching. In truth he was only half-interested in the details of what she was saying. The other half was just enjoying her company, her excitement, and her remarkable physiognomy, with her almond-shaped eyes; incredibly long, dark eyelashes; delicately sculpted nose; and absolutely flawless skin. George would be happy to follow her anywhere. He was a basket case, but so be it, even if he had little understanding of why.

Pia took George at his word and kept talking: “Each individual microbivore has more than six hundred billion atoms arranged in its elaborate structure. It’s actually a bit more than six hundred billion, but what’s a few billion here or there?” She laughed at her own humor. “They are tiny, functioning robots with movable arms that seek out and grab pathogenic microbes and guide them into a digestion chamber, where they’re eliminated. It’s incredible. Okay, here we are.”

Pia stopped in front of a blank door protected by another iris scanner. She positioned herself, mostly her head, so that the sensor could scan her iris. A light over the door clicked green. George was about to follow suit when she restrained him. “You don’t have to do anything. This scanner is just to get the door open.”

Once inside, George immediately thought of Professor Rothman’s lab back at Columbia, but this was larger and more modern. He heard the familiar low hum from the vent hoods and from the array of medical machinery dotted around the room.

“Impressive,” George said.

“It is. My boss keeps telling me there’s fifty million dollars’ worth of equipment in this lab alone.”

“Your boss, this Zachary Berman guy?”

“No, he’s the big boss. My direct boss is a woman named Mariel Spallek, who’s not my favorite person in the world.” Pia didn’t elaborate. She put down her backpack, picked up a ledger, and moved over to a central display console with readouts from all the biotech equipment. With a pencil Pia ticked off some boxes in the ledger and wrote in others.

“Everything okay?”

“Looks that way. My iPhone would have alerted me if something was amiss. But things are looking good. Until this series of experiments, we’d been having biocompatibility issues with the microbivores. Back when we first introduced them into our animal models, we were surprised to see some allergic reactions. Not a lot, but enough to be troublesome. When it comes to the mammals, especially the primates and humans, there cannot be any reaction. Initially we found that our subjects’ immune system could occasionally treat the microbivores as foreign invaders, which, of course, they are. Why we were surprised is because the surface of the microbivores is of diamondoid carbon, which is about as nonreactive and as smooth as can be. Are you following me?”

“Yes, sure,” George said almost too quickly. Nonetheless, Pia kept talking.

“What we deduced was that some molecules had adhered to the microbivore’s surface despite its presumed nonreactivity, leading to some level of immune response. I assume you remember all this from immunology in med school. Do you?”

“Oh, yeah. Of course!” George said, hoping to hide the fact that he remembered little of what Pia was talking about. Pia’s retention of such minutiae always impressed him. Whenever she spoke about science, her face radiated a kind of passion. She also had no trouble maintaining eye contact, which she could not do in general conversation, especially conversation involving anything personal, like emotions.

George nodded enthusiastically. He tried to think of an intelligent question, which wasn’t easy as close as they were standing together. He could smell her wonderful aroma. It was erotically intoxicating thanks to his memory of the few times they had had sex. “What kind of animals are you using as subjects for these studies?” he managed, even though his voice cracked.

“A type of roundworm, but we will soon be moving to mammals, provided these subjects show no immune response, which so far seems to be the case. I’m not looking forward to working with mammals, as you can well imagine. I’m sure you remember my feelings about that.”

George nodded again, knowingly.

“If and when you get to injecting these microbivores into human subjects—into Will McKinley, for instance—how many microbivores would be involved?”

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred billion, about the same number of stars in the Milky Way.”

George whistled. “How big a bolus would that be?”

“It wouldn’t be big at all. About one cubic centimeter diluted in about five ccs of saline. It gives you another appreciation of how small these things are. Each one is less than half the size of a red blood cell.”

“So this is what you have been working on for the last eighteen months, the biocompatibility of these microbivores?”

“Yes. It’s the main thing I have been doing, and we’re making progress. There was a breakthrough of sorts when I suggested that some oligosaccharide polymers be incorporated into the microbivore’s diamondoid surface.”

