found the last AmericaStrong fake cop behind one of the beds in a bedroom. The man had removed his helmet. He had lost his gun in the madness. Defenseless.
The man was young. He had very, very pale skin. He had very, very large brown eyes. He stared at Billy the Kid. He was shaking.
“Don’t,” the man said.
“You started it,” Billy said.
“I’m sorry about . . . about . . .” the man said, and waved in the direction of downstairs.
Billy thought he seemed okay. “You smell,” Billy said.
“I pooped.” The man laughed. It was a short, sharp sound.
Billy’s sights were leveled at the man’s face.
“Who did this?” Billy asked.
The man shrugged, but he couldn’t hold it together well enough to lie. “I’m just, look, I used to work for AmericaStrong, now I’m ETA.”
“ETA? Estimated Time of Arrival?”
“Emerging Technologies Agency,” the man said weakly, as though he didn’t expect to be believed. Or that he would be alive another thirty seconds. “My name is Joey. Joey Lamb. I . . . I didn’t . . . I don’t . . . Don’t shoot me, kid.”
“Billy. Billy the Kid.”
“Okay.”
“Look, it’s game over, right? I won. So just, I don’t know, run away.”
Joey Lamb stood shakily. He had pooped all right.
“Okay, now, just leave,” Billy said. “And don’t call anyone. And don’t come back.”
Joey ran. Billy heard him clatter through the house. He heard the front door slam back on its hinges.
Billy went downstairs. He went through the pockets of his friends, harvesting credit cards and driver’s licenses. He piled the laptops and the cell phones together and placed them all in a plastic trash bag.
Then he found some clean clothing, laid it out in the blessedly blood-free bathroom, and took a shower. It took a long time for the water to run clean.
Burnofsky stood up, heard his bones creak and his knees snap. Old age was coming on fast. But it wouldn’t be old age that killed him.
He walked from his office out into the main lab floor. It occupied three entire floors of the Armstrong Building. It was a huge space, very white with pink accents, designed to be functional but also pleasant and innocuous. Like everything the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation did in secret, it was designed to look as if it could not possibly conceal anything dark or sinister.
The lights were bright but soft. The walls bore huge plasma screens showing pastoral scenes, like slow-changing murals, a mountain stream would slowly give way to a strand of unpopulated beach, which in turn might, after an hour or so, switch to a field of flowers waving in the breeze.
The murals followed the time of day. As the sun would set outside, so the sun would set over mountain and beach and field. When full night fell, the screens would light up with time-lapse pictures of crazily zooming car lights crossing the Golden Gate bridge, or shots of the aurora borealis, or moonlight on a river.
It was really quite a lovely place to work while designing the end of the human race as it had heretofore been.
Structural integrity required the floors to have some strength, so gazing up Burnofsky looked through a loose-woven web of white tiled catwalks with pink railings and the occasional green contrast. This allowed some of the larger pieces of equipment to rise through the floors, but also created smaller, more intimate spaces.
“Dr Burnofsky.” It was Mamadou Attah. Dr Mamadou Attah, formerly of the Ivory Coast, later of Oxford and MIT, briefly a resident of Grand Rapids Michigan’s Applegate Psychiatric Hospital, and now one of Burnofsky’s hardest-working—and giddily happy—subordinates.
“Yes, Dr Attah?”
“We did it, we sure got that extruder calibrated!”
“Good,” he said.
She flashed him a huge grin. She was short and broad and, despite being brilliant, had a distinct tendency to go around giggling under her breath. She had been wired and indoctrinated, of course, all as a means of dealing with what had been crippling depression.
No more depression in her future. No more mental hospitals. Although she sometimes irritated non-wired staff to the point of rage, she was an excellent scientist and utterly devoted.
She stood waiting like an expectant dog, evidently not entirely satisfied by his wan, “Oh, good.” So he added a, “Fantastic work, Doctor. You’re the best.”
She grinned, made a pistol finger, and said, “No, sir, Dr B., you’re the best!”
He walked across the spotless white tile floor past white-coated scientists and pink-coated staff, a shambling, reedy, runny-eyed, corduroy-clad wreck of a human being. The door to his private lab was protected by a keypad and fingerprint ID. He punched in the number sequence and pressed his thumb against the touchscreen.
Inside was a very different space. Here the equipment was whatever putty or gray color it had been when first acquired. There were no plasma screens showing bucolic loveliness. The ceiling seemed particularly low. A Costco-size box of Little Debbie Devil Cremes spilled across his desk.
He pulled the bottle of bourbon from his desk, poured a tumbler full, and gulped it.
Back in the fabulous main lab the work of AFGC’s nanotech division went on feverishly. The piece of equipment that Dr Attah had been so proud of fixing was part of the SRN production line.
Self-replicating nanobot. SRN. But he along with everyone else involved in the project had taken to calling them “hydras,” after the mythological beast that just kept sprouting new heads any time you chopped one off: in effect, a self-replicating monster.
The first large-scale field test of the hydras was scheduled to occur in just a few weeks.
Twelve hundred hydras would be released in a high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx. The test would be whether the hydras would propagate, locate hosts, and avoid detection. If they performed as expected, the neighborhood would experience a sudden drop in crime rate as thousands of residents were crudely rewired for diminished aggression.
A smaller test, just two hundred hydras bearing special radioactive tracking signatures, were to be released on the subway. They would be able to follow the spread. And these nanobots had a particular function: to do something the first generation of nanobots couldn’t even begin to pull off: the implantation of an image. Actually creating a memory.
And yet, despite those specialized abilities, the hydras were poor relations to regular nanobots. They were crude, rough, and slow. The self-replicating process meant using whatever materials could be found at hand: one form or another of living tissue.
The regular nanobots were made of sophisticated alloys, ceramics and textiles. They were the Ferraris of the nanotech world. These new tiny monsters were scarecrows by contrast.
Each hydra was serviced by dozens of much smaller micro-machines, nicknamed MiniMites. These were very simple, very, very small devices whose sole purpose was to strip-mine living things for their useful minerals. They were tiny refineries, eating flesh and defecating iron, zinc, copper, calcium, magnesium, chromium, and the rest.
In the event that anything went wrong with the tests, the mayor of New York City, the governor of New York, and, if it came to that, the president of the United States should be under sufficient control to head off an effective investigation, let alone countermeasures.
Of course the whole thing had to be carefully managed. A fair amount of a human body could be consumed and turned into raw material without harming the host—most people had more than enough fat, extra bone, dead skin, resident bacteria, the contents of stomachs and