Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

The beetle reached the corner of the desk, made a cadet-tight pivot, and scampered back toward its master. Molleken’s finger lifted from the sensor pad, then tapped it once, the beetle freezing at attention, its antennae bristling.

He pressed his fingertip again to the pad, and the beetle’s wings slid out, beat themselves into a blur. Another movement of Molleken’s hand and it took off so abruptly Evan had to duck to avoid catching it with his face. It hummed around the room, Evan marveling at it. Over on the regal sofa, Soo-jin looked unimpressed.

Molleken said, “With tiny jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, I can control—”

He frowned and stared at the pad, making adjustments. The flower beetle sped up, looping around the room, out of control. It buzzed past Evan’s ear, zipped past the desk, and struck the window with a thud. It dropped lifelessly from sight, leaving a Rorschach blot of its innards on the pane.

“Oh,” Molleken said. “Well. Still working out the kinks. The biological ones aren’t very smart either.” He knuckled his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “So,” he said, the beetle forgotten. “A story. On my technology.”

“The military applications in particular.”

In her same casual tone, Soo-jin said, “You want me to get Legal in here?”

“No, no,” Molleken said. Back to Evan, that same focused nonfocus, as if those extra pupils were attuning themselves to invisible signals Evan was giving off rather than to Evan himself. “Do you understand what I do, Mr. Specter?”

Evan stared at the splotch on the windowpane above Molleken’s head. “You’re a software engineer and a founder.”

“He’s a biomimeticist,” Soo-jin called out from the shadows behind Evan. “He takes biological inspiration from nature and incorporates it into technological design.”

“Like, say, a dragonfly drone,” Evan said.

“Like precisely that.” Molleken brightened. “Us humans, we love to revel in our technological superiority. Deep data-mining and artificial intelligence. But nature’s been playing this game a lot longer than we have.”

“What game is that?”

“Design.” Molleken smiled, his face lighting with a childlike wonder.

Evan thought about Molleken’s defender downstairs in the bar: Don’t take advantage of Brendan’s good nature . There was something immensely appealing about him, an unshielded youthfulness that elicited an almost protective instinct. Wide-eyed, uncensored, pathologically direct.

“Dragonfly wings beat in a basic Lissajous pattern with exceedingly high efficiency. They have separate muscles for their front and back wings. That design element eliminates the need for discrete tilt and attitude controls. They can hover.”

“Don’t you think you should mingle a bit downstairs?” Soo-jin said. “It is your party.”

Molleken waved her off, his eyes never leaving Evan’s. “Abalone,” he continued. “Their shells are made out of calcium carbonate. Know what else is made of that?”

Behind Evan, Soo-jin flicked another page of her magazine. “Chalk,” she said, in a been-there voice.

“But by subtly adjusting proteins, they build it into staggered walls of nanoscale brick to create an armoring harder than Kevlar.” Molleken grinned. “A blowfly can make a near-instantaneous right-angle turn in less than fifty milliseconds. A maneuver like that would rip a Stealth fighter to pieces. A gecko can walk straight up a wall. We can model high-tech camera optics off the eyes of praying mantises. When I was figuring out how to efficiently move maritime drones through water, I looked to eels. Want to know how they swim?”

“I think I get it,” Evan said. “You use animal design to build better weapons.”

Molleken rubbed his face, exasperated, his eyeglasses bobbing up above his fingertips. “No. That stuff’s boring. It’s just for funding. That’s not where it’s at for me.”

“No? Where’s it at?”

“Imagine a hummingbird drone, nineteen grams, wingspan less than seven inches, highly efficient electronic motor. Now imagine it lives on a single 1.2v Li-Ion coin-cell battery that can keep it airborne forever through regenerative wireless charging. You could direct it through radio telemetry, fly it into the Fukushima reactor to assess the radiological threat level. Hell, it could recharge itself off the radiation in the air.” He leaned forward, his eyes shining. “Now imagine we equip it with thermal cameras and FPV capabilities—”

“First-person view,” Soo-jin said lazily from the perimeter.

“—and fly it into inaccessible earthquake disaster zones to locate trapped survivors. Or to track endangered wildlife populations. Or to catch poachers in Africa or South Asia. It could read wind patterns inside wildfires, guide water hoses to the source of a conflagration. Imagine crawling a centipede through the wreckage of 9/11—”

Soo-jin sat forward. “Brendan, perhaps just a quick hi to your other guests—”

“They’re here drinking my alcohol, eating my food, making use of my house. That’s sufficient social reciprocity to help our people leverage relationships moving forward.” Without so much as a change in his cadence, Molleken kept on his previous track with Evan. “—or a solar-powered octocopter that could provide wireless Internet in remote poverty-stricken regions in Haiti or Lesotho. What if a fleet of them delivered food? Vaccinations? Brought blood samples to medical labs to help thwart disease outbreaks? Tested for harmful gases and chemicals in the air? Imagine being liberated from size, from range, from power sources.”

“It that achievable?”

Molleken brushed back his lank bangs, which had fallen to touch the top of his eyeglasses. Then he reached in a drawer and pulled out a bigger touch pad.

“Brendan,” Soo-jin said. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s creepy.”

“Mr. Specter won’t find it creepy,” Molleken said. “He’s a curious man. Unlike the drunkards downstairs.”

He placed four of his fingers on the pad. Evan heard a faint hum from the corner over by Soo-jin. He turned, and she rolled her eyes and pulled her feet up onto the chesterfield. A metal trunk in the shadows juddered slightly, its latch rattling.

Then the lid popped open a sliver. Something seemed to pour out of the interior, but Evan couldn’t make out what it was.

It spread across the floor, a wave dispersing into individual drops that scuttled toward him. He felt his stomach turn in revulsion, a precursor to fear. The edge of the flood swept beneath Soo-jin’s stockinged feet.

A faint ticking of tiny legs against floorboards, multiplied by a thousand. The surge swept to Evan’s chair, enclosing it. He resisted the urge to leap up. He looked down.

Robotic ants.

Thousands of them.

He looked back at Molleken, who was still grinning, his fingers manipulating the pad, spread as if gripping a bowling ball.

Evan’s chair shuddered. And then lifted unevenly. His arms flared as he kept his balance.

The army of ants conveyed him in his chair around the huge desk. He stared at Molleken, who seemed to approach lurchingly. Evan’s chair was deposited next to Molleken’s. He looked down as the ants peeled themselves off the wooden legs, lowering him to the floor.

That awful skittering noise resumed as the robotic ants retreated back into the shadows. Soo-jin watched him from across the room, the pale skin of her face the only part of her visible in the shadows, her expression unreadable.

Evan heard the latch rattle once more, the lid of the metal trunk click upward. A pouring sound, like ball bearings dumping into a bin. The waterfall sound went on for much longer than seemed plausible. Then the lid clanked down once more and silence reasserted itself in the study.