Dogged Persistence
The dog stops in the middle of the road, distracted on his way to the forest. The asphalt smells damp and spicy with fallen leaves. Infrared laser-guidance posts line the shoulder at wide intervals, but most of the vehicles are of the old kind, growling inside from hot engines, belching chemical exhaust.
The twin headlights of the approaching car look like bright coins. The image fixates him, imprinting spots on his dark-adapted eyes. The dog can hear the car dominating the night noises of insects and stirring branches. The car sounds loud. The car sounds angry.
Moving with casual ease, the dog saunters toward the shoulder. But the car arrives faster than he could ever run, squealing brakes like some death scream. He hears the thud of impact, the bright explosion of pain that suddenly vanishes. He is flying through the air toward the ditch. He smells the spray of blood from inside his own nose.
Knowing he must hide, the dog hauls himself into the brambles, under a barbed-wire fence, to the dense foliage.
Car doors slam, running feet, the babble of voices: “Shit! That was no deer—that was a dog! A big black lab!” “Where’d he go?” “Shit, must have crawled off to die.” “Look at all the blood—and look what he did to your car!”
The dog has found a safe place. The human voices become fuzzy as black unawareness overcomes him. He will not move again until it is finished. He will be all right.
Inside his body, millions upon millions of nanomachines begin to repair the damage, cell by cell, rebuilding the entire dog. The night insects resume their music in the forest.
Patrice went to the window and watched her son bounce a tennis ball against the shed. Each impact sounded like gunshots aimed at her. She cringed. Judd didn’t know any better; he remembered none of what had happened so long ago. Sixteen should have been a magic age for him, when teenage concerns achieved universal importance. In all those years, she had never let Judd come into contact with other people, much less those his own age.
She opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch, taking care to keep the worried expression off her face. Judd would consider the concern normal for her anyway.
The gray Oregon cloud cover had broken for its daily hour of sunshine. The meadow looked fresh from the previous night’s rain. The patter of raindrops had sounded like creeping footsteps outside the window, and Patrice had lain awake for hours, staring at the ceiling. Now the tall pines and aspens cast morning shadows across the dirt road that led from the highway to her sheltered house.
Judd smacked the tennis ball too hard and it sailed off to the driveway, struck a stone, and bounced into the meadow. With a shout of anger, Judd hurled his tennis racket after it. Impulsive—he became more like his father every day.
“Judd!” she called, quelling most of the scolding tone. He fetched the racket and plodded toward her. He had been restless for the last two days. “What’s wrong with you?”
Judd averted his eyes, turned instead to squint where the sunshine lit the dense pines. Far away, she could hear the deep hum of a hovertruck hauling logs down the highway.
“Pancake,” he finally answered. “He didn’t come back yesterday, and I haven’t seen him all morning.”
Now Patrice understood, and she felt the relief wash inside of her. For a moment, she was afraid he might have seen some stranger or heard something about them on the news. “Your dog’ll be all right. Just wait and see.”
“But what if he’s dying in a ditch somewhere?” She could see tears on the edges of Judd’s eyes. He fought hard against crying. “What if he’s in a fur trap, or got shot by a hunter?”
Patrice shook her head. “I’m not worried about him. He’ll come home safe and sound. He always does.”
Once again Patrice felt the shudder. Yes, he always did.
Fifteen years before, Patrice—she had gone by the name of Trish, then—had thought the world was golden. She had been married to Jerry for four years. In that time, he had doubled his salary through patents and bonuses from enhanced silicon-chip development at the DyMar Laboratories.
Their one-year-old son sat in diapers in the middle of the hardwood floor, spinning around. He had deactivated his holographic cartoon companions and played with the dog instead. The boy knew “Ma” and “Da” and attempted to say “Pancake,” though the dog’s name came out more like a strangled “gaaaakk!”
