《Prey》Serial novel•Chapter 1-five

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“The demo. Didn’t you have a demo today?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes. We did. It went fine, when we finally got it going. The VCs in Germany couldn’t stay for all of it because of the time change, but—listen, do you want to see it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a dub of it. Want to see it?”
I was surprised. I shrugged. “Okay, sure.”
“I’d really like to know what you think, Jack.” I detected a patronizing tone. My wife was including me in her work. Making me feel a part of her life. I watched as she opened her briefcase and took out a DVD. She stuck it in the player, and came back to sit with me on the bed.
“What were you demoing?” I said.
“The new medical imaging technology,” she said. “It’s really slick, if I say so myself.” She snuggled up, tucking herself into my shoulder. All very cozy, just like old times. I still felt uneasy, but I put my arm around her.
“By the way,” I said, “how come you take showers at night now, instead of in the morning?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do I? I guess I do. It just seems easier, honey. Mornings are so rushed, and I’ve been getting those conference calls from Europe, they take so much time—okay, here we go,” she said, pointing to the screen. I saw black-and-white scramble, and then the image resolved.
The tape showed Julia in a large laboratory that was fitted out like an operating room. A man lay on his back on the gurney, an IV in his arm, an anesthesiologist standing by. Above the table was a round flat metal plate about six feet in diameter, which could be raised and lowered, but was now raised. There were video monitors all around. And in the foreground, peering at a monitor, was Julia. There was a video technician by her side. “This is terrible,” she was saying, pointing to the monitor. “What’s all the interference?”
“We think it’s the air purifiers. They’re causing it.”
“Well, this is unacceptable.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“I want you to fix it,” Julia said.
“Then we have to boost power, and you have—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I can’t show the VCs an image of this quality. They’ve seen better pictures from Mars. Fix it.”
Beside me on the bed, Julia said, “I didn’t know they recorded all this. This is before the demo. You can fast forward.”
I pushed the remote. The picture scrambled. I waited a few seconds, and played it again.
Same scene. Julia still in the foreground. Carol, her assistant, whispering to her.
“Okay, but then what do I tell him?”
“Tell him no.”
“But he wants to get started.”
“I understand. But the transmission isn’t for an hour. Tell him no.”
On the bed, Julia said to me, “Mad Dog was our experimental subject. He was very restless. Impatient to get started.”
On the screen, the assistant lowered her voice. “I think he’s nervous, Julia. I would be, too, with a couple of million of those things crawling around inside my body—”
“It’s not a couple of million, and they’re not crawling,” Julia said. “Anyway, they’re his invention.”
“Even so.”
“Isn’t that an anesthesiologist over there?”
“No, just a cardiologist.”
“Well, maybe the cardiologist can give him something for his nervousness.”
“They already did. An injection.”
On the bed beside me, Julia said, “Fast forward, Jack.” I did. The picture jumped ahead.
“Okay, here.”
I saw Julia standing at the monitor again, with the technician beside her. “That’s acceptable,” onscreen Julia was saying, pointing to the image. “Not great, but acceptable. Now, show me the STM.”

 

[tzhfsh6]

《Prey》Serial novel•Chapter 1-six

“The what?”
“The STM. The electron microscope. Show me the image from that.”
The technician looked confused. “Uh ... Nobody told us about any electron microscope.”
“For God’s sake, read the damn storyboards!”
The technician blinked. “It’s on the storyboards?”
“Did you look at the storyboards?”
“I’m sorry, I guess I must have missed it.”
“There’s no time now to be sorry. Fix it!”
“You don’t have to shout.”
“Yes I do! I have to shout, because I’m surrounded by idiots!” She waved her hands in the air. “I’m about to go online and talk to eleven billion dollars of venture capital in five countries and show them submicroscopic technology, except I don’t have a microscope feed, so they can’t see the technology!”
On the bed, Julia said, “I kind of lost it with this guy. It was so frustrating. We had a clock counting down to the satellite time, which was booked and locked. We couldn’t change it. We had to make the time, and this guy was a dimbus. But eventually we got it working. Fast forward.”
The screen showed a static card, which read:

A Private Demonstration of Advanced Medical Imaging by Xymos Technology
Mountain View, CA
World Leader in Molecular Manufacturing

