“They can cure radiation sickness back at Selene,” Pancho said at last. “Use nanomachines.”
“If I make it back to Selene.”
“Only about seven hours to go,” she said. “Radiation’s levelin’ off.”
“Not as deep as a well,” Dan quoted, “or as wide as a church door, but it’s enough. It’ll do.”
“You goin’ delirious?”
“No, that’s just Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.”
“Oh. Yeah, right.”
“I’m going to take a nap, kid. I feel pretty tired.”
“Good idea, I guess.”
“Wake me when it’s over.”
Kris Cardenas was surprised at how her hands trembled as she worked. Programming nanomachines to disassemble carbon-based molecules was a snap, a no-brainer. Just a slight modification to the procedure they used every day to build diamond mechanisms out of bins of soot.
It wasn’t the difficulty of the work. As she sat at the lab bench, peering intently at the desktop screen that displayed what the atomic force microscope was showing, she thought about the consequences.
Gobblers. I’m deliberately creating a batch of gobblers. If they get loose…
Calm down! she scolded herself. Go through this logically, step by step.
Okay, they’ll break in and find me dead. Lying on the floor. I’ll leave a note on the computer screen. Put it in big red letters, so they can’t miss it. I’m only making a microsample of gobblers and I’m disabling their assembly capabilities. They can’t reproduce. They’ll be contained inside my body.
But what if they get outside your body? They’ll be taking you apart from the inside. What’s to stop them from getting out?
Nothing, she told herself. So I’ll turn on the UV overheads before I swallow the bugs. That will destroy them once they get outside my body.
A knock on the door startled her.
“Dr. Cardenas? We know you’re in there. Open up, please.”
She wiped the display from the AFM and began hurriedly typing her suicide note.
“Warning. I have ingested a microgram of nanomachine disassemblers. They are programmed to take apart carbon-based molecules. Do not allow them to go beyond the confines of this laboratory. Disinfect the lab with high-intensity ultraviolet light before moving my body or touching anything in this room. Notify—”
Someone banged on the door, hard. “Kris! It’s Doug Stavenger. You don’t have to do this. Come on out.”
She scanned the red block letters on the display screen and erased the final word; no need to notify Doug, he’s already here.
“Kris, it’s not your fault.” Stavenger’s voice was muffled by the heavy steel door, but she heard the urgency in it well enough. “Come out and talk this over with me.”
She got off the spindly-legged stool and went to the sampling site at the end of the bench. A gleaming cup of lunar aluminum sat there, half full of water that contained the nanomachines that were going to kill her.
“Kris,” Stavenger called, “you’ve spent your life developing nanotechnology. Don’t throw it all away. Don’t give them another reason to say nanomachines are killers.”
She picked up the cup and held it in both hands, thinking, I can’t live with this guilt. I’ve committed murder. I’ve killed four people.
Stavenger was shouting through the locked door, “That’s what they’ll say. You know that. They’ll say that nanomachines killed the foremost researcher in the field. They’ll use it to show how dangerous nanomachines are, how right they’ve been all along to ban them.”
She looked from the cup to the closed, locked door. It was Humphries’s idea, but I did it. Willingly. He pulled my strings and I danced like a blind, obedient little puppet.
“Don’t throw your life away, Kris,” Stavenger pleaded. “You’ll be destroying everything you’ve worked for. You’ll be giving them the excuse they need to come back here and force us to obey their laws.”
Humphries, she thought. Once I’m dead he’ll be able to blame the whole thing on me. His lawyers will talk his way out of it. He’ll walk away from this. From four murders. Five, counting me.
Cardenas carried the cup back to the sampling site and sealed its aluminum top to its rim. Once the top clicked into place she placed the cup in the disposal oven and closed its door. The inner walls of the oven fluoresced as its ultraviolet lamps bathed the cup.