“And something always goes wrong,” Joe added with a pained laugh. “It’s like walking a tightrope. Each step must be perfect. Make one little mistake, it’s all over.” He picked up a pair of tweezers and guided them toward the tiny creatures, the tips appearing enormous in the microscope’s field of view. He carefully brushed away the dead Crawlers until only the scurriers and the circler remained. “Let’s put you out of your misery,” Joe said as he grabbed the circler with the forceps. He applied pressure, and its body shattered into a hundred pieces. The students cringed.
A student in the second row raised his hand. Dave called on him.
“They seem like they’re looking for something.”
“They are.”
“What?”
“Lunch.”
Joe opened up a little box marked CRAWLER FOOD, removed a handful of corn kernels, and placed them on the glass slide. First one Crawler, then another, descended on the kernels, scissoring their scalpel-sharp legs, slashing through the kernels’ fibrous skin to the soft flesh inside. Joe zoomed in on one Crawler as it stuffed bits of shredded corn into the small feeding portal on its front. “We’ve made ones that can feed on almost anything you want,” Jake said. “Corn. Grape juice. A packet of sugar can keep one going for days. Each one’s got a genetically modified fungus that lives in its belly and converts a sugar source into ethanol fuel, courtesy of Liam Connor.”
“The issue with microbots has always been power,” Jake said, stepping back to center stage. “Quite a few teams built little robots like these for the first Grand MicroChallenge, but they all had the same weakness. They were powered by onboard batteries—tiny cells that run out of juice after a couple of minutes. And you can’t load them with more batteries—they’d be too heavy to move. It was a showstopper. Everyone was stuck.
“Enter Liam Connor. He said to me, ‘No problem, my boy. You just have to teach the little fellows to eat.’ ”
Jake let that settle in before continuing.
“His idea was to create a fungus that could serve as a digester and convert food to energy. He started with something called Ustilago maydis—a fungus that lives on corn, and he added some genes from brewer’s yeast—the stuff that converts sugar to ethanol when you make beer or wine. The Crawler eats by shredding bits of food with its legs and stuffing them into a feeding portal. That portal—its mouth—leads to its stomach—a little chamber filled with the fungus. The fungus breaks down the food and voilà! Fuel. The fuel powers the Crawler, and the Crawler eats some more. It can keep going as long as the food holds out. We call them HungryCrawlers. And they are champions.”
“So what did you do with the DARPA prize money?” a student called out.
Jake laughed. “I still have my share, sitting in the bank. Joe?”
“I bought a house for my parents in China.”
“Dave?”
“I bought stock. Mostly Google and Intel. And a Segway.”
Jake said, “It’s a hazard. He rides it up and down the halls.”
A hand went up, a student down in front, wearing a red Windbreaker and matching high-tops, no more than eighteen years old. “What about intellectual property?” he asked.
“We’ve got seven patents filed,” Jake said. “Three have already been granted.” Jake was always amazed at how quickly the thoughts of today’s students went to the business side. Fifteen years ago, when he was an undergraduate, no one thought about IP, about patents. Now it was different. Kids saw dollar signs everywhere.
“Anyone license it yet?”
“Quite a few. A start-up in Boston wants every home in America to have MicroCrawler mini-Roombas running around. On countertops, walls, ceilings, cleaning away everything from crumbs to cobwebs. A medical technology company in North Carolina hopes to use them as remote surgeons that can work on a patient from the inside, excising tumors or clearing blockages without the need for incisions or the risk of infection. But our biggest suitors are a couple of military contractors. Micro-robotics is going to be the next big thing in warfare. That’s why DARPA ran the Grand MicroChallenge. Small spies, tiny assassins, things like—”
A cellphone went off. Jake was annoyed but not surprised. This happened at least once a class. Jake spotted the culprit fishing the phone out of his pocket. He did his best to shame him with his stare.
The student didn’t notice, fixated on the screen of his phone, an expression of shock on his face. What he did next surprised Jake. He whispered to his neighbors, got up, and headed for the door.
As he was working his way down the row of seats, another student pulled a phone out and started working it with his thumbs. He looked around, whispered to his friend, pointed to the door.
That’s when it really got going. Two more cellphones started ringing. Five times that number silently fished phones out from bookbags, pocketbooks, and knapsacks. More people began to leave. Jake had never seen anything like it.
He glanced at Dave and Joe. Both shook their heads, not knowing what was happening. Dave flipped open his own phone.
A couple of students near the back got up, talking louder now. “It’s Liam Connor,” one of them said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“What? What about Liam Connor?” Jake asked.
“They just found a body in Fall Creek Gorge,” the student said.
“And?”
Dave closed his phone, face white. “Jake, this can’t be true. They’re saying that the body is Liam Connor’s.”
5
THE HILLS ON WHICH CORNELL UNIVERSITY STOOD WERE the remnants of the glacial moraine left over from the last ice age. Streams cut through this loosely packed earth and shale until they reached older, solid rock, carving the dramatic gorges and waterfalls for which the campus was famous. Fall Creek Gorge was the deepest, a huge gash in the earth defining the north boundary of campus. It was spanned by a narrow suspension footbridge linking the central part of campus to the houses and dorms farther north. From its midpoint, it was a two-hundred-foot plunge to the rushing waters of Fall Creek below.
Jake always brought the students here later in the semester when he taught “Physics for Presidents.” They stood on the bridge and stared at the water below while Jake gave them a rundown on the geology, describing the advances and retreats of the glaciers that carved out the gorges. Then Jake would give them a little demo. He would take a watermelon and drop it off the bridge. They’d all time it with their watches, the seconds ticking by until it burst on the stones below. Three-point-two seconds was the average answer. They’d compare it to what Newton predicted.
But the real lesson wasn’t Newton’s laws, the acceleration due to gravity, v2 = 2gh. That was a cover. Jake had worked up this field trip after he had lost a student to suicide. Jake knew the statistics. Over the past twenty-eight years, sixteen students had jumped from this bridge. It was a painful fact about a pressure-cooker school like Cornell, but it had hit Jake hard. He still couldn’t forget the parents at the funeral. No parent should ever have to go through that. No kid should ever put their parents through that.
The real lesson of the watermelon was about the violence of falling. The melon splattered, bits of red flesh streaking out like the sun from the point of impact. Potential energy turned into kinetic, velocity growing with every second of the fall. He brought the class here every semester to see what would happen when you went over. Cut through the romanticism and get down to the reality. You jump, you fall, you hit.