The Flinkwater Factor (13 page)

33

Moles

Flinkwater High School is next door to the ACPOD campus. In the morning the ACPOD corporate tower sends its long, ominous shadow creeping over the school building. Mrs. Singh, my English teacher, claims that's a metaphor, but I attribute it to plain old bad planning.

Since I had been delayed by Agent Ffelps, I wasn't sure if I'd arrived before Billy. I tried the front door. It was unlocked. I stepped inside.

I had never before been in the school when it wasn't full of students. It was eerily empty, and not at all romantic. I stood there for a few seconds, undecided. Should I wait for Billy, or go straight to the nanolab? The door opened behind me, and I think my heart stopped. I spun around. It was Billy.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“I'm fine. You just startled me.”

He cocked his head. “You look different.”

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I smiled and said, “Thank you.”

“Your lips are kind of red.”

“That's called lipstick.”

“Oh. How come you're wearing lipstick?”

“Because I'm a girl?”

“Oh,” he said, blinking in apparent astonishment.

This first-kiss business was going to be more work than I'd thought.

“So  . . . you said something about grey goo?” I asked.

“I was kidding,” he said. “Professor Little called. He said he needed an assistant to help him with a self-replicating nanobot he was designing. He was pretty excited.”

“But  . . . isn't that kind of dangerous? Like, turn-the-planet-into-a-giant-ball-of-grey-goo dangerous?”

“I'm sure the professor has plenty of safety protocols in place to prevent
that
from happening.”

“We're talking about a teacher who once showed up for class wearing SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas,” I said doubtfully. “Why did he call you, anyway?”

“We've been working on some things.”

“Grey goo things?”

“Well  . . . not exactly. You know he's been working on some antitumor nanotech, right?”

I didn't, but I nodded.

“He—we, actually—came up with a variation on a self-replicator that attacked a certain kind of growth. Specifically, melanocytic nevi.”

“Melano  . . . what?”

“Moles.”

“I see,” I said.

34

In the Dark

Professor Lancaster Little, our nanotech teacher and a researcher for ACPOD, was one of the ugliest human beings I had ever met. Physically, I mean. As a person, Professor Little was quite nice—albeit a tad absentminded. But he had several large, unfortunately positioned moles. The biggest one was the size and color of a grape, and it was situated on the tip of his nose. It was impossible to look at anything else. Even if you were able to tear your eyes away from that supermole, they would land on one of the other moles, like the double mole on his chin, or the one hanging off his left eyelid, or the constella­tion of moles decorating the top of his mostly bald head.

Don't get me wrong, I
liked
Professor Little. I just had a really hard time
looking
at him. It
made perfect sense that he would try to develop some antimole nanotech.

“The professor said he had a breakthrough,” Billy said as we walked down the hallway. “He asked me to stop by the nanolab.”

“To help him get rid of his moles?” I said, still trying to wrap my head around the idea.

“I don't think we're quite to that point yet. The nanobots haven't been tested.”

“So we're not about to perish in a sea of grey goo?”

“Well, no. At least I don't think so.”

I figured that once we had to look at Professor Little's face it would kill any chance of romance, so as we were passing by the school theater, I moved closer to Billy.

“Listen,” I whispered.

“Why?” he said. His voice boomed through the hallway.

“Shhh!”

“What? There's nobody here.”

“I know. It's kind of scary.” I grabbed his hand.

“Ouch,” he said.

“Ouch?”

“Your fingers are digging into me.”

Boys are weird.

I said, “You know what would be exciting?”

“A self-replicating nanobot?”

“No. The theater. With nobody in it. Except us.”

“Why would that be exciting?”

“It just would.” I pulled him toward the theater entrance. Rather to my surprise, he followed. I pushed the door open and we stepped inside. The door swung shut behind us.

It was completely, totally black.

“Wow,” Billy said. “This
is
cool!”

What I had in mind: the two of us, sitting cozily in an empty theater, looking up at the empty stage, with no sound but our own breathing. I thought it would be exciting in a romantic sort of way.

Utter, mind-numbing blackness is not romantic.

“I don't like this,” I said darkly.

“Then why did you drag me in here?”

“Never mind.” I backed up until my butt hit the door and pushed back through into the hallway. “Come on,” I said. “Grey goo awaits.”

