Nanicals, short for ‘nano-mechanicals,' were fairly rudimentary at first. They were tiny little machines that could slide along under their own power and perform simple preprogrammed tasks by contracting and elongating protein-based filaments. They had a short functional life span and a very small onboard memory. Mostly they were used to scrape scale off the inside of microtubules or transport microcomponents along specified pathways in nano-scale engineering projects. One day, however, a bioengineering graduate student in Norway looking for a dissertation topic extracted mitochondria from bacteria and was able to get them to function in a nanical frame. After a little refinement and the inclusion of some vacuoles to hold fuel for a mitochondrial power source, he managed to turn out a nanical with a longer range and greater electromechanical power.

Nanical engineering really took off after that. People started fitting them with little shovels, picks, drills, hooks–even crude grasping clamps. Eventually the amount of fuel that could be stored in the vacuoles became the limiting factor in nanical development; some of the missions being dreamed up for them required not only long term deployment, but the ability to switch themselves on and off in response to environmental conditions.

Drawing upon his earlier research, the graduate student, now a doctor of engineering on the faculty of a research institute, returned to living cells looking for a solution. He gutted a bacterial cell body and grafted the cell membrane onto a nanical with one end removed. After a great deal of trial and error, he found the right combination of components and the proper technique to create a nanical/cell hybrid that could sustain itself from its environment if the right constituents were present. Once he had figured out how to fine tune the metabolism of the naniculocyte, as he called it (shortened to n-cyte by an impatient press), he triggered another wave of research and innovation into what was now known as nanoscale cybernetics.

Someone pondering the way RNA polymerase moved along an RNA strand reading and duplicating the nucleotide sequence came up with the idea of synthesizing a similar molecule capable of following a preassembled protein sequence and using the encoded information to trigger events within the naniculocyte. Contractions, relaxations, pauses, and eventually over two dozen more actions were devised, each of which could be controlled very precisely by subtle alterations in the protein sequence and the tertiary structure of the polymerase itself. It was a veritable revolution in nanoscale engineering, and one which garnered the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the now world-famous professor who started it all.

It was another professor, this one from Australia, who set in motion the juggernaut that would eventually lead to the most widespread epidemic in the history of the human species. Oddly, she was not a biologist, a physician, or even an bioengineer. She was a computer scientist, with a background in crystallography, by the name of Suzanne Ritter. Her primary interests were artificial intelligence and neural networks. She ran across a paper in an obscure journal dealing with quantum effects in self-assembling carbon crystalline structures and conceived the wild idea of encoding binary information in these crystals. She managed to produce a carbon crystal containing atoms in exactly two configurations, and then worked out a way to control precisely which configuration each atom assumed as the crystal assembled itself. By introducing a photon stream into one end of the cigar-shaped crystal, the pattern of pulses and dark intervals that emerged from the other end contained binary information encoded according to the structure of the crystal. She then refined the process of self-assembly of these crystals until she was able to manufacture them small enough to be contained in the nucleus of a cell.

Once implanted into a naniculocyte along with a properly positioned chemical luminescence body (clb), which could be switched on and off according to a pattern embedded in the protein template, a light sensitive ‘photocell' at the far end of the crystal acted as a transducer, converting the binary information into electromechanical stimuli for the n-cyte's filaments. The carbon crystal then acted as a sort of read-only memory storage area, all or part of which could be called whenever necessary in the course of the naniculocyte's mission. Hundreds, or even thousands, of these crystals could be packed into specially manufactured vacuoles in the n-cyte and rotated into position facing the clb as needed, in a movement analogous to the chamber of a revolver.

All well and good. It worked admirably for a while; so well, in fact, that thousands of applications were designed around the concept of the ‘smart' n-cyte. Biomedicine became the chief stomping grounds for these new beasties. N-cytes patrolled the circulatory system, interstitial areas, and even the sinuses of the brain, repairing damage or destroying cancerous cells. They were programmed to cover themselves immediately with the proteins used by the body to identify ‘native' cells, thus escaping attack by the immune system.

Then one day a patient who had been injected with smart n-cytes programmed to scrape the plaque off the interior of his cardiac artery, one of the most common uses for "Ritter's Critters," suddenly up and died. A postmortem revealed massive internal hemorrhaging, affecting virtually every major organ system. The medical examiners were completely stumped about the etiology of this presentation until blood samples revealed the presence of system-wide n-cytes. This in itself was odd, as all n-cytes contained an instruction for autolysis using a built-in protease that essentially digested the n-cyte into non-toxic fragments that would be quickly removed by the lymphatic system. Once the n-cyte reached the end of its useful life, or if the level of circulating glucose dropped below a point which indicated certain death of the host organism, it was supposed to kill itself, quietly and efficiently.

Even more disturbing was the discovery upon further examination of the surviving n-cytes that their crystalline memory modules no longer matched the original templates. Somehow the crystals had ‘mutated,' although this had not been thought possible. Repeated analysis under controlled laboratory conditions revealed that not only could individual n-cytes undergo spontaneous mutations, when a mutated individual encountered other n-cytes, the probability was high that it would induce the same mutation in them. Mathematical modeling of this probability over time suggested that the mutations were a result of quantum interactions among the n-cytes.

