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The longer I spent on the Squad, the more I started thinking that maybe the paranoid people in the world had it right. Big Brother was totally watching.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked. “Why did you need to talk to me?”
Chloe didn’t say anything. She just kept right on walking through the Quad, up a flight of stairs, through a labyrinth of hallways, and into her lab. “Don’t touch anything.”
Like I was going to mess up her precious inventor’s lair. Then my eyes lit upon something that looked vaguely like some kind of microscanner, and Chloe’s voice broke into my techno-daydreams.
“Let me rephrase that. Don’t touch anything.”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “What do you want?”
Chloe reached over to her desk and picked up a thick stack of papers. “It’s Ross’s dissertation,” she said. “Brooke doesn’t know I have it, and neither do our superiors, but I’m not letting the two of you go into this mission blind because they don’t feel like telling you what you’re up against.”
I wasn’t sure what surprised me more: the fact that Chloe was so adamant about protecting us, or that she’d had the exact same idea I had about finding a copy of Ross’s dissertation.
“It wasn’t easy,” she told me. “He originally submitted it for publication, but retracted it only a few weeks later. It was like he suddenly realized he could make a lot more money off of this thing underground than above. He wiped every trace of it off of the web, but the university still had a copy of it in their database.”
“You hacked it?” Compared to most of my jobs, this was kiddie play, but still, I was the hacker, and this was Chloe treading on my turf. And she knew it.
“Is that a problem, Toby?” she asked sweetly. “From the look on your face, you’d think somebody stole your boyfriend or something.”
Subtle she was not. Forget the fact that I’d been ordered to date Jack in the first place, and the fact that the two of them had been over long before I’d come into the picture. Clearly, I’d stolen her boyfriend, and therefore, her stealing hacking jobs was my just reward.
“So do you want the Cliff’s Notes, or do you want to read it yourself?” Now that she’d gotten in her jab, Chloe was all business.
“I’ll read it myself.”
An hour and a half later, Chloe grinned at me. “So do you want the Cliff’s Notes version, or do you want to read it yourself?”
On the one hand, I wanted to tell her to shut up. On the other hand, I still hadn’t managed to make sense of the dissertation, and we were running out of time before seventh period.
“Fine,” I said. “Cliff’s Notes.”
To Chloe’s credit, she didn’t make me say “please.”
“Basically, Ross managed to combine his degrees in biomedical engineering, nanotechnology, and genetics to design a nanotechnological device…” Chloe paused and then made a show of dumbing down her words for me, her smile broadening. “He built a teeny, tiny computer type thingy that is capable of targeting and altering DNA in a prespecified manner. These nanobots…I mean, these thingies he designed basically go in and rewrite a person’s genetic code.”
“Are we talking about the dissertation or a really bad science fiction movie?” I may have been stronger in math than in science, but even I knew enough to be skeptical. I was pretty sure the type of thing Chloe was describing shouldn’t have been possible.
“In terms of gene therapy, this is definitely a breakthrough,” Chloe said. “The really amazing thing is that these bots, as small as they are, can actually carry programs.”
I knew enough about technology to know that should have provoked skepticism on my part.
“This is real, Toby,” Chloe said. “I don’t know how, but it’s real. And it’s bad news.”
Nothing Chloe had said so far sounded particularly like bad news to me.
“At the point in time that Ross wrote his thesis, there were still some glitches in the programming. He managed to rewrite the DNA, but in a way that makes the information genes contain utterly useless.” Chloe’s eyes glazed over as she searched for the appropriate metaphor. “Think of a computer. What happens if you swipe your hard drive with a very large, very powerful magnet?”
“It wipes all of the data, the programs, everything. And then…”
“And then your computer is pretty much dead,” Chloe finished. “At the end of his thesis, Ross presented two alternatives for future research. One involved working out the kinks in programming so that the bots could be used for gene therapy, but that could take decades, maybe longer.”
“And the other alternative?”
“The other alternative involved two steps: adapt the prototype for use on humans, and make it airborne.”
“Airborne as in—”
“As in you release these nanobots, they spread out, permeate the skin, and start destroying every inch of code it can find.”
Now the phrase technobiological weapon was starting to make sense.
“This is what you and Brooke are retrieving,” Chloe said. “They must be containing them somehow, but if those bots get out…It’s bad, Toby. It’s very, very bad, and the two of you deserved to know.”
Translation: The Big Guys should have told us.
“We’ve got to tell Brooke,” I said.
Chloe grabbed my arm and held it. “We can’t tell Brooke. If we could, trust me when I say that I would have been talking to her and not you.”
I jerked my arm out of Chloe’s grasp.
“When it comes to this school, Brooke does what she wants, when she wants to do it. She’s in charge. She makes the rules. But when it comes to the Squad, she’s a different person. She doesn’t break the rules, Toby. She doesn’t ask questions, and she doesn’t apologize.” Chloe paused and looked away. “This is highly classified information, and Brooke can’t know that we know. She’s their good little soldier, their captain…” Chloe’s voice got very quiet. “But she’s my best friend, and there’s no way I’d let her go in there unprepared.”
So. There it was. Chloe couldn’t tell Brooke, so she told me. Standing there, looking at Chloe very carefully not looking at me, I wondered if this was the first time Chloe had kept a secret from Brooke, and just like that, I knew that it wasn’t.
