Chapter 14

By the time the three of them stumbled into the kitchen, the breakfast was cold, and the older adults were sitting about in uncomfortable silence. Eitan acted unconcerned, setting his priority of shoving food down his gullet as the only challenge. He bit, he chewed, he swallowed. He repeated until the food in front him was gone.

When he looked up, both of his siblings were waiting for him. Sten had shoveled faster, and Akemi appeared to have taken less. Eitan wiped his mouth with a napkin and led the way to the sitting area, generously called a living room or a family room.

“Nano hysteria,” Nikki said, pointing to the newspaper on the ottoman.

Sten pushed Eitan out of the way and grabbed the paper. He scanned the frontpage article. “It’s not hysteria,” Sten said, passing the paper to Akemi who had her hand out, waiting for it. “Their fear is perfectly justified. Whitcomb’s nano is going to maim, cripple and eventually kill them. Only God will be able to help any of these victims who survive.”

“Did no one learn from CRISPR?” Akemi said to no one in particular.

“What is that?” Captain Withers asked.

“CHRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing technique that acts like a tiny scissors and cuts through DNA strands,” Sten said. “Some Chinese scientists tried it on the sly, trying to eliminate just one specific genetic disease. The results were a disaster. While the technique was voluntarily banned at first, the big technology countries made using CHRISPR a felony crime without major oversight.”

“Human DNA is only part of the issue,” Joseph said. “Our bodies are walking biomes of millions of different bacteria. We have bacteria on the roots of our eyelashes that eat all the detritus flushed out of our eyes when we blink. We depend on all these symbionts to live a healthy life. If we change human DNA, we must consider the DNA of everything else upon which our bodies depend. The consequences grow exponentially.”

“Your Dr. Whitcomb knew this?” Captain Withers asked. “He makes specific statements that his series are not disruptive. His paperwork states that this series is only a stepped-evolution from previous series.”

“He’s using a sledgehammer where one should only use a scalpel,” Sten said, “if one should use anything at all.”

There was a knock on the door and before anyone could react, the door opened, and two uniformed men stepped into the house. Captain Withers sprang to her feet. When the silver-haired gentleman walked into the room, she saluted.

“As you were,” the admiral said, giving everyone a close inspection. “My adjunct, Captain Hu. You are Dr. Joseph Ngombo, Dr. Nicole Ngombo, Sten, Akemi, and you are Eitan. Captain Withers provided detailed reports of your conversation last night, but much is lacking. I need information and I need immediate analysis. We have almost no time. I have a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff this afternoon where a course of action must be determined.

The admiral sat down in the kitchen table chair his adjunct had yanked from the other room. “As of this morning, Dr. Whitcomb is sequestered in a hospital room with a non-life-threatening injury that requires reconstructive surgery. One of his security team is in the morgue. The number of stricken civilians is over 400 and their demographics are across the contiguous United States. Two of my Seals teams are under quarantine. The Justice Department secured a search warrant and writ of seizure of the Hobart Nanotechnologies site in Seattle at 23:00 EDT last night. The FBI raided the building an hour later. DoD is assisting, sending our nano scientists to help read through the files. Now, can any of you tell me what the hell are we looking for?”

“Dr. Hobart’s series had a software mechanism whereby the presence of high-salt saline solutions in the bloodstream would trigger nanobots to significantly decrease activity and in some cases, stop,” Joseph said. “God forbid, someone needed surgery. Your scientists need to find out if the mechanism was retained in Whitcomb’s series.”

The admiral made a hand signal to his adjunct, who pulled out a cell phone before walking back into the kitchen. “What else?”

“If Whitcomb stripped out Dr. Hobart’s protocols, which he probably had to for his own programming to fit,” Joseph said, “then the Whitcomb series may be susceptible to C-scan and MRI technology. You will have to find out what Whitcomb pulled out of the Hobart series. Then again, you need to know which Hobart series Whitcomb used to overlay his own series. Every series had different protocols. Even within a series, if Dr. Hobart saw adverse reactions, he often made corrections mid-series. There are six commercial Hobart lines and each one has iterations.”

The admiral signaled to Captain Withers to go inform the captain in the kitchen to pass along the information. He watched the captain leave the room before speaking. “What is it about the three of you and why did Whitcomb attempt to kidnap this young man?”

“We are the best expression of Hobart nanotechnology,” Sten said. “You know his philosophy I assume. No superhuman powers among us, but we are developing into the best human beings within the parameters of the human genome. We grew up with nano; we did not grow because of nano.”

“Dr. Hobart told Whitcomb that his approach was wrong,” Akemi said. “We used to watch them argue. At some point Dr. H pulled back from his executive duties to go back into research. We know it was sometime around Eitan’s third series three years ago. It sounds peculiar now, but Dr. H dismantled his personal research team, pulling his notes and files to another, unknown location, which we only found out because Whitcomb seized Eitan. Dr. Whitcomb did not fundamentally understand how Hobart’s nano worked, even though they worked together for years. If he had, he never would have threatened to biopsy Eitan’s brain. Main campus has our blood and tissue samples from the last year.”