BZRK ORIGINS Read Free Page B

and I decided to place a bit of tissue sample on the glass dish in close proximity to the biot. This took a while. But finally, we were ready. I dialed Donna’s phone and said, “Okay, we’ve placed an—”
    “Mesothelial cells,” Donna said without hesitation. “My God, you would not believe it. You would not believe it.”
    We ran to Donna’s office. She was staring into middle space, smiling. Smiling at something none of us could see.
    “It’s monochromatic. Just like an SEM. But I can see everything. Ican see the clearly delineated cell wall, the nucleus … One of them is in the beginning stage of mitosis. I can see the mitochondria.”
    She went on like that for a while, naming parts of the cell as if we were a high school biology class.
    “She might have guessed we’d use a tissue sample,” one of the staff, Prim—Dr. Primyantha—said.
    “What, I’m cheating?” Donna demanded.
    “No, no, no, of course not. But Dr. Prim is right: Let’s try something else, just to confirm for skeptical minds.”
    So Dr. Prim went to find something unexpected to place in the dish with Donna’s biot while the rest of us sat or perched and chatted excitedly.
    “Jesus Christ!” Donna yelled suddenly, and shot up out of her chair. “Goddamn it! Prim!”
    Dr. Prim returned to Donna’s office, and Donna threw the remains of a muffin at him.
    “What?” he demanded.
    “It’s a fly’s head,” Donna said disgustedly. “It’s as big as a goddamn house, Prim. Have you ever seen a fly face-to-face? It’s the size of a fucking whale!”
    “Describe it for the record,” I said.
    “I’m not looking at it,” she said.
    “Wait. What do you mean, you’re not looking at it? Biot eyes are fixed forward.”
    And that was how we discovered that we could do more than see through biot eyes. We could move them. In fact, we could control a biot’s movement as easily as we could move a finger.
    In the next week we created two new biots. Dr. Prim had one and his graduate student, Mitch McGovern, another.
    Mitch had the same experience Donna described. He had a sort of picture-in-picture view through the biot’s eyes. He could move the biot as easily as he could move his own feet.
    We began to test the biot’s capabilities. Its speed and endurance. Its range.
    If we had been following a normal protocol, this stage would have consumed months if not years. But I didn’t have a lot of time. Birgid’s health was failing. The cancer was metastasizing, popping up not just in her lungs now but in her esophagus and brain.
    The surgeons could remove some of these new tumors, but until the monster in her lungs was killed, the cancer would just keep coming back.
    Time was short.
    So Mitch’s biot was placed in a human body. We were looking for ways in. Looking for ways to enter the human body safely. Eyes, ears, nose, throat, urinary tract were all suggested. But the most obvious solution was injection close to the site of the tumor.
    But first, a human trial, however truncated. One of the lab techsvolunteered to be the test body, so to speak. She would have the biot injected into her bloodstream, with hopes that our biot astronaut would be able to navigate to the lungs.
    Mitch’s biot was tagged with a radioactive isotope, placed in a sterile solution, and drawn up into a hypodermic needle. Mitch is a funny guy, and a voluble one, so he gave us a running commentary. It was all very strange. He sat on a high stool at one of the lab tables and described what was happening to his biot one floor down.
    But very soon the witty banter got a bit strained. It was obvious that the experience was disturbing to him. A ring of sweat spread from his armpits. The description became more disjointed and repetitive.
    “It’s like … Fired out of a cannon. Jesus. You feel … Okay, let me try to organize my observations a little better. What I am seeing is a … I don’t know. The context is all, I mean, it’s hard without a sense of