by Brian Nelson
He headed for the shower, smearing his bloody palm across the wall as he went, and turned on the cold water. He wanted the numbing, the constriction of his lungs. Gasping in the icy water, he felt his body wanting to get out of the freezing jet. But he fought it. Don’t you dare move.
He wanted to be tough and angry, primal and savage, but under the cold water those feelings began to erode … until something inside him—a dam he hadn’t known was there—gave way. The next thing he knew, he was standing there shivering and weeping.
He was filled with an overwhelming frustration. He was furious at Olex for what he had done. But he was also disappointed in himself—for letting Olex play him, for being powerless to find a single word to defend himself. He had known the answers to some of Olex’s questions, but he’d been too petrified, in a state of intimidated shock, to speak. Perhaps worst of all, he hated that he hadn’t seen the position that Jack and Bill had put him in. He was another piece in their intricate machine—a piece they would replace if it didn’t function right. It was all an elaborate game to them. But it was his fucking life.
* * *
For the next three days, Eric remained a little unhinged. He avoided everyone, including Jane and Ryan. He was sure that they, like everyone else, were whispering about him. There he is. Did you hear what happened?
He came and went quietly, worked in a carrel in the library, even ate there. With nothing to counter it, the dark voice in his head had free rein. Nice going, Hill. Way to show ’em just how brilliant you are. That dazzling Hill brain is really something. Face it, pal. You are way out of your league.
It was the first time in his life that he couldn’t tame the voice. And that frightened him, because he had inherited the voice from his father. It was what drove him, pushed him, made him reach higher than others. Yet it was also a curse, because it was rarely satisfied, always telling him he wasn’t good enough.
He would never know why his father had killed himself, but he was quite sure it was that inner voice that had told him to pull the trigger.
It was around ten thirty in the evening on the third day after the incident when he heard a knock on his door. He asked who it was, but got no reply. He cracked the door open. It was Ryan and Jane. “Guys, it’s really not a good time …”
Jane pushed her way in as if she owned the place.
“Where have you been?” she said. “We’ve been looking all over for you. We need to talk strategy. Ryan and I have been thinking. What you need most is tutoring on the replication. I can help with that.”
“And I think I can help you with some of the equations,” said Ryan.
“Right,” Jane continued, “but we decided the equations are frustrating you because you don’t understand the genetics behind them. So we’ll do genetics first—a couple of weeks at least—then come back to the equations.”
Eric smiled. He had completely misjudged them. Yes, others may have written him off, but not them. “Thanks,” he said. “But I can’t ask you guys to do that. I have to accept the fact that I might not be the best architect.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Jane said. “You’re not rolling over yet. Don’t you see? Today was the re-opt, and you didn’t get cut. That means Bill and Jack have given you another month. You have to use it. And as for Olex, you can’t let him get under your skin. That’s what he wants. He tried to do the same with both of us.”
Eric nodded slowly. It was true. They both had suffered under Olex and survived. “Okay,” he said. But he was looking at the floor. Jane reached out and lifted his chin.
“You sure?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
“That’s better,” she said.
“You’d better get crankin’,” Ryan said. Then he seemed to suddenly notice just how trashed the apartment was. “I must say, I like what you’ve done with the place.” He tented his fingers like a self-absorbed art aficionado and began speaking with a French accent. “The bloody palm print evokes, for me, Warhol with a touch of Dachau.” He put his fingertips to his lips and blew out a kiss. “Überchic!”
* * *
Eric had a month. For the first ten days, he worked with Jane, who pushed him harder than any prof he’d ever had. Chromosome cleaving, mapping, Punnett squares. Night after night of advanced genetics. When she felt he was ready, they started back on the first sixteen-page equation. They got through the first four pages well enough, but then Eric got bogged down. Jane could read his mounting frustration and told him to be patient. They pressed on. But by one in the morning, Eric realized that all the genetics in the world wouldn’t help him crack these equations. He tossed down his stylus. “It’s no use. I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, but this isn’t working. I just need to face it: I’m not cut out for this.” He knew it was the other voice talking, and he felt ashamed for quitting, but there it was. He’d said it.
“Why are you so convinced you can’t do this?” she said.
“It’s just too much to get my mind around.”
Jane pushed back from the table and examined him. “You wanna know what I think?”
He didn’t really. He just wanted sympathy.
“The problem isn’t these equations or the genetics or even Olex. The problem is your attitude.”
Eric exhaled. He didn’t like where this was heading. “Maybe you should go,” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “You wanna know something? I saw the paper you submitted to Nature—the one that got you this job. I found it on one of Olex’s iSheets. I read it and I thought it was incredible. Incredible and beautiful, and not just the way you imagined it, but the science behind it. It was one of the best papers I’ve ever read. I knew instantly why Jack wanted you to be the architect. But whatever attitude, whatever confidence, you tapped into to write that paper—it’s gone.” She paused, letting her words sink in. “Now, are you going to get in touch with that again or not?”
