Micro

Human beings interact with complex systems very successfully. We do it all the time. But we do it by managing them, not by claiming to understand them. Managers interact with the system: they do something, watch for the response, and then do something else in an effort to get the result they want. There is an endless iterative interaction that acknowledges we don’t know for sure what the system will do—we have to wait and see. We may have a hunch we know what will happen. We may be right much of the time. But we are never certain.

Interacting with the natural world, we are denied certainty. And always will be.

How then can young people gain experience of the natural world? Ideally, by spending some time in a rain forest—those vast, uncomfortable, alarming, and beautiful environments that so quickly knock our preconceptions aside.

NOT FINISHED

MICHAEL CRICHTON

August 28, 2008

Map of Oahu (#ulink_1658e0c6-ea40-5e51-a5c4-bbbc31fe3658)

Map of the Pali (#ulink_bfd32919-1e80-55d5-a2e3-744293e86d30)

The Seven Graduate Students (#ulink_d36a2cf1-4b9c-5189-b8c6-32ac38bfb864)

Rick Hutter Ethnobotanist studying medicines used by indigenous peoples.

Karen King Arachnologist (expert in spiders, scorpions, and mites). Skilled in martial arts.

Peter Jansen Expert in venoms and envenomation.

Erika Moll Entomologist and coleopterist (beetle expert).

Amar Singh Botanist studying plant hormones.

Jenny Linn Biochemist studying pheromones, the signaling scents used by animals and plants.

Danny Minot Doctoral student writing a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.”

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Prologue (#ulink_c3b4c578-2eea-5d70-9908-ce22c5348748)

Nanigen

9 October, 11:55 p.m.

West of Pearl Harbor, he drove along the Farrington Highway past fields of sugar cane, dark green in the moonlight. This had long been an agricultural region of Oahu, but recently it had begun to change. Off to his left, he saw the flat steel rooftops of the new Kalikimaki Industrial Park, bright silver in the surrounding green. In truth, Marcos Rodriguez knew, this wasn’t much of an industrial park; most of the buildings were warehouses, inexpensive to rent. Then there was a marine supply store, a guy who made custom surfboards, a couple of machine shops, a metalworker. That was about it.

And, of course, the reason for his visit tonight: Nanigen MicroTechnologies, a new company from the mainland, now housed in a large building at the far end of the facility.

Rodriguez turned off the highway, drove down between silent buildings. It was almost midnight; the industrial park was deserted. He parked in front of Nanigen.

From the outside, the Nanigen building appeared like all the others: a single-story steel façade with a corrugated metal roof; in effect, nothing more than an enormous shed of crude, cheap construction. Rodriguez knew there was more to it than that. Before the company erected that building, they dug a pit deep into the lava rock, and had filled it with electronic equipment. Only then did they erect this unprepossessing façade, which was now covered in fine red dust from the nearby agricultural fields.

Rodriguez put on his rubber gloves, and slipped into his pocket his digital camera and infrared filter. Then he got out of his car. He wore a security guard uniform; he pulled his cap down over his face, in case there were cameras monitoring the street. He took out the key that he had taken from the Nanigen receptionist some weeks before, after her third Blue Hawaii had put her out cold; he had had it copied, then returned it to her before she woke up.

From her he had learned that Nanigen was forty thousand square feet of labs and high-tech facilities, where she said they did advanced work in robotics. What kind of advanced work, she wasn’t sure, except the robots were extremely small. “They do some kind of research on chemicals and plants,” she said vaguely.

“You need robots for that?”

“They do, yes.” She shrugged.

But she also told him the building itself had no security: no alarm system, no motion detectors, no guards, cameras, laser beams. “Then what do you use?” he asked her. “Dogs?”

The receptionist shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just a lock on the front door. They say they don’t need any security.”

At the time, Rodriguez suspected strongly that Nanigen was a scam or a tax dodge. No high-technology company would house itself in a dusty warehouse, far from downtown Honolulu and the university, from which all high-tech companies drew. If Nanigen was way out here, they must have something to hide.

The client thought so, too. That’s why Rodriguez had been hired in the first place. Truth be told, investigating high-tech corporations wasn’t his usual line of work. Mostly he got calls from lawyers, asking him to photograph visiting husbands on Waikiki cheating on their wives. And in this case, too, he had been hired by a local lawyer, Willy Fong. But Willy wasn’t the client, and he wouldn’t say who was.

Rodriguez had his suspicions. Nanigen had supposedly spent millions of dollars on electronics from Shanghai and Osaka. Some of those suppliers probably wanted to know what was being done with their products. “Is that who it is, Willy? The Chinese or the Japanese?”

Willy Fong shrugged. “You know I can’t say, Marcos.”

“But it makes no sense,” Rodriguez had said. “The place got no security, your clients can pick the lock and walk in any night and see for themselves. They don’t need me.”

“You talking yourself out of a job?”

“I just want to know what this is about.”

“They want you to go and find out what’s in that building, and bring them some pictures. That’s all.”

“I don’t like it. I think it’s a scam.”

“Probably is.”

Willy gave him a tired look as if to say, But what do you care? “At least nobody’s going to get up from the dinner table and hit you in the mouth.”

“True.”

Willy pushed back his chair, folded his arms over his ample belly. “So tell me, Marcos. Are you going, or what?”

Now, walking toward the front door at midnight, Rodriguez felt suddenly nervous. They don’t need any security. What the hell did that mean? In this day and age, everybody had security—lots of security—especially around Honolulu. You had no choice.

There were no windows on the building, just a single metal door. Next to it, a sign: NANIGEN MICROTECHNOLOGIES, INC. And beneath it, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door clicked open.

Too easy, he thought, as he glanced back at the empty street, and slipped inside.

Night lights illuminated a glass-walled entry area, receptionist’s desk, and a waiting area with couches, magazines, and company literature. Rodriguez flicked on his flashlight, moved to the hallway beyond. At the end of the hallway were two doors; he went through the first, and came into a new hallway, with glass walls. There were laboratories on both sides, long black benches with lots of equipment, stacks of bottles on the shelves above. Every dozen yards there was a humming stainless refrigerator and something that looked like a washing machine.

Cluttered bulletin boards, Post-its on the refrigerator, whiteboards with scribbled formulas—the general appearance seemed messy, but Rodriguez had the overwhelming sense that this company was real; that Nanigen was actually doing scientific work here. What did they need robots for?

And then he saw the robots, but they were damned strange: boxy silver metal contraptions, with mechanical arms and treads and appendages; they looked like what they send to Mars. They were various sizes and shapes: some the size of a shoebox, and others much bigger. Then he noticed that beside each one was a smaller version of the same robot. And beside that was a still smaller version. Eventually they were the size of a thumbnail: tiny, highly detailed. The workbenches had huge magnifying glasses so the workers could see the robots. But he wondered how they could build anything so small.