2
Marine sentries escorted President Jane Campion and two aides down the halls of the Pentagon and into an elevator that opened three stories below the ground. Nobody spoke. Jane Campion's stomach sizzled with a presidential ulcer. It had revealed itself the morning she took the oath of office and had made her wince that same night as her husband zipped up her silver-sequined white Versace gown for the Inauguration Ball. She had come to regard the ulcer as a badge of power: first woman to be President of the United States.
A few hours ago, she had taken a phone call in the Oval Office-on the red phone, no less-informing her the National Emergency Council had gathered to deal with a crisis that involved "imminent danger to the planet." That's how Gen. Cunningham, Military Chief of Staff, had put it. Now Marines in gleaming black shoes were sweeping her briskly down tiled halls and she knew very little about what the hell was going on, and the dread was burning a hole through her gut.
As the President's entourage swept through double doors, a waiting assembly of men and women in military uniforms and business suits rose to stand at attention. The sentries locked the doors behind her and took their post in the hall.
Jane Campion arrived at her station at the head of a mammoth mahogany table. The smell of wood polish saturated the oak-paneled chamber. With a curt nod, she acknowledged directors and staff from the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and senior military advisors from the Department of Defense. The tension in the room felt like a static charge; tiny hairs stood on the back of her neck.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said, "please be seated." The President took her seat in a high-backed leather chair. "I can tell by your worried looks that we are in deep trouble, so let's dispense with formalities and get straight to the bad news. This morning I was yanked away from a quiet breakfast with my granddaughter, and informed that our armed forces are standing at Defense Condition One. I know next to nothing about what's going on, and I am more than a little angry about that."
She drummed the polished table top with manicured nails and scowled at the faces around the room. It gave her some relief to indulge in wrath; the only other emotion she had available at the moment was fear. "Would anyone care to explain to me why the President of the United States has been left in the dark on this situation?"
After a pause, a tall man in an Army dress uniform cleared his throat. "Madam President, for security-"
"Your name? Your position?" she interrupted.
"Sorry. Colonel Jack Eberhard. United States Army Chemical and Biological Weapons Response Team, Redstone Military Labs, White Sands, New Mexico."
Colonel Bullet-head. His looks alone made her bristle. Or was it his lordly body language? Eberhard was the kind of man people reacted to when they wondered, Wouldn't it be better if women ran the world? Jane glanced about the table, surrounded by two dozen such men. Precisely the types of leaders who had helped her to get elected on the simple platform that she was not one of them. The only other woman of power in the room was Air Force Major-General Paige Paine, who had fought her way up the glory-ladder by kicking and slugging as if she had bigger balls than her competitors; and judging by her flat-chested, square-jawed, sharp-boned looks, maybe that really was her secret. The half-dozen other women in the room were mere assistants, secretaries, coffee-fetchers.
She nodded. "Proceed, Colonel."
"Ma'am, for security reasons, Project Second Nature from its inception has been ultra-secret. A small, select team has conducted the research and the information has been strictly monitored and controlled."
"What you call a need-to-know basis?"
"Exactly, ma'am."
She felt her face grow hot. "And you're saying, Col. Eberhard, that your Commander-in-Chief did not need to know?" Her dark eyes flashed. "According to a quaint old document called the Constitution, I am the final authority over all military and intelligence matters in this nation."
They locked eyes. His gaze was hard and cool, gray eyes the tint of granite. His mouth tightened, but he did not look away. The only way to confront men like him was to show equal grit, which is why so many women who rose to power became stone-hearted bitches. She hoped she had not become one.
"The next obvious question is, Why am I being told now?" She made her fingers stop drumming. "I'm almost afraid to find out."
Eberhard shifted in his chair. "Ma'am, we need your presidential authorization for the underground detonation of a thermonuclear device."
Chrissake, things are that bad? She blew out a loud sigh. "All right. We'll deal with this secrecy issue later. And I promise you, it will not be forgotten."
