“Need for what?”
Pia’s window rose, and Paul had no option. He got in his car and followed Pia to Boulder Memorial. All was quiet at the hospital, and they drove all the way up to the ER loading dock. Paul escorted Pia through the quiet ER to the staff lounge. It was the first time she had seen the ER without any patients waiting.
Without speaking, because one of the ER physicians was sleeping on the couch, Paul opened the fridge where the staff kept their packed lunches and reached into the back of the freezer compartment to retrieve a brown paper bag.
“You kept it in here?”
Paul shrugged. “No one ever cleans out the freezer. You had me paranoid about this after the other sample was lost, so I thought of here. Hiding in plain sight, sort of.”
“But the blood’s frozen. I need to look at it under a microscope.”
“Yes, Pia, it’s been in the freezer. I didn’t know how long I was supposed to be keeping it. And I never imagined you’d need it at five minutes’ notice in the middle of the night. “
“Okay, okay. You go home, and I’ll be right over as soon as I can, okay?”
They quickly went back outside. Pia climbed back into her car, which she’d left running, but Paul kept her door from closing. “Do I have to worry about you? Where exactly are you going?”
“No, you don’t have to worry. I’d love to tell you everything, but it would take too long to explain. I’ll be back as soon as I can to your apartment to fill you in. Turn on your phone, and I’ll call you, or I’ll just ring your buzzer again. Whatever! Now let my door close!”
Pia’s door slammed shut, and she backed up quickly and headed for the exit. Paul watched her go. She was a trip, that was for sure. Headstrong was not quite a forceful enough word for him to describe her. She could be exasperating, yet that was part of her charm. Paul found himself worrying about Pia, despite her protestations. He knew he wasn’t going to fall back asleep until she showed up.
Whitney Jones often had trouble getting back to sleep once she’d been awoken. But when her cell phone had finally stopped informing her of Zachary Berman’s movements, she’d fallen into a deep slumber. She’d heard the ping as Berman left the inner lab and, quickly, another as he apparently moved around the Nano complex. By the time the phone sounded again, when Pia exited the Nano bio-lab building, Jones was asleep.
But her rest was short-lived.
Now, as she woke again, she was irritated. Whitney snapped on the light to see what was going on this time. She wished she could just switch off the damn phone, but being apprised of her boss’s movements was part of her job. Whitney got a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and sat at her counter. She saw that Zachary Berman had gone back into the Nano complex, just after four o’clock in the morning. But she knew he had just left — where had he been? What the hell was he doing?
Whitney scrolled back to her texts to see what her boss had said in reply to her query about what he was up to. But there was no text from Berman. She was momentarily confused, but then she realized that what she had assumed to be a text from Berman was the security system at Nano telling her that he had reentered the lab he had been in before. Why was he doing that? It didn’t make sense.
Whitney saw that she’d missed another text as Berman left Nano. Whitney thrummed her fingers on the marble countertop. Berman hadn’t responded to her text. That wasn’t unprecedented, but it was unusual, given that he was so active at that time of night. She figured he must have seen his phone and just ignored her message. She could have taken that as an affront, but she had learned to know better.
The phone pinged as she held it in her hand. Now she was being told he was going back into that same lab in the common area at Nano for a second time. Why was he going in and out of that particular lab?
Whitney thought about the lab for a second, and then she remembered who had worked in it. Her mind raced with the possibilities that this realization presented her.
“Shit,” she said quietly, and finally called Berman on his main house phone.
Pia looked through the eyepieces of a high-power microscope to view the centrifuged blood from the submerged man. She backed up the objective and the field came into view. Just as she suspected, she saw a plethora of spheroid forms that looked for all intents and purposes like microbivores. Yet she doubted they were, because under the light microscope there was a cobalt bluish cast to the structures and the microbivores looked black. So far she felt her suspicions were vindicated. The blood from the submerged, dissected man contained billions of nanorobots of some sort.
Pia then moved over to the console of the scanning electron microscope. She had prepared a sample of the same blood and placed it into the specimen chamber and activated the vacuum pumps. There was now a complete vacuum, so she turned on the electron source. Sometime later she had an image on the monitor screen. She knew she was looking at nanorobots, and she knew they were definitely not microbivores. Microbivores were spheroid; the ones she was looking at were spherical. What kind of nanorobots they were, she had no idea. To get a better view, she upped the magnification to the order of 300,000 and waited for the scanning to take place. When it was finished, she brought it into focus.
Now she could see the nanorobots with much better clarity. She could not appreciate the blue cast that she had seen under the light microscope since the electron microscope image was only in black-and-white. What she could now see is that the nanorobots’ surface, from the equator to about halfway up to the poles, was covered with what looked like nanoelectrical rotors. What they did, she had no idea.
Switching to the blood sample she had gotten from Paul, which was now thawed, Pia went through the same sequence. With the light microscope, she searched for any nanorobots. At first all she saw were blood cells, mostly red, but also some white. She searched for more than ten minutes and was about to give up when she found one of the bluish spheres. The Chinese runner had the nanorobots in his blood, just not as high a concentration, but their presence gave Pia the idea of what they might be.
When she had first arrived at Nano, and had done her due diligence in relations to nanorobots, she’d learned that Robert Freitas, the man who had originally designed the microbivores, had also designed a respirocyte, a nanorobot capable of carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide a thousand times more efficiently than a natural red blood cell. If Pia was forced to guess at that point what she was looking at, she would have said a respirocyte. The implications were obvious: Nano was using nanorobot artifical red blood cells prematurely in human subjects with disastrous results. The why she didn’t even try to comprehend.
Knowing that she had accomplished all she could under the circumstances, Pia collected her samples and the extra blood and put it all into the brown paper bag she’d used to bring back the jogger’s blood.
Pia powered down the equipment in the lab and checked her watch. It was now approaching five o’clock in the morning. She had wasted no time and was pleased she had not been interrupted. She wouldn’t need to come back because she felt she had everything she needed to expose Nano and, in the process, Zachary Berman with her evidence of the vile, inhuman experiments that were going on. She had her proof: two blood samples from separate sources, one involving live and one mostly dead human subjects and hopefully one photo, which she had yet to look at.
Despite the reassuring quiet of the deserted lab, Pia knew she had taken a great risk leaving and then coming back to Nano, but she felt she had had to confirm the presence of the nanorobots in both blood samples.