The X-Files: Antibodies (14 page)

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chip researcher hiding beneath the disguise. “Very tiny self-replicating machines small enough to work inside a human cell, versatile enough to assemble just about
anything
. . . and smart enough to know what they’re doing.”

Mulder looked at Scully. “Big things come in small packages.”

Darin’s eyes shone with fervor. “Because each nanomachine is so small, it can move its parts very rapidly—think of a hummingbird’s wings vibrating. A swarm of nanomachines could scour through a pile of rubble or a tank of seawater and separate out every single atom of gold, platinum, or silver and sort them into convenient bins, all in total silence, with no waste and no unsightly mess.”

Scully’s brow furrowed. “And this was your DyMar work?”

“I started long before that,” Darin said. “But David and I took our ideas in even more exciting directions. Inside a human body, nano-scouts could do the same work as white corpuscles do in fighting diseases, bacteria, and viruses. But unlike white corpuscles, these nano-doctors can also inspect DNA strands, find any individual cell that turns cancerous, then reprogram the DNA, fixing any errors and mutations they find. What if we could succeed in creating infinitesimal devices that can be injected into a body to act as ‘biological policemen’—submicroscopic robots that seek out and repair damage on a cellular level?”

“A cure for cancer,” Mulder said.

“And everything else.”

Scully flashed him a somewhat skeptical look.

“Mr. Kennessy, I’ve read some speculative pieces in popular science magazines, but certainly nothing that would suggest we are within decades of having such a breakthrough in nanotechnology.”

“Progress is often closer than you think,” he said.

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“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin used litho-graphic techniques to produce a train of gears a tenth of a millimeter across. Engineers at AT&T Bell Laboratories created semiconductors out of clusters containing only six to twelve atoms at a time. Using scanning tunneling microscopy, scientists at the IBM

Almaden Research Center drew a complete map of Earth’s western hemisphere only a fiftieth the diame-ter of a human hair.”

“But there must be a limit to how small we can physically manipulate tools and circuit paths,” Mulder said.

The dogs set up a louder barking, and the man with the beard went over to shush them. Darin Kennessy frowned, distracted, as if torn by his need to hide and deny all his technological breakthroughs and his clear passion for the work he had abandoned.

“That’s only tackling the problem from one direction. Between David and myself, we also started to build from the bottom up. Self-assembly, the way nature does it. Researchers at Harvard have made use of amino acids and proteins as templates for new structures smaller than the size of a cell, for instance.

“With our combined expertise in silicon micro-miniaturization techniques and biological self-assembly, we tried to match up those advances to yield a sudden breakthrough.”

“And did you?”

“Maybe. It seemed to be working very well, up until the time I abandoned it. I suspect my fool brother continued pushing, playing with fire.”

“So why did you leave your research, if it was so promising?”

“There’s a dark side, Agent Mulder,” Darin continued, glancing over at the other survivalists. “Mistakes happen. Researchers usually screw up half a dozen times before they achieve success—it’s just part of the 118

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learning process. The question is, can we afford that learning process with nanotechnology?”

The woman with the shotgun grumbled, but kept her direct comments to herself.

“Just suppose one of our first nanomachines—a simple one, without fail-safe programming—happens to escape from the lab,” Darin said. “If this one goes about copying itself, and each copy builds more copies, in about ten hours there would be sixty-eight billion nanomachines. In less than two days, the run-away nanomachines could take apart the entire Earth—
working one molecule at a time
! Two days, from beginning to end. Think of the last time you saw any government make a decision that fast, even in an emergency.”

No wonder Kennessy’s research was so threatening to people in well-established circles of power, Mulder realized. No wonder they might be trying to suppress it, at all costs.

“But you left DyMar before you reached a point where you could release your findings?” Scully asked.

“Nobody was ever going to release our findings,”

Darin said, his voice dripping with scorn. “I knew it would never be made available to society. David made noises about going public, releasing the results of our first tests with lab rats and small animals, but I always talked him out of it, and so did our assistant, Jeremy Dorman.” He drew a deep breath. “I guess he must have come too close, if those people felt they finally had to burn down the lab facility and destroy all our records.”