Eric felt embarrassed and angry at the same time. But he said nothing. There was a long silence.
“You know what?” she finally said. “You asked me to leave, and on second thought, I will. Because the guy I came to help was the guy who wrote that paper, the guy who tracked Olex’s encrypted phone—not the guy who’s sitting next to me now.”
She calmly gathered up her things and put them into her backpack. A minute later, she was gone. She didn’t slam the door, but the sound of it closing seemed to hang in the air.
Eric sat there for a long time in silence, the conical reading lamp spotlighting the equations. He saw them but didn’t. After a long while, he nodded slowly to himself, turned out the light, and went to bed. On the iSheet, he had written a line: Strength is the outcome of need.
* * *
The next morning, he got up at five forty-five and went for a four-mile run. After breakfast, he went back to the library with a copy of the equations. He stayed there for the next twenty-two hours. He slept for six hours, then did it all again: workout, eat, work. Checking and recalculating. He started at the beginning, teaching himself everything he needed to know, downloading several books on advanced algorithms, energy coupling, and cloning. By the third day he understood every term, every assumption, and, finally, every equation. In fact, he rewrote each equation out by hand on a long ream of dot-matrix paper he found. And in doing so, he made them his equations. They were no longer Arundhati’s. They were his. He checked the time. It was three forty-five in the morning. He could have sworn that the last time he lifted his head it was still light out. He was exhausted and had to pee. But he had done it. They were the toughest he had ever seen, but he’d done it. And that was the key: he had worked them out himself. No shortcuts, no calculators, no computers. He realized that the very complexity of the thing had been what frightened him. But it also reminded him that one of the reasons he had succeeded so well at Stanford was be
cause he never assumed anything. He questioned all existing methods and often tweaked them or designed his own.
And that was where he found the answer (at least part of it): in their assumptions. At first, he thought he had missed something, but after double-checking it, he realized that Jack had made a very controversial assumption. It was right there on the second page: that the leptons (electrons, muons, and neutrinos) would have a spin quantum number of one-half. But it was known that some leptons could have different spins. When he gave the muons and neutrinos a spin of 3/2 and 5/2 respectively, he found he had only a .004 percent rate of error as opposed to Arundhati’s 16 percent. It was that simple. The team had been working on the problem for so long, no one had bothered to review the assumptions.
But Eric waited. He still had to figure out the remaining .004 percent error. He wasn’t going to settle for half the answer. He was going to do it all.
And he was sure he would. Something in him had changed, and the dark voice, for now, was quiet.
He picked up his phone and dialed.
He heard a long string of expletives, followed by, “It’s the middle of the night. Whatever you have to say, say it quickly.”
“You were right,” he said.
“Of course I was right.” And she hung up.
* * *
The next morning, he got to work on the other half of the problem. He tried to step back, to go to the place where he got so many of his ideas for Nanotech: from his horseshoe crab. That is, he tried to look at how nature did nanotech, because the truth was all organisms were made by nanotechnology. A bluebird, a blue whale, a man. They all were machines. But not the antiquated notion of a machine with gears and clockwork. They were molecular machines with billions of synchronized parts—machines made from protein, using the DNA/RNA/ribosome system. DNA was the master program, and RNA transmitted the instructions to the ribosomes, which, in turn, built all the protein molecules that made up our bodies.
The work at the lab was all about making tiny machines—assemblers—that could grab and rearrange atoms in any way that man wished. Certainly complex, but something that our proteins and enzymes did within our bodies already: taking nutrients out of our food, moving iron across a cell wall, and breaking down ATP to ADP to fire our muscles. Nature had been doing nanotech for billions of years. And once the team figured out how to program assemblers using the model that nature had given them, they could do anything. After all, the difference between hazardous waste and seawater, the difference between cancerous cells and healthy cells, was merely the arrangement of atoms. The awesome power of nanotech would come from this versatility. As Otto Mayer often said, “Anything that can be imagined can be made.”
And made better.
While nature was good, it could certainly be improved on. This was because evolution was locked into using protein as its building material, and once it started, there was no turning back. No creature could exchange its calcium bones for steel or its dendrites for copper, not once the program had been hardwired for protein. But Eric and the other scientists at NRL had no such limitations. They intended to build their nanosites faster and stronger than anything nature had produced.
The horseshoe crab was Eric’s reminder of the roots of his science.
He had been nine years old when he got it—on the Hill family’s summer vacation to Cape May, New Jersey. His sister, Ellen, who had just turned six, was wading in the shallow water with Dad when she stepped on the poor creature. She screeched in horror and tried to bolt for shore, but Dad held her by the wrist, likely knowing exactly what had frightened her. Intrepid in the name of science, he had fished through the ankle-deep water with his free hand until, a moment later, he pulled up a handsome specimen of the Precambrian arthropod. He held it up proudly by its hard tail, its spindly legs moving in the air like typing fingers while its armor plates clanked and flapped about. Ellen shrieked with renewed vigor at this monster that was now joined to her father—who was still joined to her.