Then, on the screen, Julia appeared, standing in front of the gurney and the medical apparatus. She’d brushed her hair and tucked in her blouse.
“Hello to all of you,” she said, smiling at the camera. “I’m Julia Forman of Xymos Technology, and we’re about to demonstrate a revolutionary medical imaging procedure just developed here. Our subject, Peter Morris, is lying behind me on the table. In a few moments, we’re going to look inside his heart and blood vessels with an ease and accuracy never before possible.” She began walking around the table, talking as she went.
“Unlike cardiac catheterization, our procedure is one hundred percent safe. And unlike catheterization, we can look everywhere in the body, at every sort of vessel, no matter how large or small. We’ll see inside his aorta, the largest artery of the body. But we’ll also look inside the alveoli of his lungs, and the tiny capillaries of his fingertips. We can do all this because the camera we put inside his vessels is smaller than a red blood cell. Quite a bit smaller, actually. “Xymos microfabrication technology can now produce these miniaturized cameras, and produce them in quantity—cheaply, quickly. It would take a thousand of them just to make a dot the size of a pencil point. We can fabricate a kilogram of these cameras in an hour. “I’m sure you are all skeptical. We’re well aware that nanotechnology has made promises it couldn’t deliver. As you know, the problem has been that scientists could design molecular-scale devices, but they couldn’t manufacture them. But Xymos has solved that problem.”
It suddenly hit me, what she was saying. “What?” I said, sitting up in bed. “Are you kidding?” If it was true, it was an extraordinary development, a genuine technological breakthrough, and it meant—
“It’s true,” Julia said quietly. “We’re manufacturing in Nevada.” She smiled, enjoying my astonishment.
Onscreen, Julia was saying, “I have one of our Xymos cameras under the electron microscope, here”—she pointed to the screen—“so you can see it in comparison to the red blood cell alongside it.”
The image changed to black-and-white. I saw a fine probe push what looked like a tiny squid into position on a titanium field. It was a bullet-nosed lump with streaming filaments at the rear. It was a tenth of the size of the red blood cell, which in the vacuum of the scanning electron microscope was a wrinkled oval, like a gray raisin.
“Our camera is one ten-billionth of an inch in length. As you see, it is shaped like a squid,” Julia said. “Imaging takes place in the nose. Microtubules in the tail provide stabilization, like the tail of a kite. But they can also lash actively, and provide locomotion. Jerry, if we can turn the camera to see the nose ... Okay, there. Thank you. Now, from the front, you see that indentation in the center? That is the miniature gallium arsenide photon detector, acting as a retina, and the surrounding banded area—sort of like a radial tire—is bioluminescent, and lights the area ahead. Within the nose itself you may be able to just make out a rather complex series of twisted molecules. That is our patented ATP cascade. You can think of it as a primitive brain, which controls the behavior of the camera—very limited behavior, true, but enough for our purposes.”
I heard a hiss of static, and a cough. The screen image opened a small window in the corner, and now showed Fritz Leidermeyer, in Germany. The investor shifted his enormous bulk. “I’m sorry, Ms. Forman. Tell me please where is the lens?”
“There is no lens.”
“How can you have a camera with no lens?”
“I’ll explain that as we go,” she said.
Watching, I said, “It must be a camera obscura.”
“Right,” she said, nodding.
Camera obscura—Latin for “dark room”—was the oldest imaging device known. The Romans had found that if you made a small hole in the wall of a dark room, an upside-down image of the exterior appeared on the opposite wall. That was because light coming through any small aperture was focused, as if by a lens. It was the same principle as a kid’s pinhole camera. It was why ever since Roman times, image-recording devices were called cameras. But in this case—
“What makes the aperture?” I said. “Is there a pinhole?”
“I thought you knew,” she said. “You’re responsible for that part.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Xymos licensed some agent-based algorithms that your team wrote.”
“No, I didn’t know. Which algorithms?”
“To control a particle network.”
“Your cameras are networked? All those little cameras communicate with each other?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re a swarm, actually.” She was still smiling, amused by my reactions.
“A swarm.” I was thinking it over, trying to understand what she was telling me. Certainly my team had written a number of programs to control swarms of agents. Those programs were modeled on behavior of bees. The programs had many useful characteristics. Because swarms were composed of many agents, the swarm could respond to the environment in a robust way. Faced with new and unexpected conditions, the swarm programs didn’t crash; they just sort of flowed around the obstacles, and kept going.
But our programs worked by creating virtual agents inside the computer. Julia had created real agents in the real world. At first I didn’t see how our programs could be adapted to what she was doing.
“We use them for structure,” she said. “The program makes the swarm structure.” Of course. It was obvious that a single molecular camera was inadequate to register any sort of image. Therefore, the image must be a composite of millions of cameras, operating simultaneously. But the cameras would also have to be arranged in space in some orderly structure, probably a sphere. That was where the programming came in. But that in turn meant that Xymos must be generating the equivalent of—