Trish and Jerry chuckled together as they watched the black Labrador play with Jody. She did not start calling the baby Judd until after they had fled. Pancake romped back and forth with paws slipping on the polished floor. Jody squealed with delight. Pancake woofed and circled the baby, who tried to spin on his diapers on the floor.
“Pancake’s like a puppy again,” Trish said, smiling. She had owned the dog for nine years already, all through college and in her four years with Jerry. Pancake had settled into a middle-aged routine of sleeping most of the time, except for a lot of slobbering and tail wagging to greet them every day when they came home from work. But lately the dog had been more energetic and playful than he had been in years. “I wonder what happened to him,” she said.
Jerry’s grin, his short dark hair, and heavy eyebrows made him look dashing. “Maybe all those little things that make a dog feel old got fixed inside of him. The sore joints, the stiff muscles, the bad circulation. Like a million million tiny repairmen doing a renovation.”
Trish sat up and pulled her hand away from him. “Did you take him into your lab again? What did you do to him?” She raised her voice, and the words came out with cold anger. “What did you do to him!”
Trish stopped and turned to see her baby boy and the dog looking at her as if she had gone insane. What business did she have yelling when they were trying to play?
Jerry looked at her, hard. He raised his eyebrows in an expression of sincerity. “I didn’t do anything. Honest.”
With a woof, Pancake charged at Jody again, wagging his tail and banking aside at the last instant. The holographic cartoon characters marched back into the room, dancing to a tune only they could hear. The dog trotted right through the images to the baby. “Just look at him! How can you think anything’s wrong?”
But in only four years of marriage, Trish had learned one thing, and she had learned to hate it. She could always tell when Jerry was lying.
“Mom, he’s back!” Judd shouted.
For a moment, Patrice reacted with alarm, thinking of the hunters, wondering who could have found them, how she might have given themselves away—but then through the open window, she could hear the dog barking. She looked up from the stove to see the black Labrador bounding out of the trees. Judd ran toward him so hard she expected him to sprawl on his face. Just what she needed, Patrice thought, he would probably break his arm. That would ruin everything. So far, she had managed to avoid all contact with doctors and any other kind of people who kept names and records.
But Judd reached the dog safely, and both tried to outdo the other’s enthusiasm. Pancake barked and ran around in circles, leaping into the air. Judd threw his arms around the dog’s neck and wrestled him to the ground.
According to her notes, Pancake would be 24 years old in a few months. Nearly twice the average lifespan of a dog.
Judd and Pancake raced each other back to the house. Patrice wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and came out to the porch to greet him. “I told you he’d be okay,” she said.
Idiotically happy, Judd nodded and then stroked the dog.
Patrice bent over and ran her fingers through the black fur. The wedding ring, still on her finger after fifteen years alone, stood out among the dark strands. Pancake had a difficult time standing still for her, shifting on all four paws and letting his tongue loll out.
Other than mud spatters and a few cockleburs, she found nothing amiss. Not a mark on him. There never was.
She patted the dog’s head, and Pancake rolled his deep brown eyes up at her. “I wish you could tell us stories,” she said.
In Jerry’s lab, the dog paced inside his cage. He whined twice. He obviously didn’t like to be confined and he was probably confused, since Jerry had never caged him before. Pancake wagged his tail, as if hoping for a quick end to this.
Jerry paced the room, running a hand through his own dark hair, trying to kill the butterflies in his stomach. He had worked himself into self-righteous cockiness at showing the management turds just what they had spent all their money on. Progress reports went unread, or at least not understood. Memos describing their work and its implications disappeared in the piles of paper—yes, even though Ethan and O’Hara had perfectly functioning electronic mail systems, they still insisted on old-fashioned paper memos from DyMar underlings.
He glanced at his watch. “What the hell is taking them so long?”
Beside him, Frank Peron sighed. “It’s only five minutes, Jerry. You know, wait for them, but they’ll never wait for you. We were lucky to get them to come down here at all.”
