Mary followed the movement of his lips, noting that he was growing some serious stubble on his face, and, big surprise, it too looked damned good on him. She probably would have noticed it earlier if she hadn’t been studiously avoiding looking directly at him all morning, thanks to her night of torrid dreams. Mary was looking now though, and thought that was probably dangerous. It made her want to run her fingers over his face to see if the stubble now gracing his face would feel as good as it looked. Fortunately, she was saved from herself when he began to speak again, reclaiming her attention to his words rather than how pretty he was.
“They had reached the point where they were experimenting with the use of nanos in health care,” Dante continued. “They had bio-engineered nanos that, once introduced to the human body, could use human blood to reproduce and repair themselves as they worked to heal and repair the human body. For instance, if someone had cancer, the nanos recognized those cells as not belonging and would destroy them, and if a person was injured, the nanos would repair the wounds and so on.”
Mary raised her eyebrows at this claim. It sounded like an awesome invention if it were possible. She just didn’t think it was likely. These nanos would have to be programmed with every single little bit of knowledge about the human body, a lot of info to stick into something smaller than the head of a pin. However, she held her tongue.
“But as a result of a flaw in their design, the nanos had some unexpected side effects,” he said solemnly.
“What kind of flaw?” Mary asked, curious, despite knowing none of this could be true.
Dante paused and frowned, and she wondered if he was making up an answer, and then he said, “The human body is attacked by many different illnesses and diseases; cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, meningitis and so on. And then there are about a million different injuries a human could sustain, anything from damage caused by a stroke to a punctured lung from a stab wound. Programming nanos specific to each possible need would have meant creating hundreds or even thousands of illness-or injury-specific nanos.”
“More than that,” Mary said dryly. She couldn’t even guess how many different illnesses and injuries humans could suffer from. She’d read something once that had claimed there were at least 100,000 diseases in the world. How many injuries could be added to that? Creating that many programs for the nanos would have been a herculean task.
“Yes. So, rather than program the nanos for each specific need, the scientists developed a program that included the information for both male and female bodies at their peak, and programmed the nanos with the directive to ensure their host was at their peak condition and then self-destruct. At which point they would be flushed from the body naturally like all dead cells are.”
Mary nodded. “Sensible.”
“They thought so,” he agreed with amusement. “However, it did not go quite as they planned. Nanos are ultimately machines, and machines are very literal, so if you gave them to a seventy-year-old man with cancer, not only did they eradicate the cancer, but they set about returning his body to the peak condition they had been programmed with.”
Mary raised her eyebrows in question, not seeing a problem there. A fit seventy-year-old would be a good result.
“As it turns out, the human is at their peak condition in their mid to late twenties,” he said quietly. “And so the nanos worked to return their hosts to that peak.”
Mary sat back slowly as his words flowed over her. What he was talking about was that in a mythical land they had developed a mythical, scientific fountain of youth of sorts.
“Even once they had accomplished that, though, the nanos did not self-destruct and get flushed from the body,” he continued. “Because the body is constantly under attack by the environment, the air we breathe, the sun, or just the passage of time, the nanos simply could not get the body to remain at what they considered its peak long enough to self-destruct. They would finish repairs only to find several cells had died from exposure to the sun or just because they’d reached their optimum age. So the nanos remained in the host, continuing to work and repair. Their hosts never sickened, did not age, and were they injured, the nanos quickly repaired them.”
Mary let her breath out on a little sigh, thinking that it was a damned shame none of this was true, because that would rock. Or maybe not, she thought in the next moment. She’d lived a long time, gone through a lot and seen a lot, and frankly, Mary was kind of tired. It wasn’t that she was suicidal or anything, but death to her was starting to look like a bit of a respite or rest, rather than the scary ending she’d always thought of it as when she was young.
“And that is how I survived being crushed by your RV,” Dante announced.
Mary blinked and refocused on him.
“What?” she asked sharply.