Dust
Page 24
Chapter 24 - Redemption
Helen paused in the hall to be sure she wasn’t observed or followed, and then she moved quickly down the stairs to the basement. Helen opened the door to the lab. It looked like a simple act but as she grabbed the door handle, a camera in the latch compared her thumbprint to a database of authorized persons. A second camera near the ceiling used face recognition and body movement nuances to identify Helen. An x-ray backscatter scanner unit stripped her naked and parameterized every nuance of her body. It verified that there were no artificial parts of Helen bent on deceiving the security system. Finally, there were sensors that sniffed Helen’s unique human odor and could even tell if her motives for entering the lab were benign. In any other database all this information would be filed as the ideal female reference, here it was only used to identify Helen. The system was satisfied that the person before the door was the owner of the thumb presented and no other persons were in the vicinity that might tailgate through the door. The door opened.
She held the door open a moment to check behind her again before closing the door and switching on the light. She went through the changing area (the lab had been set up as a clean room originally). She went through an air jet barrier and another door into the lab and to the box containing Beatrice. "Chow time." she said and flipped a switch on the side of the table that held the box. Two one-hundred-watt LED lamps came on illuminating the box. The floating particles of nano brain paraded and swirled in the light absorbing their ration of photon energy.
Laying a hand lightly on the transparent cover of the box Helen said softly “I have something for you, Beatrice.” She opened her other hand. In it was one of Ruth’s lances, as are used by diabetics to test their blood, and a swap. She tore open the packets, prepared her finger and punctured it. She squeezed a drop of blood onto the top of Beatrice’s box, then another drop, and another, into a tiny puddle on the transparent surface. Then she stepped back and asked, “What do you think?”
The fog in the box was unchanged. The girl stood expectantly. “Thank you, Helen” said a woman’s voice from somewhere. It took Beatrice only few seconds to commandeer the communication codes of the small group of isolated nanobots in the blood drops. The blood ever so slowly started to change. From the center of the tiny puddle of human life, a gray spec appeared and started to grow consuming the red of the human corpuscles and replacing them with copies of the previously dormant nanobots that were in Helen’s blood.
What was that Steven had said about being programmed not to convert living organisms?
Helen peered closely at the blood spot and smiled. Soon the whole of the spot was gray. Three drops of blood were now two hundred thousand nanobots.
Having converted the blood cells and serum, the nanos started on the hydrocarbons in the Lexan plastic box. The army of two hundred thousand worked downward multiplying their numbers until a hole the size of the original blood sample opened in the transparent top. Wisps of animated matter fanned out through the room foraging for the elements needed by the constructors but not found in the plastic. The hole kept expanding in diameter as workers transformed more and more imprisoning plastic into nano muscle under the complete control of a liberated Beatrice.
The girl went to the door but turned to say in leaving “Enjoy life”. A bodiless woman’s voice replied, “I love you.