By the light of the moon

therefore suggesting the wisdom and the integrity of men who
rose to greatness from humble origins. Merriweather added a
light note, implying a calm, untroubled soul, perhaps even one
capable of entertaining moments of frivolity. A proctor was a
person who supervised students, mentored them, who maintained
order, stability.
    This Lincoln Merriweather Proctor had been a child of
privilege, educated first at Yale, then at Harvard. Judging by a
quick sampling of his writings, to which Dylan guided her on the
laptop, Jilly decided that Proctor's soul, far from being calm, was
troubled by megalomaniacal visions of the total mastery of nature
followed by the complete perversion of it. His life's work –
the mysterious stuff in the syringe – didn't
contribute to order and stability; it fostered uncertainty, terror,
even chaos.
    A certifiable prodigy, Proctor had earned two Ph.D.'s –
the first in molecular biology, the second in physics – by
the age of twenty-six.
    Assiduously courted by academia and industry, he enjoyed
prestigious positions with both, although before his thirtieth
birthday, he had formed his own company and had proved that his
greatest genius lay in his ability to attract enormous sums of
investment capital to finance his research with the hope of
discovering commercial applications of tremendous economic
significance.
    In his writing and his public speaking, however, Proctor had not
merely pursued the creation of a business empire, but had dreamed
of reforming society and in fact had hoped to change the very
nature of humankind. In the scientific breakthroughs of the late
twentieth century and in those certain to follow in the early
twenty-first, he foresaw the opportunity to perfect humanity and to
create utopia.
    His expressed motives – compassion for those who suffered
from poverty and disease, concern for the planet's ecosystem, a
desire to promote universal equality and justice – sounded
admirable. Yet when she read his words, Jilly heard in her mind
vast ranks of marching boots and the rattle of chains in
gulags.
    'From Lenin to Hitler, utopians are all the same,' Dylan agreed.
'Determined to perfect society at any cost, they destroy it
instead.'
    'People can't be perfected. Not any I've ever known.'
    'I love the natural world, it's what I paint. You see perfection
everywhere in nature. The perfect efficiency of bees in the hive.
The perfect organization of an anthill, a termite colony. But what
makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our
endless striving in spite of our imperfection.'
    'Beautiful... and terrifying,' she suggested.
    'Oh, it's a tragic beauty, all right, but that's what makes it
so different from the beauty of nature, and in its own way
precious. There's no tragedy in nature, only process – and
therefore no triumph, either.'
    He kept surprising her, this bearish man with the rubbery face,
dressed like a boy in khakis and an untucked shirt.
    'Anyway,' he said, 'that stuff about plugging memory cards into
data ports in the brain wasn't the track Proctor's research took,
but you were right when you thought it might cross his track
if we kept following it.'
    He reached past her to use the laptop keyboard. New material
flashed on the screen.
    Pointing to a key word in a headline, he said, 'This is the
train Proctor's been riding for a long time.'
    Reading the word above his finger, Jilly said, 'Nanotechnology.'
She glanced at Shep in the corner, half expecting him to provide
the definition, but he remained engaged in an apparent attempt to
press his head into the corner until his skull re-formed itself to
fit the wedge where wall met wall.
    'Nano as a unit of measure means "one billionth,"' Dylan
revealed. 'A nanosecond is one billionth of a second. In this case,
however, it means "very small, minute." Nanotechnology – very
tiny machines, so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye.'
    Jilly mulled that over, but the concept wasn't easy to digest.
'Too tiny to be seen? Machines made of what?'
    He looked expectantly at her. 'Are you sure none of this rings a
bell?'
    'Should it?'
    'Maybe,' he said mysteriously. 'Anyway, these nanomachines are
constructed of just a handful of atoms.'
    'Constructed by who – elves, fairies?'
    'Most people remember seeing this on the news maybe a decade ago
– the corporate logo that some IBM researchers built out of
maybe just fifty or sixty atoms. Lined up a handful of atoms and
locked them in place to spell out those