“What? Yeah, okay.” She had been carrying her laptop at her side in her good hand. Now she brought the thin case up against her chest, smiling — and irritated — at the idea that the real reason he’d chosen her was for her boobs. Wrong woman.
He didn’t smile back. “I’m serious. Don’t go overboard, let’s just see what happens.”
“It’s not a problem.”
* * * *
Sawyer’s room had a rancid stink. His guts were a mess and his digestive process was inconsistent. Dr. Anderson had said that breaking down solid foods took nearly as much out of him as he gained in nutrition, describing lumpy stools and bloating and screaming fits, and Ruth wondered if this flatulence was the result of tempting him with beef ribs. She wondered if Cam had done it deliberately, to hurt and distract him.
The relationship between these men was one she might never fully comprehend, brother, enemy, each of them dependent upon and simultaneously dominant over the other.
“Hey, buddy,” Cam said, “you feel better?”
“Nuh.” Sawyer lay on his right side, his withered side, knees drawn up beneath the covers. His other hand shifted along the edge of the mattress, crablike, groping and pausing and groping again. His eyelids were low, his attention drifting.
A part of her wished she wasn’t here. She had no idea what to do. Her impulse was to shout and beg, but there was so little they could offer someone in Sawyer’s condition. She thought ruefully of Ulinov, poor Ulinov, who had tried for days and weeks to make her return to her work when she would only stare out through the lab module’s viewport.
Sawyer surprised her again. “Came back,” he said clearly enough, in a voice that was contrite, almost childishly so.
Ruth felt worn down to nerves and bone, but Sawyer, being so much weaker, had been reduced to an utterly vulnerable state — and Cam had expected it, planned for it.
“She wants to hear more about your ideas,” Cam said.
“A lot more.” Ruth hefted the laptop. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Hah.” Sawyer’s grunt was ambiguous to her, but he tried to raise his head, a tremor in his neck muscles quickly becoming a shudder. He slumped back down onto the mattress with a sigh.
Cam hauled him up into a sitting position, untangling his strengthless legs. Sawyer cried out. Ruth knelt away from them and busied herself with her laptop, sneaking glances. Finally he was settled. Too bad Cam had positioned himself on Sawyer’s left side, his strong side — probably by habit, because it was easier to talk to the living half of his face.
Ruth sat close, her bulky cast like a weapon or a wall between them, his drooping eye and cheek a barrier of a different sort. “This is the best we’ve put together,” she said, placing the open laptop on her legs.
The first graphic was Vernon’s, a simplified progression intended to wow nontechnical big shots. It had four squares across the top and four across the bottom, like the panels of a Sunday paper cartoon. It showed an oversized, two-dimensional star of an HK ANN attacking and then breaking down an oversized fishhook of an archos nano. The written description for each panel was ten words or less.
“Yuh yusing th’now?” Sawyer asked, blurting his sounds, and Cam said, “You’re using this now?”
“No, we’re still in trials. It’s a mock-up. But the groundwork is solid, we’ve hit 58 percent effectiveness. There’s no question that the discrim key is functional.”
“Fif ’y hey sno’good.” His slur remained incoherent but the smugness in his tone was unmistakable.
“Fifty-eight is awful,” she agreed, “but if we can operate faster than archos, it might not matter if the error rate is through the roof.”
Sawyer shifted, grunting again, and Ruth mourned his speech impediment. Was that yes or no or something else altogether? How much wasn’t he saying because it was too much effort? She looked across his misshapen profile at Cam, needing help.
It would be right to warn him, recruit him into the conspiracy. Cam would be instrumental in continuing to control Sawyer, and they might need another pair of hands during the takeover — but there was just too much at risk. She hardly knew him, and the chance existed that he might take her confession straight to Hernandez.
Always alert, Cam noticed her glance and seemed to interpret it as a prompt. “Maybe you can make this thing better,” he told Sawyer, “make it a hundred percent.”
“Yah.” Sawyer bobbed his head.
“I have proofs and schematics,” Ruth said.
“Lemme see.” Sawyer fumbled one-handed with the computer and Ruth tried to help, equally limited, her cast blocking her way. Cam reached in and the three of them managed to set the laptop on Sawyer’s thighs.
He scrolled through the data Vernon had assembled, sectional diagrams and test series analysis. He muttered. He beat his good hand on the bed. Cam stared at the screen as he translated Sawyer’s growl, maybe hoping to increase his own understanding of their terms and concepts: “Just the fact that we’re putting this ANN tech inside the body should improve its targeting ability. It will congregate in the same places as the archos, in the extremities and scar tissue.”
Ruth nodded with all the caution of someone in a minefield. “Sure.” She didn’t want to argue. What if he shut up for a week just to punish them? But human beings were not empty containers. A living organism was many times more complex than any equivalent area outdoors, tightly packed with miles of veins and tissue. The blood system might bring most vaccine nanos into proximity with most archos nanos, but every stray archos tucked away here and there would be free to replicate…
Sawyer was ahead of her. “The problem is the ones we miss,” he said, through Cam, “and this discrim key looks like good work. You could probably keep everyone you’ve got sweating over it for another year before you pushed that percentage up. So we add a new component.”
“More bulk will slow us down.” The criticism was out before she could catch it, even though she’d just reminded herself not to antagonize him.
But Sawyer seemed to enjoy the challenge. He made a throaty bullfrog laugh and said, “Iffah wurks awurks.”
Cam shook his head. “Sorry, what?”
“Iffit,” Sawyer repeated, loud with anger, and Ruth said, “If it works, it works. Absolutely.”
The archos nano generated marginal amounts of waste heat, a fraction of a calorie, when it first awoke inside a host body and then seventy-one times more during replication. By modifying the vaccine nano to detect this signature pulse as a backup to the discrimination key, Sawyer thought they could ensure that it located every archos that hadn’t been destroyed while still inactive. The person whose body was this battlefield might experience some pain and a long-term accumulation of injury, but the best way to improve the vaccine nano would be to have a working prototype that could be tested and refined.
It was chancy, innovative. And it would be quick. Sawyer insisted they’d need only a bit of integral coding. There would be no new design work. He could craft a thermo-sensor from a single port of the heat engine, and his team had used EUVL fabrication gear — extreme ultraviolet laser — with machining capacities well beyond the MAFM or electron probe in Leadville.
“But a lot of Stockton burned,” Ruth said. It was the perfect opening, assuming the FBI report targeting that city was accurate. “What if your lab got wiped out?”
Sawyer turned stiffly, bringing the animate side of his face around to her. His pebbled lips drew back in a thin, numb smirk. Then he shook his head and carefully formed four syllables, pleased as always to correct her.