"Lot of cooling for this puppy, I can tell you. And a lot of power: fifteen kilovolts. Takes a full-minute load time for the capacitors. And of course we can only pulse it. If we turned it on continuously, it'd explode-ripped apart by the field it generates." He pointed to the base of the magnet, where there was a round push button at knee level. "That's the safety cutoff there," he said. "Just in case. Hit it with your knee if your hands are full."
I said, "So you use high magnetic fields to do part of your assemb-"
But Ricky had already turned and headed out the door, again glancing at his watch. I hurried after him.
"Ricky…"
"I have more to show you," he said. "We're getting to the end."
"Ricky, this is all very impressive," I said, gesturing to the glowing arms. "But most of your assembly line is running at room temperature-no vacuum, no cryo, no mag field."
"Right. No special conditions."
"How is that possible?"
He shrugged. "The assemblers don't need it."
"The assemblers?" I said. "Are you telling me you've got molecular assemblers on this line?"
"Yes. Of course."
"Assemblers are doing your fabrication for you?"
"Of course. I thought you understood that."
"No, Ricky," I said, "I didn't understand that at all. And I don't like to be lied to."
He got a wounded look on his face. "I'm not lying."
But I was certain that he was.
One of the first things scientists learned about molecular manufacturing was how phenomenally difficult it was to carry out. In 1990, some IBM researchers pushed xenon atoms around on a nickel plate until they formed the letters "IBM" in the shape of the company logo. The entire logo was one ten-billionth of an inch long and could only be seen through an electron microscope. But it made a striking visual and it got a lot of publicity. IBM allowed people to think it was a proof of concept, the opening of a door to molecular manufacturing. But it was more of a stunt than anything else.
Because pushing individual atoms into a specific arrangement was slow, painstaking, and expensive work. It took the IBM researchers a whole day to move thirty-five atoms. Nobody believed you could create a whole new technology in this way. Instead, most people believed that nanoengineers would eventually find a way to build "assemblers"-miniature molecular machines that could turn out specific molecules the way a ball-bearing machine turned out ball bearings. The new technology would rely on molecular machines to make molecular products. It was a nice concept, but the practical problems were daunting. Because assemblers were vastly more complicated than the molecules they made, attempts to design and build them had been difficult from the outset. To my knowledge, no laboratory anywhere in the world had actually done it. But now Ricky was telling me, quite casually, that Xymos could build molecular assemblers that were now turning out molecules for the company. And I didn't believe him.
I had worked all my life in technology, and I had developed a feel for what was possible. This kind of giant leap forward just didn't happen. It never did. Technologies were a form of knowledge, and like all knowledge, technologies grew, evolved, matured. To believe otherwise was to believe that the Wright brothers could build a rocket and fly to the moon instead of flying three hundred feet over sand dunes at Kitty Hawk.
Nanotechnology was still at the Kitty Hawk stage.
"Come on, Ricky," I said. "How are you really doing this?"
"The technical details aren't that important, Jack."
"What fresh bullshit is this? Of course they're important."
"Jack," he said, giving me his most winning smile. "Do you really think I'm lying to you?"
"Yes, Ricky," I said. "I do."
I looked up at the octopus arms all around me. Surrounded by glass, I saw my own reflection dozens of times in the surfaces around me. It was confusing, disorienting. Trying to gather my thoughts, I looked down at my feet.
And I noticed that even though we had been walking on glass walkways, some sections of the ground floor were glass, as well. One section was nearby. I walked toward it. Through the glass I could see steel ducting and pipes below ground level. One set of pipes caught my eye, because they ran from the storage room to a nearby glass cube, at which point they emerged from the floor and headed upward, branching into the smaller tubes. That, I assumed, was the feedstock-the slush of raw organic material that would be transformed on the assembly line into finished molecules.
Looking back down at the floor, I followed the pipes backward to the place where they entered from the adjacent room. This junction was glass, too. I could see the curved steel underbellies of the big kettles I'd noticed earlier. The tanks that I had thought were a microbrewery. Because that's certainly what it had looked like, a small brewery. Machinery for controlled fermentation, for controlled microbial growth.
And then I realized what it really was.
I said, "You son of a bitch."
Ricky smiled again, and shrugged. "Hey," he said. "It gets the job done." Those kettles in the next room were indeed tanks for controlled microbial growth. But Ricky wasn't making beer-he was making microbes, and I had no doubt about the reason why. Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology. "Well, not exactly," Ricky said, when I told him what I thought. "But I admit we're using a hybrid technology. Not much of a surprise in any case, is it?" That was true. For at least ten years, observers had been predicting that genetic engineering, computer programming, and nanotechnology would eventually merge. They were all involved with similar-and interconnected-activities. There wasn't that much difference between using a computer to decode part of a bacterial genome and using a computer to help you insert new genes into the bacteria, to make new proteins. And there wasn't much difference between creating a new bacteria to spit out, say, insulin molecules, and creating a man-made, micromechanical assembler to spit out new molecules. It was all happening at the molecular level. It was all the same challenge of imposing human design on extremely complex systems. And molecular design was nothing if not complicated.
You could think of a molecule as a series of atoms snapped together like Lego blocks, one after another. But the image was misleading. Because unlike a Lego set, atoms couldn't be snapped together in any arrangement you liked. An inserted atom was subject to powerful local forces-magnetic and chemical-with frequently undesirable results. The atom might be kicked out of its position. It might remain, but at an awkward angle. It might even fold the entire molecule up in knots.
As a result, molecular manufacturing was an exercise in the art of the possible, of substituting atoms and groups of atoms to make equivalent structures that would work in the desired way. In the face of all this difficulty, it was impossible to ignore the fact that there already existed proven molecular factories capable of turning out large numbers of molecules: they were called cells.
"Unfortunately, cellular manufacturing can take us only so far," Ricky said. "We harvest the substrate molecules-the raw materials-and then we build on them with nanoengineering procedures. So we do a little of both."
I pointed down at the tanks. "What cells are you growing?"
"Theta-d 5972," he said.
"Which is?"
"A strain of E. coli."
E. coli was a common bacterium, found pretty much everywhere in the natural environment, even in the human intestine. I said, "Did anyone think it might not be a good idea to use cells that can live inside human beings?"
"Not really," he said. "Frankly that wasn't a consideration. We just wanted a well-studied cell that was fully documented in the literature. We chose an industry standard."