The Goliath Stone Read Free Page B

didn’t remember being this good.
    Eventually she broke the mood: she asked about what was working in her body.
    Toby was delighted to lecture. “The core of the nano is a buckyball of the first order, a regular polygon made of sixty carbon atoms. There’s a big atom of … call it kryptonite, trapped inside.”
    “Kryptonite? Toby, you don’t keep secrets well at all.”
    “Just say it’s a big, heavy atom. It doesn’t react chemically. The buckyball holds it like a cage. The nano needs an anchor. A, a cornerstone. It doesn’t behave right, it flexes into the wrong shape, if the kryptonite atom isn’t in there. We grow the nanos in a sea of kryptonite, precise temperature and pressure. Ideal conditions, and we still get a few duds. We separate them by luring the working ones to a holding tank where there isn’t any kryptonite, and we watch. There’s never been a batch that reproduces then, but if there was, we’d dissolve it in fluorine and recycle. We do that with the duds.
    “When the nanos go into your body, the only kryptonite around is in the nanos. A nano dies, another can, hypothetically, reproduce. Not all of them can manage, so they keep a census. After they pull the crap out of a diverticulum, they turn it loose and crawl downstream, so to speak. The crap leaves you the usual way. The dose moves in a slow wave down your gut, maintaining its numbers until it’s out. Except that you’ve got a reserve now. The first target was your appendix, and they’ll be crawling out of there for months.”
    “What happens when, ah…”
    “The dose finishes the tour, he said tactfully? It breaks down. Fast. In principle you could build a nano that has a coating to protect it from ambient oxygen, but you’d face the same problem they get when oxygen starts combining with the surface. Poor mobility. Like a kid wearing two snowsuits. With the Briareus nanos, more like three, the outer one made of sapphire. They are mostly aluminum.”
    “So why don’t evolved— Never mind.”
    Toby grinned. “Evolved microbes have had a billion years or more to adapt to the presence of oxygen, and you’ll kindly notice that they’re still not articulated. Those don’t sort, they just glom on to stuff whole and spit out what they don’t want.”
    “So you made an atom sorter.”
    “With Connors, yeah. Connors came up with the method, but he didn’t have the dexterity or training to do any of it himself. He called it a ‘scratch-n-sniff.’ Pop off an atom with a diamond chisel, poke it with photons to see what it will and won’t absorb, and now you know what element it is. Give it a shake to find its weight, pigeonhole it in the slot for that isotope, and pop off another atom. I’m waving my hands a lot here.”
    “It sounds awfully slow.”
    “It’s a lot faster than cells do it, and all the unstable nuclei end up in the power plant. That was one of our arguments. He didn’t want to use chemical power at all. Sunlight and radiation only. The D-1 breaks down cellulose for fuel, and I’m sure he’d have pointed out that the added sugars contribute to weight problems. Can’t have them touch fats; most of the brain is fat.”
    “Explains why supermodels always look drifty. —You two argued a lot?”
    “May, in five minutes the man could have made Mother Teresa start looking for a ruler. And that was his polite mode. I got to see him lose his temper with an ‘adviser’ an investor sent once. Guy was an MBA from Yale. After fifteen minutes I thought he was going to cry—the Yalie, I mean.”
    May’s eyes were wide enough to be conspicuous even in the faint light. She’d dealt with Ivy Leaguers. “My God, what kind of language was he using?” she laughed.
    “Not a bad word. Never raised his voice. Started by asking the man’s history as if checking for qualifications, asked a few more questions to draw out detail, and then delivered a little parable about Jesus going to work for the Roman Empire and