“Considering that this breakthrough will change the universe as we know it,” Jerry said, “I’d think they might want to give up a coffee break to have a look.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off the poster tacked up on the lab wall. It showed Albert Einstein handing a candle to someone few people would recognize by sight—K. Eric Drexler; Drexler, in turn, was extending a candle toward the viewer. Come on, take it! Drexler had been one of the first major visionaries behind nanotechnology some thirty years before.
It will change the universe as we know it, Jerry thought. Pancake looked expectantly at him, then sat down in the middle of his cage. “Good boy,” Jerry muttered.
“They’re management boobs,” Frank said. “You can’t expect them to understand what it is they’re funding.”
At that moment Mr. Ethan and Mr. O’Hara, two of the highest executives in DyMar Laboratories, entered the lab room, apologizing in unison for being late. Smiling, Jerry assured them that neither he nor Frank Peron had noticed.
“Dr. McKenzy, your memo was rather, uh, enthusiastic,” Ethan said.
Beside him, O’Hara scowled and chose a different word. “Ebullient. Tossing around promises of immortality, the end to all disease, curing the handicapped, stopping aging—”
“Yes, sir, we felt we had to limit our discussions to only those topics,” Jerry interrupted. He had to shock these two so thoroughly that they would be ready to question all their preconceptions. “Actually, this nanotechnology breakthrough opens the doorway to much more, such as an end to dirty industry, instantaneous fabrication of the most complex machines, new materials stronger than steel and harder than diamond. That’s why so many people have been working on it for so long. We’ve all been racing each other because when it happens, it happens. And the first ones to break through are going to shake up society like you won’t be able to imagine.”
Ethan and O’Hara looked as if they had never heard so much bullshit before in their lives. Very well, Jerry thought, time to haul out the big guns. Literally.
“Watch this, please, and then we can adjourn to the conference room.”
Jerry pulled out an automatic pistol from the pocket of his lab coat. He had bought it at a sporting goods store for this purpose only. No one should have been able to smuggle a gun into a lab, but security was lax. He had brought the dog in, hadn’t he? He looked at Pancake.
The two executives scrambled backward, muttering outcries. Jerry didn’t give them time to do anything. He was running this show. Melodramatic though it might seem, he knew it would work.
He pointed the pistol at the dog and fired two shots. One struck Pancake’s ribcage; another shattered his spine. Blood flew out from the bullet holes, drenching his fur.
Pancake yelped and then sat down from the impact. He panted.
“My god!” Ethan shouted.
“McKenzy, what the hell do you think—” O’Hara cried.
“The first thing that happens,” Jerry said, then repeated himself, yelling at the top of his lungs until he had their attention again. “The first thing that happens is that the nanomachines shut down all of the dog’s pain centers.”
The two executives stared wide eyed. They were both shaking.
In his cage, Pancake looked confused with his tongue lolling out. He seemed not to notice the gaping holes in his back. After a moment, he lay down on the floor of the cage, squishing his fur in the blood still running along his sides. His eyes grew heavy, and he sank down in deep sleep, resting his head on his front paws. He took a huge breath and released it slowly.
“In a massive injury like this, the machines will place him in a recuperative coma. Already, they are scouring the damage sites, assessing the repairs that will be needed, and starting to put him together again. They can link themselves into larger assemblies to make macro repairs.” Jerry knelt down on the floor beside the cage, reached his hand in to pat Pancake on the head. “His temperature is already rising from the waste heat generated by the nanomachines. Look, the blood has stopped flowing.”
“The dog’s dead!” O’Hara said. “The animal activists are going to crucify us!”
“Nope. By tomorrow, he’ll be up and chasing jackrabbits.” Jerry felt intensely pleased with himself. “I brought in my own dog so we didn’t have to go through all the procurement crap to get approved experimental animals.
“You are out of a job, Dr. McKenzy!” Ethan said. His face had turned a deep red.
“I don’t think so,” Jerry answered, and smiled. “I’ll bet you a box of dog biscuits.”
