The Last Sword Maker (The Course of Empire, #1)

by Brian Nelson

on in his life. Not interested. God, was he a fool? He was two weeks away from getting a PhD in chemical engineering from Stanford fucking University, and he wasn’t interested in the twenty-one job offers he had. Twenty-one. They had started coming during his very first semester of grad school. Six figures, corporate car, eight weeks’ vacation, profit sharing, write your own ticket. How many times had he heard that? They all must have said it. Most of his friends were gone now. Few had bothered to graduate. Nanotech was just too hot. They’d gone pro, hit the majors. They called to say how great it was, that he was an idiot for staying. Who cares if the suffix after your name is only MS? The offer from Merck—that was the sweetest. He could pay off his student loans in six months. Not interested. But he was interested. He was obsessed—by one job, which may or may not even exist. He was obsessed with finding Bill Eastman. For the past six weeks, many of the greatest minds in nanotech, artificial intelligence, and genetics had been disappearing. Two of his Stanford professors and one from MIT had suddenly taken extended sabbaticals and moved away. He didn’t know precisely where they had gone or what they were doing—only that the disappearances had come shortly after a rumor began that Eastman was going to lead a big project for the government. Then he too, had suddenly dropped out of sight. It had to be self-replication, he thought. The government had finally realized what was...