George couldn’t keep himself from wincing at this comment. Pia was talking way over his head. He vaguely remembered the word
oligosaccharide
from first-year biochemistry—something about complex sugars—but that was about all. To divert attention from his ignorance, he quickly said, “You mentioned back in the apartment having some scanning electron microscope images of these microbivores. Can I see them so that I have an idea of what we’re talking about?”

“Good idea,” Pia said with enthusiasm. She led George to a nearby computer terminal, and with a few clicks she brought up an image. She stood aside and proudly gestured toward the screen. The image was in black-and-white, showing multiple, dark, shiny microbivores in the presence of a larger donut-shaped object. Pia pointed toward the object. “That’s a red blood cell. The rest are the microbivores.”

George stepped closer for a good view. What he saw amazed him. “They look like spaceships with a big mouth.”

“I never thought of it that way, but I see your point.”

“What are all these circular objects arranged around the hull?”

“Those are the sensors that detect the targeted microorganism or protein, as the case may be. They also contain reversal binding sites to cause the target to stick. The very tiny circles surrounding each sensor are the grapplers that come out to move the target along the microbivore in a kind of bucket-brigade fashion before pulling it into the digestion chamber.”

“Is that what this hole is?”

“That’s right. Once the target has been swallowed, so to speak, it is enzymatically digested into harmless by-products, which are then pushed back out into the bloodstream.”

“And this whole thing is six times smaller than the width of a human hair? It seems incredible.”

“It’s got to be that small to get through the smallest capillary, which is about four microns in diameter.”

George straightened up and looked at Pia. She was still doing well with maintaining eye contact with him. “How does this miniature robot know what to do and when to do it?”

“It has an onboard computer,” Pia said. “Thanks to nano circuitry and nano transistors, it has a computer with five million bits of code, twenty percent more than the Cassini spacecraft had in its onboard computer on its mission to Saturn.”

“It’s all hard to believe,” George said, and he meant it.

“Welcome to the future. When we get back to my apartment I’ll give you an article on microbivores written more than a decade ago by a futurist named Robert Freitas. He predicted all this back when molecular manufacturing was nothing but a pipe dream. It’s pretty exhaustive.”

“I bet that’s fun reading,” George said, unable to resist a bit of sarcasm. Luckily it went over Pia’s head, as she had returned her attention back to the microbivores image. From her expression and posture, he could tell how proud she was about what she was doing.

“I think you’ll find it fascinating.”

“So doing this is what the head-hunters brought you out here to Boulder for?”

“No. What brought me out here was that the CEO, Berman, had read about Rothman’s work on salmonella that I was involved with. You see, from an operational standpoint, microbivores are having a problem with bacteria that have a flagellum. You know, little whiplike tails, like salmonella has. When the microbivores ingest a salmonella, the flagellum doesn’t get into the digestion chamber but rather gets detached and floats off, and the flagellum can cause as much immunologic havoc as the intact bacteria. With my experience with salmonella in Rothman’s lab, they thought maybe I could help with this problem.”

“Were you able to help?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it and have done some work toward a solution. I do have an idea of how to solve it, but when I learned of the biocompatibility issue, I got more interested in that. The flagellum problem is mechanical, the biocompatibility is more intellectual. I find it more of a challenge.”

As Pia talked, George couldn’t help but ruminate again of how he had ended up at UCLA.

“When did Nano actually make you the offer?”

“The offer? I don’t know, late June, I guess, just before graduation? Why are you asking about that again?”

George’s frustration surged again—again being reminded that his whole move to Los Angeles had been a wild-goose chase. He should have stayed in New York. Luckily, before he could say anything, his attention was diverted. The door to the lab swung open, and a woman in a lab coat strode into the room. George regarded her. She was striking, athletic-looking, and taller than Pia, with light blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She had a decidedly imperious air, and her demeanor was not friendly as she looked first at Pia, then at George, and back to Pia. The blond woman referred to a clipboard she was carrying. George felt immediately uncomfortable.