The light near sunset slanted through a cut in the Oregon hills where the trees had been shaved in strips from robotic logging. The clouds had cleared again, leaving Patrice and Judd to sit by the table in the living room. The lights, sensing their presence in the household, would come on soon.
The two of them worked on a sprawling jigsaw puzzle that showed the planet Earth rising over the lunar crags, photographed from the moonbase. The blue-green sphere covered most of the table, with jagged gaps from a few continents not yet filled in.
Patrice and Judd talked little in the shared comfortable silence of two people who had had only their own company for a very long time. They could get by with partial sentences, cryptic comments, private jokes.
Judd knew why they had to hide from the outside world. Patrice had kept no secrets from him, explaining their situation in more complicated terms as the boy grew older and became able to comprehend. He had never complained. He knew no other life.
Outside, Pancake barked. He stood up on the porch and paced, letting a low growl loose in his throat.
Patrice stiffened and went to the lace curtains. Her mouth went dry. Somehow, she knew the dog was not making one of his puppy barks at a squirrel. She had owned the dog more than half her life, and she knew him better than any human being could. This was a bark of warning.
“What is it, Mom?” Judd asked. From the drawn expression on his face, she could tell he felt the fear as much as she did. She had trained him well enough.
She could hear a vehicle toiling up the winding gravel drive away from the highway and toward the house.
The demonstrators outside DyMar Laboratories consisted of an odd mix of religious groups, labor union representatives, animal-rights activists, and who knew what else. Some were fruitcakes, some were violent.
Staring out the window, Jerry McKenzy didn’t know how to deal with the mob. Maintenance had added steel bars in the last week. “We didn’t get as much breathing space as we counted on.”
He paced in the lab office, with his terminal and notes, brainstorming files, and records. The actual nanotech experiments were done in clean-rooms in the annex building, where Jerry himself rarely went. But with the demonstrations growing, all experiments had been shut down as the DyMar execs tried to figure out what to do. But then, they were idiots anyway.
DyMar had made a fatal error in announcing the nanotechnology breakthrough to the world. Pressed for time and knowing their research facility couldn’t be the only one so close to success, DyMar had blitzed the public with premature announcements. They had taken everyone by surprise.
The outcry in response had been swift and frightening, much more organized and aggressive than the misguided or ineffective complaints Jerry had normally seen. The protest was organized under the aegis of a new organization called “Purity” that had burst into existence with unbelievable speed.
Peron stored his file in the computer and tapped his fingers on the keyboard. “And you thought we’d be the only ones to grasp the implications of nanotechnology.”
“It’s always nice to see that some people understand more than you give them credit for,” Jerry said.
Peron tugged on his lower lip. Something had been bothering him all morning. “Did you ever hear the story about the guy who perfected a solar-power engine? Would have put the gas and electric companies out of business, would have changed the world as we know it. But he disappeared before he could disseminate his blueprints. Now, somebody with a billion-dollar invention like that doesn’t just drop out of sight. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Jerry scowled at him. “Oh, that’s just an urban legend! Like the choking Doberman.”
Peron shrugged. “Well, Drexler predicted back in 1985 that we’d have functioning nanotech within a decade—and that was thirty years ago! A dozen groups have been working, but somehow the crucial experiments fizzle at just the wrong times, the key data gets misprinted in technical journals. It’s only because of your damned arrogance, Jerry, that we plowed our way around the usual scientific channels. Have you checked how often the most promising nanotech researchers move off to other fields of study, how often they die in accidents?”
Jerry blinked at the other man in astonishment. “Have you run a reality diagnostic on yourself recently, Frank? You’re sounding paranoid.”
Peron forced a laugh. “Sorry. This isn’t exactly a high-security installation we’re working in, you know. You smuggled your damned dog in here twice, and Pancake isn’t a lap dog that’ll fit in a glove compartment. A chain-link fence and a couple of rent-a-cops does not make me feel safe.”
As if in response, the crowds outside took up a loud chant.
