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maple table like something one’s grandparents might own, and greasy drapes filtering gray light from the air shaft outside, and dishes in the sink and a trash can overflowing with Starbucks cups and takeout containers. The whole place smelled of ashes, trash, and good whiskey.
    Despite (or perhaps because of) his bad habits, Burnofsky was all loose skin over jagged bones. Not an ounce of fat. His daughter was pretty without being beautiful and had striking blue eyes. Her father’s eyes, I suppose, though his were bleached-out and bleary. It was impossible to imagine a young Burnofsky. He was probably my age but looked twenty years older. We’d known each other for years, worked together at times.
    “There really are Armstrongs at Armstrong Fancy Gifts?” I asked. He’d told me before, but the ins and outs of a company that made souvenir snow globes and such didn’t interest me.
    “Oh, there are Armstrongs, all right,” Burnofsky said. He smirked and seemed about to say more, but stopped himself. He lit a cigarette and shoved his chair back so he could lean his elbows on the table. There was a bottle of Macallan 12 between us. Burnofsky always had good booze. “I thought I might be able to get some supplemental funding for your biologicals approach. Not happening.”
    I sprang my big surprise on him. “Turns out I don’t need it.”
    He had Gandalf eyebrows, and they rose an inch. “You found a financial angel?”
    I nodded. “Yep. They’ll own twenty percent of McLure Labs, and thirty percent of Meldcon sales, but they have deep pockets. And they’ll let me buy them out down the road.”
    Meldcon was the reason anyone wanted a piece of me. It was a genetically engineered medicine that could be added to other meds to cause them to bind closely with bacteria. It was the next big weapon in the war on bacteria.
    Burnofsky seemed irritated by my news and hid it poorly behind a drag on his cigarette. Then he shrugged and poured us each an inch of the Scotch. We drank to McLure Labs and financial angels.
    “I have some news of my own,” Burnofsky said. “Looks like I solved the power storage issue.”
    At that point we both whipped out our tablets, and the conversation devolved into pure tech-speak. Burnofsky was building something he called a “nanobot,” a very tiny machine he proposed to use in medical research, a tool that would allow us actually to enter the human body without incisions. Sort of like a laparoscopic camera but much smaller and thus able to go places where no long tube would reach. At that point his models were about the size of a grain of sand—bigger than he wanted them to be. Why the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation should be interested in such a thing I did not know. And Burnofsky’s work was not some poorly fundedhobby. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being poured into it.
    I was naïve in those days. I fell for the innocuous name and never so much as Googled the company. I could have easily discovered that Armstrong Fancy Gifts had gone way beyond the ubiquitous airport gift shop chain they still owned.
    “Once we solve the comm issues we’ll have functioning nanobots,” Karl said in summarizing our little kitchen table geek-fest.
    “I thought you were pleased with what you’d done on that.”
    “Mmm,” he said, nodded, and took a drink. “But I want more range. I want a kilometer.”
    That brought me up short. There was no conceivable manufacturing or medical use for nanobots that would require communicating with them over that kind of distance.
    “Why so much? Even in some exotic medical application you can always just arm the patient with a signal repeater. A one-meter range would be more than enough. The power demands go up astronomically if you want a one-kilometer range.”
    He changed the subject then. And I would have normally reflected on that moment and seen very quickly what was being contemplated. But that was the night I came home late, smelling of smoke