“This is Mr. Wilson?”

“Yes, Mariel. Dr. Wilson, actually,” Pia said.

George stepped forward and stretched out a hand. “Nice to meet you. George Wilson.” He assumed this had to be the boss Pia had mentioned.

The woman merely nodded, and George withdrew his hand.

“Mr. Berman is on his way back. He may even have landed. He doesn’t like visitors to Nano, which is why they are not encouraged. I thought you understood this. I would hazard to guess that he will be especially displeased about young men coming to visit you, Pia. We are counting on your being productive here at Nano. You were recruited for very specific reasons.”

George looked over at Pia. What did she mean by that?

“George and I were med students together in New York. He’s a resident at UCLA, and he’s staying with me as a houseguest for a couple of days. I can’t imagine Mr. Berman would find that irregular in the slightest. It is not going to have any effect on my productivity.”

Houseguest?
thought George. That was the first encouraging news about where he was going to stay, but he kept quiet. Tension sparked between these two women, and it was obviously related to Berman and Pia. Perhaps his intuition and vague fears had been justified, knowing what he did about Zachary Berman. Too often George had seen how a lot of men reacted to Pia, himself included. And a brand-new VW sports car seemed a bit beyond the pale for any casual boss-employee relationship.

“What exactly is Mr. Wilson doing here in the lab?”

“I’m just checking on several of my biocompatibility experiments that I started last night,” Pia said. “I just wanted to be sure they were running properly. I knew it would be quick. He’s merely accompanying me. We’re almost done.”

Mariel Spallek glanced at George and gave him a look that made the discomfort all the more intense. The situation reminded him that there was an unfortunate history of Pia’s ability to get him into trouble.

“I’ll be sure to let Mr. Berman know you’re around.” Mariel looked over at Pia as she left, but George wondered if she meant him.

“What was that about?” George questioned. “Or shouldn’t I ask? She seemed to be implying something about you and Berman or am I reading more into it than I should?”

“It’s probably better that you don’t ask,” Pia said without elaboration. She was pleased. Now she was certain that Berman would hear that she had a gentleman visitor. Perhaps, as she had hoped, it would cool Berman’s ardor. As far as what George might be thinking subsequent to this episode with Mariel, the issue didn’t even enter her mind.

4.

NANO, LLC, BOULDER, COLORADO

SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2013, 2:45
P.M.

The pleasant sense of calm that Zachary Berman had felt during the plane flight had dissipated completely. It wasn’t that there’d been any hitch in the arrival and delivery, and everything had run smoothly at the general aviation terminal at the airport. The dignitaries were driven in one of Nano’s Suburbans to company headquarters, where they would be set up in their accommodations. The involuntary guests were discreetly carted off the plane by means of a catering truck and were also at Nano, in less comfortable surroundings than their compatriots. Berman impatiently demanded that his driver get him to his office as soon as possible. Berman’s unofficial arrangement with the airport allowed him easy access to all areas, and his car was able to take him right off the tarmac and out onto the airport’s perimeter road.

With Whitney Jones trailing behind him in a separate limo, Berman entered the Nano facility through an unmarked private vehicular entrance. Once at the proper building, an inconspicuous outer door opened into a compact lobby, where two armed guards stood at an inner door, on either side of the iris scanner that everyone, Berman included, had to negotiate before gaining access to the core of the facility. Passing through the scanner and hustling along, Berman reached his office to find Mariel Spallek waiting for him.

“How was the flight?” asked Mariel.

“Who’s the guy with Pia?” Berman demanded, ignoring the question.

Mariel knew Zachary would latch on to that part of the email message she had sent as Berman drove in. He wouldn’t tell her about the status of the four new subjects; he would neglect to bring her up to date on the state of the financing negotiations; he wouldn’t ask her about progress in the multiple trials that were going on in the private and the public areas of the facility; he would want to know about Pia and the young man who had accompanied her here to Nano.

“His name is George Wilson and he’s a radiology resident at UCLA. He checked out.”

