‘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 three letters.’
‘Hey, yeah. I was in maybe tenth grade. Our science teacher showed us a picture of it.’
‘They photographed it with a camera hooked up to a powerful electron microscope.’
‘But that was pretty much just a tiny sign, not a machine,’ she objected. ‘It didn’t do anything.’
‘Yeah, but platoons of researchers have been burning up a lot of development funds designing nanomachines that will work. Machines that already do.’
‘Teeny-tiny fairy machines.’
‘If you want to think of it that way, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Eventually, when the technology’s perfected, the applications are going to be incredible, virtually infinite, especially in the medical field.’
Jilly tried to imagine at least one of the infinite applications of teeny-tiny machines performing teeny-tiny tasks. She sighed. ‘I’ve spent too much of my life writing jokes, telling jokes, and stealing jokes. Now I feel like a joke. What applications?’
He pointed to the laptop screen. ‘I’ve sourced up an interview that Proctor did a few years ago. It’s in layman’s terms, easy to grasp. Even I understood it.’
‘Why don’t you condense it for me?’
‘All right. First, an application or two. Imagine a machine tinier than a blood cell, composed of a handful of atoms, but with the capacity to identify plaque on blood-vessel walls and the ability to remove it mechanically, safely. They’re biologically interactive in function but fashioned from biologically inert atoms, so your body’s immune system won’t be triggered by their presence. And now imagine receiving an injection containing hundreds of thousands of these nanomachines, maybe millions.’
‘Millions?’
He shrugged. ‘Millions would fit in a few cc of a carrier fluid like glucose. It’d be a smaller syringe than Proctor used with us.’
‘Creepy.’
‘I suppose when the first vaccines were developed, people back then thought it was creepy to be injected with dead germs in order to build up an immunity against live ones.’
‘Hey, I still don’t like the sound of it.’
‘So anyway, these millions of nanomachines would circulate endlessly through your body, searching out plaque, gently scrubbing it away, keeping your circulatory system as clean as a whistle.’
Jilly was impressed. ‘If that ever hits the market, welcome to the age of the guilt-free cheeseburger. And you know what? This is starting to sound a little familiar.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘But why should it?’
Instead of answering her question, he said, ‘Nanomachines could detect and eliminate colonies of cancer cells before the tumor was half as large as the head of a pin.’
‘Hard to see the downside to all this,’ Jilly said. ‘But we know for sure there is one. And why’re you being enigmatic? Why do you think this should sound familiar to me?’
In the corner, Shep said, ‘Herethere.’
‘Oh, shit!’ Dylan bolted from his chair so fast that he knocked it over.
‘Herethere.’
Closer to Shepherd than Dylan was, Jilly reached the kid first. Approaching him, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, no red tunnel to California or to anywhere else.
Shepherd no longer leaned with the top of his skull jammed into the juncture of walls. He had taken a step backward. He stood erect, head up, eyes focused intently on something that appeared to be a lot more interesting than anything Jilly could see.
He had raised his right hand again, as if taking an oath, but he hadn’t started to wave. As Jilly arrived at his side, Shep reached in front of his face, to the point in midair at which he’d been staring, and between his thumb and forefinger, he took a pinch of… a pinch of nothing, as far as she could tell. When he tweaked that pinch of air, however, the corner of the room began to fold in upon itself.
‘No,’ Jilly said breathlessly, and though she knew that Shepherd often recoiled from contact, she reached in front of him and put her hand atop his. ‘Don’t do this, sweetie.’