Jerry sat down, kicked a few of the stray pencils away from his feet, and spoke in his “let’s be reasonable” voice. “Frank, some bone-headed fanatic is always trying to stop progress—but it never works. Nobody can undiscover nanotechnology.” He made a rude noise through his lips.
Jerry spent a quarter of an hour reassuring his partner, convincing him not to worry. With dogged persistence they could get through this mess. He felt confident when they both packed up to brave the gauntlet of protesters and go home.
But he never saw Frank Peron again.
When Patrice saw the red vehicle approaching, she squinted into the sunset and made it out to be a small American truck outfitted with laser-guidance sensors, mud-spattered and identical to a million other vehicles in Oregon. She didn’t recognize the silhouette of the man behind the wheel.
She didn’t have time to run.
Patrice and Judd had lived in the state for nine years, at the same location for three of them. She and her son had fled to Oregon because of its track record of survivalists, of religious cults, of extremists and isolationists—all of whom knew how to be left alone. The state’s rural ultra-privacy legislation forbade any release of tax documents, credit card transactions, or telephone records.
But the last time she had gone into a grocery store, she had noticed the cover of a weekly newsmagazine depicting the fenced-off and burned ruins of DyMar Laboratories. The headline advertised a fifteen-year retrospective on the disaster, bemoaning that all records had been lost of such an important technological breakthrough. No doubt the story would talk about how she and her son were still missing, presumed killed by Purity extremists. There would have been pictures of her—as Trish McKenzy, not Patrice Kennesy, and the boy Jody, not Judd.
Uneasy, she had taken her groceries and backed away from the TV guides and beef jerky strips and candy bars by the register. No one, she insisted to herself, would have put such a coincidence together, would have connected all the details. Still, the clerk had stared at her too intently.…
Now, with a grim expression on her face, Patrice stepped out on her front porch to meet the approaching stranger.
The demonstrators did not go home, not even late at night. Jerry had remained at the lab office until after ten o’clock, sending a vidmessage to Trish that he wanted to finish another simulation before locking up. People massed against the chain-link fence, shouting and chanting. They had lit bonfires.
Somehow he could not believe that anybody but the technically literate would understand how significant a breakthrough he and Frank Peron had made. This wasn’t the type of thing people normally got up in arms about—it was too complicated and required too much foresight to see how the world would change, to sort the dangers from the miracles DyMar had been promising in its PR. Who was orchestrating all this?
Like Utah’s cold fusion debacle from decades before, DyMar had made a lot of promises and produced nothing tangible. They were waiting for patent approval before releasing any details, but the red tape had been tangled, the patent office had lost the first two sets of applications, though the e-mail trace verified that they had been received and logged in. Lawyers did not return vidmessages. News of the “immortal dog” had leaked in one interview, but Jerry sure as hell was not going to shoot Pancake again in front of a TV camera just to make a point.
The dog wasn’t the only one blessed with nanotechnology cell repair, though. He had seen to that himself. Nobody knew that he carried his own cell-repair machines tailored to human DNA, and it would stay that way.
Outside he heard glass breaking, the roar of the crowd. It just didn’t make any sense to him. He watched out the window. Clouds had obscured most of the stars overhead, but mercury vapor lamps spilled garish light across the near-empty parking lot.
At the gate, a team of rent-a-cops paced about holding rifles ready, probably quaking in their boots. DyMar had called for backup security from the State Police, and they had been turned down. The ostensible reason was some buried statute that allowed the police to defer “internal company disputes” to private security forces. How they could consider the mob of demonstrators to be an internal company dispute, Jerry could not imagine. It felt as if somebody wanted the lab unprotected.
He heard sharp popping noises outside, and it took him a moment to realize they were gunshots. He turned to see one of the security guards fall; others ran away as a group of people streamed through a breach in the chain-link fence. He heard more gunfire.
“This is nuts!” he said to himself, then switched off the light in his lab. No use attracting them; but they would know exactly where he was working. Jerry couldn’t believe it, but he knew he had to get away immediately.