“Patrice and Jody aren’t with you, are they?”

Scully said, confirming her suspicions. “Do you know where they are?”

Darin snorted. “No, we went our separate ways. I haven’t spoken to any of them since I came out here to join the camp.” He gestured to the dogs, the guard antibodies

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shacks, the razor wire. “This wouldn’t be scenic enough for them.”

“But you are Jody’s uncle,” Mulder said.

“The only person that kid spent time with was Jeremy Dorman. He was the closest thing to a real uncle the boy had.”

“He was also killed in the DyMar fire,” Scully said.

“He was low man on the totem pole,” Darin Kennessy said, “but he knew how to pull the business deals. He got us our initial funding and kept it coming. When I left to come out here, I think he was perfectly happy to step into my shoes, working with David.”

Darin frowned. “But I had nothing more to do with them, not then and not now.” He seemed deeply troubled, as if the news of his brother’s death was just now breaking through his consciousness. “We used to be close, used to spend time out in the deep woods.”

“Where?” Mulder asked.

“Patrice designed a little cabin for me, just to get away from it all.”

Scully looked at Mulder, than at Darin. “Sir, could you tell us how we could locate the cabin?”

Darin frowned again, looking skittish and uneasy.

“It’s up near Colvain, off on some winding fire roads.”

“Here’s my card,” Mulder said. “In case they do show up or you learn anything.”

Darin frowned at him. “We don’t have any phones here.”

Scully grabbed Mulder’s sleeve. “Thank you for your time.”

“Be careful of the minefield,” the man with the beard warned.

“We’ll watch our step,” Scully said.

Feeling tired and sweaty, Mulder was nonetheless excited by the information they had learned.

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They made their way back through the thick woods past the dozens of warning signs to where they had parked their car at the edge of the road.

Scully couldn’t believe how the survivalists lived.

“Some people will do anything to survive,” she muttered.

TWENTY

Kennessys’ Cabin

Coast Range, Oregon

Thursday, 11:47 P.M.

On hearing Jody’s cry, Patrice awoke from a X restless sleep. She sat up in her narrow cot in the cabin’s single back bedroom, throwing aside the musty-smelling blankets.

“Jody!”

The cabin was dark and too silent—until the dog woofed, once. She blinked the disorientation of sleep away and brushed mussed strawberry blond hair away from her eyes. She struggled free of the last tangles of blankets, as if they were a restraining net trying to keep her from the boy. He needed her.

On her way to the main room, she stumbled into an old wooden chair, hurt her foot as she kicked it away, then plunged blindly ahead into the darkness.

“Jody!”

The moonlight gave just enough silvery light to guide her way once she got her bearings. On the sofa in the main room, she saw her boy lying in a sweat.

The last embers of their fire in the hearth glowed red-orange, providing more wood smell than heat. After dark, no one should have been able to see the smoke.

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For a moment the smoldering embers reminded her of the DyMar fire, where her husband had died in the raging flames. She shuddered at the thought, the reminder of the violence. David had been ambitious and impulsive and perhaps he had taken ill-advised risks. But David had believed passionately in his research, and he had tried to do his best.

Now he had died for his discoveries . . . and Jody had lost his father.

Vader sat erect close to Jody, a black guardian snuffling the boy’s chest in concern. Seeing Patrice, Vader’s tail thumped on the hardwood floor next to where one of the pillows had fallen. The black Lab pushed his muzzle into the blankets, whining.

Jody moaned and made another frightened sound.

Patrice stopped, looking down at her son. Vader stared back up with his liquid brown eyes, emitting another whine, as if asking why she didn’t do anything.

But she let Jody sleep.

Nightmares again.

Several times in the past week, Jody had awakened in the isolated and silent cabin, frightened and lost. Since the start of their desperate flight, he’d had good reason for nightmares. But was it his fear that brought on the dreams . . . or something else?

