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Chapter 9

Nanigen Headquarters

28 October, 7:30 p.m.

While Drake was talking with the students, Peter Jansen had taken Alyson Bender aside. “Some of us brought samples and compounds to show Mr. Drake.”

“That’s good,” Alyson said to him.

“I’ve got a CD with some of my, uh, research on it,” Peter said. She nodded in response. “It’s a recording. It involves my brother,” Peter added. He hoped to start winding her up, making her nervous. She nodded again and left the conference room; did he see a flicker of alarm in her eyes?

After she’d left, while Drake was still talking, Peter slipped behind the service door and went to the audio panel. He needed some equipment; something to magnify his voice; he did not want Drake or anyone to be able to shut him up or shout him down. Behind the service door there were some drawers; he began opening them, and he found what he wanted. It was a lavalier, a wireless microphone device that would transmit his voice to a loudspeaker. The lavalier was identical to a unit Drake had used during his slide show and talk. The device consisted of a transmitter unit and a throat mike with a wire that ran to the transmitter. He slipped the transmitter into his pants pocket, stuffed the wire and mike in after it.

Drake concluded his presentation on the screens, and the lights went up in the meeting room. “Some of you have brought things to show us,” Drake said, “and we are very eager to see them. Now if—yes, what is it?”

Alyson Bender had come back into the room. She leaned close to Drake, whispered in his ear. Drake stared at Peter as he listened, then looked away. He nodded twice, but said nothing. Finally he turned back to Peter.

“Peter, you have a recording?”

“A CD, yes.”

“What is on that recording, Peter?” Drake didn’t seem upset at all.

“Something that will interest you.” Peter’s heart was pounding.

“Related to your brother?”

“Yes.”

Drake seemed unruffled. “I know this is a difficult matter for you,” he said, placing his hand on Peter’s shoulder. Gently, he added, “Wouldn’t it be easier to talk privately?”

Drake wanted to get him off alone, where nobody could hear what was said. Peter balked. “We can talk here,” he answered. In the conference room with everybody else.

Drake looked concerned. “If I might have a private word with you Peter—Eric was a friend of mine, too. I’ve suffered a loss myself. Let’s step into the next room.”

Peter shrugged and got up, and walked with Vin Drake and Alyson Bender into a smaller adjacent room—it was a prep booth for the conference room. Drake closed the door behind them and with a smooth gesture flipped the door’s lock. Then he spun around, and in the blink of an eye his face had been transformed: it was contorted with rage. He viciously clamped his hand around Peter’s throat and slammed him against the wall. With his other hand, he took Peter’s arm and bent it, holding it in a lock. “I don’t know what your game is, you little bastard—”

“No game—”

“The police aren’t looking for a phone on the boat—”

“No?”

“No, you little bastard. Because they haven’t been to the boat yard all day.”

Peter’s mind was racing. “The police didn’t need to go to the boat yard,” he said, “because they can find the phone just by looking at the GPS tracking signal—”

“No they can’t!” Drake let go of his arm and punched him in the stomach, hard. Peter gasped and doubled over, and Drake grabbed his arm and bent it behind him, and got Peter in a neck lock, immobilizing him. “Don’t lie to me. They can’t, because I disabled the GPS before I ever put that phone on the boat.”

Alyson said nervously, “Vin…”

“Shut up.”

“So,” Peter said, “you disabled the GPS and rigged up the phone to clog my brother’s gas line?”

“No. To kill the fuel pump, you little asshole…I killed the radio, too…”

Alyson: “Vin, listen…”

“Alyson, keep out of this—”

“Why’d you do it?” Peter said, coughing, pulling at Drake’s fingers. Drake’s grip was strong on his throat. “Why?”

“Your brother was a fool. You know what he wanted? He wanted to sell this technology. Turns out there’s some legal issue about ownership, who really owned it. So Eric thought we should sell. Can you imagine: sell this technology. Eric betrayed Nanigen. He betrayed me personally.”

“Vin, for God’s sake—”

“Shut up—”

“Your mike!” Alyson pointed to the lavalier microphone on Drake’s lapel. “It’s on.”

“Ah, shit,” Vin Drake hissed. He punched Peter brutally hard in the solar plexus, and let him crumple to the floor on his knees, gasping. Very deliberately, Drake pulled back his jacket, revealing the transmitter clipped to his belt. He tapped a switch: the light was off. “I’m not stupid.”

Peter knelt on the floor and retched and coughed, unable to get a breath. He realized that the small clip microphone had come out of his pocket, and dangled on its cord. Drake might see it. Groping around, he tried to stuff it back in his pocket, and his hand hit the transmitter. He heard a loud popping noise coming over the loudspeakers in the conference room.

Drake looked toward the conference room. He had heard the sound. His eyes followed Peter’s hand, and he saw the little microphone. He took a step backward and lashed out with his boot, kicked Peter on the side of the head. Peter collapsed. Drake tore the lavalier’s cord out of Peter’s pocket, disconnecting the mike, and tossed it away. Peter rolled on the floor and groaned.

“What do we do now?” Alyson said to him. “They’ve heard it—”

“Shut up!” He paced. “God damn it. None of them have cell phones, right?”

“Right, they left them at the front…”

“Okay then.”

“What are you going to do?” she said, trembling.

“Just stay out of my way.”

He flipped open a security panel, and hit a red SECURITY button. A loud, rising and falling alarm began to sound. He hauled Peter up under the armpits and dragged him to his feet, where he swayed, unsteady and in pain, groggy from his beating. “Suck it up, sport,” Drake said. “Time to clean up your mess.”

Drake unlocked the door and burst into the conference room, supporting Peter. He had to shout over the alarm. “We’ve had a security breach,” he said. “Peter has been injured. The security robots have been released. These bots are extremely dangerous. Come quickly this way, all of you. We need to get to the safety room.” He led them out into the hallway, holding on to Peter while Alyson Bender took Peter’s other arm.