A male aide poured for her a cup of coffee. She sipped it black while glancing around the table at the nation's top defense and security advisors. They all looked scared, and she wondered if her fear showed, too.
"For now, priorities," she said. "So far, all I've been told is that a bio-warfare project has gotten out of control and become critically dangerous. But the tension in this room...it feels like we're huddling in a trailer park, waiting for a tornado."
She turned to a man seated on her right, wearing a gray suit, white shirt, and black bow tie. His white, wooly hair and white beard contrasted sharply with his dark brown skin.
"What can you tell me, Doug?"
Dr. Douglas Freeman, the White House Chief Science Advisor, licked dry lips. "I can tell you..." he sighed, "I can tell you that I'm terrified. I believe all life on Earth is threatened."
Behind eyeglasses, his brown eyes met hers with a grim look. Her heart sounded to her like it was pounding from the bottom of a deep well. She wondered if others could hear the booms. She took a breath to calm herself.
"Start at the beginning."
Dr. Freeman shook his head. "I've just been briefed about this mess myself, an hour ago. Let me assure you, if I had known about the project, I would have argued vehemently for shutting it down long before this." He looked accusingly at the Army colonel seated across the table. "Col. Eberhard is the project's director. Let him tell you."
The President's eyes settled on Eberhard again. Back to you, Bullet-head. He rubbed a big hand through salt-and-pepper hair buzzed in a severe crewcut, then folded his hands on the table. "Madam President, how much do you know about nanotechnology?"
She squinted. "I've heard of it. Small things. Little machines. That's about the extent of my knowledge."
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "Nanotechnology means engineering machines on the scale of nanometers."
The President turned back to her science advisor. "Help me out."
"One-billionth of a meter," he said. "Microscopic."
She tried to imagine the scale. "Microscopic machines?"
Eberhard nodded. "Yes, ma'am. We call them nanobots-robots the size of proteins. Millions of them can fit into a single human cell."
She shook her head. "But...machines that tiny can actually perform work?"
"Nature's been using them for billions of years," Eberhard said.
She turned to Dr. Freeman. "Doug?"
"He's right. The machinery of nature already operates on the microscopic scale. That's where life is busiest," Dr. Freeman said. "Think about the activities within your cells-the oxidation of foods, defense against germs, tissue repair and so forth. Molecular machines do all that work. We call them white blood cells and hormones and such, but one could regard them as tiny...well, as he said: robots. Nanobots. Each cell has factories to build an amazing variety of these machines-one molecule at a time, you see-according to instructions provided by the genes."
She nodded slowly. "Hard to think so small."
Dr. Freeman shook his head. "Think big. Think blue whales and sequoia trees. The construction work goes on at the molecular level, but the final product..." He raised his palms.
"I see your point." She looked back at Eberhard. "Continue, Colonel."
"Ma'am, Project Second Nature was designed to explore a defensive application of nanotechnology."
She didn't like the sound of that. "Explain."
"Well, imagine a battlefield soldier with trillions of nanobots flowing through his bloodstream, each programmed to break down a chemical warfare agent such as sarin. The soldier could wade through a cloud of poison gas and the nanobots would turn the stuff into water inside him before it did any harm," he said. "Or imagine trillions of nanobots, all programmed to repair damaged cells. A severely wounded combatant could heal in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, without leaving a scar."
"Hold on," the President said, raising a hand. "I'm not following you. Each of these machines is extremely tiny-microscopic. Right?"
Eberhard nodded.
She took the last sip of coffee and tilted the empty cup toward him. "So it would take an army of-what? Millions of them-just to scrub out the bottom of this cup."
"Certainly," he said. "If not billions."
"Well, hell-wouldn't it take forever to manufacture trillions of nanobots? Trillions for each soldier? How could you manage that?"
Eberhard smiled, though the strain in his gray eyes did not relax. "You program the nanobots to replicate, just as living cells do. Each one makes many copies of itself. Starting with one of each type, you end up with swarms," he said. "In a matter of hours, in fact."
The President almost blurted Oh shit. "These things can replicate?"
