“Hmmm.”
Jack held his sore arm. Vulkan was not the best phlebotomist, having jammed the syringe into his vein like a vulture ripping out his inner elbow. He took five tubes, a few swabs from inside his mouth. And now he was on the other side of the lab looking through a microscope.
“Are you anemic?” asked Vulkan as he still looked through the microscope.
“Nobody told me I was.”
“You have a preponderance of white blood cells. More than normal.”
“Is that bad?’
“It can be.” He stepped away from the microscope. “I didn’t see see any nanites, but I want to look somewhere else.”
Jack didn’t do a good job at hiding his horror. “Are you gonna stick me again?”
The young man glanced at the tubes of blood, then back at Jack. “That should be unnecessary.” He gathered the tubes and beckoned. “Come with me.”
Still holding the gauze on his arm, he followed Vulkan to a different section of the lab. He put some of the blood through different microscopes, on a slide in a chamber, and in all different sections of the lab. He would say, “Mmm hmm,” but say nothing coherent.
Jack got impatient. “Look, what exactly are you doing?”
“Right now?” he said, as he put another drop of blood on a slide and put it in a large box, which he started walking to a section of the lab. At He placed the box down and positioned what looked like a large spear against a tiny hole in the box. “I’m going to look at your blood subatomically. Of course, we don’t have the technology to actually see your blood’s atoms, but we can see its reaction to light.” Vulkan walked up a set of stairs, with Jack following. “Good news is that your blood is not radioactive, so what we see will not exactly be spectacular.”
Vulkan turned on a few cameras, and they showed pictures of his blood cells. Another picture was gray, round with pockmarks. It pulsed–pockmarks disappeared, then reappeared. Vulkan stared at that picture. He turned on the machine, and the pockmarks changed for an instant.
Vulkan gasped, and said, “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“The proton. It changed.” He pressed some buttons on the console, and Vulkan replayed the moment. “Look. Its protons. See what it looks like on the outside? A pattern. Now when I struck the light, it changed to this–” he pointed to the screen. “It’s not a pattern at rest. It shouldn’t change so dramatically.”
He went into a whole series of physics explanations, until Jack stopped him. “But what does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
He printed out the grainy picture of the proton and handed it to Jack. “I know one thing. This pattern isn’t found in nature.”
