Free Invasive by Chuck Wendig Page B

water.
    â€œAre those whales?” she asks.
    He gives her a look, like, Please don’t insult my intelligence . “That’s the fringing reef. Makes it hard to bring boats in—where you came in is the only place that works unless you’ve got yourself a little shallow raft or something. But that’s good, it means this place isn’t, you know, all that spoiled yet. We still have some species that you can’t find anywhere else on this planet. The Kolohe finch, the Koloheduck, the alkali noctuid moth.” His fingers fritter in the air like he’s trying to pick the point out of the ether. “This is a special place. A pure place. And it’s kept that way by being unfriendly. Paradise is precarious. Just one little thing . . .” He mimes a little shove. “Can push it into imbalance. It didn’t take much to screw up the Garden of Eden. Do you understand?”
    He’s telling her the same thing that Ray did: You’re not welcome here .
    â€œLet’s remember,” she says crisply, “that Eden wasn’t disturbed by outsiders. The destruction of paradise was from within. I’m not here to hurt anybody or destroy the company. But someone is dead and something strange is going on, and right now, it connects here.”
    He sighs. “Of course. I will help you in any way that I can.”
    â€œThe way you say that sounds like it comes with a caveat.”
    â€œIt does. I don’t know that anybody else here will.”
    â€œI can deal with that.”
    â€œGood.” His smile—which has never wavered, which has remained plastered to his face not in a pedantic or sardonic way but rather in an almost avuncular manner—broadens. “Let’s go get you a room in the dorm, see the lab, meet the team.”

11
    T hey come up out of the rain forest. What rises up from the shade of the island reminds her of Luke Skywalker’s house on Tatooine.
    â€œThey’re called mod-pods,” David says. “Module-Pods. That’s their official name. One of Einar’s friends from college invented them. They’re 3-D printed buildings.” He rubs a chin wispy with little hairs. “Actually, I’m surprised Einar hasn’t gotten into the 3-D printing gig yet.”
    â€œHe will,” Ray says, coming up behind them, looking at his phone. The 8-bit chirps and warbles of some kind of game rise from the device as his thumbs make quick work.
    The lab—with a modest sign reading ARCA in Futura font above the double doors—is a chain of these modular pods: one round plastic dome after the next, linked together by telescoping tunnels and pressurized doors. Some pods are larger than others, some have a different arrangement of windows (round portholes or rectangular wraparounds that look almost like windshields), some seem to have HVAC split systems. A few in the back look particularly large—two, maybe three stories tall.
    â€œWe don’t call them mod-pods, though,” David says. “We call them bubbles. The lab bubble, the dorm bubble. Pretty cool how they build them. These robot arms work along these two axis poles—rotatable—and the nozzles and lasers print a flexible honeycomb skeleton of stainless steel. Then it adds layers of plastic, then insulation, then more plastic. I’ve seen some that spray in concrete, too.” As he talks, he moves his hands around like it’shappening in real time, his own limbs turned into imaginary maker bots.
    â€œImpressive,” Hannah says. She has her doubts about 3-D printing. If people think that hacking intellectual property is a problem now, just wait till what they’re hacking isn’t books and movies but entire blueprints. Third world countries might benefit from 3-D printing, particularly using stolen intellectual property and forbidden patents. They could build cheap, storm-resistant structures or make new farm equipment