"That is precisely why nanobots are so dangerous," Dr. Freeman said.
"It is controlled, of course," Eberhard said, and frowned at the science advisor. "You simply program exactly how many copies each nanobot can make of itself before its ability to replicate switches off."
Dr. Freeman slapped the table and the President nearly jumped out of her wool skirt.
"There it is!" he said. "The hubris, the arrogance of science." He glared at the colonel and the man returned his stare. "You act like you've got nature under control-like you've never heard of Murphy's Law."
The President closed her eyes, then opened them again. She regretted drinking the coffee. Her mouth tasted sour. Beneath the table she put a hand on her belly and wondered if her ulcer had finally perforated her stomach lining. "Project Second Nature, Colonel. You were getting to the bad news."
He nodded. "Until a few years ago, building nanobots seemed to be a good thirty, forty years beyond our know-how, for a number of reasons. How to provide a power supply that small, how to build a motor and propulsion unit that small, how to program the things. Then the late Dr. Richard Osden, of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, wrote a paper with a brilliant idea. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use the cellular machinery the body already contains? His idea was to convert mitochondria into nanobots. That led to the creation of Project Second Nature."
"Back up." The President knit her brows. "Mito-?"
"Mitochondria," Dr. Freeman said. "Tiny, sausage-shaped structures inside the cells. The powerplants of the cells. They convert sugar to energy. The point here is, they were once separate organisms," he said, "bacterial parasites. Then, about two billion years ago they got smart and realized it was better to live inside your host than to kill your host and yourself in the process. So they became symbiotic-um, that means they cooperated-with the primitive cells they invaded."
"And those primitive cells evolved into us," Eberhard added.
"That's right," Dr. Freeman said. "Now all plants and animals contain mitochondria. They're like batteries, they generate energy. So the more active the cell, the more mitochondria it keeps inside. Brain and muscle cells, for example, contain tens of thousands."
"I see," the President said.
"Thing is, they still have their own, separate DNA," Eberhard said. "The only place in the body you can find DNA outside of cell nuclei is inside the mitochondria. And they replicate, too; not just when the whole cell divides, but on their own-at their own pace. Do you follow me? They were once independent bacteria and they still act somewhat like distinct animals living inside us."
The President nodded. "I get the picture. Tiny powerplants that make copies of themselves. It was a natural design to work from."
"Like a prototype. Exactly," Eberhard said. "And it gets better. Encoded in the genes of mitochondria are instructions to build parts to enable them to swim about-as they once did. Our team mapped the genome and switched on the genes to return them to the body-plan of free swimmers."
President Campion rubbed her gut, feeling queasy. She imagined countless micro-tadpoles paddling through her bloodstream.
"We called them mitobots," he said. "To begin with, we engineered them to invade and break down cells that produce a high level of waste heat. Since cancer cells have higher metabolisms and produce more waste heat than normal cells, the mitobots singled out and destroyed tumors."
"You tested it?"
He nodded. "Rats, rabbits, pigeons. Cats and dogs. A dozen monkeys. Worked perfectly. The mitobots replicated a prescribed, limited number of times. After they finished their job, we flushed them out of the animal's system."
"How?" the President said.
"A simple diuretic. They flush out in the urine."
"And at that point they're inactive?"
Eberhard nodded. "As in dead. They don't live long after they stop dividing."
"I see." Sort of.
"Next, we tested the mitobots on a human subject with an advanced, terminal stage of liver cancer."
"Oh, god. You didn't." The President winced.
"A young woman, a dance major from the University of New Mexico," he said. "We explained the risks. She gave us complete authorization. The test went perfectly. Within minutes, her cancer was gone."
"But now tell us about your little problem," Dr. Freeman said.
Here it comes. The President twisted her lower lip and bit it, bracing for the bad news.
Eberhard studied his folded hands. "The woman became pregnant."
The President wondered if she had missed something. The woman's cancer was cured. Now she was pregnant. "That's bad?"
Eberhard looked up. "She was housed at the laboratory in a Biohazard Level Four Isolation Unit. Level Four, the strictest level. No one touched her."
