Switching to the blood sample she had gotten from Paul, which was now thawed, Pia went through the same sequence. With the light microscope, she searched for any nanorobots. At first all she saw were blood cells, mostly red, but also some white. She searched for more than ten minutes and was about to give up when she found one of the bluish spheres. The Chinese runner had the nanorobots in his blood, just not as high a concentration, but their presence gave Pia the idea of what they might be.

When she had first arrived at Nano, and had done her due diligence in relations to nanorobots, she’d learned that Robert Freitas, the man who had originally designed the microbivores, had also designed a respirocyte, a nanorobot capable of carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide a thousand times more efficiently than a natural red blood cell. If Pia was forced to guess at that point what she was looking at, she would have said a respirocyte. The implications were obvious: Nano was using nanorobot artifical red blood cells prematurely in human subjects with disastrous results. The why she didn’t even try to comprehend.

Knowing that she had accomplished all she could under the circumstances, Pia collected her samples and the extra blood and put it all into the brown paper bag she’d used to bring back the jogger’s blood.

Pia powered down the equipment in the lab and checked her watch. It was now approaching five o’clock in the morning. She had wasted no time and was pleased she had not been interrupted. She wouldn’t need to come back because she felt she had everything she needed to expose Nano and, in the process, Zachary Berman with her evidence of the vile, inhuman experiments that were going on. She had her proof: two blood samples from separate sources, one involving live and one mostly dead human subjects and hopefully one photo, which she had yet to look at.

Despite the reassuring quiet of the deserted lab, Pia knew she had taken a great risk leaving and then coming back to Nano, but she felt she had had to confirm the presence of the nanorobots in both blood samples.