Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,93

loose curl of Molleken’s fist. It crept around his pinkie and then scuttled across his knuckles.

A giant flower beetle.

“And what do you want?” Molleken asked, admiring his pet.

“I’m writing a story on your technology.”

The beetle hopped off Molleken’s hand onto the desktop. His finger moved pointedly on the sensor pad, and the beetle skittered around the desk, adhering to the very edge. As it passed before Evan, he caught a reflective flash from its thorax, a metallic circle no bigger than a dime.

A remote-controlled insect.

When he looked up, Molleken was watching him. “It’s real,” he said. “A living machine. You might think of it as a cyborg. I equipped it with a microprocessor and implanted six tiny electrodes.”

The beetle reached the corner of the desk, made a cadet-tight pivot, and scampered back toward its master. Molleken’s finger lifted from the sensor pad, then tapped it once, the beetle freezing at attention, its antennae bristling.

He pressed his fingertip again to the pad, and the beetle’s wings slid out, beat themselves into a blur. Another movement of Molleken’s hand and it took off so abruptly Evan had to duck to avoid catching it with his face. It hummed around the room, Evan marveling at it. Over on the regal sofa, Soo-jin looked unimpressed.

Molleken said, “With tiny jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, I can control—”

He frowned and stared at the pad, making adjustments. The flower beetle sped up, looping around the room, out of control. It buzzed past Evan’s ear, zipped past the desk, and struck the window with a thud. It dropped lifelessly from sight, leaving a Rorschach blot of its innards on the pane.

“Oh,” Molleken said. “Well. Still working out the kinks. The biological ones aren’t very smart either.” He knuckled his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “So,” he said, the beetle forgotten. “A story. On my technology.”

“The military applications in particular.”

In her same casual tone, Soo-jin said, “You want me to get Legal in here?”

“No, no,” Molleken said. Back to Evan, that same focused nonfocus, as if those extra pupils were attuning themselves to invisible signals Evan was giving off rather than to Evan himself. “Do you understand what I do, Mr. Specter?”

Evan stared at the splotch on the windowpane above Molleken’s head. “You’re a software engineer and a founder.”

“He’s a biomimeticist,” Soo-jin called out from the shadows behind Evan. “He takes biological inspiration from nature and incorporates it into technological design.”

“Like, say, a dragonfly drone,” Evan said.

“Like precisely that.” Molleken brightened. “Us humans, we love to revel in our technological superiority. Deep data-mining and artificial intelligence. But nature’s been playing this game a lot longer than we have.”

“What game is that?”

“Design.” Molleken smiled, his face lighting with a childlike wonder.

Evan thought about Molleken’s defender downstairs in the bar: Don’t take advantage of Brendan’s good nature. There was something immensely appealing about him, an unshielded youthfulness that elicited an almost protective instinct. Wide-eyed, uncensored, pathologically direct.

“Dragonfly wings beat in a basic Lissajous pattern with exceedingly high efficiency. They have separate muscles for their front and back wings. That design element eliminates the need for discrete tilt and attitude controls. They can hover.”

“Don’t you think you should mingle a bit downstairs?” Soo-jin said. “It is your party.”

Molleken waved her off, his eyes never leaving Evan’s. “Abalone,” he continued. “Their shells are made out of calcium carbonate. Know what else is made of that?”

Behind Evan, Soo-jin flicked another page of her magazine. “Chalk,” she said, in a been-there voice.

“But by subtly adjusting proteins, they build it into staggered walls of nanoscale brick to create an armoring harder than Kevlar.” Molleken grinned. “A blowfly can make a near-instantaneous right-angle turn in less than fifty milliseconds. A maneuver like that would rip a Stealth fighter to pieces. A gecko can walk straight up a wall. We can model high-tech camera optics off the eyes of praying mantises. When I was figuring out how to efficiently move maritime drones through water, I looked to eels. Want to know how they swim?”

“I think I get it,” Evan said. “You use animal design to build better weapons.”

Molleken rubbed his face, exasperated, his eyeglasses bobbing up above his fingertips. “No. That stuff’s boring. It’s just for funding. That’s not where it’s at for me.”

“No? Where’s it at?”

“Imagine a hummingbird drone, nineteen grams, wingspan less than seven inches, highly efficient electronic motor. Now imagine it lives on a single 1.2v Li-Ion coin-cell battery that can keep it airborne forever through regenerative wireless