BZRK ORIGINS Read Free Page A

intelligent for that. Notechnology 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.”
    “Are you saying—”
    “It’s like picture in picture, but the edges are indistinct. At first I didn’t understand. Then I realized what I was seeing: glass, in extreme magnification. I was seeing through the biot’s eyes.”
    I just froze. Part of me was arguing that as her boss, as the one responsible for this company, for this research, for this desperate search for a means to save Birgid, that I should be yelling ordisciplining.
    But I was never much of a boss. I am a scientist. I have spent my life looking for answers. Well, here was a possible answer. A breakthrough of truly epic proportions.
    And part of me guessed that Donna would never have broken protocol except for her desperation to help me save Birgid.
    So all I said was, “Show me.”
    We ran across the lab, a fact that drew others behind us like the tail of a comet. Donna had the biot isolated and ready to go under the scanning electron microscope.
    “We need a test,” I said, looking around me, as if the answer were scrawled on a wall or tabletop somewhere. “We place something in the dish with the biot. Some kind of sample. Something … And we don’t tell you, Donna. A quick-and-dirty single blind. Step out of the room. Go to your office.”
    She went, and the rest of the team