When they had plowed a furrow—and there was no pain in harvesting dead skin cells—they stopped.
They turned.
Billy punched the virtual controls. He frowned, and Burnofsky saw that frown.
“I wish I could see what you’re seeing, Billy.”
The nanobots revealed then a feature that was unexpected. A jaw, toothless, but curving like the Joker’s slashed mouth, opened at the bottom of the nanobot.
The ripped and torn skin cells were sucked into the unhinged jaws.
Within seconds the nanobots began defecating a pinkish paste.
What happened next was a blur Billy couldn’t even see. The nanobots ’ legs moved like a spider on speed. Or like a sculptor, wasn’t that what they called guys who carved statues? A shape began to emerge from the pink goo.
Other things—tiny needles, busy sculpting cilia, jets of flame, on and off in an instant. A faint haze almost that was the MightyMites crawling across the nanobots like fleas on a dog, a scarcely visible blur of activity.
He was seeing programmed activity, he knew that much. He was seeing something that he was not controlling.
He looked for a Stop button. He searched the controls, punching this and that, trying to distract the nanobots, trying to make them do this or that. Or anything.
But his controls were no longer controlling. A prompt appeared, demanding a code.
“What’s happening?” Billy asked.
“Watch,” Burnofsky said with an almost sensuous whisper.
“The controls aren’t working.
“No, they won’t now unless you punch in the code. Thirty-two characters, alphanumeric,” Burnofsky said. “If you just start guessing, you should be able to hit the right sequence within, oh, probably a year—”
“Give it to me!”
It was now clear to Billy what was happening. New nanobots was being built from the pink goo.
As he watched the new monsters rose. They were crude, postapocalyptic versions of the original nanobots, less sharp-edged, rougher, simpler.
And then, they began to dig.
It was then that Billy screamed.
Minako woke from troubled sleep. She gasped as memories came flooding back.
She rolled onto her side, swung her legs off the bed, and stood up. She still smelled of urine. She had not had the strength to shower before.
Would they come for her again?
Please, no. Please. No.
The ship was pitching and rolling far worse than before. Somewhere outside, in the world beyond this terrible gleaming sphere, a major storm must be raging. She felt sick to her stomach and ran, wobbly, to the tiny bathroom. But by the time she made it there the nausea had lessened. She closed the door with barely room to sit down on the toilet.
She had to lace her fingers together to keep them from shaking, but even then they trembled, and the trembling went all the way through her.
She sat and there was the door directly before her and there was something on the door.
A piece of toilet paper, just a single square held there with a tiny piece of tape.
Someone had written on it in pen.
It said: Be strong. You are not alone.
“Yes, I want a goddamned cigarette.”
“But, Madam President, you don’t smoke.”
That was from her chief of staff, Ginny Gastrell. Gastrell was painfully thin, with a sort of concave chest, knobby elbows, and hands that could almost have belonged to a man. She was often described by detractors as looking like the weak horse in the third race at Belmont.
“I did smoke, though. I gave it up. Now I want it back,” Helen Falkenhym Morales said. She was in the Oval Office, staring through the bulletproof glass at the south lawn. “I gave it up and I want it back. I want a cigarette. Surely someone in this place still smokes.”
“Madam President, you—”
“I want a goddamned cigarette! I’m the goddamned president of the goddamned United States, and I want a goddamned cigarette!”
“Yes, Madam President. I think one of the Secret Service agents . . .” She let herself out.
The president went back to reading a report on her pad, an endless, dire report on the rash of bizarre terrorist or suspected terrorist incidents.
The plane crash in Jets stadium.
The bombing and shootout at the United Nations.
The murder of the sole surviving suspect from that bombing— she had been identified, finally. A good girl, of course weren’t they all, from a good Indian American home in Connecticut. Someone had gotten into her secure hospital room, incapacitated the FBI agent in the room with her and pumped liquified white phosphorous into her brain. By the time anyone had discovered her, she had a meatless, empty skull sitting atop her shoulders.
A massacre in a house right on Capitol Hill.
Worst of all, for the moment at least, Washington, DC police were all over the massacre in the bookstore. The FBI had tried hard to federalize it and been told in no uncertain terms to drop dead. A cop had been shot. No way the PD didn’t investigate.
And what they were turning up was Rios’s ETA. Evidence was mounting that the witnesses had been right: the lead shooter had ID’d herself as ETA and she was, in fact, ETA.
The president had scheduled a meeting with Rios. She liked him. She liked him a great deal, although she seemed to remember that at first she hadn’t. He’d grown on her, then. Lately she had come to think he reminded her of an early political mentor, Senator Reynolds, a man of unshakable integrity.
Not that Rios looked or sounded or acted anything like the senator. Just …well, there was some connection there . . .