Invasive (10 page)

“Your guy, Agent Copper, has already sent them ahead,” Kit says. She's got a hint of a Jersey accent. “I'll be honest: those look like our markers.”

Nancy scowls. “
Looks like
our markers doesn't mean they
are
.”

“Are they proprietary?” Hannah asks.

“They are,” Nancy answers.

“Could they be stolen, then?”

“Impossible.”

“Im
probable,
” Will says. “But that's not the same as impossible. Wouldn't take much to sneak.” To Hannah, he says with a small smirk, “We do not hire dummies, after all. A lot of those people sitting at those tables graduated from some of the best programs in the country—in the
world
.”

After dinner, Hannah heads to the dorm they assign her and starts unpacking her bag.

“Hey, dorm buddy,” says a voice from the doorway. It's Kit.

“I can ask David if he can give me another bunk—”

“Psssh.” Kit waves her off, then starts kicking off her Tevas. “My tiny messy bunk room is
your
tiny messy bunk room. A minor inconvenience that will surely reveal itself to be an unplanned delight. Besides, you're out in a couple days, right? Out with the off-islanders?”

“I am.” A reminder:
I am on a time limit.

“Good.”

That word. A bit too sharp. A bit too happy-to-see-Hannah-go.

And it's then that Hannah understands why she's in a bunk and not on her own. It's not just a space issue. Here, Kit can keep an eye on her. The question floats to the fore of her mind:
What do they have to hide?

“Besides,” Kit says, “that way you'll beat the weather.”

“Captain Dan said something about that. What weather?”

Kit stands there, arms crossed. “It's the start of typhoon season in these parts, so we get some whopper storms out here.”

Just then, David Hamasaki pops his head in. “Kit, can we talk?”

“Sure,” Kit says.

The two of them give Hannah a look before they exit. She decides now is a good time to ask: “David? Real quick. I know my cell doesn't have a signal, but—”

“We have three satphones, but they float around, so you'll have to track them down. Sometimes they're in the lab?” The lab to which she does not have access, she reminds herself.

“How do I contact someone off-island?”

“Try yelling really loud,” Kit says.

And then the two of them are gone, leaving Hannah feeling all the more alone on an island with no friends and little contact. She gets suddenly dizzy, as if plagued by vertigo, even though she's standing here on solid ground. Hannah feels immediately small: this island is nothing more than a speck on a map surrounded by blue, and she is just a speck upon that speck.

Hannah has to stand outside with the phone. Some bubbles have exits at the back (in case there's a fire), and David pointed her to one of the doors placed just before the bathrooms.

Now she stands under a canopy of palms and calls her mother. It's almost four in the morning back in Ohio, but Mom barely sleeps.

But the phone just rings and rings. Hannah leaves a message: “Mom. It's me. Everything's fine. I'm on an island. I'll call you.” She thinks of adding
Love you,
but she holds back.

Then she takes a chance and dials Hollis.

He's awake. Either up early or never went to bed. “Stander. You kicking back on a beach somewhere, sipping a Mai Tai?”

“Oh, sure. Just like spring break. I won the wet T-shirt contest.” She clenches her jaw and says, “I'm just checking in, letting you know I got here all right. I haven't gotten too deep yet. But nobody here seems to think it's even
possible
to have engineered those ants in the way that they are.”

“And do you believe them?”

“I believe some of them believe that. But somehow, those ants exist, and it's not by divine intervention. How are things on your end?”

“Nothing here yet. No movement on the body ID. Techs have gone through a little over half the skin samples, though. Maybe get a print by this time tomorrow if we're lucky.”

“And if we're not?”

“Then it's all down to you, Stander. Just gimme a reason to send a team to Hawaii to knock on Einar Geirsson's door.”

“Will do.”

“One more thing, Stander.”

“What's that?”

“Don't forget that one of those people you're with could be a murderer.”

She flinches. “Thanks for that reminder.”

“Just doing my part of the job.”

K
it lies facedown on her bed. She's snoring in a deep bass rumble.

Hannah is awake. Eyes open. An orange ring of light creeps in around the plastic shutters in the porthole window. She fumbles for her watch. Six in the morning.

She sighs. She knows how lying there awake will end: with her plunging into the icy waters of her own mind. A willful, anxious descent.

She wills herself out of the bed.

Once showered, she gets dressed—sensible white T-shirt, jeans—and she smells it: coffee.

Adjacent to the rec room is the little kitchen, and there's Will Galassi. He's got a Bunsen burner out and it's hissing blue flame under the bell of an onion-shaped glass container. Water bubbles and then rises up into a glass hopper above it. He sees her and gives her a small grin. “Early riser, too?”

“Not usually
this
early,” she says. “Jet lag.”

“Ah. Jet lag's a monkey on your back.” He begins to pour the coffee. “You want?”

“I don't just want it, I need it.”

“I can relate.” He pours the both of them cups.

His coffee makes her normal Starbucks brew taste like the charcoal filter you'd use in a freshwater aquarium. She makes an
ahhh
sound.

