“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, because I think you’re going to be intrigued, provided you listen instead of zoning out like you did in the apartment.”
“I’m listening!”
Pia started walking again, gesturing with her hands as if she were fully Italian rather than just half. George followed, keeping up with her, watching. In truth he was only half-interested in the details of what she was saying. The other half was just enjoying her company, her excitement, and her remarkable physiognomy, with her almond-shaped eyes; incredibly long, dark eyelashes; delicately sculpted nose; and absolutely flawless skin. George would be happy to follow her anywhere. He was a basket case, but so be it, even if he had little understanding of why.
Pia took George at his word and kept talking: “Each individual microbivore has more than six hundred billion atoms arranged in its elaborate structure. It’s actually a bit more than six hundred billion, but what’s a few billion here or there?” She laughed at her own humor. “They are tiny, functioning robots with movable arms that seek out and grab pathogenic microbes and guide them into a digestion chamber, where they’re eliminated. It’s incredible. Okay, here we are.”
Pia stopped in front of a blank door protected by another iris scanner. She positioned herself, mostly her head, so that the sensor could scan her iris. A light over the door clicked green. George was about to follow suit when she restrained him. “You don’t have to do anything. This scanner is just to get the door open.”
Once inside, George immediately thought of Professor Rothman’s lab back at Columbia, but this was larger and more modern. He heard the familiar low hum from the vent hoods and from the array of medical machinery dotted around the room.
“Impressive,” George said.
“It is. My boss keeps telling me there’s fifty million dollars’ worth of equipment in this lab alone.”
“Your boss, this Zachary Berman guy?”
“No, he’s the big boss. My direct boss is a woman named Mariel Spallek, who’s not my favorite person in the world.” Pia didn’t elaborate. She put down her backpack, picked up a ledger, and moved over to a central display console with readouts from all the biotech equipment. With a pencil Pia ticked off some boxes in the ledger and wrote in others.
“Everything okay?”
“Looks that way. My iPhone would have alerted me if something was amiss. But things are looking good. Until this series of experiments, we’d been having biocompatibility issues with the microbivores. Back when we first introduced them into our animal models, we were surprised to see some allergic reactions. Not a lot, but enough to be troublesome. When it comes to the mammals, especially the primates and humans, there cannot be any reaction. Initially we found that our subjects’ immune system could occasionally treat the microbivores as foreign invaders, which, of course, they are. Why we were surprised is because the surface of the microbivores is of diamondoid carbon, which is about as nonreactive and as smooth as can be. Are you following me?”
“Yes, sure,” George said almost too quickly. Nonetheless, Pia kept talking.
“What we deduced was that some molecules had adhered to the microbivore’s surface despite its presumed nonreactivity, leading to some level of immune response. I assume you remember all this from immunology in med school. Do you?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course!” George said, hoping to hide the fact that he remembered little of what Pia was talking about. Pia’s retention of such minutiae always impressed him. Whenever she spoke about science, her face radiated a kind of passion. She also had no trouble maintaining eye contact, which she could not do in general conversation, especially conversation involving anything personal, like emotions.
George nodded enthusiastically. He tried to think of an intelligent question, which wasn’t easy as close as they were standing together. He could smell her wonderful aroma. It was erotically intoxicating thanks to his memory of the few times they had had sex. “What kind of animals are you using as subjects for these studies?” he managed, even though his voice cracked.
“A type of roundworm, but we will soon be moving to mammals, provided these subjects show no immune response, which so far seems to be the case. I’m not looking forward to working with mammals, as you can well imagine. I’m sure you remember my feelings about that.”
George nodded again, knowingly.
“If and when you get to injecting these microbivores into human subjects — into Will McKinley, for instance — how many microbivores would be involved?”
“Somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred billion, about the same number of stars in the Milky Way.”
George whistled. “How big a bolus would that be?”
“It wouldn’t be big at all. About one cubic centimeter diluted in about five ccs of saline. It gives you another appreciation of how small these things are. Each one is less than half the size of a red blood cell.”
“So this is what you have been working on for the last eighteen months, the biocompatibility of these microbivores?”
“Yes. It’s the main thing I have been doing, and we’re making progress. There was a breakthrough of sorts when I suggested that some oligosaccharide polymers be incorporated into the microbivore’s diamondoid surface.”
George couldn’t keep himself from wincing at this comment. Pia was talking way over his head. He vaguely remembered the word oligosaccharide from first-year biochemistry — something about complex sugars — but that was about all. To divert attention from his ignorance, he quickly said, “You mentioned back in the apartment having some scanning electron microscope images of these microbivores. Can I see them so that I have an idea of what we’re talking about?”
“Good idea,” Pia said with enthusiasm. She led George to a nearby computer terminal, and with a few clicks she brought up an image. She stood aside and proudly gestured toward the screen. The image was in black-and-white, showing multiple, dark, shiny microbivores in the presence of a larger donut-shaped object. Pia pointed toward the object. “That’s a red blood cell. The rest are the microbivores.”
George stepped closer for a good view. What he saw amazed him. “They look like spaceships with a big mouth.”
“I never thought of it that way, but I see your point.”
“What are all these circular objects arranged around the hull?”
