Part 1 (1/2)

The NanoTech Network.

Science-Fiction Novel by Alexander Lazarevich.

DISCLAIMER NOTICE.

The intent of this notice is to antic.i.p.ate possible accusations against me that I am trying to create a distorted notion about historical characters, both still alive and dead, by ascribing to them the words they never actually said. I hereby state that the text following after this notice is a product of my imagination. The words that I put into the mouths of historical characters of the past or the present only represent my idea of what these characters might have said, had they found themselves in the imaginary situation described in the following text. To the best of my knowledge they never actually said these words.

As far as I know, the events described in this text did not take place in reality. However, the latter statement should not be construed to mean that the events described hereinafter could not have happen in reality, or that they will never occur in the future.

The author END OF THE NOTICE.

Part One: Cyborg-Bacteria

1.1. Dissemination. May 15, 1997, 11:35 AM, Moscow subway

Around noon, as usual, the subway car was full of foreign tourists. A group of American high-school students, maps of Moscow subway in their hands, were unsuccessfully trying to p.r.o.nounce the Russian names of the stations written on the map in English transcription. Closer to the door there stood an elderly j.a.panese couple, video cameras and other high- tech gadgets hanging from their necks.

A middle-aged man, who looked like a Russian, and who did not at all look like he was suffering from a cold, suddenly sneezed, bespattering the Americans with his saliva. ”Excuse me” said he in English with a strong Russian accent, and started getting through to the door. At the door he sneezed once again, this time bespattering the j.a.panese. Apparently he did not know any j.a.panese, so he just excused himself in Russian. The train arrived at the station, he got off, and was forever lost in the crowd...

The next day, 2:50 PM, Moscow International Airport ”Sheremetievo”

An elderly j.a.panese couple, who dropped by a duty-free souvenir shop to buy a Russian nested doll before leaving Moscow, approached the salesgirl to pay for the souvenir.

When proffering his credit card to the salesgirl, the j.a.panese man unexpectedly, even for himself, sneezed. So unexpectedly, in fact, that he did not even have time to cover his mouth with his hand. Extremely embarra.s.sed, he started jabbering rapidly in his own tongue, hurriedly bowing. The salesgirl impatiently waved her hand, meaning ”That's OK”...

The j.a.panese couple flew out to their j.a.pan, without even suspecting what other souvenir, besides the nested doll, they were carrying from Moscow...

Same place, an hour later.

The salesgirl in the duty-free shop suddenly sneezed. She had not felt any symptoms of an incipient cold, not a hint of a headache. She just had suddenly wanted to sneeze, without any apparent reason. ”Probably some kind of allergy”

- thought she, while aloud she apologized to an Arab-looking customer, whom she seemed to had bespattered. After the Arab came a Latin-American, then came an African, and after the African came a Chinese. All the world was coming. Everybody was going home, to hundreds of countries on all the continents. Each of them was to take along some invisible souvenirs and to become the sources of dissemination in their own respective countries...

1.2. Detection June 25, 1997. Center for Communicable Decease Control, Atlanta, USA

- ”It's hard to say now who was the first to spot them.

It might have been that schoolgirl during a biology cla.s.s who was looking through a microscope and suddenly asked her teacher: what's this? And the teacher could not answer. In appearance they are not very different from conventional bacteria, but at high magnification, or rather, at a relatively high magnification, the highest magnification a conventional school microscope is capable of, if you look very carefully you could see some particles inside that have regular geometric shapes.”

The deputy director for science of the center for communicable disease control put the first of the photographs on the director's desk. At first glance there was nothing extraordinary about them. The usual a.s.sortment of all kinds of bacteria that one can see wherever one points one's microscope. Some of the bacteria were marked with a felt pen circles, and inside those one could indeed see some rectangles and geometrically perfect spheres that were interconnected by some strings and pipes.

-”The teacher contacted us. At almost the same time we were also contacted by some lab a.s.sistants who had been doing some routine medical a.n.a.lyses and also noticed something unusual. It is worth noting here that they all live in different states, hundreds of miles from each other.

They have mailed us some samples. But I'm afraid, they were too late.”

-”How do you mean, too late?” The anxiety in the director's voice increased.

The deputy director for science took one more photograph out of his folder, and hesitated for a moment, as if not daring to put it on the director's desk. After a momentary pause he said: -”This photograph was taken this morning. It has nothing to do with the samples that we received. We just took some water out of tap, out of the city water works, and took a picture through a microscope.”

He went silent and put the picture on the desk. The director gingerly took the picture in his hands. He had braced himself for the worst. But what he saw was a shock to him. Almost a third of all the bacteria in the picture had been marked with a felt pen by somebody's slightly shaking hand.

-”Do you mean to say ”-said director in a constrained voice-”that they are already... everywhere?”

-”They are anywhere you look. If you washed your face and brushed your teeth this morning, I bet your have millions of them in your bloodstream by now. Just as I have in mine as well.”

-”Is this dangerous?”

-” We don't now. We have gone through all the epidemiology reports for the last week from all over the country. There don't seem to be any new unknown diseases, no unusual symptoms. So if we a.s.sume it to be an agent for some exotic disease, its incubation period is apparently longer than one week. The only thing it seems to be doing now is just breeding like h.e.l.l. Although, some data suggest that it may cause sudden fits of sneezing - that seems to be its method of propagation. But no other symptoms. There is, however, one strange fact that transpires from these reports...” - the deputy director for science hesitated for a moment.

-”I'm listening. Go ahead.” -said the Director.

- ”It's unlikely that it has anything to do with these...

”things”. Most likely it's just a coincidence. The mortality rate throughout the population went down. Earlier in the week it dropped just a little, within the normal statistical fluctuation range, but by the end of the week its value plunged far beyond usual statistical variations and continues to go down. There are lots of reports about terminal cancer patients whose condition unexpectedly improved during this week. There was also a steep decline in the number of deaths related to heart attacks and strokes.”

-”A bacteria that does not cause diseases but rather cures them - that's something new. We've got to stop this epidemic before all of us medical folks are out of our jobs”

- nervously joked the director.

The deputy director did not even smile at the joke: ”The most terrible thing is - and I've been saving the worst news for the end - it is that this ”thing” just is not a bacteria at all. Or, rather, not quite a bacteria. We have managed to photograph it through an electron microscope. Have a look at this.”

What was shown in the picture looked a little bit like a spa.r.s.e forest made up of industrial robots in place of trees, photographed from a helicopter. Mechanical manipulator arms, a little c.u.mbersome in appearance, looking as if they were made of thick gla.s.s, stuck out here and there from the surface of a great pain.

-”This is a close-up of one of the areas on the surface of this so-called ”bacteria”. Just to give you an idea of the scale of this picture, let me point out that the grapple on this manipulator arm is merely several tens of atoms of carbon thick.”

-”But this means that... that...” - the director was momentarily at a loss for words - ”This means that this thing is artificial!”

- ”In a certain sense it is. The first one was indeed created by somebody, but after that they multiplied by themselves, by making copies of their own selves. They are half bacteria, half self-replicating engineering systems. We nicknamed them cyborg-bacteria. Look at the next picture.

This is what they have inside. This here is an ordinary cell nucleus, although the number of chromosomes in it is somewhat higher than one would normally expect to find in a bacteria. But all around the nucleus...”

All around the nucleus, there were strange structures floating in the cell's cytoplasm, that bore a remote resemblance to some kind of s.p.a.ce stations interconnected by a maze of tubing.”