Whitney saw that she’d missed another text as Berman left Nano. Whitney thrummed her fingers on the marble countertop. Berman hadn’t responded to her text. That wasn’t unprecedented, but it was unusual, given that he was so active at that time of night. She figured he must have seen his phone and just ignored her message. She could have taken that as an affront, but she had learned to know better.

The phone pinged as she held it in her hand. Now she was being told he was going back into that same lab in the common area at Nano for a second time. Why was he going in and out of that particular lab?

Whitney thought about the lab for a second, and then she remembered who had worked in it. Her mind raced with the possibilities that this realization presented her.

“Shit,” she said quietly, and finally called Berman on his main house phone.

•   •   •

PIA LOOKED THROUGH the eyepieces of a high-power microscope to view the centrifuged blood from the submerged man. She backed up the objective and the field came into view. Just as she suspected, she saw a plethora of spheroid forms that looked for all intents and purposes like microbivores. Yet she doubted they were, because under the light microscope there was a cobalt bluish cast to the structures and the microbivores looked black. So far she felt her suspicions were vindicated. The blood from the submerged, dissected man contained billions of nanorobots of some sort.

Pia then moved over to the console of the scanning electron microscope. She had prepared a sample of the same blood and placed it into the specimen chamber and activated the vacuum pumps. There was now a complete vacuum, so she turned on the electron source. Sometime later she had an image on the monitor screen. She knew she was looking at nanorobots, and she knew they were definitely not microbivores. Microbivores were spheroid; the ones she was looking at were spherical. What kind of nanorobots they were, she had no idea. To get a better view, she upped the magnification to the order of 300,000 and waited for the scanning to take place. When it was finished, she brought it into focus.

Now she could see the nanorobots with much better clarity. She could not appreciate the blue cast that she had seen under the light microscope since the electron microscope image was only in black-and-white. What she could now see is that the nanorobots’ surface, from the equator to about halfway up to the poles, was covered with what looked like nanoelectrical rotors. What they did, she had no idea.