“Settle down,” Dad said, or some such thing, but Ellen was having none of it. She squirmed until she broke free and raced up the beach crying, straight to their mother. Dad had shrugged and lumbered up the beach after her, still holding his struggling prize. “Eric, I want to show you something.”
Eric was instantly intrigued. Cool, it grosses girls out!
The horseshoe crab had been marvelous to him even then. Dad had explained everything. Its beauty was in its simplicity: an armored exoskeleton with toothed ridges that protected its sensitive belly, primitive gills that had evolved only in horseshoe crabs—book gills, each with one hundred leaves. Water was circulated over them by the movement of the legs. The long tail, the telson, was used to right itself during mating—not for defense, as many thought. Simple. Perfect.
Eric listened, storing every word so that later he might impress his father with his memory—so that his father might suddenly hug him as he sometimes did, and say, “Yes! That’s it. That’s my boy!”
He had kept the crab with him ever since. Junior high, high school, MIT, Stanford, and now the Naval Research Laboratory. It was still amazing to him: a living fossil that had survived all five of Earth’s mass extinctions. It was the quintessence of masterful engineering, because it had been made right the first time. Most protein machines, whether human, virus, fish, or insect, had to be continually redesigned, upgraded, and tweaked to ensure their survival. By comparison, the horseshoe crab was a beta version, release 1.0—a molecular machine so perfectly constructed that it didn’t need to adapt to environmental pressures. And so, over time, it had outdistanced—lapped and then relapped—all the other creatures that we consider primitive. The horseshoe crabs had seen the dinosaurs come and go. They were older than sharks, older than the crocodiles, older than the cockroach and the dragonfly, and older than the splitting of Pangaea.
He suddenly caught a whiff of it, the smell salt and sea life.
He made himself focus on the problem.
An error rate of even .004 meant that replication could never take place. The key to making assemblers was volume. Just as the human body needed trillions of proteins to function, building with assemblers required trillions of flawlessly identical copies—which meant that a .004 percent error rate would not do. It had to be much lower. But how did nature manage it? How did the horseshoe crab handle errors in its cell replication? What was the difference?
Then he knew, and he was mad that he hadn’t thought of it before: an error-checking program. In horseshoe crab cell replication (in all DNA replication, really), the DNA copied itself and then the cell pinched itself in two. Yet the copied DNA in most of these cells made less than one error in one hundred billion, or .000000001 percent. The key to that accuracy was that certain enzymes, such as DNA polymerase I, proofread the new DNA and corrected it for errors.
That was the answer: a subgroup of assemblers would have to be designed that mirrored the error-checking enzymes in the natural world. Then Arundhati’s error rate would be within tolerable limits.
It was now June 23, a week before the next re-opt. For the next two days, he worked almost around the clock on a general design for an error-checking nanosite, getting help from Jane on the biology of existing proofreading enzymes. He had no doubt that it would work; he had covered every base. But he had to be tactful, especially with Olex. He had gone so long without making a contribution, he feared it might look suspicious. Solving one part of the problem was impressive, but two?
With four days to go before the deadline, he went to Jack’s office.
“Eric!” he cried. “Come in. Have a seat.” Jack seemed genuinely happy to see him.
Eric began telling him about the energy-coupling problem, explaining how he had been reviewing the equations. Then he asked if, just perhaps, Arundhati might have made a mistake in her assumption about the lepton spin.
“Hmmm.” Jack leaned back and
folded his arms across his chest, his poor chair yawning under his weight. His eyes narrowed for a moment—thinking it through. Then he broke into a grin that pushed his cheeks up into his eyes. “Oh, yes!” he said. “Yes, that would bring down the error to less than five in ten thousand.” Eric nodded. “Excellent.” Jack laughed, and his beard seemed to grow whiter as his face went pink with embarrassment. “I certainly should have seen that … But what about the rest of the errors?”
“I’ve got some ideas,” Eric said, knowing he needed a gap between the two parts of the answer for it to seem plausible. “But let me do some more testing.”
“Very well,” Jack said, still smiling. “Keep me posted.”
* * *
At the next Tuesday talk, when the discussion was heating up about the remaining .004 percent error, he spoke up at last. He immediately felt the heat of Olex’s eyes on him. But he proposed slowly and deliberately—a speech he had rehearsed five times with Jane the night before—explaining how the proofreading nanosites were the only way to get the margin of error within acceptable parameters.
Olex scoffed. Preposterous. But Eric could tell by the nods, by Jane’s reserved smile, by the way that Jack slowly nodded his head with an expression that might have been pride, that he had won them over.
A ritual had been played out. An initiation. He was now one of them. After a few questions went around that reinforced the merits of his idea, Olex gave a grunt. A conditional acknowledgment. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut.
Chapter Eleven
The Fourth of July
July 3, 2025
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Phase 1 Deadline: T-minus five months and seven days