The Forbidden Door (Jane Hawk, #4)

by Dean Koontz

The wind brought the dark, and the dark brought a chill, but the sea of stars was a work of wonder and a source of solace.

In a compartment without dry ice are hypodermic syringes, cannulas, and other items related to intravenous injections.

twelve insulated sleeves of quilted, silvery material about an inch in diameter and seven inches long, each containing a glass ampule of cloudy amber fluid. Three ampules for each person residing at Hawk Ranch. The

Each set of three ampules contains a nanotech brain implant. A control mechanism. Hundreds of thousands of parts, maybe millions, each comprising just a few molecules. Inert until injected, warmed by the subject’s blood, they become brain-tropic.

The incredibly tiny nanoconstructs migrate through veins to the heart, then through arteries to the brain, where they penetrate the blood-brain barrier and pass through the walls of capillaries just as do vital substances that the brain needs. They enter the tissue of the brain and self-assemble into a complex weblike structure.

The injected people are programmed to be obedient. They are made to forget they have been injected. They don’t know they are enslaved. They become “adjusted people.” The control is so complete that they will commit suicide if told to do so. Indeed, Clare and Ancel Hawk’s son, Nick, had been in a special class of adjusted people, those on the Hamlet list. The Arcadians have developed a computer model that identifies men and women who excel in their fields of endeavor and who possess certain traits that suggest they will become leaders with considerable influence in the culture; if those individuals hold positions on key issues that conflict with Arcadian philosophy and goals, they are injected and controlled. To doubly ensure they don’t influence others with their dangerous ideas and don’t pass their unique genomes on to a lot of children, they are instructed to kill themselves.

China is all about weaponizing space and orbital surveillance, so NSA has seeded a rootkit in their military’s computer network.

the Chinese are even more interested in what America does in the

dark than in the day. They fear the U.S. has mobile missile platforms that are shifted around at night. The Chicoms have highly sensitive look-down capability in infrared,

“A female deer tends to follow a male, behind and a little off to one side. And deer won’t travel as directly as this. They wander.

Bad people were often more clever than good people because they spent their entire rotten lives scheming and conniving.