Little Deadly Things

and glucose could be called a meal. It appealed to none of his senses save hunger.

He walked through his modest bungalow to a plain bedroom, furnished only with a smartbed. He programmed it to maintain his skin temperature and ensure a comfortable recovery. He neglected this step once, and upon awakening, every centimeter of his skin burned with the devil’s own pins and needles as warm blood returned to cold flesh.

Naked, trusting the smartbed to protect his skin, Miller lay down and activated the inhaler. He registered a brief tickle as billions of nanoparticles penetrated his nasal membranes. He could almost feel his brain flood with neurotransmitters. These chemical emissaries relayed messages to his body, barking orders to a fleet of corporeal agents. They slowed the nettlesome business of life support, system by biological system, putting vitality in nearly exclusive service to the mind. Miller was to be accorded a multi-hour experience of satori—Zen clarity without the fuss of zazen meditation.

At first he experienced the normal effects of SNAP. Seven seconds after inhaling, he felt his sinuses erupt and knew there would be a brilliant crimson trail where bloody mucus blanketed his face. The red stain was the source of the pejorative nickname: Rudolph. Then SNAP stilled his warming responses and he shivered. Even the hair on his body lay flat as the drug destroyed every source of thermal insulation.

But ah…the high! He was one with the cosmos—transcendent, omniscient. He danced among the stars, sang the music of the spheres and soared along simultaneous paths of quantum particles.

The coppery taste was Miller’s first warning that something was wrong. While he lay paralyzed in ecstatic thrall, blood began to puddle in his mouth. It rushed away from his core towards the skin’s superficial capillaries, a torrent at escape velocity from the body’s gravity well. It seeped from sightless eyes and deafened ears. It suppurated at a rate that would make hemorrhagic fever look like a bridal blush. Every centimeter of his skin oozed. It would be a race to see if he bled out or suffocated first. Five times before, NMech nanobots kept him alive. Today, he was swept across a biological Rubicon towards death’s cold embrace.

Still, the body is stubbornly attuned to one lodestone, the irresistible pull of survival. This most powerful of instincts punched its mighty way through the chemical interference, demanding life for an unresponsive body.

All for naught.

Emery Miller often imagined that his final thoughts would be a flashing montage of his short life’s events or that he would behold a mystical White Light proclaiming the Oneness of All. But Emery Miller’s last thought before blood saturated his thousand-thread-count silk sheets and flooded his smartbed’s sensors, before his heart stilled into silence, was to wonder, Did I remember to feed the cat?

Three thousand miles away, in the sixth-floor management suite of a Boston office building, a chief executive sat at an ebony desk custom-scaled to fit her frame. A long bank of bare windows gave the space a clinical feel that matched the businesswoman’s demeanor. She’d scattered mementos on the opposite wall thinking this is what executives did, but the diplomas, photos, and a framed, jewel-studded gold pin were as out of place in the woman’s barren office as a litter of puppies in an operating room.

A mat of dirty blond curls clung to her scalp like coiled worms. Her hands trembled, her legs kicked, and her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably. The 33-year-old face betrayed emotion for the first time in over a quarter-century. She’d pushed her body and mind beyond the limits that evolution had designed and her endocrine system rebelled.

Confused steps replaced her once-certain movement. Only days ago, her muscles had obeyed with a speed and precision beyond normal human capabilities, but now, on the rebound, she was riddled with tics and twitches. As she lost control within, she sought greater control in the world outside her.

Eva had a plan. The task was a difficult one, to create a master switch that would control every NMech product, every NMech customer. She was a scientist, so she would experiment. She would learn. She’d picked her test subjects carefully, as any good scientist would. Emery Miller was first on her list.

Miller had no family, no friends, no one to miss or to mourn him, none to question his death—a perfect test case. She peered into a heads-up display and then grunted in approval at her short list. Like Miller, the other three on the list lacked family or close friends. The soldier’s entire world was his army. The scientist’s was her career, and the tea expert’s, his employer.

An electronic back door gave her control—not to the actual medical, recreational, military, and environmental nanoagents; any tinkering there would immediately be flagged to the systems that monitor product safety. No, Eva would control the accounting for these applications. It was simple: a bookkeeping entry thwarted all of the safeguards built into the company’s products. It simply cancelled his life-support subscription for nonpayment. One stroke of a pseudo-accountant’s pen had transformed Emery Miller from preferred customer to deadbeat, and then from deadbeat to…dead.

All NMech’s products were rigorously tested to ensure the safety and satisfaction of its subscribers. But bookkeeping entries? Insignificant. They were of no more interest to the ardent sentinels of product safety than an ant would be to Cerberus, the three-headed beast that guards the gates to the underworld.

Eva Rozen’s face twitched again, this time into a smile. Control was in her grasp. Cerberus was her pet, and programmed to do her bidding.

13 AN UNEASY ALLIANCE

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 19, 2038, 7:00PM

When Jim Ecco told Marta about Eva’s unexpected visit to the shelter earlier that day, he recounted her dramatic entrance, the receptionist’s flight, and Eva’s willingness to wait for Jim to finish his rounds with the dogs. Marta was skeptical, and at first refused even to listen to Eva’s proposal. When Jim outlined Eva’s plan to fund public health projects that Marta would administer, Marta immediately grasped the relationship between commercial nanomeds and paying for the costs of developing public health applications. But she was unmoved.

“I don’t even want to hear the details,” she said. “I don’t trust her.”

“Marta, if we can hold Eva to her word, you can save remedies that might be lost. You’ve said yourself that the cost to find the plants that have medicinal value, to isolate the active compounds, and then to synthesize the drugs means the pharmaceutical corporations are not interested in developing. Many of the remedies you’ve catalogued will be extinct before the drug companies think to fabricate them.”

“I can’t argue with that. But I haven’t spoken with Eva in years. Why should I suddenly trust her now?”

“This is not the same Eva Rozen. And if she and you can manufacture with nanoassembly, you’ll save some of the cures that will be lost if the rainforests die out. Maybe they’ll recover, maybe not. But we’ll have the medicines.”

“And make Eva rich,” said Marta brusquely.

“That’s the deal. She gets what she wants, and you get what you want.”

“What I want is for her to stay away from me. From us.”

“Marta—”

Marta held up a hand to stop Jim. “Sorry. My answer is no.”

“No? How can you say no?”

“I’ve been collecting plants since my first summer in Puerto Rico. There are still millions of hectares of rainforest to explore. I want to find and catalog what I can before the forests are destroyed.”

“You sound more like a librarian than a scientist. At least people use the information that a librarian files away so neatly.”

“That’s not fair,” Marta protested, but she knew that it was beyond fair: it was accurate. Worse, it was not