“Welcome to my world: Tahitian vanilla and small-batch homebrew cocktail bitters and dragon tongue beans.” He grins. “Since we're both up, would you care for a tour of our work? Wanna go see some bugs?”

The lab is huge: two pods married together. A pair of conjoined bubbles. It's easy for Hannah to see how a couple of dozen people could be in here at a given time, all of them working side by side. Right now, there's only a young woman with bright eyes and freckles as big as ladybugs. It looks like she's testing equipment.

Everything in the lab is clean and spartan. All the equipment looks new—some of it cutting edge. Hannah sees a genetic piezoelectric microdispensing station, a handful of 3-D printers, a massive thermal cycler against the back wall. One wall has a series of thin robotic arms mounted to the counters. Two of them end not in hands but with what look like repeating pipettes.

Will holds up a pair of black goggles affixed to a white helmet, which is itself connected to a series of cables. “Oculus Rift VR. We're also getting a HoloLens in here. We take the microscopic space and make it macro—so we can literally operate in that space. Using those arms.” He gestures toward the robotic limbs.

“Impressive,” Hannah says, and it is. But she's wondering: How does this help her solve a murder?

Will unlocks another set of double doors with his wristband and leads her through a small collapsible hallway to another staging room, this one with three doors. “Choose a door.”

Hannah points to the leftmost door.

“The left door. The sinister door. The word
sinister
comes from
sinistra
in the Latin, which means—”

“Left, yes, I know.” She gestures for him to open the door. He does, and she sidles through and—

“Hey!” Barry says, wheeling around at the intrusion. He shakes a jar of what look like stinkbugs at them, and it sounds like the rattling of some strange, alien musical instrument. “Holy crap, guys, come on in, come on in. People don't visit here very often.” He says that last sentence like he's surprised.

The room is a smaller bubble: utilitarian and plain, with metal
shelves forming a horseshoe shape against the curvature of the walls. On those structures, Hannah sees opaque plastic bins big and small. Dark mass fills them and she already understands what she's seeing: containers brimming with dead bugs. Another doorway sits at the end of the room, closed.

Near Barry's hip is a little table with tiny plastic cups. In each of those cups, Hannah sees more stinkbugs. The cups are notated with marked numbers in black ink, one through six.

“You guys wanna do a taste test?” Barry asks.

“I'm good,” she answers. “I still need breakfast and I'm hoping this isn't it.” Barry laughs at that, because he seems to laugh at everything, until she adds, “So, this is part of Einar's vision, huh?”

That's when Barry gets deadly serious. “Don't joke. People joke, but this is no joke. The world is home to a lot of starving people. Famine's the real deal. Global warming makes it worse, and then we're losing pollinators, so finding a new source of protein is a real important struggle. Insects are cheap, sustainable, and, if I do my job right, tasty.”

“I wasn't trying to poke fun,” Hannah says. “I apologize if I came across that way. I just mean—it's a room full of dead bugs. We think the future is robots and hovercars and maybe it's really here.”

“It is,” Barry says. “It really is.” But then he snaps out of super-serious mode. “You think the dead bugs are cool, you oughta check out the live ones—” He starts to reach for the door just past the shelves, but Will stops him.

“Barry, I'm going to take her to the next rooms.”

Barry nods. “Those guys get to do the rock-star work, you'll see. It's really something!” He smiles at her, but Will is already leaving and Hannah has to hurry to catch up.

As they head back into the room with the three doors, she says, “So. Einar.”

“What about Einar?”

“First, you all call him Einar.”

“He asks that we call him by his first name.”

“He's an easy boss, then?”

Will smiles and chuckles softly. “That would not be how anyone describes him. Einar is incredibly serious and driven. He honestly wants to save the world. And that means he runs us pretty hard. Work weekends. Little vacation.”

“I read he expects parents of newborns to take as little time off as they are legally afforded.”

“That remains a controversial point, but it's true.”

“I want to talk to him. They told me I likely wouldn't be able to, but . . .”

“He doesn't come here except for quarterly reviews, where we have to do our song and dance to demonstrate our progress. That was just a few weeks ago. He won't come back soon, and who even knows where he is in the world right now? Sorry to disappoint.” He directs her through the next door.

When she steps through, she instantly
feels
the sound vibrating her back teeth. It goes all the way through her, from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. A thrumming hum that almost makes her dizzy.

This bubble room has been specially made—
printed,
she reminds herself—to accommodate hives of honeybees. Long channels of translucent material run from floor to ceiling. The walls squirm: thousands of bees vibrating, dancing, dipping and diving, and pulling themselves back out of the hexagonal honeycomb chambers. She heads over to one, pressing her hands against it: the vibrations carry all the way through her palms to her elbows. Little white blobs hide within the bee throng:
baby bees,
she thinks. Larvae. Along the edges of the glass and behind all the insects are combs of gooey gold. Honey.

