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and booze, and crawled into bed to find Birgid crying.
    That was the night she told me about her lab results.
    “Is Mom going to die?” That was Stone’s question.
    Sadie’s question was, “How soon will she die?”
    Want to know why Sadie posed it that way? Because even then she was a thoughtful person, and she had already absorbed the fact that all of us die. Her question was specific. It assumed death and asked for a date.
    Later that night Sadie came to me in my library. Birgid was upstairs getting ready for bed. Stone was watching TV.
    “I looked it up on the Internet,” Sadie said.
    I didn’t need to ask what she had looked up.
    “There are all kinds of treatments. But none of them work, do they?” She was calm. Not emotionless, but calm.
    “Not very well, no,” I admitted.
    She had just started developing the freckles she would keep from then on. They seemed inconsistent somehow with her solemn expression.
    “You have to not worry about me and Stone,” she said. “You just have to help Mommy.”
    “I’m going to do everything I can to help Mommy,” I said. “You know, your dad is a scientist. This is what I do.”
    That sounded very hollow, and Sadie must have thought so, too, because she ignored it.
    “Take care of Mommy,” she reiterated. “I’ll take care of Stone.”
    I smiled. “And who takes care of you?”
    “I take care of me,” she said.

TWO
    After that first trip inside, I couldn’t touch Birgid.
    I loved her with all my heart, or at least as much as I am capable of loving anyone, but I couldn’t touch her. I could barely stand to be in the same room with her.
    The whole world around me was alien. I was alien. My God, I thought: I must never go inside myself like that, or I wouldn’t be able to go on living.
    The disorientation was like nothing you can imagine.
    You cannot unsee once you’ve seen.
    I wondered if my extreme reaction was unique to me, but my biot tech, Donna, later had the same experience. Worse in some ways. She stopped coming to work, and later, after it all went down and I sent my security chief, Stern, to see what had happened to her, he said he’d found her in her apartment, rocking back and forth and making sounds like a cat purring.
    Of course, she had lost her biot, and we didn’t know then what that meant.
    Stern reported to me on what he’d found. Her carpeting had all been ripped up off the floor and tossed into her backyard. There was plastic over everything. There was Purell everywhere. She had a box of respirator masks and was wearing two, one on top of the other.
    She had wrapped her hands in Ziploc bags secured with duct tape.
    She had shaved all the hair off her head, face, and body.
    By that point I understood. But it was too late to help her.
    My financial angel invested a billion dollars in McLure Labs. They invested in me, in Meldcon, in a promising antiviral agent we were testing, and in the fact that I had attracted half of the best young minds in biotech and genetic engineering.
    They knew nothing about the little side project I’d earlier hoped would get AFGC support. I had become fascinated by Karl’s work on miniaturized machines—nanobots. And I began to wonder if a biological solution might not be superior. Not a tiny machine, but a tiny creature.
    Needless to say, I had to obscure what I was doing. It is illegal to create new life-forms, new species. And yet, that’s what I proposed to do. It would cost a fortune and take years just to get FDA approval even to begin such a venture, and the oversight and regulation might be crippling.
    So I had gone ahead on my own. With every possible safeguard. The new species would be incapable of reproduction: that was the greatest safeguard. Each biot—that was the name I stuck with—had to be grown by man. Grown in a lab. I hoped to program them to perform limited functions—to move within the body and cut away blood clots, for example, or to attack tumors by delivering chemotherapy