The President shrugged. "She was already pregnant when she came to the lab."
He shook his head. "I'm afraid not. She had never had sexual intercourse. Strict Roman Catholic-she was a virgin."
"But...I don't understand."
"We didn't either, at first. Eventually, we realized that one of the mitobots had deposited its DNA into one of her egg cells. Somehow, it had modified its genes to do the job. Incredible, really. As soon as the egg cell had the full complement of genes, it began dividing, turning into a fetus."
It took a few seconds for the President to close her jaw. Surely the others could hear her booming heart now. "One of the mitobots fertilized an egg, made her pregnant?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Come on! That's not possible." She worked to steady her breathing. "Look, I think I've proven here that I'm no biology expert," she said. "But two species-a woman and a...a...germ-two species can't mix, can't mate."
"We... um, don't understand it," Eberhard said quietly. "But the fact is, mitochondria lived inside our ancestral cells and co-evolved with us for a couple billion years... and... " He shrugged.
"And an ancient, symbiotic life-form came up with its own little surprise," Dr. Freeman said.
"So you aborted the fetus," the President said. It was not a question.
Eberhard shook his head. "No ma'am. By the time we realized she was pregnant, she had reached full term and gone into labor."
"For chrissake, your medical staff couldn't spot a pregnancy for nine months?"
Granite-gray eyes fixed on hers. "The entire pregnancy lasted less than two hours."
She gasped. "Oh my god." Others around the table broke into loud murmurs. Her hand rubbing her belly began to tremble. "How could that not kill her?"
He held up his palms. "Apparently, the fetus sent out streams of nanobots that rebuilt her body. She gave birth without pain."
The President swallowed hard. She felt a drop of sweat run down between her breasts. She could smell cologne, perfume, and deodorant, which meant everyone else was sweating, too, despite the room's chilly air-conditioning.
"The baby..." She took a breath to calm the quaver in her voice. "What was it...a freak? A monster?"
He shook his head. "The baby looked perfectly normal. A girl. Almost a clone of its mother, who was...well, she was quite beautiful."
"Was beautiful? What happened? Where is the mother now?"
Eberhard's eyes shifted back to his folded hands. "The pregnancy did not harm her physically. But emotionally, the experience...well...she had a psychotic break. Believed the baby was the devil, tried to kill it. We took the infant from her. She, um...managed to kill herself."
This time, a groan came from the U.S. Attorney General at the end of the left-hand row. The President figured he was imagining nightmarish lawsuits if this news left the room. She wondered about the girl's family, her loved ones-what lies had they been told? A sudden sadness mixed with her horror.
"And the baby?" the President prompted.
"Actually, it stayed an infant for less than a week," Eberhard said. "Then-as if it had suddenly made up its mind-it grew up in a few hours to have the size and features of a young girl. Say, nine, ten years old."
The President grasped the edge of the desk and held on for stability. Too much, too much.
"Over the past five years she has appeared to age normally," he said. "She's grown from a ten-year-old to a fifteen-year-old."
"Five years."
"Yes, ma'am."
President Campion had been in office less than a year. "Did my predecessor know about this project?"
"No ma'am, he did not."
Two presidents kept in the dark. Bastards!
"Colonel, you felt safe enough to study this girl for five years. You and your secret club. Why is she a threat now?"
"We surrounded her isolation chamber with banks of high-intensity x-ray generators," he said. "Mitobots are living cells-vulnerable to high radiation. If she tried to escape, or if a breach in the chamber triggered the electronic alarms, a massive burst of x-radiation would kill her, sterilize everything in her body."
"But," she said. "Something changed."
He nodded. "She's starting to experiment, try things. She's discovering her abilities. We've studied her intensively and learned a lot, but frankly, we don't know what those abilities might be. Since her birth, she's been producing new series of mitobots in her bloodstream. It's anybody's guess what they're built to do."
Dr. Freeman moaned and slumped his head into his hands, which did nothing to boost the President's good cheer.
