“Well doctor?”
Doctor Granula considered Shana Presley’s medical chart. “Well, there’s good news and bad news.”
Shana frowned. “Gimme the bad news first.” She said, bracing herself for the worst.
“Well the bad news is that we’re going to need to take your med-stats off the network for a few weeks.”
“Oh god.” Shana wailed.
“Now don’t be so upset!” The doctor interjected. “Being taken offline is rather common.”
“Yeah, for terminals!” Shana argued.
“For many things. Until just a few years back, we’d temporarily disconnect those who caught the flu!”
“But I don’t have the flu.” Shana retorted, gesturing to her numb leg. “My body’s shutting down.”
“Not your body, no. It’s the nanos causing this.”
This surprised Shana, who immediately clammed up and stared at the doctor, deeply hoping for some relief.
“That’s what I’m getting at.” The doctor continued. “The good news. Your leg’s having circulation issues, not because of bad health, but because of the nanobots themselves.”
“But I thought nanos were incapable of clumping.” Shana said. “I distinctly recall that being the reason why it took two generations before they were commonly used.”
“They can’t clump… Well, not on a physical level.” And upon seeing his patient’s probing expression, continued “You see, the nanobots in your body each possess a small level of intelligence. Nothing too brilliant, you understand, but enough to monitor your body’s health and survive inside you, and that’s kind of what’s causing your current issues.”
“What do you mean?”
The doctor considered his next words carefully. “Well sometimes a small health-alert will cause the density of nanobots to briefly increase in a small, concentrated region of the body. In your case, it looks like there might’ve been a varicose vein… Err, that is to say, a burst vein.”
“Yes? And?”
“Well when the bots get too close to one another, they begin interacting, and, well, we’ve found that strange things begin to occur. No! Nothing you need to worry about!” The doctor added hastily upon seeing Shana’s growing fright. “It’s just that they begin communicating with one another. Helping each other, specializing in roles like gathering nutrients and monitoring the area, and, well… I don’t know how to say this exactly, but the nanos sometimes form a civilization.”
Shana reacted as if she’d just been slapped in the face with a fish. “What?”
“Yeah… I mean, it’s not common, and it’s not exactly something the company wants to advertise, but, well… Look.”
The doctor handed Shana a manilla folder. She regarded the doctor before opening it and staring in disbelief at the first black and white image. It was clearly taken with a microscope, as the individual blood cells could be seen in great detail, but whoever had captured the picture hadn’t been focusing on the blood cells. No. It was the city that had caught the photographer’s attention.
Along one of the walls of her vein, nested beneath the river of blood, were clear structures of intelligent creation. They formed a rough grid-pattern, with large mounds reaching toward the heavens in the center of the city and smaller mounds extending outward from them in all directions.
The next photo was an apparent close-up of these mounds, which appeared far more pyramid-like at such a scale. They were ornate and had many delicate designs etched into their faces, and groups of the small, tripod-shaped nanobots surrounded them on all sides. The blood cells above created faint shadows in much the same way clouds might.
The next photo featured a row of stalls which were staffed and being visited by other nanobots.
The next photo showed a nanobot walking a smaller, 6-legged bot down the street.
“It’s actually not atypical for nanobot civilizations to spontaneously form.” The doctor explained to an increasingly horrified Shana. “But usually they destroy each other in the Tribal Phase. In your case, the nanobots in your leg have reached the Sumerian Phase, and have advanced to the point of building permanent structures and forming an organized hierarchy.”
Shana gaped at the next photo, which showed a nanobot adorned with a gaudy crown being worshiped by other nanobots.
“Thankfully, we have several simple solutions to this problem.” The doctor walked to a drawer and withdrew a syringe. Shana initially thought he was going to use it to suck up the civilization in her leg, but instead he opened a nearby cabinet filled with a myriad of clear tubes pumping blood to and from small beakers. Each beaker had been labeled: Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Feudal, Industrial, Digital.
Beside these were small corked bottles. The doctor grabbed one and stuck a syringe through its rubber cap and withdrew a small amount of the translucent pink fluid that had been inside.
“We’ll start with the Usurper Option.” The doctor explained, gesturing to the syringe. “This here contains nanobots that are designed to criticize power structures. When introduced to the city, they’ll use deconstructivist tactics to make the other nanos skeptical about the religion, the hierarchy, gender roles… Pretty much everything that allows a coherent civilization to exist.” The doctor mulled over a thought in his head. “That works about 80% of the time.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
The doctor gestured to the cabinet. “Then we inject you with a different strain of Sumerian-Phase nanobots. They kill each other off and the survivors should return to their normal function. If that doesn’t work, we can always introduce a far more advanced civilization-“ The doctor moved his hand toward the related beakers. “-and they should take care of the problem. Once they do, we activate a signal that kills them off. Another good option, but it usually causes indigestion, as later civilizations often realize that stomach acid can be harvested for energy.”
“And if that doesn’t work?” Shana asked, still stunned by what she was hearing.
“Ah, then we inject you with aggressive microbots, which are several hundred times the size of the nanos. They’ll travel through your body and crush any city they encounter. We call it The Godzilla Option.” The doctor winked. “Of course the microbots will then need to be stopped with millibots, which are then destroyed by a centibot, which will need to be killed by a normal-bot, which will itself need to be shot in the head.”
“That’s-“
But she was interrupted as the doctor continued. “And if nothing else works, if the usurpers are killed too soon, and the civilizations regard each other peacefully instead of with hostility, and if the advanced civilization fails to destroy your local civilization with modernism, and if the Godzilla Option becomes domesticated, then we’ll bring you into the hospital, put you in a medically induced coma, and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Wait for the bots to grow more advanced. At a certain point they reach a sort of singularity, and when that occurs they all just disappear.”
“Disappear? Where do they go?”
The doctor shrugged. “No one knows. They don’t die off, as we can detect dead nanobots, and they don’t seem to travel outside the body. They just vanish… Poof. Gone. Maybe they become so advanced they integrate into your body, maybe they time travel, maybe they reach a higher plane of being.” The doctor shrugged again. “All we know is that anytime we wait, they wind up disappearing, after which you’ll be given a new batch of nanobots and sent on your merry way.”
“It’s just… All of this sounds so crazy!” Shana gawked, shaking her head.
The doctor nodded in agreement. “There’s a lot to being a medical professional these days.”