Annihilation: Origins and Endings (Decimation Book 3) by Richard T. Burke

Author:Richard T. Burke [Burke, Richard T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: RJNE Books
Published: 2021-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 36

Sunday 5th April 2037

Ilithyia Biotechnology, Northstowe

Rosalind Baxter read the label on the door: BioNEMS. The fact she had no idea what the letters stood for summed up her lack of knowledge when it came to nanomachines. She had arranged a two-hour meeting with the French leader of the team, Armand Allard, to rectify the situation.

She held her card to the reader. A red light glowed for a moment, then turned off. Clearly, they didn’t trust her enough to permit access to the laboratory. She raised her hand and knocked.

A guard in the ubiquitous pale-blue uniform strolled down the corridor in her direction, glaring at her suspiciously. When he was still a few paces away, the door swung open.

“Ah, there you are,” the rotund Frenchman said. “Please come in.”

Rosalind followed him into a room fifteen metres long by ten wide. When she had been the CEO of the company, this was one of the operating theatres. Now computer workstations had replaced the surgical tables. Four people sat in front of the screens. None of them looked up at her entry.

“This isn’t what I was expecting,” Rosalind said.

“No,” Allard replied, “but this is the future of medical research. We use nanomachines to do the work once performed by drugs. But somebody has to tell these machines what functions to perform. We do this using computers.”

“Surely, you must still carry out tests and experiments.”

“Yes, of course. We have small-scale production capabilities here. That happens in there.” He pointed towards the room where the surgeons had once scrubbed up before an operation. “The researchers only go in when they want to run an experiment. We take precautions to ensure none of our creations can escape.”

“Pardon my ignorance, but what do the letters on the door outside stand for?”

“You mean BioNEMS? Bio-nanoelectromechanical systems. Shall we sit down?”

Rosalind followed Allard to an unoccupied workstation. He grabbed an empty chair and pulled it up alongside the one already there. Both sat.

“Now,” the Frenchman said, “what would you like to know?”

“I guess, the first thing to discuss is how you think these nanomachines could destroy the virus.”

“Okay. Put simply, we can program them to latch onto particular molecular sequences. They have the means to travel through the body, but we must tell them when they are in the right place. There are several ways to do this, but the two principal methods are magnetic fields and light.”

“So,” Rosalind said, “if I understand you correctly, you can design them to home in on and attack a specific pattern of molecules.”

“Yes, but they can also be used to build. For example, one area of research for this technology is the reconstruction of severed nerves, such as those that occur in spinal cord injuries. However, this is not the focus of our work here.”

“How do you program them?” Rosalind asked.

Allard spent the next hour taking her through the process of design and manufacture. The subject changed to the application of the technology for another thirty minutes. When he had finished, he turned to Rosalind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.