She frowned. "Again, I'm no biology whiz, but...where are the genetic instructions coming from? You know, to build these new forms? I thought it takes genes to tell the cell factories how to build stuff. Isn't that what you said earlier, Doug?"
Dr. Freeman lifted his head and managed a wan smile. "Yes, Madam President, you're a quick student, and that is just what I said. But we're dealing with something unfamiliar, here. Ask the colonel how his girl keeps producing new types of mitobots in her system."
She looked at Eberhard and raised her eyebrows.
"Frankly, ma'am..."
"You don't know," she finished his sentence.
"Apparently there are deeper genetic codes, hidden somehow, encrypted within the genome of the mitochondria-codes we never mapped."
"Apparently, nature is a bit more profound than you assumed, Colonel," Dr. Freeman said. Eberhard shot him a killing look, but let the comment slide.
"Go on with your report, Colonel," the President said. O Eleanor Roosevelt-or whoever is the Protectress of First Female Presidents-please help me out, here. Tell me what to do.
"A week ago, two major changes occurred," he said. "I'll begin with the second change: the girl, uh...morphed again-for lack of a better word." He raked a hand through his crewcut. "She quit being a teen-ager and developed to the height and appearance of a young woman; she now looks to be in her early twenties. And her ability to morph has made a leap, an acceleration: The entire transformation took less than ten minutes."
He pressed a button on a remote control console in the table top. High-definition television screens tilted upward and switched on in front of each seat. The screens glowed blue against dark mahogany. "Ladies and gentlemen, you're about to see the relevant segment from last week's video record. The event occurred late at night, when the lab was empty. The footage has been edited from several cameras."
Each set of eyes stared at the screen before it. Eberhard pressed PLAY.
Abruptly, the teen-aged girl appeared.
The President found herself transfixed, gawking at the slender figure. Images moved on the screen without sound.
The girl stood inside what looked to be a glass-and-steel vault that nested like a Chinese box inside a larger vault. The room held simple steel furniture: a bed, a desk and chair, a kitchen table, bookshelves, a three-quarter-sized refrigerator, and some equipment and features the President didn't recognize. A knobby mound of fruits and vegetables covered the small kitchen table, as if the girl had dumped all the produce from the refrigerator into a pile.
The focus remained tight on the girl. The President gazed at her smooth, dark skin and tried to name its color: caramel, raw honey, café au lait? Long black locks fell in tight, rippling waves to the girl's hips. Exotic, the President thought. Exquisite. The girl reminded her of three stunning daughters in a family of Ethiopian Jews she had met while living in Israel as the U.S. ambassador. That post had been years ago, but the gorgeous sisters remained one of her strongest impressions from the Middle East.
The girl appearing in the television screen outclassed those girls in natural beauty. When the subject gazed up at the video camera, the viewers around the table took a collective breath.
Those eyes!
The President's father had been an ophthalmologist and had joked that he entered the specialty because of a boyhood crush on Elizabeth Taylor-he loved her eyes. He had said the purple hue of Liz's irises was so rare as to be unheard of: the shade belonged to Liz alone; trademark of her beauty. For her father's sixtieth birthday, Jane had given him a gold ring, set with a round-cut amethyst, so he could wear the color of his boyhood fantasies. He adored the ring; she buried him with it.
The clear violet eyes gazing from the television screen matched the tint of that gemstone.
The girl tugged off her clothes: an orange nylon jumpsuit and white cotton underwear. She stood relaxed, feet apart, arms held out from her sides, eyes closed. She placed one hand on the kitchen table. The contours of her body began to blur softly.
The President bent toward the television screen, squinting. An abrupt edit to a close-up view revealed a thin layer of mist flowing over the girl's skin and hair. The mist caused the blurring, fuzzy outline.
Then a wide camera angle showed the whole body again and the President noticed the same foggy coating smudging the table's sharp edges and flowing over the mound of food. The fog thickened and turned iridescent, a shimmering play of colored light. Rainbows wrapped the girl's flesh and the table in a translucent, glittering veil. The President realized she was watching a labor force of trillions of nanobots.
