Micro

He paused to let this sink in. “It’s been known for fifty years that magnetic fields affect animal tissues in various ways. You’re all familiar with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs. You also know that magnetic fields can promote bone healing, inhibit parasites, change platelet behavior, and so on. But it turns out that those are all minor effects arising from exposure to low-intensity fields. The situation is entirely different under extremely high field strengths of the kind we have only recently been able to generate-and until recently nobody had any knowledge of what happened under those conditions. We call such magnetic fields tensor fields, to distinguish them from ordinary magnetic fields. Tensor fields have ultra-high field strengths. In a tensor field, dimensional changes can become evident in matter.

“But we did have a hint-a clue, if you will. It came from research conducted in the 1960s by a company called Nuclear Medical Data, which studied the health of workers at nuclear facilities. The company found workers were generally in good health, but they also noted that over a ten-year period workers exposed to high magnetic fields lost a quarter of an inch in height. This conclusion was considered a statistical artifact, and ignored.”

Drake paused again, waiting to see if the assembled students understood where this was going. They didn’t yet seem to suspect. “It turns out that it was not a statistical artifact. A French study in 1970 found that French workers in a high magnetic field area lost about eight millimeters in height. But the French study also discarded the finding, calling it ‘trivial.’

“However, we now know that it was nothing of the sort. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, took an interest in these studies and apparently tested small dogs under high strength fields-the strongest that could be generated at that time, at a secret lab in Huntsville, Alabama. There are no official records of these tests, except for some faded Xeroxes of faxes, which make reference to a Pekingese dog the size of a pencil eraser.”

That caused a stir. Some of the students shifted in their chairs. They glanced at one another.

“It seems,” Drake continued, “that the dog squeaked pitifully and died after a few hours, exsanguinating with a tiny drop of blood. In general the results were unstable and inconclusive, and the project was abandoned by order of then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.”

“Why?” one of the students asked.

“He was worried about destabilizing U.S.-Soviet relations,” Drake said.

“Why would it do that?”

“That will be clear in a minute,” Drake said. “The important point is that we can now generate extremely high magnetic field strengths, these so-called tensor fields. And we now know that under the influence of a tensor field, both organic and inorganic matter undergo something analogous to a phase change. The result is that material in the field experiences rapid compression by a factor of ten to the minus one to ten to the minus three. Quantum interactions remain symmetrical and invariant, for the most part, so that shrunken matter interacts in a normal way with regular matter, at least most of the time. The transformation is metastable and reversible under inverse field conditions. Are you with me so far?”

The students were paying close attention, but their faces registered a wide range of reactions: skepticism, outright disbelief, fascination, even some confusion. Drake was talking about quantum physics-not biology.

Rick folded his arms and shook his head. “So what are you getting at?” he said quite loudly.

Unruffled, Drake answered, “It’s good you asked, Mr. Hutter. It’s time you see for yourselves.” The giant screens behind Drake went dark, then the central panel lit up. They were watching an HD video.

It showed an egg.

The egg sat on a flat black surface. Behind the egg there was a folded yellow backdrop, like a curtain.

The egg moved. It was hatching. A small beak poked through the eggshell; a crack lengthened; the top of the egg broke off. A baby chicken struggled out, cheeping, and stood up, wobbly, and flapped its little stubby wings.

The camera began to pull back.

As the scene widened, the chick’s surroundings came into view. The yellow backdrop, it turned out, was actually the huge, clawed foot of a bird. The foot of a chicken. The baby chick now tottered by a monstrously large chicken foot. As the camera drew back farther, the entire adult chicken became visible-it seemed gigantic. As the camera pulled fully back, however, the chick and the pieces of eggshell became nothing but specks of dirt under the grown bird.

“Get out…” Rick began, then stopped. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.

“This,” Drake said, “is Nanigen’s technology.”

“The transformation-” Amar began.