Micro - Michael Crichton [1]
Human beings interact with complex systems very successfully. We do it all the time. But we do it by managing them, not by claiming to understand them. Managers interact with the system: they do something, watch for the response, and then do something else in an effort to get the result they want. There is an endless iterative interaction that acknowledges we don’t know for sure what the system will do—we have to wait and see. We may have a hunch we know what will happen. We may be right much of the time. But we are never certain.
Interacting with the natural world, we are denied certainty. And always will be.
How then can young people gain experience of the natural world? Ideally, by spending some time in a rain forest—those vast, uncomfortable, alarming, and beautiful environments that so quickly knock our preconceptions aside.
NOT FINISHED
MICHAEL CRICHTON
August 28, 2008
The Seven Graduate Students
Rick Hutter Ethnobotanist studying medicines used by indigenous peoples.
Karen King Arachnologist (expert in spiders, scorpions, and mites). Skilled in martial arts.
Peter Jansen Expert in venoms and envenomation.
Erika Moll Entomologist and coleopterist (beetle expert).
Amar Singh Botanist studying plant hormones.
Jenny Linn Biochemist studying pheromones, the signaling scents used by animals and plants.
Danny Minot Doctoral student writing a thesis on “scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation.”
Prologue
Nanigen
9 October, 11:55 p.m.
West of Pearl Harbor, he drove along the Farrington Highway past fields of sugar cane, dark green in the moonlight. This had long been an agricultural region of Oahu, but recently it had begun to change. Off to his left, he saw the flat steel rooftops of the new Kalikimaki Industrial Park, bright silver in the surrounding green. In truth, Marcos Rodriguez knew, this wasn’t much of an industrial park; most of the buildings were warehouses, inexpensive to rent. Then there was a marine supply store, a guy who made custom surfboards, a couple of machine shops, a metalworker. That was about it.
And, of course, the reason for his visit tonight: Nanigen MicroTechnologies, a new company from the mainland, now housed in a large building at the far end of the facility.
Rodriguez turned off the highway, drove down between silent buildings. It was almost midnight; the industrial park was deserted. He parked in front of Nanigen.
From the outside, the Nanigen building appeared like all the others: a single-story steel façade with a corrugated metal roof; in effect, nothing more than an enormous shed of crude, cheap construction. Rodriguez knew there was more to it than that. Before the company erected that building, they dug a pit deep into the lava rock, and had filled it with electronic equipment. Only then did they erect this unprepossessing façade, which was now covered in fine red dust from the nearby agricultural fields.
Rodriguez put on his rubber gloves, and slipped into his pocket his digital camera and infrared filter. Then he got out of his car. He wore a security guard uniform; he pulled his cap down over his face, in case there were cameras monitoring the street. He took out the key that he had taken from the Nanigen receptionist some weeks before, after her third Blue Hawaii had put her out cold; he had had it copied, then returned it to her before she woke up.
From her he had learned that Nanigen was forty thousand square feet of labs and high-tech facilities, where she said they did advanced work in robotics. What kind of advanced work, she wasn’t sure, except the robots were extremely small. “They do some kind of research on chemicals and plants,” she said vaguely.
“You need robots for that?”
“They do, yes.” She shrugged.
But she also told him the building itself had no security: no alarm system, no motion detectors, no guards, cameras, laser beams. “Then what do you use?” he asked her. “Dogs?”
The receptionist shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just a lock on the