On Fire

by Thomas Anderson

A grey mist has settled on the white parchment branches of the river birch outside the window of the lab. The tree is up lit and casts a spectral glow. But Asobi Shimada, the girl from Osaka, doesn’t notice.

  She is watching several monitors while one computer, an artificial intelligence machine, teaches another, which specializes in nano materials development, how to conduct a variety of tests on some bio matter, which is being conducted by yet a third machine that is located under the fume hood next to her. The work has a lot of moving parts and she is barely keeping up with the notes she is supposed to take when she hears a noise.

  Asobi thinks it is the lab door opening. She looks up. It’s a large laboratory in one of the biggest research buildings on the campus and the door is too far away. She can’t actually see the door. When she came in, Asobi lowered the lights in the lab, turning on only every other row of the overheads. She strains to hear, but there is no other sound.

  Asobi returns to work.

  The Nanotechnology machine is the key to her work. It performs materials analysis at the quantum or nano level, between one and one hundred nanometers in size, a nanometer being a mere billionth of a meter. At this level atoms and molecules can be discerned, a simple molecule of water being 1.5 nanometers (nm). The DNA double helix, the key to all life, is only two nm wide. A nanometer to a meter is as a marble is to the size of the earth. A human fingernail grows one nm every second. A sheet of paper is one hundred thousand nanometers thick. Even that which is referred to as micro-technology is on a whole different, and much larger, scale.

  There. She hears it again.

  It is definitely a door.

  Given the size of the lab it could be any of a number of different doors situated at various points, to the offices next door, to the hallways. Like most people, she can hear the sound but can’t determine the direction from which it hails. So she goes back to work, pressed to stay on task.

  It is basically molecular engineering. But quantum mechanics appear almost infinitely variable. The artificial intelligence machine is intended to address this. It can look at the results of an experiment and decide, based on what has just been discovered, what the next logical test should be.

  Asobi’s AI interlocutor may not be as perspicacious as an average human being, but it has a level of general intelligence that does approach that of homo sapiens in terms of capability. In fact, the AI machine has learned a great deal about nanotech just doing the experiment. While it is not intended for the purpose, it could be put to use learning foreign languages, and, to the extent that it could effectively serve as a language translator, it could provide near perfect translation of any human language. It is, however, only disembodied synthetic intelligence, at best. It cannot keep improving itself at faster and faster rates, and by that means approach the almost frightening never never land of the singularity, the holy grail of artificial intelligence, where machine intelligence dwarfs that of pigmy humans.

  She glances up and notices the ghastly lit tree adjacent to the window.

  That’s it.

  She is officially spooked.

  Time to go.

  She carefully goes about ending the session with her companion computers, cleaning up the necessary parts under the fume hood. All this takes her about 15 minutes before she is ready to leave the light gray, color coded surroundings of the lab, along with its filtered lighting. She dutifully locks the door behind her, and, just for fun, checks a couple more doors to the lab on her way out. But she finds nothing of any concern. She concludes that she is being silly.

  But perhaps she’s not that silly. Asobi takes the open stairway down, avoiding the elevators. The stairway is surrounded by the Clark Center’s glass exterior walls and glass interior atrium. The stairs are interior to the building but they are literally suspended, and from them there are great views all around.

  After reaching the ground floor, Asobi takes the nearest exit and walks along the building’s exterior sidewalk. The building is all curtain walls, so that at night anyone can see in, many of the labs being still bright even at this hour, and there are a few researchers sitting in the labs among racks of monitors and equipment. They are easily spied on, graduate lab rats, trapped eternally behind the Center’s glass curtain walls. They are part time research associates, part time graduate students, and Asobi, despite being among their number, feels for them and their late hours. The Center is for biomedical engineering and she knows that many of these associates are medical students of one stripe or another.

  Asobi can stand in the courtyard between the two rounded wings of the Center, which are connected by walkways that cross above the courtyard, and see into the three fifteen foot tall stories, all glass, mostly lit, even at this time of the night. Each floor has a wide balcony, the uppermost having a futurist bronze roof that sweeps grandly around the building’s curves. There’s a surprising amount of activity in the Center tonight and Asobi finds this to be comforting. Her shoulders relax involuntarily and she feels the muscles unwind. She discounts the feelings of being watched that she was having moments ago.

  Asobi walks the short distance along Campus Drive to the Engineering Quad and past the Nano Science and Engineering Lab, where she used to work, and from there she double times it to the Main Quad. Here the fog and clammy mist close in around her as she passes other late nighters heading back to dorm and apartment.

  The center of campus has warm decorative street lighting that can’t dispel the invading damp bay air. The Spanish sandstone buildings at the center of campus are tile roofed and all have distinctive loggia or arcades, stone archways running along the sides. To the South is the Stanford campanile, a rectangular tower shining alabaster in its own lights.

  Asobi enters the spacious Quad and looking around sees no one. She walks past Memorial Church and sees that there is nobody around there either. She notices how the Church’s fresco covered façade is so brightly lit at night.

  Asobi reminds herself that she could have waited for the campus shuttle to take her around to her dorm, though it would not have been much faster. The shuttle doesn’t come around as often at night. Her habit is to always walk, taking advantage of the exercise, as well as the beauty of the campus. For the rest of her life she wants to remember the experience of being, and walking, on this campus. But now she is questioning the wisdom of the choice, given such an eerie night.

  She leaves the Quad, heading east across campus, finding a few students still around, as there would be virtually any time of night. Her well trained situational awareness comes into play and she is keeping track of the people nearby, this couple, that individual, where they are moving from and to, how fast and how slow. She observes a shrouded figure behind her walking in her direction. The guy’s shoes are making a sound on the pavement.

  Asobi picks up her pace. She dips in and out of the campus lighting and keeps her distance from the sidewalk’s lighted bollards. All the while Asobi keeps looking out for the shrouded figure. She loses track momentarily, later sees something and then wonders: is that him?

  It is a moment of distraction. A cyclist comes zooming at her seemingly out of nowhere and she freezes, not knowing if he is going to hit her, or, at the last moment, head to one side or the other of her. She is afraid to move, certain that if she does it will most certainly be the wrong move, placing her directly in the way of her own destruction. At the last second, there is a whoosh and the cyclist breaks left, grabbing the bag hung over her shoulder, yanking if violently from her, and sending her careening.

  Asobi shouts in surprise and anger but she recovers her balance, just. The cyclist on the other hand keeps going, his legs pumping him quickly away.

  Asobi recovers herself, but any remaining reserve of collected calm that she may have once had, well that’s gone. She looks and there is nobody else around, not even the dark figure she had been trying to keep track of. She gets off the bike to see if she can find her bag. After lookin
g about for a bit, she locates it just out of the lamplight next to a tree, lying in the grass.

  And now the only thing she can think about is getting gone. Asobi bends and grabs the bag. She gives a last look around, mostly out of embarrassment. She starts off, and really kicks it, running the short remaining distance to the front door of her hi rise. As Asobi darts down the sidewalk she passes familiar trees and flower beds, finding them warm and welcoming. Asobi practically slams her ID card through the swipe of the key lock and hears the heavy door make a big clicking sound. She presses against it with all of her weight and it gives way, letting her in. Later, sitting in her room, trying to gather herself, a really big, spontaneous shiver strikes her. It ricochets up and down her spine, hitting her so hard it makes her shake.

  A figure appears in the spray of a coach light near the front of the building, stops, looks up and then walks away.

  Chapter 18