Glow from the parking-lot lights mixed with the dim EXIT sign to give him enough illumination to move. He slipped out of the room and hesitated, wondering if he should call the police or the fire department. Someone smashed the front doors downstairs. He had no time.
They would ransack the place and destroy his work. Jerry tried to think if he could save anything, like in all those old movies where the mad scientist rescued his single notebook from the flames. But his work and Frank Peron’s was scattered in a thousand computer files, delicate microhardware, and intangible AI simulations. Everything was backed up, with duplicates stored in various vaults. It would be safe. For now, the important thing was to escape. The mob had already killed one of the guards; Jerry had no doubt they would tear him apart.
He ran down the hall as he heard footsteps in the lobby, shouted orders, another gunshot. Jerry fled to the back stairwell, yanked open the door, and leaped down the concrete stairs three at a time, balancing himself on the railing. At the bottom, he ripped off his lab coat and left it on the landing before emerging into the administrative section of the main building.
He peeked around the door. They had not gotten this far down the halls yet, and managerial offices would not be their first target. He heard a huge roaring explosion and saw through a set of windows the annex building erupt into orange flames. Impossible! This couldn’t be happening! But ignorant peasants had always stormed the doctor’s castle, carrying torches.
Jerry kept close to the wall as he hurried along. The front and side doors would be out of the question. But the back had an emergency exit, a crash-out door that would also activate alarms and notify the police and fire departments. He couldn’t decide if that would be good or bad.
A window shattered in one of the suites in front of him, and a puddle of flames spilled from a broken bottle. Molotov cocktail; one of the front offices—either Ethan’s or O’Hara’s—burst into flame.
Jerry placed his ear to the emergency exit door. He heard chaos outside, but it sounded distant. He imagined somebody stationed back here with a rifle pointed at the door, waiting for him to come running. But he had no other choice.
Jerry used his back to slam out through the door, throwing himself to the ground as he emerged. He rolled, waiting to hear gunshots strike the door, ping off the asphalt, slam into his chest. What had Pancake felt when the bullets slammed into him? He didn’t know how much damage his own body could endure and still repair itself. He had never tested his limits.
But the only gunshots came from the side of the building. He heard more shouts and running people. He got up and sprinted to the corner of the building. If only he could make it to the parking lot and to his car, he could crash through the fence and drive off, get Trish and the baby, and hide in a motel for a few days until this stuff calmed down.
He let himself feel a ripple of smugness. The violence here would stun the protest movement; once the public saw them do murder and destruction like this, all sympathy for their cause would be gone. This was like mass insanity. Killing people by blowing up abortion clinics never won any support for Pro-Life groups, did it? Armstrong’s bomb hadn’t helped the Vietnam War protest decades before, had it?
But when Jerry saw the people attacking the DyMar building, saw the weapons they carried and the uniform way they moved, he knew immediately that this was no mob, this was no ragtag band of second-generation hippies yanking shotguns off their mantels.
Fire from the lower level spread through the main building. More burning bottles had been tossed through downstairs windows.
With a shock he noticed a complete absence of TV crews, though they had been covering the protest since its beginning. On the parking lot near the gate, Jerry saw the sprawled uniformed bodies of two security guards. The others were probably dead somewhere along the fence line—unless they were themselves part of the assault team.
In the confusion, Jerry added an angry expression to his face and ran among the mob, working his way to the parking lot. He slipped through, shouting directions to anyone who looked his direction as if to challenge him.
Once Jerry got to the cars, he ducked low, working among them. This late at night, not many vehicles remained, only his own, the guards’, a handful of other cars and trucks that had either been broken down, or sat with For Sale signs in their windshields.
He found Frank Peron’s black sports car and hesitated. But Frank had left days ago! Unless he had never made it. Jerry swallowed a cold lump in his throat.
