Despite the noise in the room, Zach Berman was practically asleep on his feet. Two Chinese trainers were shouting instructions to a pair of riders crouched over racing bikes on stands that converted them to stationary mode. The riders were wired up to banks of instruments, and as they pedaled furiously they yelled back to the trainers, begging to be allowed to stop, or so Berman assumed, going by the little Mandarin he’d been able to pick up. The air in the lab was so thick and close that the riders were perspiring profusely and adding to Berman’s sleepiness.

He had spent hours in the room as the scientists and trainers tried again to replicate the conditions under which the rider might go into arrest, as the runner and now two cyclists had done in the open. Indeed, the same cyclist who’d had the mishap previously was one of the test subjects, but try as the scientists might, adjusting dosages, degree of hydration, various stressors, and varying riding conditions, both men were riding as hard, and complaining as loudly, as ever after almost ten hours of work, with absolutely no change in their relatively slow heart rates and their normal cardiac rhythms and shallow breathing.

These had been a frantic few days for Zach Berman. Despite strict orders for all the subjects not to go out on their own, no matter how confident they felt, here he was, presented with yet another problem. The cyclist’s crisis had come just weeks after the jogger’s similar public collapse, over which Berman believed he had finally prevailed and ridden out the storm of questioning that had emanated from China. Having another similar episode would be inconvenient timing, to say the very least. Berman’s backers believed the technology was close to being perfected, and any technical glitch like this seemed to throw the whole project into doubt. Berman knew he couldn’t help much with the science, but he had to be in the room to witness the work, as being away from it, speculating on what was going wrong, proved unbearable for him. His only consolation was that it was better that it should happen now rather than when it really counted.

The other problem driving Berman nuts was that he couldn’t stop thinking about Pia. The emergency contingency plans put into place by Berman’s head of security had worked smoothly. As soon as the rider had gone down, the team assembled their van and got ready to retrieve him, and they were aware, through their contact at Boulder Memorial, that the ambulance was getting there ahead of the Nano team. But the pickup from the ambulance went well and the situation appeared to be under control when the chief of security heard a report that the head of the Boulder Memorial ER and “some young woman” seemed to have set off in pursuit.