"You aren’t the machine."
But David continued into the fourth and then fifth day of leave. On the fifth day, he did not eat, leaving Susan to glower at him, sigh, and put the meal into the freezer in case he wanted it another time. But he did not touch it the next day (which was a Saturday, on which he did not have to work), nor on Sunday. The last thing Susan heard him say was "I’m nearly there!"
Susan found David lying on the armchair on Monday morning, his head flopped back on the head-rest for want of any effort to hold it up, and his skin dry and pale. He was not breathing. Susan dragged him onto the floor, kicking the still-glowing machine aside, and began resuscitation. But she quickly perceived that it was hopeless. She sat back, with her hands on her hips and her legs folded underneath her body. From this position she stared at what was left of her husband, and then at the machine that had brought him to this state. She couldn’t blame it, she supposed, and her husband did have such a wonderful smile on his face.
(2018)
NANONAUTS! IN BATTLE WITH TINY DEATH-SUBS!
Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald (born 1960) lives just outside Belfast and writes award-winning fiction, mostly about the impact on different societies of rapid social and technological change. By 2014, however, and as McDonald explained in an interview for Locus magazine, "I didn’t want to get stuck doing the same SF books over and over, successful though they may be. I didn’t want to keep writing books about the developing economy of the year – India, Brazil. I could feel myself getting trapped in that." A year later Luna: New Moon appeared. Two further volumes in the series have followed, and the project, exploring the intrigue that surrounds the five powerful families who control industry on the Moon, has been optioned for development as a television series.
We torpedo the killer robot death-sub just off the Islets of Langerhans.
It’s been a long chase. Days spent stalking the trace, up through arches and long fibrous loops of the pancreatic cytoarchitecture. There are a million islets: many, many places for a rogue nanobot to hide. A slow chase, too; hunting, hiding, moving, scanning for a trace, trying to hide the noise of our hunter-killers firing up their drive flagella among the general endocrine traffic roar.
The President’s pancreas is a noisy place.
But our target is a rogue all right. No mistaking that signature death-sub echo. It tried to hide in a flotilla of neutral nanobots, but once we have the signature, we never let go. We are relentless, we are remorseless, and we never, ever stop. And the death-sub can’t change its signature unless, well… unless it stops being a death-sub. Which would be good. It would be one less of the little fuckers.
We catch it before it begins the evangelizing process. A plus. Once the conversions start, we can be hours—days sometimes—taking out the fresh recruits. Time the dark-side sub can use to slip away. But now, we can simply Spray ’n’ Sterilize the neutrals without even slowing down.
Sometimes we get lucky and sink the target before it even knows we’re there. Not so today. Not so for several days. They’ve gotten good at detecting us as we detect them. They’re evolving new techniques. We’ll counter them. They evolve. We design.
Let’s see who wins the Darwin Wars.
And so we slip into Stealth ’n’ Stalk. The death-sub tries to throw us off with false echoes and synthesized signatures. Please. That didn’t even fool us on day one of the nanowar. It tries decoys and tagging friendly cells as black hats. Do not insult us! And in the end, among the million islands of the pancreatic archipelago, we run it down. We anchor it with tractor molecules, fire up the torpedoes, and phago its nanobot ass.
Go nanonauts! Nanonauts ahoy!
We watch the shredded chains of pseudoproteins tumble away as the neutrophils swarm in like sharks.
"Inside the President’s body?"
When she has a question—a Big Question—she does this thing. Her eyes go wide and at the same time her lips open, just a tad, not stupid-open, not gobemouche open. (That’s a French expression. Means catching flies in your mouth.) But the bit that slays me—slays me—is the way her bottom lip catches on her upper front teeth, just a tiny pull, enough to pucker the skin and no more. That, to me, says Woooo.
I am, I have to say, slaying. Slaying. Tight, tight shave and a little concealer for the perfect top coat. I blue up quick. Concealer has saved my ass more times than I can remember. Boys, you need concealer in your guy drawer. You need it. Your skin will be like the blush of a peach in the first light of an Aphrodite dawn. Girls check these things right away, before you even notice. Flick of the eyes, dish-dash-done. Old pickup artist trick.
"The President, the VP, most of the senators, almost all the bankers. Your one percent. The Pope. I haven’t been inside the Pope yet. That would be a privilege, but I’m not Catholic."
I lean forward so the little Orthodox cross falls into the light. Another pickup artist trick. But I am no pickup artist. I am a warrior, and I am on R&R.
"Greek. Cypriot. Cyprus is the island of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, risen from the wine-dark sea. My home is Kalavasos. It’s beautiful. Most beautiful place on God’s green earth. The gods live there still. The mountains go up behind my grandparents’ house and in the evening the last rays of the sun turn the mountaintops pink. And down in the valley, in the notch where the road goes down, there is a glitter, so bright it would blind you, of the Mediterranean. My heart lives there. Even while I’m here, fighting, my heart lives in Kalavasos. When this war is done, I will go back, and I will go to the little church of Ayios Panteleimon, and I will kneel before the iconostasis. And I will take off this cross, and kiss it, and place it there among the icons of the saints."
I can see her exhale as she shakes her head slowly. That’s wonder, not disbelief. And it’s true. Well, maybe not the bit about hanging the cross on the altar screen. But they love that bit. That’s another thing for your guy drawer, brothers. Old-time religion.
"So how does a boy from Kalavasos in the wine-dark sea come to fighting killer death-subs inside the body of the President of the United States?"
And in. But hold it, don’t show it, don’t lose it.
"I’ll tell you, but first, let me buy you a drink."
When I say "torpedo," it’s not actually torpedoes. Not even very small ones. Not missiles loaded into tubes and fired out and exploding: you know, fire one, fire two, torpedo running.
And we’re not submariners, not even very tiny ones. Come on. That’s Disney. There is no physical way in this universe you could take an entire attack sub and its crew, shrink them down to the size of a cell, and inject them into the bloodstream of the President—and not just the President, but all those other rich and powerful and popular people who thought nanotechnology would make them like gods… and got a hell of a surprise when their stab at immortality started to eat their brains. (And the Pope. Not forgetting the Pope.)
Actually, it’s way smaller than cells—cells look like apatosauruses to us… like clouds even. The point is: physics says no. Sorry. This is not Innerspace 2 or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Even Smaller.
It’s analogies. We need analogies. We fight by analogies.
The Islets of Langerhans, they’re tiny nodules about half a millimeter in diameter. What they are to you, my friend, are analogies.