Once he got in his car, he would have to start it fast, and drive away fast, keeping his head low to avoid gunfire. Judging from what Pancake had endured, Jerry could survive some major injuries with his nanotech healing machines, but he had no desire to test them.
He reached the passenger side of his car and fished in his pocket for the key ring. Among the shouts and burning and gunshots, the noise he made was insignificant, but still the jingle seemed too loud to him. He unlocked the door and slipped in, crawling over the passenger seat and pulling the door shut behind him. Squirming, he positioned himself behind the steering wheel, still ducking low, and took an absurd moment to strap himself in with the seatbelt. He would have to crash through the fence and he did not want to smack his head on the dashboard and knock himself senseless.
Before starting the car, he plotted his route, found a side gate with an access road that would take him off to the highway. He switched off all the automatic collision-avoidance systems, the laser-guidance options. He was going to have to drive like a stunt man. He made up his mind to plow right over anybody who stood in his way. This was life or death here. Adrenalin pounded through him. He would gain nothing by waiting.
He turned the key in the ignition.
The car bomb instantly blew him into pieces, trapping his body in the burning hulk of twisted metal. Not even his cell-repair machines could fix so much damage.
In front of Patrice’s house, the man wasted no time as he ground the red vehicle to a halt. He left the engine purring, slid the door open, and stood up.
He brought a scattershot rifle out of the front seat and leveled it at Patrice. “Ding dong, Avon calling,” he said.
Patrice stood defiantly on the porch, unable to move. She felt old and weak. When Judd stepped out and stood beside her, she felt weaker still.
“Or would you rather I said ‘I’m from the government, I’m here to help you’?” the man continued. He had a medium build and wore a red flannel shirt with a white T-shirt poking up to his neck. His face was bland, nondescript, showing no indications of outright evil.
Without taking his eyes from them, he reached in to the dashboard of his truck and yanked out two sheets of paper, colored computer printouts showing faces. The images were split: one side showed a photograph of her from fifteen years before, and the other image—computer enhanced—had “aged” her to approximate what she looked like now, along with a detailed personality analysis suggesting how she might normally dress. The second sheet of paper showed baby Jody and a much-less-exact extrapolation of how he would look as a sixteen-year-old boy.
“I’m convinced,” the man said. “Or are you going to deny it, Mrs. McKenzy?”
For a moment, all the words backed up in her mind. She couldn’t think of anything to say, couldn’t think of anything worth saying. “What do you want from us?”
“What do I want?” He laughed and stepped around the door of the vehicle, still pointing the scattershot at them. “Purity’s been looking a long time.”
Growling, Pancake stood up and eased forward, baring his teeth. He stepped in front of Judd.
The Purity man stopped and blinked in astonishment. “Jesus, that’s the dog! The goddamned dog—it’s still alive! Well, well, well!”
“Do you want money?” Patrice said. She didn’t have much left, but it would stall him for a few minutes. “I have cash. It won’t show up on any account record.”
“This goes beyond money,” he said. “We need to bring you in. Take the dog and destroy him. Then find out from you and the boy if you’ve kept any of Dr. McKenzy’s notes, maybe some of his nanotech samples. We can’t take chances with the human race.”
Seeming to sense the boy was the weak link in this scenario, the Purity man aimed the scattershot at Judd’s head and took a few more steps toward them. Holding the rifle with one hand, he fumbled in his pocket, withdrawing a pair of polymer handcuffs.
“Now then, Mrs. McKenzy, let’s not make this difficult. I want you to cuff one of these around your wrist and the other around the boy’s ankle. That’ll make it impossible for you to run anywhere.” He extended the handcuffs forward.
Pancake lunged. Black Labradors were not normally used as attack dogs, but Pancake must have been able to sense the fear and tension in the air. He knew who the intruder was, and he had been with the same owner for 24 years.
He struck the Purity man full in the shoulders, startling him, spoiling his aim. The scattershot dropped. The man’s finger squeezed the trigger. The explosion roared through the quiet isolation far from the main road.