The discovery that the n-cytes were mutating at the quantum level led inexorably to the even more disturbing realization that natural selection would also be operating. The mutation that led to disabling the autolysis mechanism would over time become dominant, as these n-cytes would survive longer and thus be able to induce that same mutation in more companion n-cytes. While there was as yet no evidence that n-cytes could reproduce themselves, mutated ones could bestow a form of immortality on others, which amounted to largely the same thing. Over 2.5 million people had by that time received n-cyte treatments, for conditions ranging from brain abscesses to varicose veins. The public health authorities were therefore quite alarmed at the prospect of rogue n-cytes, and advised anyone who had been injected with them to come in for a scan to make sure all n-cytes had been inactivated at the proper time.

The trouble was, no one had developed a reliable assay for definitive detection of n-cytes in vivo. They could ‘hide,' moving out of the bloodstream into spaces where conventional passive methods were ineffective. Various attempts were made to create antibodies that would be specific for n-cytes, but since n-cytes had the capacity to alter their surface chemistry, and therefore their antigenic properties, these met with limited success.

Fortunately, no further cases of unexplained hemorrhage or any other medical condition that could be obviously linked to the presence of superannuated n-cytes were reported, so the medical community settled into an uneasy peace. Research into solutions was still going on, to be sure, but it lacked the feverish pitch that had characterized the first few weeks after it became generally known that rogue n-cytes were responsible for a fatality.

A U.S. government mathematician, a civilian employee of DARPA, was reviewing Dr. Ritter's research and looked up her original references. When he came across the paper on quantum effects in carbon crystals, he got a copy of it from the installation library and settled in to read. Three hours later he was completely hooked.

Suzanne Ritter was a well-respected computer scientist, but her knowledge of quantum mathematics was limited. She found the subject interesting, but a bit too esoteric for any practical applications in her research. The learning curve for deep comprehension was rather steep, and it just wasn't likely to provide sufficient tangible return to make the investment of time worthwhile.

Albert Merino, on the other hand, was an expert in quantum mathematical modeling, and while he had dipped extensively into the literature pertinent to his chosen field, he had never before encountered this particular paper or its author. The quantum mathematical treatment of the crystalline interactions wasn't really what he'd term rigorous, yet it showed several clear and intriguing effects that had never occurred to Al before. He worked with the basic formulae until he felt relatively comfortable with them, then applied them to some arbitrary structures generated on his computer. He factored the results and used them to refine the original equations, until he had by repeated application of this process arrived at a new set of formulae, derivative of the originals but subtly different.

To test his formulae under near-‘real world' conditions, he set a simulation to be run on one of the DARPA supercomputers that used his refined equations to predict the long-term behavior of n-cytes in certain simplified physiological environments. The model would take about 6 hours of CPU time to build, so Al decided to let it run in batch mode over the weekend.

When he came in on Monday morning, Al drank a cup of coffee while he read his email. After taking a couple of phone calls and scanning an agenda for a meeting later in the morning, he switched on the 3270 terminal that connected him to the supercomputer center. His results were there, third in the queue, and showed to have run without error. So far, so good. He downloaded the file to his PC and opened it. He skimmed over the statistical information until he got to the generative matrices, where most of the real meat of the report was. As he took it in, he felt his forehead wrinkle in annoyance. Something was obviously wrong here; he must have made a mistake in the input data or when he was constructing the equation symbology. He would have to go over it again with a fine-toothed comb to find the mistake. Right now, though, it was time for his Monday morning staff meeting. He printed off the salient parts of the report and stuck them in his briefcase, in case the morning got unbearably boring.

It was a long and tedious meeting, as government meetings are wont to be, and after the first couple of hours Al found his attention wandering drastically. When the electrical outlet plates on the wall to his left began to dance in place and change colors, he knew it was time to find something to keep himself from slipping into the familiar next step in his descent into utter ennui: a limited form of astral projection, in which he floated about six inches above his body and felt numb all over. It wasn't a very interesting sensation, really, and it always left him feeling rather disturbed. There were, after all, things about the tops of his colleagues' heads he simply didn't want to know. Remembering the report, he felt a stir of something that might have been excitement, though probably it was more akin to relief, and with practiced discretion pulled it out, laying it atop the dreadfully dry Management Control Review he was meant to be following.

He started reading the printouts in more depth. He was struck almost immediately by the apparent mathematical errors, yet had no success in finding their source. There had to be errors in the math somewhere; these results simply couldn't be accurate.

Ten minutes after the meeting had ended, one of his coworkers shook his arm.

"Hey, Earth to Al," he said, jovially, "You can go back to your cubbyhole now."

Al looked up suddenly, startled and momentarily disoriented. He had trouble focusing his eyes on his colleague. The man looked closely at Al's face.

"Are you OK?" he asked, in some alarm.

"Uh, yeah, I'm fine," answered Al slowly, "I just, um, discovered something a little weird, that's all." He hastily shoved the report and his other papers into his briefcase. "Excuse me, I've got to get back to my office." He pushed past his coworker and hurried down the hall.

The man stood and watched him go, then shook his head as he turned away.

"You just never know what planet those guys are on."

Seated at his desk, Al realized he was sweating a little. His hands felt clammy and his forehead flushed. He manually checked each and every detail of the analysis he had just finished performing on the n-cyte predictive model. There were no errors. Not a single one. That could only mean that the disturbing results he'd been so reluctant to accept were valid, at least insofar as the simulation parameters themselves were valid. He needed to tell someone about this, the sooner the better.

The thing which had propelled Al Merino to the point of breathless panic was the indication by his program that the n-cytes were beginning to manipulate their own destinies.