Beneath the fog, the girl's body softened like warm wax and began to change and grow. The cloud of microscopic workers scavenged organic materials from the fruits and vegetables to build the girl's new tissue. As she grew, the mound of food shrank to nothing; then even the stainless steel table withered to a skeleton of itself.
The girl's legs and torso lengthened, chest and hips filled out with feminine curves, face molded into a new, more womanly harmony of beautiful features.
President Campion thought of a line from a James Wright poem, "If I could step outside my body, I would burst into bloom." Before her eyes, the teen-ager was flowering, sculpted from within and without into a young woman.
The cocoon of fog began to dissipate, reabsorbed through the skin. The nude figure was no longer undeveloped and girlish but lusciously sexually mature. Some viewers at the table shuffled uncomfortably and a few men stole sideways glances at each other.
The video camera had recorded the images in real-time, not time-elapsed sequences. The President checked the moving numbers on a digital clock at the bottom right corner of the screen. Less than ten minutes had passed, but equal to five or more years of normal growth.
The young woman opened her eyes.
The television viewers reacted again with an in-drawn breath.
Her eyes had darkened from pale violet to deep violet; no longer amethysts, but sapphires.
The transformation was complete. The changes had made her, if possible, even more lovely.
The screens went blank. A long silence overtook the room.
"Wow. And I thought my teen-ager grew fast," someone quipped at last, to a trickle of nervous laughter.
"Did you see that table dissolving?" someone else muttered. "Jesus."
It took President Campion another moment to find her voice. "Col. Eberhard, you said two big changes occurred in the past week. We saw the girl change into a woman. What else happened?"
He nodded. "The other change is the critical one. It occurred first. A routine daily blood sample found that the girl has built a new series of mitobots, and, uh...these latest ones...might be actual machines."
A low buzz of murmurs swept back and forth across the table.
The President wondered about surgery for her ulcer. "What do you mean-actual machines?"
"The mitobots began as re-engineered living organisms, like bacteria, built from proteins, and dependent on water and sugar and oxygen-like the rest of the body's living cells," he said. "But this new series is made out of diamond fibers."
She shook her head. "How is that possible?"
"Diamonds are a crystalline arrangement of carbon," Eberhard said. "Our bodies are full of carbon. The mitobots must have assembled the diamond threads, atom by atom." He coughed into his fist. "The point is, these new ones, they really are like tiny machines, at least in their material construction. We're not even sure if they are alive in the normal sense. We don't know what's powering them. It's doubtful x-rays would have any effect on them."
Paige Paine, the Air Force Major-General, spoke up in a Texas twang. "Colonel, you're saying she can't be hurt? Can't be stopped?"
"Ma'am, I'm saying that we don't have that information."
"Does she have the capability-you mentioned it before-to heal combat wounds, all that?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency leaned forward and bellowed into his microphone, "Why in hell would you teach her something like that?" His jowls shook and the mike squealed with feedback.
"Well, um, actually, sir, it's already encoded in her genes," Eberhard said. "She didn't need to learn how, no more than you need to know how to form a scab over a cut. We performed a series of tests on her ability to repair major tissue damage. She can do it. With ease."
"You wounded her?" the President said. "You injured that little girl just to find out if she can heal herself?" It was getting ever easier to hate this man.
"Ma'am, you should not think of her as a girl," Eberhard said. "She only looks human."
"Then what is she, Colonel?" a Marine Brigadier-General said. "You make her sound like a creature from another world."
"Well, sir, she is a new kind of life-form," he said. "Dr. Freeman has explained that mitochondria have lived inside us for eons, beginning as parasitic invaders of our ancestral cells, then evolving to cooperate with their hosts." He dragged a hand through his crewcut. "But..."
"What?" the President said.
"But...it seems now, the mitochondria may have had their own agenda all along."
"Christ in a cowboy hat!" Major-General Paine said in her Texas drawl, "you got me pissin' in my dress blues. What are you saying? These little buggers are intelligent? An army of smart lil' ants?"