Instead of taking off Judd’s head, the swath of silver needles spattered across the boy’s chest, spraying blood behind him to the walls of the house.
Patrice screamed.
Pancake bore the man to the ground. The man thumped into the front of his vehicle, banged against the sharp laser-guidance detectors and then sprawled. He tried to fight the dog off. Pancake bit at his face, his throat.
Wailing, Patrice dropped to her knees and cradled her son’s head. “Oh my god! Oh my god!”
Judd blinked his eyes. They were wide with astonishment and seemingly far away. Blood bubbled out of his mouth, and he spat it aside. “So tired.” She stroked his hair.
Pancake backed away from the motionless man on the ground. Blood lay in pools from the man’s torn throat.
The headlights of Patrice’s carryall glared up from the wet pavement long after dark. She had switched off the old and unreliable laser-guidance systems and drove faster than safety or common sense allowed, but panic had gotten into her mind now. She kept driving, pushing her foot to the floor and wrestling with the curves of the coast road, heading north. Dark pine trees flashed by like tunnel walls on either side of her.
She had to find someplace else, to run again, to start a new life.
Pancake rested in the back of the station wagon, exhausted. Clumps of blood bristled from his fur. She hadn’t taken time to clean him up. She had paused only long enough to throw all of her ready cash into the glove compartment. The Purity man’s own wallet had held two hundred dollars and several cred cards under different names.
Looking down at the man’s body in failing dusk light, she noticed that the blood had stopped flowing, yet his heart continued to beat. He looked to be in a deep sleep, and his skin felt warm and feverish. She stepped back in horror. Of course the government had nanotech healers of their own! All of Jerry’s records were supposedly destroyed in the DyMar labs disaster, but with backups and disjointed systems, no simple fire could have eliminated everything.
Now she knew why, after all these years, others had not made similar breakthroughs. Jerry had been merely the first, but other researchers were close on his heels. The sham organization of Purity, or the government, or some worldwide power consortium had kept nanotechnology to themselves, blocking or absorbing all other breakthroughs as they occurred.
This man would wake up in a day or so, and report back to his superiors. She could destroy him now, set his body on fire or squash his head with the front wheel of his own vehicle.
Instead, she siphoned all the fuel out of his truck and switched license markers. In some coast town, she would find a darkened parking lot and other unattended vehicles, and she would switch markers again. Then she would move on.
In the back seat of the carryall, Judd lay in silence, wrapped in two bloodstained blankets she had torn from the beds upstairs. His pulse was faint, his breathing shallow, but he still lived. He seemed to be in a coma.
The obstacle alarm screeched. From the trees on her right, a dog stepped into the road in front of her.
Patrice cried out, slammed the brakes and yanked the steering wheel. The dog bounded back out of sight. She swerved, nearly lost control of the car on the slick road, then regained it. Behind her, in the rear-view mirror, she saw the dark shape of the dog walk back across the road, undaunted by its close call.
She remembered one of the last conversations she had had with Jerry, after he had finally told her what he had done to Pancake and the immortality his nanotechnology had brought. Jerry had wanted to give her the same type of protection.
She had blinked at him in horror when he told her he had already done it to himself. He wanted to do it to her, too.
The thought of a billion billion tiny machines crawling through her body, checking and rechecking her cell structures, seemed abominable to her. She’d refused to let him. Jerry would not let her ponder the question, would not let her come to grips with the idea. He wanted an answer right then. That was just the way Jerry McKenzy did things.
Baby Jody had started to cry, awakened by their raised voices. Trish had looked up at her husband with wide eyes; she caught a faint smile on his face as Jerry glanced toward Jody’s room.
“You didn’t do anything to the baby, did you! What did you do to Jody?”
“Nothing!” Jerry said. He smiled. “I didn’t do anything.”
But she could always tell when her husband was lying.
As she drove off into the night, with her son’s bleeding body in the car seat behind her, Patrice prayed she was right.