According to everything he’d read or heard about, that just wasn’t possible. Not even close. And yet Rydell was telling him it was.
“Smart dust”—minuscule electronic devices designed to record and transmit information about their surroundings while literally floating on air—was still a scientific dream. The concept was first imagined, and the term coined, by electrical engineers and computer scientists working at the University of California’s Berkeley campus in the late nineties. The idea was simple: Tiny motes of silicon, packed with sophisticated onboard sensors, computer processors, and wireless communicators, small enough to be virtually invisible and light enough to remain suspended in midair for hours at a time, gathering and transmitting data back in real time—and undetected. The military was immediately interested. The idea of scattering speck-sized sensors over a battlefield to detect and monitor troop movements was hugely appealing. So was sprinkling them in subways to detect chemical or biological threats, or on a crowd of protestors to be able to track their movements remotely. DARPA had kicked in the initial funding, as, although the concept also had a host of potential civilian and medical uses, the more nefarious surveillance possibilities were even more alluring. But funding doesn’t always lead to success.
The concept was sound. Breakthroughs in nanotechnology were inching the dream closer to reality. Theoretically, manufacturing the motes was possible. In practice, we weren’t there yet. Not overtly, anyway. Making the sensors small enough wasn’t the problem. The processors that analyzed the data, the transmitters that communicated it back to base, and the power supply that ran the whole minuscule thing—typically, some kind of minute lithium battery—were. By the time they were added on, they turned the dust-sized particles into hardly stealthy clusters the size of a golf ball.
Clearly, Rydell’s team had managed to overcome those hurdles and achieve new levels of miniaturization and power management.
In secret.
Jabba was struggling to order the questions that were coming at him from all corners. “You were working on it for DARPA, weren’t you?”
“Reece was. The applications were endless, but no one could figure out how to actually manufacture them. Until he did. He told me about it before letting them know he could do it. We stayed up late one night, imagining all kinds of things we could use it for.” He paused, reliving that night. “One of them stood out.”
“So that whole biosensor story?” Jabba asked.
Rydell shook his head. “Just a smoke screen.”
“But . . . how? Where are they coming from? You dropping them from drones or . . . ?” His voice trailed off, his mind still tripping over the very notion.
“Canisters,” Rydell told him. “We shoot them up, like fireworks.”
“But there’s no noise, no explosion,” Jabba remarked. “Is there?”
“We’re using compressed air launchers. Like they’re now using at Disneyland. No noise. No explosion.”
The questions were coming to Jabba fast and furious. “And the motes . . . How are they lighting up? And how’d you get the power source down to a manageable size? What are you using, solar cells? Or did you go nuclear?” Sensing, sorting, and transmitting data used up a lot of juice. One option scientists were exploring was to sprinkle the motes with a radioactive isotope to give each mote its own long-term energy supply.
Rydell shook his head. “No. They don’t actually need an onboard power source.”
“So what are they running on?”
“That was Reece’s brilliant brainchild. They feed off each other. We light them up with an electromagnetic signal from the ground. They convert the transmission into power and spread it across the cloud where it’s needed.”
The answer triggered a new barrage of questions in Jabba’s mind. “But how do you get them to light up?”
Rydell shrugged. “It’s a chemical reaction. They’re Janus particles. Hybrids. They light up and switch off as needed to take on the shape we want, like skydivers in an aerial display. They burn up after about fifteen minutes, but it’s long enough.”
Jabba was visibly struggling to absorb the information and complete the puzzle. His voice rose with incredulity. “But they’re constantly moving around. They’ve got to be. I mean, even the slightest breeze pushes them around, right? And yet the sign wasn’t moving.” He extrapolated his own answer, then his eyes widened. “They’re self-propelled?” He didn’t seem to believe his own words.
“No.” Rydell shook his head, then glanced over at Matt, his expression darkening with remorse, his shoulders sagging, before looking away again. “That’s where Danny came in. His distributed processing program . . . more like massively