So on our screens, we see steampunk submarines and Baroque architecture—which is a nice touch—very Jules Verne, Captain Nemo–ing through someone’s body—and they look great. Those animation guys did a hell of a job. That brass and those gears: looks good when you fuck it to pieces. But the reality—the reality is: fuzz. Fuzz and glue. Brownian motion in high-viscosity fluid. See? Losing you already. Cute brass subs (with portholes FFS!) are much easier for you to deal with than biochemical signatures and protein folding and ion transfers. Easier for us too, but we are scientists, first and foremost, so the reality is always in our minds. We are not seduced by the magic.
And we’re in the Big Box, an aluminum shed at the back of the United States Naval Academy, in the unsexy area where they make the deliveries and have the heating plants and server farms. It’s kind of atavistic thinking: we move through fluid, so we’re a navy. And that gives us our name: nanonauts!
Nanonauts ahoy! Go, go, you bloodstream battlers, fight against the evil death-subs! Crush the nanorobot rebels! Keep safe our souls, defend our hearts. Go! Nanonauts ahoy!
They paid someone to write that, and stick a tune around it.
Doesn’t even scan. I’m going into the nanowar muttering the lyrics from a Muse B-side.
"Biochemistry?"
A strange war it is—but a good one—where the biochemists are the Special Forces. I’ve always liked those movies where the dull guys get to be heroes: the interior designer is the superhero, the accountant turns into avenging killing machine. They’re not nerds—they’ve got that kind of grudging hip thing—but they’re dull. Biochemistry is not a shiny subject. We don’t make the world go round. We do make money. That made my father very happy. My son is a biochemist! First boy from Kalavasos! He had no idea what it meant. He has even less of an idea what being a nanonaut means, but it keeps him in coffee down at Lefteres’s.
This girl Rebecca has this cute thing she does: she twists her glass on the mat. It says, I’m interested, but not too interested.
"Well, we call the bad guys ‘death-subs’ and the good guys ‘nanonauts,’ but the kind of scale we’re fighting at, everything really is more like biology—you know, living things."
"I know about biology," she says.
Whoa. False step there.
"Rebecca, I think it’s a good thing—a very good thing—when people straddle the divide between humanities and sciences. They need each other. Without both, we are not rounded human beings."
I established in the opening gambit that she’s a political science major. Everybody is in this town. (Apart from the nanonauts.) I go on: "Everything happens at the level of molecules, sometimes even individual atoms. It’s chemical warfare for real."
"So how does a guy from Kalavasos…"
"I like the way you say my home."
She smiles, but doesn’t let me derail her.
"How does a guy from Kalavasos come to be battling nanobots inside the body of the President of the United States?"
"I did my doctorate at MIT and they headhunted me. It’s kind of an elite force." That first winter down in D.C., when they were training the nanonaut teams, it was so cold I kept five different lip balms in my guy drawer. Chapped lips are not a good look. And I moisturized twice daily. Cold air dries the skin out. And I used hair-nourishing product. Rebecca should get some. She has a split-end problem, which, I can see, is not solved by cutting it yourself. Folks assume that because you’re a scientist, you don’t care about things like grooming. That is a false notion based on a vile stereotype. "It’s not just a U.S. war. It’s an everywhere war."
Her eyes go wide. Her drink is empty. I didn’t even notice her finish it.
"I’ll tell you," I say. "It’s, like, classified, but then, it’s not as if they’ve got spies in the bottom of your glass. Which, I see, is empty. Can I get you another one?"
She puts her hand over her glass.
"No. Let me get you one."
In. In. So in.
Elis summons us for coffee and a briefing. It’s Ikea sofas and swipe-screens. The coffee of course is very good. We are scientists.
Elis. Garret. Owain. Twyla. Together, we are the Eagles of Screaming Death. Quite who this name is supposed to scare I do not know. Certainly not nanoscale bloodstream robots. Most likely, the other squads scattered around the Big Box in their battle pods. Which again, sounds more impressive than it is. Screens, sofas, laptops, and water coolers.
Elis wears good brands, even when leading the Eagles of Screaming Death on patrol. She’s from Rio. New York girls may think they’re the thing in sophistication, but they look like homeless occupiers next to Cariocas. Elis battles the evil nanobots in Christian Louboutins. I can spot those red soles from the far end of the shed.
Elis has intel. Owain opens the Tupperware of baked goods he’s made. He’s been practicing his brioche over the weekend. He wants to be a bakemeister. It’s good. Light, not too sweet. We tear off chunks with our hands and eat it with our good coffee while Elis tells us what Biochemical Analysis has found. In a sense, the real battle is fought between the nanobots and Biochem. The death-subs evolve a new tactic, we develop a countermeasure, back and forth. We’re just the delivery system.
Elis tells us that Biochem ran an analysis of the exocytotic debris after the Islets of Langerhans fight. Our drones are equipped with receptors and ligand guns. Biochem has identified and decrypted a new chemical messenger. It will allow us to identify the enemy absolutely and infallibly—but we must use it with caution. We must use it to strike a killing blow to the death-subs before they can evolve a new messenger protein. And Biochem has a little sting in the tail. The messenger chemical also contains instructions. They’re a simple and clear call to muster in the hypothalamus. The final assault on the President’s brain is massing. No time to lose! The President’s brain is under attack!
Elis can run in those Christian Louboutins. I jump into my seat, log in, and watch the screens fill with data. Then I pull the 3-D goggles down and I am back in the Jules Verneiverse of brass subs and Baroque buttresses.
"The credit crisis was caused by nanobots in the brains of Wall Street bankers?"
"And London and Frankfurt and Tokyo bankers, but Wall Street the most. It’s true. If you think about it, auction rate securities and credit default swaps are weapons of mass financial destruction."
These vodka martinis are really very good. I pick the Pirandello for R&R sorties because you get professional clientele and the bartender does the best martinis I know. When it comes to cocktails, stick to the classics. Nothing that sounds like you are young and trying too hard. Certainly nothing that sounds like sex. Classics. But James Bond is wrong, wrong, wrong: shake it and you kill the cocktail. Do not sucuss. Just a stir, and a nanoscale application of Martini & Rossi. Homeopathic levels of Martini.
"We’ve had the tech a lot longer than people think." I lean back and take a sip from my drink. "A lot longer. The one percent don’t want you to know about it. Blood scrubs, cholesterol cleaning, enhanced attention, concentration, memory; telomere repair—that’s a three-hundred-year life span, to you and me—if it gets into the street, that’s a recipe for revolution."
"You’re telling me," she says.
I have to be smart here. Diplomatic. That I can do. Cypriot charm. The loquaciousness of the gods is on my lips.
"Do you believe me?" I ask.
"To be honest?"
"Be honest. Honesty is the soul of every human relationship."