Patrice knelt down, and Vader squirmed with energy, pushing his nose against her side, anxious for her to reassure him. She patted him on the head, thumping hard, just the way he had always liked it.

“It’s okay, Vader,” she said, attempting to soothe herself more than the dog.

With the flat of her palm, she touched Jody’s forehead, feeling the heat. The boy stirred, and she wondered if she should wake him. His body was a war zone, a cellular battlefield. Though David had repeatedly denied what he had done, she knew full well what caused the fever.

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Sometimes Patrice wondered if her son would be better off dead after all—and then she hated herself for even thinking such things. . . .

Vader padded across the floor toward the fireplace, nosed around the base of a faded overstuffed chair, and came back to Jody’s bedside with a slobber-soggy tennis ball in his jaws. He wanted to play, as if convinced that would make everything all right.

Patrice frowned at Vader, turning away from the sofa. “You’ve got so damned much energy, you know that?”

Vader whined, then chewed on the tennis ball.

She remembered sitting at home in their living room, back in the old suburban house in Tigard—now trashed and ransacked—with David. Jody, in extreme pain from his cancer, had soaked in a hot, hot bath, taken his prescription painkillers, and gone to bed early, leaving his parents alone.

Vader didn’t want to settle down, though, and if his boy wouldn’t play, then he would pester the adults. David halfheartedly played tug-of-war with the black Lab, while Patrice watched with a mixture of uneasiness and fascination. The family dog was twelve years old already, the same age as Jody, and he shouldn’t have been nearly so frisky.

“Vader’s like a puppy again,” Patrice said.

Previously, the black Lab had settled into a middle-aged routine of sleeping most of the time, except for a lot of licking and tail-wagging to greet them every day when they came home. But lately the dog had been more energetic and playful than he had been in years.

“I wonder what happened to him,” she said.

David’s grin, his short dark hair, and his heavy eyebrows made him look dashing. “Nothing.”

Patrice sat up and pulled her hand away from him. “Did you take Vader into your lab again? What did you do to him?” She raised her voice, and the 124

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words came out with cold anger. “What did you do to him!”

Vader dropped the pull-toy in his jaws, staring at her as if she had gone insane. What business did she have yelling when they were trying to play?

David looked at her, hard. He raised his eyebrows in an expression of sincerity. “I didn’t do anything. Honest.”

With a woof, Vader lunged back with the pull-toy again, wagging his tail and growling as he dug his paws into the carpet. David fought back, leaning against the sofa to gain more leverage. “Just look at him! How can you think anything’s wrong?”

But in their years of marriage, Patrice had learned one thing, and she had learned to hate it. She could always tell when David was lying. . . .

Her husband had been focused on his research, bulldozing ahead and ignoring regulations and restric-tions. He didn’t consult with her on many things, just barged along, doing what he insisted was right. That was just the way David Kennessy did things.

He had been too focused, too involved in his work to take note of the suspicious occurrences at DyMar until it was too late. She herself had noticed things, people watching their house at night, keeping an eye on her when she was out with David, odd clicks on the phone line . . . but David had brushed her worries aside. Such a brilliant man, yet so oblivious. At the last moment, at least, he had called her, warned her.

She had grabbed Jody and run, even as the protesters burned down the DyMar facility, trapping her husband in the inferno with Jeremy; she barely made it into hiding here with her son. Her
healthy
son.

On the sofa, Jody fell into a more restful sleep. His temperature remained high, but Patrice knew she could do nothing about that. She tucked the blankets around him again, brushed straight the sweat-sticky bangs across his forehead.

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Vader let the tennis ball thump on the floor, giving up on the possibility of play. With a heavy sigh, the dog turned three times in a circle in front of the sofa, then slumped into a comfortable position, guard-ing his boy. He let out a long, heavy animal sigh.

Comforted by the dog’s devotion, Patrice wandered back to her cot, glad she hadn’t awakened her son after all. At least she hadn’t switched on any lights . . . lights that could have been seen out in the darkness.