“What’s he doing here?” Mariel could tell that Zachary was trying to be calm, but he was failing miserably. He was like a lion in heat. He picked up memos and reports from his desk, feigning interest in them, but his eyes were elsewhere, darting across his desk and back. This piece of news about George Wilson was driving him crazy, and a part of Mariel relished his discomfort. She didn’t know the nature of Pia and George’s relationship, but she didn’t mention that. She was content to allow Zachary to think the worst.

“She said he was visiting for a few days. They were classmates at Columbia Medical School. The background check we ran on Pia before we hired her mentioned him; they had been friends for the duration of the four years. The exact nature of the friendship had not been mentioned. What had been mentioned was that he had been involved in that kidnapping business.”

“Right, I remember. He was the guy who was supposed to get shot.”

“That’s right,” said Mariel. “He certainly seems to be a lucky young man.”

Berman looked up and fixed Mariel with a stare. Was she messing with him? He knew that Mariel was fully aware of his unrequited interest in Pia, and he knew with ever greater certainty that his brief affair with Mariel had been a mistake, a big mistake. She had latched on to him like a limpet and had taken some shaking off, despite the chasm in status between the two of them at work. Mariel had been spurned, but he was certain she was hoping that passion would be rekindled, and if so, she would come back to him in a second.

Berman would have liked nothing more than to fire Mariel so he wouldn’t have to be continually reminded of his mistake, but no one knew more about Nano’s medical nanotechnology program than she did. The sum total of everything she knew about Berman and Nano could be dangerous to him, so he was constantly walking a tightrope with her. Perhaps one day he’d jump off, but not today. Berman wondered why Mariel couldn’t be as mature as Whitney Jones. Whitney knew the working relationship they had was too important to jeopardize over something as frivolous as a few rolls in the hay.

“Do you want to go and see her?” Mariel broke the uncomfortable silence. “When I left her, which wasn’t that long ago, she was in the lab with the young man checking on some of her experiments. Perhaps she is still there.”

“How are those experiments going?” Zach was well aware of what Pia was doing and was impressed, which only fanned his desire. She was erotically gorgeous and smart, both qualities Zach found irresistible, especially in the same person.

“Seems they’re going well. So far no suggestion of any immune response. But they are not over.”

“Right,” Zachary said. He got to his feet. “I need to talk to her about the flagellum issue. Now that she’s been making such progress on the biocompatibility problem, she needs to get cracking on what she was initially hired for.”

“Of course,” said Mariel, backing away to let the onrushing Berman past. She knew the real reason he wanted to get down to Pia’s lab, and she set off slowly behind her boss, letting him charge ahead. In his eagerness he was soon out of sight. “Men, they are so predictable,” she muttered disparagingly.

When she got back to the lab where Pia worked, she found Berman standing alone in the center of the room, holding a file.

“She left,” he said. “What does this mean?” Berman handed the file to Mariel. She was well aware of Pia’s ongoing experiments—she had helped to design the protocol herself for most of them.

“It is a summary to date of what is currently running. As you can see, everything is negative for any suggestion of an immune reaction, which is encouraging. The new microbivore design with the polyethylene glycol molecules incorporated into the outer shell apparently is a stroke of genius. Obviously, Pia was right, and I think we should use it you know where.”

Mariel might not have been the easiest person to get along with, but she was honest to a fault. She disliked Pia not only because of Pia’s signature aloofness but also because Berman was so obviously physically attracted to her and not to Mariel. She also knew that Berman’s ardor was fueled by Pia’s rejection of him, meaning he wanted what he couldn’t have. Although Pia was a reminder to Mariel that Zach had rejected her, she was able to give Pia credit for her intelligence.

“If these positive results continue,” Berman said, “I think we can start considering moving to mammals for safety studies.”

Mariel studied Berman’s face. It appeared as though he had forgotten momentarily about Pia. She recognized his expression—he had it every time they made a step toward the major breakthrough they sought. The look on Berman’s face suggested more to Mariel than just excited anticipation of a seriously profitable business accomplishment, it was almost yearning.