Will walks next to her, reaches down below one of the windows, and pulls out a clear plastic drawer like a file box. Inside, Hannah sees racks and rows of honeycombs. Bees dancing. Honey oozing. A memory hits her like a splash of water:
Running behind one of the generator sheds, stepping on a hole, yellow jacket wasps pouring out,
darting in and stinging her, three dozen stings, two weeks of misery, and Mom told her she still had to do her chores . . .

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yes. Yeah.” Hannah forces the memory away. “So, how does all this work? Bees make honey from pollen. Where are they getting it?”

“On the other side—I can take you out there eventually—you walk around and you'll see these tubes, these plastic tubes that open up to the air so that the bees can go to the flowers. We've nearby guava, pineapple, ohi'a lehua, and so on. Ajay harvests the honey. There's some in the kitchen if you want a taste.”

“What's the end game here?”

“With the bees? To make a stronger honeybee. A bee with a stronger immune system against varroa mites and other parasites. Or, alternatively, to dampen the aggressive response of African honeybees.” Hannah knows that African honeybees evolved in an area where their honey reserves were persistently plundered by other animals, and so they developed a fast, brutal response. They're hard to domesticate in terms of food production.

“Any luck so far?”

“Not really. We've gotten some foreign genes into queens, but while we've had the
Apis mellifera
genome cracked for well over a decade now, we still haven't puzzled out the intricacy therein. Bees' immune response is coded in there, but how that interacts with brood disease or mites, we just don't know. You want to go see the ants?”

“I do.”

Back out of the buzzing, humming room. Toward the other door. But Will stops before he opens it. “I have a confession,” he says. “I'm a fan.”

“A fan of . . . Charlize Theron? The X-Men? Mumford & Sons?”

“You. I'm a fan of yours.”

Hannah takes a half step back. “I don't follow.”

“I read your work in
Wired
. I watched your TED talk—”

“TEDx.”

“And some of your university talks are on YouTube. It's insightful stuff. And it aligns with things I already believe, which, admittedly, means I'm leaning into confirmation bias. But it's smart. You're smart.”

The feeling that goes through Hannah is a strange one: she's honored and pleased. And yet, it still feels creepy. Despite being in the public realm, her work has always been small and—to her, at least—unexceptional. And oddly, curiously, paradoxically private. “Thank you” is all she can muster.

“I think about the future a lot,” Will says. He leans backward without looking and taps his wristband against the lock. “Let's see some ants.”

The door hisses open. Hannah's breath is snatched away by the dueling forces of wonder and fear. The whole room is one big ant colony.

In the other bubbles, the walls curve down with little adornment. In this pod, the walls are unseen, hidden behind what Hannah guesses is about six inches of dirt and then another clear plastic layer. In that dirt an ant colony works. All around her. Left, right, above her head. It exists in all directions but down: her feet still stand on the textured floor common to each pod within Arca Labs.

She feels ants crawling over her skin—
formication
. Tingling, tickling, an invisible sensation but no less real. Minimovies of fear play out in her mind: the plastic suddenly cracking as the colony crashes down upon her, dirt in her eyes, ants in her hair, her ears, her nose—

She takes a sharp breath.
Stop it, Hannah. Get it together.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Will asks.

“It is.” She asserts that for herself and for her own well-being. And in truth it really is a beautiful thing. This room is a feat of engineering, entomology, and even art. It feels like being underground. The sophistication of the ant colony is laid bare: the labyrinth they've built, the ants of different sizes and different
purposes moving silently through the passages in an almost arterial movement. The entire nest gives the sense of a circulatory system: the churning of life through tunnels and chambers. “What species is this?” she asks.

“
Pogonomyrmex badius.
Florida harvester ant.”

Harvester ant. She hears Ez's voice in her head:
The venom in a harvester ant is the most toxic in the insect world.
Didn't the venom of the modified ants closely resemble that of the harvester? She asks carefully, “Those are highly venomous, right? The harvester ants.”

“Hm? They do have a very painful attack—the sting is vicious. I've gotten hit and it swells, grows hot, starts to secrete fluid. Painful for a few days. Though the really venomous ones are the Maricopa harvesters. And even though it hurts, these little guys aren't aggressive. You have to
really
provoke one to get a sting.”

She steps closer to the plastic—closer to the ants. Behind the clear wall, they dance through their maze. She spies them carrying little bits of something to a small, dead-end chamber.
Seeds,
she thinks.

“That's one of their granaries,” Will says, standing suddenly and unexpectedly near her. She didn't even sense him approach.
I'm off my game,
she thinks. Must be the jet lag. “They're seed collectors. That's what they harvest.” He bends one knee and leans down to open a drawer just below the colony, pulls out a magnifying glass—a jeweler's lens—and presses it against the plastic. “Here, take a look through. You'll get a better glimpse.”

Hannah takes the lens, presses it against the plastic, gives a look. In the tunnels, the ants move fast—so she repositions herself over the granary instead. There, little red ants carry seeds into the storage area. The movement is slower and easier to see. “They seem to have seeds near their mouths but not
in
their mouths.”