"General, we don't understand it, but...yes, apparently they do possess intelligence...though, uh, I wouldn't say like ants."
"What would you say?"
"I don't know..." Eberhard shook his head. "More like us."
General Paine made a spitting sound. "Hogwash. How can some teensy, itty-bitty cells be as smart as us? I mean, what the hell size brain could something that small possess?"
"I know it sounds far-fetched, General, but a member of my staff suggested that the cells are acting as biological computers, using sections of their own genes as switches to record and process information. MIT has done some basic research along those lines using E. coli bacteria. The germs managed to compute elementary math. Primitive stuff-one plus one-but it worked; the principle is sound."
"My bet is that it goes well beyond using genes as switches," Dr. Freeman said. Every head swiveled to face him. "I don't claim to understand the physics behind it, but I've read about the possibility of processing information at the sub-atomic level, using fluctuations of energy states as computer switches. The nanobots may be operating as quantum computers," he said. "If so..." He shook his head.
"Go on," said the President. Complete this nightmare.
"Well. Figure, we've got nearly seven billion people on the planet. The girl has trillions of beings inside her of extremely high intelligence. That means she has-or the mitobots have... not sure where one stops and the other begins-they have far more brain power than everyone on Earth put together."
"Damnation!" Major-General Paine growled. "That...that so-called girl...should be treated like an alien invader!" Her lips tightened to a thin pale strip. "Or, to use a quaint lil' term from the neck-o'-the-woods where I was brought up, she's kinda devil."
Dr. Freeman held his head again, mumbling something into his hands.
"What if this... organism gets a hankering to break out of the lab-go to the mall, grab a cheeseburger?" the Major-General said. "What could stop her? Not sarin-you've already told us that. Not acid. And if you blew her legs off, she'd simply grow new ones."
"Actually, it would be most imprudent to wound her." Dr. Freeman's hands over his face muffled his voice. He lifted his head, cleared his throat. "That would hasten the spread of the nanobots. They'd float on the breeze like deadly pollen-making copies of themselves."
He locked eyes with the president, gripped her arm. "Madam President, this young woman-what's inside her-makes Typhoid Mary seem like a housewife with a mild cold." He squeezed her arm painfully. "Imagine a fucking intelligent plague!"
The President blanched. Douglas Freeman, M.D., Ph.D., the White House's Chief Science Advisor, smartest man she'd ever known, had just used the f-word. In thirty years of friendship, she had never heard him curse. Not even when his wife had been killed by a drunk driver. Of everything she'd heard this morning, that scared her most.
"Nanobots could make or disassemble anything," Freeman said. "Build artifacts bigger than Manhattan. Or break down the whole biosphere-turn trees and birds and people into organic sludge."
Her heartbeat accelerated from trotting to galloping. Faces around the table wore expressions of horror, and the President tried her best not to look as panicked as she felt. Just breathe. Breathe.
"There's more to it," he said. "The properties of any object are a function of the pattern of that object's atoms and molecules. If she could learn to control the elemental patterns, she could control every attribute of matter. It blurs the line between science and magic; it's hard to imagine anything she could not do."
She gulped. "Good God!"
He nodded gravely. "Yes. I think we are talking about a new species of god."
Everyone began talking, shouting, at once.
"Ladies and Gentlemen. Order!" the President said. "Order."
The room grew quiet. "Thank you." She took a deep breath. "All right. The purpose of this emergency session is to decide how to deal with this problem. So let's decide. Quickly. I'm open to suggestions."
People began shouting again. "Order!" the President said, and for lack of a gavel, she slammed down her coffee cup on the tabletop so hard it shattered. That shut them up. "We're going to maintain order now, understand? One at a time."
Colonel Eberhard jumped in: "Clearly, the need has arisen to terminate the experiment," he said. "A thermonuclear explosion will vaporize the subject. Diamonds and all. That's a fact I do know."
