“That’s very quick, isn’t it?” he said.
Elise’s computer stopped trying to compute the calculation. “My computer tells me these are multiplying at a rate of one every 4 minutes.”
“That couldn’t possibly be right,” Sam said.
“Not naturally anyway,” Veyron agreed. “No, someone has intentionally gone into the DNA and changed the code.”
“Why would someone want to speed up evolution?”
“It’s a faster way of seeing an organism’s response to an external stimuli.” Senator Croft answered. “Before politics I was an environmental scientist. We would often use mice, whose life-expectancy is substantially shorter than ours, to understand their physiological response over the course of many generations. That way, we could get results in five years that would take us more like five hundred if we were looking at humans.”
“Okay, so whoever did this wanted to increase the speed of the plankton’s evolutionary cycle, but to study what?” Sam said.
Senator Croft stood next to him. “May I?”
“Sure, have a look. See what you can make of it.”
“Perhaps they simply wanted to mass produce the genetically modified creatures so that they could build a rogue wave?” Vanessa suggested.
“That’s what we thought at first,” Veyron replied. “Unfortunately, the reason is much more dangerous. You were right about one thing. They were trying to speed up evolution, but not for the reason you both assume.”
“What then?” Sam persisted.
Veyron took the slide out of the current microscope and placed it into another one. “They were trying to reach the plankton’s next level of evolution. About a million rungs above their natural ladder of evolution. They were trying to make a weapon — one that might just destroy the world.”
Sam felt the tingling of death on his spine as he began to comprehend exactly what was happening. “Precisely what was inside that liquid you fed them?”
“A combination of several trace elements including gold, silver, platinum, and common sand or more precisely, silicone.” Veyron studied him for a reaction. “Now, have a look at it using an electron microscope.”
Sam looked through the scope. His worst fears confirmed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s impossible!”
Chapter Seventy Two
Sam wanted to scream. There were nanoparticles moving inside the cell. It was impossible. The research that he’d read suggested that this sort of technology was at least thirty to forty years away. The nanoparticles were not simply moving from side to side, the particles were moving with purpose. They were performing a task.
But what task? It would take him months to properly examine the technology. He wasn’t an expert, and even Veyron would need specialist help to understand how it worked. The fact was, it did. Someone had cracked the code. It didn’t make sense, if someone could develop such technology, why would they use it to create rogue waves? If they wanted riches, they would have it. Every venture capitalist in the world would be offering to invest billions in functioning nanotechnology. Instead, it was unclaimed by the scientific community.
Running free and killing people.
He continued examining what he saw, trying to determine a reason that made it fake. A trick of the mind. Anything to discredit what was impossible. Science fiction, nothing more. He adjusted the electron microscope, searching for answers. Recalling his basic science days at MIT, his chemistry teacher once explained that one of the problems with the study of molecules was the fact that they are really, very small. Small of course being an understatement. When measuring particles and molecules, he was talking about nanometers and molecular mass. Where nanometers, written as nm for short, were one-thousand millionths of a meter in length and molecular mass referred to the amount of electrons inside an atom.
It turns out that using light, you can’t see things smaller than its wavelength — it just goes straight through. Visible light has wavelengths in the range of 400 nm for blue to 700 nm for red — so you can only see things that are this size or larger with it.
Nanoparticles are typically about 10 nm in size or so — some larger, some smaller. You can only see them with various types of electron microscopes, which use a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than visible light photons, the electron microscope has a higher resolving power than a light microscope and can reveal the structure of much smaller particles. The current agreement among the groups that set the scientific standards is that the scale from 1 — 100 nm defines the size range of a nanoparticle. Below 1 nm may be excluded in order to avoid calling clusters of atoms a particle, but the literature contains references to particles less than 1 nm.
When he looked at the single celled phytoplankton through a standard microscope Sam saw only the structures of the cell, not the nanoparticles working inside. This was because the dinoflagellates were between 1 and 4 millimeters in length, easily visible using the natural wavelength of light, while the nanoparticles were well under 100 nm in length.
Sam squinted his right eye, trying to make out what task two small movements of nanoparticles were achieving. “I don’t understand. What happens after cellular division?”
“What don’t you understand?” Veyron replied. “The dinoflagellates divide as they normally would, producing two cells out of one. Eventually, usually after eight divisions, the original cell loses its integrity and dies, while the others continue to reproduce It’s natural proliferation.”
“I get that,” Sam said. “You know I was a marine biologist at one stage, right? It’s called mitosis. During which, a parent cell duplicates all of its contents, including its chromosomes, and splits to form two identical daughter cells.”
“So what don’t you get?” Veyron asked without hiding the frustration in his voice.
“The cell I’m looking at has complex nanoparticles inside. The purpose of which, I have no idea yet, but even so, it would take weeks or months for someone to build such particles in a lab. So then, what happens to them when the cell divides?”
Veyron tapped the table. His anxiety’s returned. “The nanobots reproduce with them.”
Chapter Seventy Three
“They’ve found the holy grail!” Sam yelled. “Are you telling me whoever created these, worked out a way to self-replicate nanobots?”
“That’s precisely what I’m telling you.”
One of the main problems scientists have in making nanotechnology useable is that due to their microscopic size, it would be necessary for very large numbers of them to work together to perform any specific tasks. One theory is to make enough nanobots to work collectively to achieve a common goal, the same way bees or ants achieve a goal for their queen, which would otherwise be impossible individually.
The number of individual nanoparticles required to build nanomachines capable of functions such as sensing, communicating, navigating, manipulating other particles, locomotion, and computation, is still an unknown in the realms of theory. In fact, science and technology is still potentially hundreds of years off the level of detailed engineering required to manufacture such tiny machines. The hindrance has always been the time it would take to build the first one is substantial, but the time it takes to build the second one, and the third, and so-on, is the same. Producing millions, makes such a project impossible due to the insurmountable length of time required to do so.