"Ah!" Hu jerked as if a dozing puppeteer had just realized he'd slackened off on the strings: "That would be the cytology samples Dr. James provided two months ago. That's how we got started," he added. "Want to see them? Come down to the lab and see what's on the slab?"
Eric nodded, and followed Hu out through the door.
Eric glanced round. The neighboring cubicles were empty: "Where is everybody?"
"Team meeting," Hu said dismissively. "Look. Let me show you the slides first, then we'll go see the real thing." "Okay." Eric stood behind him. "Take it from the top." Hu pulled up a picture and Eric blinked, taken aback for a moment. It was in shades of gray, somehow messy and biological looking. After a moment he nodded. "It's a cellular structure, isn't it?"
"Yeah! This slide was taken at 2,500 magnification on our scanning electron microscope. It's a slice from the lateral geniculate nucleus of our first test sample. See the layering here? Top two layers, the magnocellular levels? They do fast positional sensing in the visual system. Now let's zoom in a bit."
The image vanished, to be replaced by a much larger, slightly grainier picture in which individual cells were visible, blobs with tangled fibers converging on them like the branches of a dead umbrella, stripped of fabric.
"Here's an M-type gangliocyte. It's kind of big, isn't it? There are lots of dendrites going in, too. It takes signals from a whole bunch of rod and cone cells in the retina and processes them, subtracting noise. You with me so far?"
"Just about," Eric said dryly. Image convolution had been another component of his second degree, the classified one he'd sweated for back when he'd been attached to NRO. "So far this is normal, is it?"
"Normal for any dead dried human brain on a microscope slide." Hu giggled. It was beginning to grate on Eric's nerves.
"Next."
"Okay. This is where it gets interesting, when we look inside the gangliocyte."
"What- "it took Eric longer, this time, to orient himself: the picture was very grainy, a mess of weird loops and whorls, and something else-"the heck is that? Some kind of contamination-"
"Nope." Hu giggled again. This time he sounded slightly scared. "Ain't nothing like this in the textbooks."
"It's your black box, isn't it?"
"Hey, quick on the uptake! Yes, that's it. We went through three samples and twelve microscopy preparations before we figured out it wasn't an artifact. What do you think?"
Eric stared at the screen.
"What is it?"
A different voice said, "it's a Nobel Prize-or a nuclear war. Maybe both."
Eric glanced round in a hurry, to see Dr. James standing behind him. For a bureaucrat, he moved eerily quietly. "You think?"
"Cytology." James sounded bored. "These structures are in every central nervous system tissue sample retrieved so far from targeted individuals. Also in their peripheral tissues, albeit in smaller quantities. At first the pathology screener thought he was looking at some kind of weird mitochondrial malfunction-the inner membrane isn't reticulated properly-but then further screening isolated some extremely disturbing DNA sequences, and very large fullerene macromolecules doped with traces of heavy elements, iron and vanadium."
"I'm not a biologist," said Eric. "You'll have to dumb it down."
"Continue the presentation, Dr. Hu," said James, turning away.
Hu leaned back in his chair and swiveled round to face Eric. "Cells, every cell in your body, they aren't just blobs full of enzymes and DNA, they've got structures inside them, like organs, that do different things." He waved at the screen. "We can't live without them. Some of them started out as free-living bacteria, went symbiotic a long time ago. A very long time ago." Hu was staring at Dr. James's back. "Mitochondria, like this little puppy here-"he pointed at a lozenge-shaped blob on the screen"-they're the power stations that keep your cells running. This thing, the thing these JAUNT BLUE guys have, they're repurposed mitochondria. Someone's edited the mitochondrial DNA, added about two hundred enzymes we've never seen before. They look artificial, like it's a tinker-toy construction kit for goop-phase nanotechnology-well, to cut a long story short, they make buckeyballs. Carbon-sixty molecules, shaped like a soccer ball. And then they use them as a substrate to hold quantum dots-small molecules able to handle quantized charge units. Then they stick them on the inner lipid wall of the, what do you call them, the mechanosomes."
