Spiral

Jake’s phone went off. He checked the area code-California-and let it go. His phone had not stopped ringing-colleagues, reporters, friends-everyone wanting to know what had really happened. Jake had called back only a select few people. He had called his DARPA grant manager, a Stanford professor on loan to DARPA in Arlington, Virginia, and told him about the missing Crawlers. Since DARPA paid the bills, Jake thought they deserved to know. He’d also tried to call Maggie Connor-to offer his condolences and ask how Dylan was holding up-but the phone had been constantly busy.

Jake stared into the glass that separated him from the rarefied environment inside the CNF. This is where Dave and Joe made the Crawlers, carving them out of silicon wafers like Michelangelo finding the David inside the stone. The room before him was filled with GCA projection steppers, wafer coaters, and an old EV620 contact mask aligner, all part of the assembly line of the micro-world. This entire section of the CNF was standard computer-chip technology-furnaces for growing oxides, acid baths for etching, and evaporators for depositing metal films. Enough sheer miniaturizing power to write the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin.

A young woman entered, dressed in a light blue jumpsuit, blue booties, and a white headcovering. She looked a little like Beth, his ex-wife. They’d married young, then grown apart after he had come back from the war. She lived in Phoenix now, was remarried, with a kid, a little girl named Olivia. Once a year they talked on the phone. There wasn’t much to say. Beth had a new life. She was doing okay.

Jake watched the woman work, movements deliberate as she dipped a silicon wafer into a beaker, holding it carefully with specialized tweezers. She clicked the button on a stopwatch, swishing the wafer in the liquid. After a time, she lifted it out and dipped it into a water bath. Jake recognized the procedure, the ritual. The removal of every speck of dust and dirt, leaving behind nothing but the pure silicon crystal underneath, every atom locked in its place relative to its neighbors. The elimination of everything that did not belong, so she could begin her work on a perfect canvas.

She glanced up, saw him watching. He smiled politely, turned away.

Liam’s death was bringing back the black empties. It was just like it had been with Beth-he couldn’t fully connect with her. Jake felt detached, slippery, as though his insides and outsides were disconnected.

He returned his thoughts to Liam. Though Liam was a biologist, he loved the wonderful precision of all this technology, the miniature landscapes of almost impossibly intricate detail that were created. Liam had been there in the beginning, at the birth of the first information revolution. He was friends with all of the big players: Alan Turing, von Neumann at Princeton, Weiner at MIT. The ideas were there by the fifties-the vision of machines executing algorithmic programs stored on some kind of linear tape. It was increasingly clear that life worked that way, with DNA as the tape, and cells as the machines that executed the programs. It was also clear that electronics could be made to work that way, with magnetic bits or packets of charge as the data and computer chips as the processors.

Shockley, Kilby, Moore-they took up the challenge. Liam knew all of them, right up to Bill Gates and the Google guys. He’d said he had a front-row seat for the information revolution and he wasn’t going to waste it. He’d studied the growth of the semiconductor industry like he studied fungi, following each step in the evolution of this new technology, and watching, in turn, how the world adapted to it.

And he’d loved the Crawlers. While the military saw the Crawlers as potential spies, Liam saw them as soldiers in a new revolution. Liam believed that a second wave was coming-one even bigger than the information revolution. When the technologies of the information age were applied to biology, life would become an engineering discipline. Using tools such as microfluidic labs-on-a-chip, PCR machines, and assemblers such as the MicroCrawlers, you’d be able to make living cells the way you made computer chips, process DNA like so many ones and zeroes. He was incredibly excited. He thought that in five years he’d be making fungi from scratch. Design their genetic sequence on the computer, push a few buttons, and there they would be. A genome as easy to write as a string of computer code. A new fungus as simple to construct as an integrated circuit. He maintained that the Crawlers would be the foot soldiers in the revolution.

Jake still couldn’t believe that Liam wouldn’t be there to see it happen. Wouldn’t be there when someone managed to boot up the first artificial cell. When kids started to post their favorite genomes on their MySpace pages. When the cell nucleus replaced the computer chip as the symbol of technological sophistication.