“No,” Greg said. “We knew they worked in humans in other locations. They would not work correctly in this location, on your planet. Conditions here were interfering with the machines, stopping them from functioning properly. We do not know exactly what those conditions are, so we could not at any reasonable cost duplicate them elsewhere. Guild rules do not allow us to set up our own laboratory here. As we explained, the guild would also not allow us to openly pursue the product line this more aggressive faction led us to create. Hence our need for James Peterson.”
The realization hit me hard enough that I had to stay quiet or risk giving it away, so I made myself drive in silence for another half hour before I said, “One more question. How far along was Jim in his research when he escaped?”
“I do not know.”
“Was he yet using human subjects? If so, it would help me find him to know that he needed a place that could hold additional people.”
“No,” Greg said, “he had not yet progressed to that point. However, the day before he escaped he told us that he would need to obtain subjects soon.”
“What if he has tested the nano-machines in people, or if he’s testing them in people when we find him?”
“Then we must retrieve those people as well as any other containers of the machines.”
Crap. Now I had to find Jim or risk either him hurting more people, the aliens taking those people away, or both. I nudged the cruise control a few miles per hour higher and forced myself to focus again on the road.
* * *
For a little over two years after I left the company, I traveled and worked odd jobs when I found them or they found me. As the specter of turning thirty became more real, I decided it was time to settle in one place, even if only to have a base of operations for a while. The Chapel Hill area was the logical choice. My mother had died in my second year at Langley, so there was nothing to take me back to St. Pete. I’d kept up with Jim and Louise via the Web, and I knew they were both working at UNC, Jim as a nanotechnology staff researcher and Louise as a math post-doc. Though part of me wasn’t sure seeing Louise again was the best idea, another part was eager to see her. More importantly, she and Jim were the closest thing to family that I had. R.C. and I had just started working together, and where we were based didn’t really affect the kind of work we did, so he agreed to move to North Carolina as well.
We spent the first year there setting up our gym and doing a couple of small jobs for old clients so we could have a bit of a nest egg, and I wondered when I’d get around to calling Jim and Louise. I meant to do it many times, but I kept finding excuses to put it off. Finally, I called. They both seemed happy to hear from me, so I proposed that the three of us get together.
At my suggestion, we met on neutral ground at a neutral time, for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a shopping center in the middle of Research Triangle Park. I got there first and grabbed a booth in the back with a clear view of the front door. They came in only a few minutes apart, Jim first, then Louise. Jim looked like he still played some ball but wasn’t hitting the gym much, thinner than he had been during college but still carrying more muscle than when we first met. Louise was remarkably unchanged, perhaps a bit heavier but with the additional weight only filling out her figure and making her look even better than she had. We were all pretty awkward at first, but when I got them talking about their work, the conversation flowed easily.
“The use of nanotech in medicine is in its infancy,” Jim said. “Drugs can take you only so far. Cloned parts are okay if the host body can handle the shock of the transplant surgery and if you can afford the cloning. Only nanotech can go right in and actually rebuild organs that aren’t working well, destroy bad cells, and basically make you a literally new person.”