35

N
anobots

The Flinkwater High School nanotech laboratory was not a serious ACPOD-level research facility, but it was advanced way beyond an Easy-Bake Oven and a couple of test tubes. We had a sterile build-box with a digital electron microscope, and a set of computer-assisted hydrogen-fiber waldoes that could manipulate matter on a near-molecular level.

“Why is the professor working here at the school?” I asked. “Doesn't he have access to the ACPOD labs?”

“He quit ACPOD a few months ago,” Billy said. “He said he didn't like what they were doing to animals over in Area Fifty-One.”

The door to the nanolab was locked, as usual. Billy pressed the buzzer. Nobody answered.

“That's strange,” Billy said. “He told me he'd
be here.” He pulled something out of his pocket. It looked like a deck of miniature playing cards.

“What are those for?” I asked.

“Key cards,” he said as he sorted through them.

“That's a lot of key cards.”

“You never know when you might have to open something. This one is the key to my dad's office. And this one is the bank.”

“The
bank
?”

“Yeah. Here's the key to the police station, and this one's the master key for all the school locks. Watch.”

He swiped the key across the sensor. The nanolab door opened with a sucking, hissing sound. The high school nanotech lab might not be a serious research facility, but it still had some serious safety features—like negative air pressure and a pneumatically sealed door—to ensure that no rogue nanobots escaped.

Inside the lab the air felt still and dead.

“Professor Little?” Billy called out.

Silence.

“Weird.”

The build-box display was turned on. Billy sat down at the controls and zoomed in on the image—a glass petri dish containing a reddish, gooey-­looking ball no larger than a pea.

The build-box controller had a seat large
enough to accommodate two people, like a love seat, only without the arms, back, and cushions. Okay, like a bench. I sat down beside Billy. Our shoulders were touching. He didn't seem to notice.

He zoomed in some more. “Look, they're moving.”

The surface of the ball of red goo was shifting and writhing in a most unsettling way.

“Those are nanobots?” I asked.

“Yeah. Probably about a million of them.”

“How many would it take to remove a mole?”

“In theory, only one, because they're self-­replicating. The idea is that you put a smear of bots on a mole. The bots recognize the abnormal flesh and start to absorb it while reproducing themselves. When they run out of mole flesh, the bots draw the normal skin together, seal it, shut themselves down, then drop off like a scab.”

“Eww!”

“The professor said he was having trouble getting the bots to turn themselves off. I wonder where he is.”

“He probably forgot you were coming and went home. He
is
a little absentminded.”

Billy turned the monitor up to maximum magni­fication so that we could see the individual bots. Now they looked like a cluster of red ants crawling over each other. “They're pretty active,” he said.

I leaned closer to him, pressing my shoulder against his. “What are they doing?”

“My guess is there's some energy source in the middle of that blob. Pretty soon they'll run out of food and stop moving.”

“That's amazing,” I said, trying to make my voice husky.

He looked at me, then drew back and said, “Do you have a cold?”

“No!”

“Your voice sounds funny.”

I batted my eyes. “Billy  . . . do you remember the time we spent here last spring?”

He looked blank.

“When we built the nanobot that spun around all on its own?”

“Oh!” His eyes lit up. “That was fun. You were there?”

“I was your lab partner!”

“Oh.”

I pressed closer to him. “You're the smartest boy I know.”

“Really?” He liked that. I could tell. I licked my lips and ran my hand through my hair and batted my eyes some more. Maybe that was too much, but I wanted to be sure he was thinking about me and not about nanobots. I tipped my head and stared into his eyes. His pupils had gotten bigger. I could smell
his breath—a little peanut-buttery, but not bad.

It was working. I had hypnotized him with my feminine charms. Our faces were only about ten inches apart. Slowly, dreamlike, our lips moved closer—

“Nnngh! Urr! Gack!”

Billy and I flew apart as if the air between us had exploded.

“Hgnak! Heek! Awwng!”

We jumped to our feet and looked around wildly, searching for the source of the horrible choking, gasping noises.

“Awwwwwnnnnnnnnn!”
A groaning, gasping ginormity of a moan, like the last drawn-out gasp of a dying ogre. My heart had stopped—literally, I think—and every hair on my body was quivering.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered.

Billy, eyes wide, nodded.