By the Light of the Moon

Getting up from the desk, she said, 'You want to take over the chase while I clean up my act?'

'Nine minutes,' he said.

'Not possible. My hair has some style to it.'

***

Risking scalp burn from a too-relentless application of her hair dryer, Jilly returned to the motel bedroom, cleaned and fluffed, in forty-five minutes. She had dressed in a banana-yellow, short-sleeve, lightweight, stretchy-clingy knit sweater, white jeans tailored to prove that the big-ass curse plaguing her family had not yet resized her buttocks from cantaloupes to prize-winning pumpkins, and white athletic shoes with yellow laces to match the sweater.

She felt pretty. She hadn't cared about being pretty in weeks, even months, and she was surprised to care now, in the middle of an ongoing catastrophe, with her life in ruins and perhaps worse trials to come; yet she'd spent several minutes examining herself in the bathroom mirror, making carefully calculated adjustments to further prettify herself. She felt shameless, she felt shallow, she felt silly, but she also felt fine.

In his calming corner, Shepherd remained unaware that Jilly had returned prettier than she'd left. He no longer waved. His arms hung at his sides. He leaned forward, head bowed, the top of his skull actually pressed into the corner, in full contact with the striped wallpaper, as though to stand at any distance whatsoever from this sheltering juncture would make him vulnerable to an intolerably rich influx of sensory stimulation.

She hoped for considerably more reaction from Dylan than from Shepherd, but when he looked up from the laptop, he didn't compliment her on her appearance, didn't even smile. 'I found the bastard.'

Jilly was so invested in the expectation of a compliment that for a moment she couldn't compute the meaning of his words. 'What bastard?'

'The smiley, peanut-eating, needle-poking, car-stealing bastard, that's what bastard.'

Dylan pointed, and Jilly looked at the laptop screen, where a photograph showed their Dr. Frankenstein looking respectable and far less like a lunatic than he had appeared the previous night.

27

Lincoln Merriweather Proctor was, in this case, a name deceptive in every regard. Lincoln made you think of Abe, therefore suggesting the wisdom and the integrity of men who rose to greatness from humble origins. Merriweather added a light note, implying a calm, untroubled soul, perhaps even one capable of entertaining moments of frivolity. A proctor was a person who supervised students, mentored them, who maintained order, stability.

This Lincoln Merriweather Proctor had been a child of privilege, educated first at Yale, then at Harvard. Judging by a quick sampling of his writings, to which Dylan guided her on the laptop, Jilly decided that Proctor's soul, far from being calm, was troubled by megalomaniacal visions of the total mastery of nature followed by the complete perversion of it. His life's work – the mysterious stuff in the syringe – didn't contribute to order and stability; it fostered uncertainty, terror, even chaos.

A certifiable prodigy, Proctor had earned two Ph.D.'s – the first in molecular biology, the second in physics – by the age of twenty-six.

Assiduously courted by academia and industry, he enjoyed prestigious positions with both, although before his thirtieth birthday, he had formed his own company and had proved that his greatest genius lay in his ability to attract enormous sums of investment capital to finance his research with the hope of discovering commercial applications of tremendous economic significance.

In his writing and his public speaking, however, Proctor had not merely pursued the creation of a business empire, but had dreamed of reforming society and in fact had hoped to change the very nature of humankind. In the scientific breakthroughs of the late twentieth century and in those certain to follow in the early twenty-first, he foresaw the opportunity to perfect humanity and to create utopia.

His expressed motives – compassion for those who suffered from poverty and disease, concern for the planet's ecosystem, a desire to promote universal equality and justice – sounded admirable. Yet when she read his words, Jilly heard in her mind vast ranks of marching boots and the rattle of chains in gulags.

'From Lenin to Hitler, utopians are all the same,' Dylan agreed. 'Determined to perfect society at any cost, they destroy it instead.'

'People can't be perfected. Not any I've ever known.'

'I love the natural world, it's what I paint. You see perfection everywhere in nature. The perfect efficiency of bees in the hive. The perfect organization of an anthill, a termite colony. But what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.'

'Beautiful… and terrifying,' she suggested.

'Oh, it's a tragic beauty, all right, but that's what makes it so different from the beauty of nature, and in its own way precious. There's no tragedy in nature, only process – and therefore no triumph, either.'

He kept surprising her, this bearish man with the rubbery face, dressed like a boy in khakis and an untucked shirt.

'Anyway,' he said, 'that stuff about plugging memory cards into data ports in the brain wasn't the track Proctor's research took, but you were right when you thought it might cross his track if we kept following it.'

He reached past her to use the laptop keyboard. New material flashed on the screen.

Pointing to a key word in a headline, he said, 'This is the train Proctor's been riding for a long time.'

Reading the word above his finger, Jilly said, 'Nanotechnology.' She glanced at Shep in the corner, half expecting him to provide the definition, but he remained engaged in an apparent attempt to press his head into the corner until his skull re-formed itself to fit the wedge where wall met wall.

'Nano as a unit of measure means 'one billionth,'' Dylan revealed. 'A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. In this case, however, it means 'very small, minute.' Nanotechnology – very tiny machines, so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye.'

Jilly mulled that over, but the concept wasn't easy to digest. 'Too tiny to be seen? Machines made of what?'

He looked expectantly at her. 'Are you sure none of this rings a bell?'

'Should it?'

'Maybe,' he said mysteriously. 'Anyway, these nanomachines are constructed of just a handful of atoms.'

'Constructed by who – elves, fairies?'

'Most people remember seeing this on the news maybe a decade ago – the corporate logo that some IBM researchers built out of maybe just fifty or sixty atoms. Lined up a handful of atoms and locked them in place to spell out those three letters.'

'Hey, yeah. I was in maybe tenth grade. Our science teacher showed us a picture of it.'

'They photographed it with a camera hooked up to a powerful electron microscope.'

'But that was pretty much just a tiny sign, not a machine,' she objected. 'It didn't do anything.'

'Yeah, but platoons of researchers have been burning up a lot of development funds designing nanomachines that will work. Machines that already do.'

'Teeny-tiny fairy machines.'

'If you want to think of it that way, yes.'

'Why?'

'Eventually, when the technology's perfected, the applications are going to be incredible, virtually infinite, especially in the medical field.'