“Well,” Maple started, chewing thoughtfully on his ragged thumbnail. “There was a guy, but it was a long time ago. And by a long time ago, I mean when you and I were still using Clearasil and chasing cheerleaders. He wasn’t the theoretical father of nanotech—that was probably Richard Feynman—but he was the practical father. He was the first guy to make something actually work in the real world. But then he left his university position and started up a consulting company. As far as I know, he never worked in the field again.”

“Name?”

“Ito.”

Smith felt a jolt of adrenaline at the Asian-sounding name. “Chinese?”

“Hideki Ito,” Maple said. “Japanese.”

Smith began pacing around the lab again. “What’s Ito done since he started consulting?”

The engineer frowned. “I honestly don’t know. I mean, I assume he’s still alive because I haven’t heard otherwise but I’m not aware of any meaningful work coming out of him since the nanotech stuff early in his career.”

A Japanese scientist. A Japanese reactor. As the pieces fell into place, the picture seemed to get hazier. Smith continued to pace, stopping short less than a minute later.

“What?” Maple said. “Do you have something?”

Smith looked him directly in the eye. “First of all, I want to reiterate that this is so far beyond top secret we don’t even have a category for it. If this leaks, there would be consequences.”

“Are you threatening me, Jon?”

“Yes. Look, I’m sorry I got you involved in this, Greg. But the fact is you are involved and there’s nothing I can do about that now.”

“Are you kidding? I have honest-to-God molecular factories in my lab. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. You’ve known me for a long time, Jon. This isn’t my first rodeo. You can trust me.”

“Okay. Then here’s the rest of it. The radiation levels in Fukushima’s Reactor Four were way too high to be explained by the damage done by the tsunami. That reactor was supposed to have been defueled.”

Maple frowned. “After that buildup, I have to admit that I was hoping for something more interesting.”

“Could radiation destroy these things?”

“At high enough levels, sure.”

“So these little machines are basically just artificial viruses, right? They co-opt their host for fuel to replicate themselves. And the more there are of them, the more damage they do.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good way of thinking about it for someone with your background. They’re viruses that destroy the cellular structure of concrete, steel, and plastic.”