“You’re making an eye.”
“Kind of. Yes.”
“But where’s the light source?”
“The bioluminescent perimeter.”
“That’s not enough light.”
“It is. Watch.”
Meanwhile, the onscreen Julia was turning smoothly, pointing to the intravenous line behind her. She lifted a syringe out of a nearby ice bucket. The barrel appeared to be filled with water. “This syringe,” she said, “contains approximately twenty million cameras in isotonic saline suspension. At the moment they exist as particles. But once they are injected into the bloodstream, their temperature will increase, and they will soon flock together, and form a meta-shape. Just like a flock of birds forms a V-shape.”
“What kind of a shape?” one of the VCs asked.
“A sphere,” she said. “With a small opening at one end. You might think of it as the equivalent of a blastula in embryology. But in effect the particles form an eye. And the image from that eye will be a composite of millions of photon detectors. Just as the human eye creates an image from its rods and cone cells.”
She turned to a monitor that showed an animation loop, repeated over and over again. The cameras entered the bloodstream as an untidy, disorganized mass, a kind of buzzing cloud within the blood. Immediately the blood flow flattened the cloud into an elongated streak. But within seconds, the streak began to coalesce into a spherical shape. That shape became more defined, until eventually it appeared almost solid.
“If this reminds you of an actual eye, there’s a reason. Here at Xymos we are explicitly imitating organic morphology,” Julia said. “Because we are designing with organic molecules, we are aware that courtesy of millions of years of evolution, the world around us has a stockpile of molecular arrangements that work. So we use them.”
“You don’t want to reinvent the wheel?” someone said.
“Exactly. Or the eyeball.”
She gave a signal, and the flat antenna was lowered until it was just inches above the waiting subject.
“This antenna will power the camera, and pick up the transmitted image,” she said. “The image can of course be digitally stored, intensified, manipulated, or anything else that you might do with digital data. Now, if there are no other questions, we can begin.” She fitted the syringe with a needle, and stuck it into a rubber stopper in the IV line.
“Mark time.”
“Zero point zero.”
“Here we go.”
She pushed the plunger down quickly. “As you see, I’m doing it fast,” she said. “There’s nothing delicate about our procedure. You can’t hurt anything. If the microturbulence generated by the flow through the needle rips the tubules from a few thousand cameras, it doesn’t matter. We have millions more. Plenty to do the job.” She withdrew the needle. “Okay? Generally we have to wait about ten seconds for the shape to form, and then we should begin getting an image ... Ah, looks like something is coming now ... And here it is.” The scene showed the camera moving forward at considerable speed through what looked like an asteroid field. Except the asteroids were red cells, bouncy purplish bags moving in a clear, slightly yellowish liquid. An occasional much larger white cell shot forward, filled the screen for a moment, then was gone. What I was seeing looked more like a video game than a medical image.
“Julia,” I said, “this is pretty amazing.”
Beside me, Julia snuggled closer and smiled. “I thought you might be impressed.” Onscreen, Julia was saying, “We’ve entered a vein, so the red cells are not oxygenated. Right now our camera is moving toward the heart. You’ll see the vessels enlarging as we move up the venous system ... Yes, now we are approaching the heart ... You can see the pulsations in the bloodstream that result from the ventricular contractions ...” It was true, I could see the camera pause, then move forward, then pause. She had an audio feed of the beating heart. On the table, the subject lay motionless, with the flat antenna just over his body.
“We’re coming to the right atrium, and we should see the mitral valve. We activate the flagella to slow the camera. There the valve is now. We are in the heart.” I saw the red flaps, like a mouth opening and closing, and then the camera shot through, into the ventricle, and out again. “Now we are going to the lungs, where you will see what no one has ever witnessed before. The oxygenation of the cells.”
As I watched, the blood vessel narrowed swiftly, and then the cells plumped up, and popped brilliantly red, one after another. It was extremely quick; in less than a second, they were all red. “The red cells have now been oxygenated,” Julia said, “and we are on our way back to the heart.”
I turned to Julia in the bed. “This is really fantastic stuff,” I said.
But her eyes were closed, and she was breathing gently.
“Julia?”
She was asleep.
Julia had always tended to fall asleep while watching TV. Falling asleep during your own presentation was reasonable enough; after all, she’d already seen it. And it was pretty late. I was tired myself. I decided I could watch the rest of the demo another time. It seemed pretty lengthy for a demo, anyhow. How long had I been watching so far? When I turned to switch off the TV, I looked down at the time code running at the bottom of the image. Numbers were spinning, ticking off hundredths of a second. Other numbers to the left, not spinning. I frowned. One of them was the date. I hadn’t noticed it before, because it was in international format, with the year first, the day, and the month. It read 02.21.09.
September 21.
Yesterday.
She’d recorded this demo yesterday, not today.
I turned off the TV, and turned off the bedside light. I lay down on the pillow and tried to sleep.