"You are some piece of work, Colonel," the President said. "You want me to-what?-authorize you to take this young woman out to the middle of the desert and nuke her?"
He held her in a rock-hard gaze. "There is no other choice."
She wondered if the colonel was trembling with anger or fear. She looked hard at Dr. Freeman. His judgment she trusted completely. "Doug. What do you say?"
He took off his eyeglasses and rubbed a hand over his face. "I'm afraid I can see no alternative, Jane." He called her by name and spoke softly, as if they were the only two people in the room. "Microscopic, self-replicating, intelligent machines. As a formula for doomsday, I'd say that's close to perfection. If we don't annihilate this threat, it could bring the end of civilization, of life itself." He placed his palms flat on the polished tabletop and took a deep breath. "Therefore, I believe it is your terrible responsibility to authorize the bomb."
The President nodded slowly. She thought of her own twin daughters, both of them married now, with kids of their own. She loved kids. She was the woman president, the one who was supposed to protect life, because she was a giver of life.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said, "I want each of you to make a brief comment-I emphasize brief-followed by your recommendation; starting with General Cunningham on my left, going clockwise around the table. Please begin."
She folded her hands as if in prayer, tapped them on her chin while she listened. She remembered giving birth to her twins, Casey and Suzette. Nursing them. Such pretty babies. Such splendid women. She thought of her eight-year-old granddaughter, Brooke, who wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up.
The commentary took a half-hour. As she had expected, the assembly showed unanimous support for nuclear extermination. Some of the military staff seemed anxious to nuke the woman themselves.
The President stared at her reflection in the dark gleaming surface of the table. Jane Campion: Commander-in-Chief. Why couldn't I have gotten hit with something easy, she thought, like the Cuban Missile Crisis?
"All right. I'll authorize the nuclear explosion," she said quietly. "I just hope our ambassadors can put the proper spin on this. This stands the nuclear test ban treaty on its ear. We'll never hear the end of it from the world press."
Even beneath his uniform, she could see tension melt from Colonel Eberhard's shoulders. "Tell them the truth," he said, suddenly animated. "Part of it, anyway. Tell them we're eliminating biological warfare material that has become too hazardous to store. Explain that the only way to safely destroy it is with a nuclear blast."
"Col. Eberhard, I want you to know, I'm ordering a congressional investigation into this project," the President said.
The Attorney General spoke up. "Madam President, I don't believe that's a good idea," he said. "So far, Col. Eberhard and his team have managed to keep this whole thing ultra-secret. Hell, even most of us here didn't know about it until this meeting. And I think it must remain that way. The press would have a feeding frenzy over this. It would certainly become an international crisis, a worse predicament than it already is."
The President bristled, but realized he was right. "Okay. You've got a point. We'll keep the lid screwed tight. But I want Project Second Nature shut down-hear me, Colonel? Shut it down. I'm going to assign an independent group of overseers to make sure of that."
"Yes, ma'am," Eberhard said. "We are planning to close up shop as soon as the subject is terminated."
The President thought of her granddaughter, Ella, just turned nineteen. Ella had announced at breakfast three hours ago-a week ago?-that she had been invited to become a member of the New York Ballet Theater.
The beautiful creature in the lab, who was she? Even if she was not a human girl, she was innocent. And her mother, the dancer who had killed herself-what had been her crime? She had merely been brave or desperate enough to undergo an experimental treatment for cancer.
"Does your subject have a name?" the President said.
He looked confused.
"The young woman, dammit. Does the woman have a name?"
"Gen," Eberhard said. "Short for Genesis. The lab techs named her."
"And what was her mother's name?"
"Arista Monteverde."
President Campion had promised herself, when she chose public office, that she would never allow herself to cry in public. Politicians who shed tears are rejected as weak. Tears had helped to sink Geraldine Ferraro.
Jane Campion had promised, but a tear sneaked down her cheek before she could blink it back.
"Well, tonight," she whispered hoarsely, "I am going to say a prayer for Gen and Arista. And believe me, I'm going to ask God's forgiveness for my role in this tragedy."