Then Pia walked out of the room without looking back. Had she been seen? There must be cameras in there, she thought, but perhaps she didn’t look suspicious. Still, if anyone compared the entry logs with her appearance, she didn’t look much like Zachary Berman. She was afraid she didn’t have a lot of time. As Pia walked, she tried to process exactly what she had just seen. They were living, human laboratory experiments, somehow being kept alive, their circulatory systems being run through banks of testing equipment. Pia stopped for a second and thought she was going to throw up. What Nano was doing was such a travesty of ethics that it was unspeakable. But she didn’t have time to let herself become emotional. She gathered herself quickly. She had work to do.

As she retraced her steps back to her lab, Pia couldn’t help but think of the Chinese runner she had helped take to the ER. Was that him back in that chamber of horror? If not him, it was someone like him, a tattooed person maintained in a fish tank for physiological experimentation. Berman had said there were things going on at Nano that were taking place at facilities like it all over the world. Did he mean that? What she had just seen? Again, she felt a momentary wave of nausea sweep over her, making her shudder.

When she reached the lab, Pia thought about calling the police right away, but she was still ruled by her significant distrust of authority. She was trespassing, and it would be easy for Nano security to prove she had faked her way in using fabricated ID. The authorities would get nowhere near that lab tonight, and Nano probably had some major contingency plan for emergencies. Maybe they could dismantle the whole setup or exchange the human bodies for some other animals if necessary. The more information Pia had, the better.

Pia needed to look at the blood. Her work at Nano had involved microbivores, but she knew Nano could easily have been making other nanorobots with the same nanomolecular manufacturing techniques the company had perfected. Having seen the bodies in the tanks, Pia wondered what else Nano might be making. Perhaps these were nightmarish versions of tests that normally would have been conducted on lab animals, but in their race to bring to market, maybe they were just skipping animal testing for reasons of expediency and going directly to humans.

Back in her lab, Pia subjected some of the blood to a gentle, selective centrifugation, utilizing a special kind of apheresis to separate the blood solids from the plasma and then the solids themselves. Pia knew the nanorobots could be converted to neutral buoyancy by ultrasound waves, which she had used on the sample prior to putting it in the centrifuge.