Nanospray

Day 5 of Five Stories in Five Days 2

Enjoy the five stories from the first round of Five Stories in Five Days, all for free:

When Mr. Fusion Finally Arrived
A Tale of Ass
Telekinetically Yours
Alien Life
Very, Very Bad Erotica

Thank you in advance for reading Day 5 of Five Stories in Five Days 2, a new campaign of mine. Normally, this sort of creative writing appears in my paid Substack (under Creative Stuff), but this week, I’ve decided to give a partial preview to free subscribers and the general public to see whether anyone might be interested in joining my larger world. 10% of my Substack is free in my Bad Online English section—just me ranting about the sloppy, slovenly English I see (and no, that doesn’t mean that I make myself out to be Shakespeare or Hemingway—I can admit that with no problem). 90% of my Substack, though, is content that’s available for only $5 a month—the price of a single, halfway-decent burger. Like my Amazon ebooks, which I’ve committed to sell forever at minimum price ($2.99 for now), I’ve made the same guarantee here: $5/month or $50/year is all I’ll ever charge you, no matter what new things I do on Substack. So, please: Enjoy the story below, but think about joining. Think about joining the dark side. We all float down here.

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The advent of nanoswarm technology revolutionized fashion, industry, sports, and especially the medical world. Applications seemed to be numberless. Program the nanobots to swarm in different patterns and to react to different stimuli, and you could move mountains. Many of the problems associated with swarming nanobots had long been solved: motion through fluids, swarm control/coordination, distribution of nanobot roles, adaptability to changing situations, vulnerability to radiation, etc.—pretty much all managed these days. The sky was the limit.

Liam blinked as he woke, his wrists, shoulders, and ankles in agony. Where the hell am I? He realized that he was in some warehouse, suspended by his wrists from a beam or girder. His ankles were bound, too, and those bindings pulled down and held his legs in place thanks to a huge block of concrete on the ground. He doubted he could have kicked. Struggling seemed useless. He dug urgently into his memory and recalled that he’d been driving with Erica when something horrible had happened. Erica! Oh, God, where was she? Even more frightened now, he looked around for her.

And you didn’t need to inject the bots hypodermically, either: A simple nanospray was enough. The bots would land on the skin (although some would randomly float off into the air, deactivate, and become inorganic dust), gently penetrate the dermal layer by sliding smoothly through pores and other microscopic passages, then swarm in formation to perform whatever their programmed task was: fighting tumors, cleaning up skin lesions, getting rid of excess fat, relieving headaches (the blood-brain barrier was nothing to these bots), correcting poor eyesight, curing epilepsy, fighting Parkinson’s, acting as latticeworks for healing nervous tissue—yes, even CNS tissue in the treatment of spinal injuries . . . whatever you might want. The bots could act as a chemical delivery system, too, targeting drugs directly where they were needed. This was especially important for things like brain and pancreatic cancer, where swift, decisive, direct, and localized action made a crucial difference to patient outcomes.

“Lookin’ for your girlfriend?” a menacing voice sneered. “Yeah, dat bitch hangin’ out behind you, bro. Good luck tryin’ to turn around to look.” Liam tried anyway. No dice. Something prevented rotation.

“Erica!” he yelled over his shoulder.

“I’m here,” said a weak voice. Liam’s blood ran cold. Erica sounded badly hurt.

“Are you okay?!” Liam called. No answer from Erica.

The owner of the menacing voice circled around and into view. Liam didn’t know him, but he looked like a gang member. “Nah, she ain’t okay. But she got a perfect view of what’s gonna happen to you.”

Who was this guy? A leader? A right-hand man? A mere henchman?

In the fashion world, nanotees had become all the rage: tee shirts filled with nanobots that could display changing and moving images that varied according to mood or effort or geographic location or time of day or proximity to another person. Many tees came equipped with “emergency screens” that could display a person’s vital signs and medical history when activated by a trauma team (assuming the tee was still intact). And features that used to be separate devices in the old days could now be nanosprayed onto the skin. Dermal cell phones were extremely popular: spray a phone onto your forearm and use it the way the older generation used to use old-school cell phones. Dial numbers. Watch videos. Use apps. If the phone ever wore off, just respray it back on.

“Who are you?” demanded Liam.

“You in no position to ask questions,” said the gangster—bald, tan, and muscular in his tank top and jeans, twisty tattoos all over his arms, his chest, his face, his back. He had one gold tooth. Identifying marks, thought Liam. I’ll tell the police. Then with a chill, But if I’ve seen his face, he’s probably gonna kill me. Kill Erica. Fuck.

Gold Tooth grinned. “You got sumpin’ we want. You know what it is. Talk.”

“What the fuck are you yapping about?” gasped Liam, who was starting to feel excruciating pain in his wrists and shoulders.

One bit of nanotech that not everyone had gotten behind yet was the use of nanoswarm technology for a sort of mind-reading. Certain programmed swarms were capable of sending and receiving signals, and developers had learned how to let the swarms enter a brain, “sync” with it, then broadcast thoughts to other people who had similar swarms in their heads. As people began to realize the potential that this particular tech represented, both good and bad things began to happen. Conflict between spouses plummeted once couples could “read” each other’s minds. But more negatively, mass conformity and the hive-mind mentality became exponentially worse, which is one reason why so many still refused to be inhabited by such swarms. The net effect on society was to produce something akin to stratified castes or walled-off cliques of exclusive users who preferred to associate only with each other, resulting in hardened viewpoints and less inter-group communication.

“We went trew a lotta trouble to findjoo,” said Gold Tooth. “Now, you owe us for dat trouble. Talk.”

“I have no clue what you’re going on about,” said Liam, who was concentrating on not letting his arms pop out of his shoulder sockets, and on not letting his hands turn more purple and become completely useless. He flexed his increasingly numb fingers. He had to think of a way out of this mess. He had to think. And he needed his limbs to fight when he finally got free.

“Wrong answer,” said Gold Tooth. With a sudden sense of purpose, the gangster walked over to a sloppy stack of crates and picked up a baseball bat that had been leaning against the stack. He walked back to Liam, who had temporarily forgotten about his wrists and shoulders.

“Choose,” Gold Tooth threatened, hefting the bat.

“Choose what?”

“Knees or stomach. Or, hey, both. You say nothing, I do both.”