In the hallway, a few researchers were running toward the entrance. “Get outside!” somebody shouted, running past, heading for the building’s main exit. Most employees had gone home for the day.

Drake, however, turned and led the students deeper into the complex.

“Where the hell are you taking us?” Rick Hutter said to Drake.

“It’s too late to get outdoors. We need to get to the safety room.”

The students were in a state of confusion. What safety room? What did that mean?

“What are you doing?” Alyson said to Drake.

Drake didn’t answer.

They came to a heavy door marked TENSOR CORE. Drake punched a keypad and the door swung open. “This way, come on now…”

The students entered a large space with hexagonal tiles on the floor. The floor was almost transparent; they could see machinery below, complex machinery, going deep into the ground. “All right, everyone,” Drake said, “I want you all to stand in the center of one of the hexagons. Each hexagon is a safety spot. It’s robot-proof. Do it now, that’s it—hurry, hurry—we don’t have much time.” Drake touched a security pad and they heard bolts slamming home. They were locked inside the room.

Erika Moll had gotten extremely frightened. She uttered a cry, and made a run for the exit door.

“Don’t!” Danny Minot screamed after her.

The exit door was locked, and Erika couldn’t get out.

Drake had shut himself in a control room, where he looked in on the students through a window. An instant later, he went out of sight. The control room door opened, and a man, a stranger, was flung into the big room; he was a Nanigen employee. “Get in there and help them!” Drake’s voice roared after the man.

The man followed Drake’s order. Looking shocked, he stood in the center of a hexagon among the students.

The students were all positioning themselves; Erika had come back. Peter Jansen toppled and fell to his knees; Rick Hutter grabbed him and tried to support him but Peter stayed on his knees. Karen King noticed a row of backpacks hanging along the wall, and she ran and grabbed one and slung it over her shoulder. Meanwhile Drake had become visible in the window again, and they saw him punching buttons in a rapid sequence. Alyson was by his side.

“Vin, for God’s sake,” Alyson said, standing beside him.

“No choice,” Vin Drake said, and he hit the final button.

For Peter Jansen, groggy from his beating, everything happened fast. The hexagonal floor sank beneath him, and he descended some ten feet into the multiple jaws of some huge electronic apparatus that was all around him, and very close, almost touching his skin. The jaws were actually wired armatures, painted at intervals with red and white stripes. The air smelled strongly of ozone and there was a loud electronic hum. The hairs on his skin were raised up. A synthesized voice said, “Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath…and hold it!” There was a loud clank!, unnerving and mechanical, and then that electronic hum returned. A brief wave of nausea. He sensed he had shifted somehow, within the apparatus.

“You may breathe normally. Stand by.”

He took a breath, let it out slowly.

“Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath, and hold it!”

Another clank! Another hum. A ripple of nausea, stronger than before.

He blinked his eyes.

Now he was sure things had changed. Before, he had been looking at stripes at about the midpoint of the jaws. But now he was looking at stripes much lower down. He was shrinking. The jaws buzzed and moved closer toward him. Of course they would do that, he thought, the magnetic field would be strongest at small distances. The smaller the better.

The synthetic voice: “Take a deep breath, and hold it!”

When he looked upward again, he saw that he was really very much smaller. The top of the jaws, ten feet above, seemed now as high as a cathedral ceiling. How tall was he?

“Don’t move, please. Take a deep breath, and—”

“I know, I know…” Peter’s voice was shaking.

“Don’t speak. You risk serious injury. Now: take a deep breath and hold it!”

One final clank, a grinding sound, a final spasm of dizzying nausea—but now the jaws moved away from him, and he felt the floor beneath his feet begin to vibrate as it rose upward. He saw light from above shining down, and felt a cool breeze.

And then he was flush with the rest of the floor, and the vibration stopped. He was standing on a polished black expanse stretching away in all directions. In the distance he saw Erika and Jenny, both looking around, dazed. And still farther away, Amar and Rick, and Karen. But how far away were they, actually? Peter couldn’t be sure, because he himself was no more than half an inch tall. Dust motes and flecks of dead cellular debris rolled across the floor, came to rest against his knees, like tiny tumbleweed.

He looked down at this tumbleweed in stupefaction. He felt slow, dull-witted, stupid. The reality of the situation gradually dawned on him. He looked across the floor at Erika and Jenny. They seemed as shocked as he felt. Half an inch tall!

A crunching sound made him turn; he faced the tip of an enormous boot, the sole as tall as he was. Peter looked up and saw Vin Drake crouched down on one knee, looming above him, his face enormous, his exhalations a stiff, noxious wind. And then Peter heard a deep rumbling that reverberated throughout the room like thunder.

It was the sound of Vin Drake laughing.

It was difficult to hear, with all the echoes and reverberations from these two enormous people. The sounds made his ears ache. They seemed to move and speak slowly, almost in slow motion. Alyson Bender crouched down alongside Drake, and together they stared at Peter. Alyson said, “What—are—you—doing—Vin?” The words boomed and rolled, and seemed to slur together into a mishmash of sounds, too deep to make out without difficulty.

Vin Drake just laughed. Apparently he found the situation amusing. But the man’s laughter propelled gusts of stinking breath toward Peter, and he recoiled from the odor of garlic, red wine, and cigars.

Drake glanced at his watch. “It’s—after—hours,” he said, and smiled. “Pau—hana,—as—they—say—here—in—Hawaii.—Means—work—is—done.”

Alyson Bender stared at him.

Drake tipped his head from side to side, as if he had gotten something stuck in his ear; it seemed to be a habit. The students heard his voice, rolling out: “After—work—comes—play.”