“Those are the sensors that detect the targeted microorganism or protein, as the case may be. They also contain reversal binding sites to cause the target to stick. The very tiny circles surrounding each sensor are the grapplers that come out to move the target along the microbivore in a kind of bucket-brigade fashion before pulling it into the digestion chamber.”
“Is that what this hole is?”
“That’s right. Once the target has been swallowed, so to speak, it is enzymatically digested into harmless by-products, which are then pushed back out into the bloodstream.”
“And this whole thing is six times smaller than the width of a human hair? It seems incredible.”
“It’s got to be that small to get through the smallest capillary, which is about four microns in diameter.”
George straightened up and looked at Pia. She was still doing well with maintaining eye contact with him. “How does this miniature robot know what to do and when to do it?”
“It has an onboard computer,” Pia said. “Thanks to nano circuitry and nano transistors, it has a computer with five million bits of code, twenty percent more than the Cassini spacecraft had in its onboard computer on its mission to Saturn.”
“It’s all hard to believe,” George said, and he meant it.
“Welcome to the future. When we get back to my apartment I’ll give you an article on microbivores written more than a decade ago by a futurist named Robert Freitas. He predicted all this back when molecular manufacturing was nothing but a pipe dream. It’s pretty exhaustive.”
“I bet that’s fun reading,” George said, unable to resist a bit of sarcasm. Luckily it went over Pia’s head, as she had returned her attention back to the microbivores image. From her expression and posture, he could tell how proud she was about what she was doing.
“I think you’ll find it fascinating.”
“So doing this is what the head-hunters brought you out here to Boulder for?”
“No. What brought me out here was that the CEO, Berman, had read about Rothman’s work on salmonella that I was involved with. You see, from an operational standpoint, microbivores are having a problem with bacteria that have a flagellum. You know, little whiplike tails, like salmonella has. When the microbivores ingest a salmonella, the flagellum doesn’t get into the digestion chamber but rather gets detached and floats off, and the flagellum can cause as much immunologic havoc as the intact bacteria. With my experience with salmonella in Rothman’s lab, they thought maybe I could help with this problem.”
“Were you able to help?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it and have done some work toward a solution. I do have an idea of how to solve it, but when I learned of the biocompatibility issue, I got more interested in that. The flagellum problem is mechanical, the biocompatibility is more intellectual. I find it more of a challenge.”
As Pia talked, George couldn’t help but ruminate again of how he had ended up at UCLA.
“When did Nano actually make you the offer?”
“The offer? I don’t know, late June, I guess, just before graduation? Why are you asking about that again?”
George’s frustration surged again — again being reminded that his whole move to Los Angeles had been a wild-goose chase. He should have stayed in New York. Luckily, before he could say anything, his attention was diverted. The door to the lab swung open, and a woman in a lab coat strode into the room. George regarded her. She was striking, athletic-looking, and taller than Pia, with light blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She had a decidedly imperious air, and her demeanor was not friendly as she looked first at Pia, then at George, and back to Pia. The blond woman referred to a clipboard she was carrying. George felt immediately uncomfortable.
“This is Mr. Wilson?”
“Yes, Mariel. Dr. Wilson, actually,” Pia said.
George stepped forward and stretched out a hand. “Nice to meet you. George Wilson.” He assumed this had to be the boss Pia had mentioned.
The woman merely nodded, and George withdrew his hand.
“Mr. Berman is on his way back. He may even have landed. He doesn’t like visitors to Nano, which is why they are not encouraged. I thought you understood this. I would hazard to guess that he will be especially displeased about young men coming to visit you, Pia. We are counting on your being productive here at Nano. You were recruited for very specific reasons.”
George looked over at Pia. What did she mean by that?
“George and I were med students together in New York. He’s a resident at UCLA, and he’s staying with me as a houseguest for a couple of days. I can’t imagine Mr. Berman would find that irregular in the slightest. It is not going to have any effect on my productivity.”
Houseguest? thought George. That was the first encouraging news about where he was going to stay, but he kept quiet. Tension sparked between these two women, and it was obviously related to Berman and Pia. Perhaps his intuition and vague fears had been justified, knowing what he did about Zachary Berman. Too often George had seen how a lot of men reacted to Pia, himself included. And a brand-new VW sports car seemed a bit beyond the pale for any casual boss-employee relationship.
“What exactly is Mr. Wilson doing here in the lab?”
“I’m just checking on several of my biocompatibility experiments that I started last night,” Pia said. “I just wanted to be sure they were running properly. I knew it would be quick. He’s merely accompanying me. We’re almost done.”
Mariel Spallek glanced at George and gave him a look that made the discomfort all the more intense. The situation reminded him that there was an unfortunate history of Pia’s ability to get him into trouble.
“I’ll be sure to let Mr. Berman know you’re around.” Mariel looked over at Pia as she left, but George wondered if she meant him.
“What was that about?” George questioned. “Or shouldn’t I ask? She seemed to be implying something about you and Berman or am I reading more into it than I should?”
“It’s probably better that you don’t ask,” Pia said without elaboration. She was pleased. Now she was certain that Berman would hear that she had a gentleman visitor. Perhaps, as she had hoped, it would cool Berman’s ardor. As far as what George might be thinking subsequent to this episode with Mariel, the issue didn’t even enter her mind.