“Dr Burnofsky.” It was Mamadou Attah. Dr Mamadou Attah, formerly of the Ivory Coast, later of Oxford and MIT, briefly a resident of Grand Rapids Michigan’s Applegate Psychiatric Hospital, and now one of Burnofsky’s hardest-working—and giddily happy—subordinates.

“Yes, Dr Attah?”

“We did it, we sure got that extruder calibrated!”

“Good,” he said.

She flashed him a huge grin. She was short and broad and, despite being brilliant, had a distinct tendency to go around giggling under her breath. She had been wired and indoctrinated, of course, all as a means of dealing with what had been crippling depression.

No more depression in her future. No more mental hospitals. Although she sometimes irritated nonwired staff to the point of rage, she was an excellent scientist and utterly devoted.

She stood waiting like an expectant dog, evidently not entirely satisfied by his wan, “Oh, good.” So he added a, “Fantastic work, Doctor. You’re the best.”

She grinned, made a pistol finger, and said, “No, sir, Dr B., you’re the best!”

He walked across the spotless white tile floor past white-coated scientists and pink-coated staff, a shambling, reedy, runny-eyed, corduroy-clad wreck of a human being. The door to his private lab was protected by a keypad and fingerprint ID. He punched in the number sequence and pressed his thumb against the touchscreen. Inside was a very different space. Here the equipment was whatever putty or gray color it had been when first acquired. There were no plasma screens showing bucolic loveliness. The ceiling seemed particularly low. A Costco-size box of Little Debbie Devil Cremes spilled across his desk.

He pulled the bottle of bourbon from his desk, poured a tumbler full, and gulped it.

Back in the fabulous main lab the work of AFGC’s nanotech division went on feverishly. The piece of equipment that Dr Attah had been so proud of fixing was part of the SRN production line.

Self-replicating nanobot. SRN. But he along with everyone else involved in the project had taken to calling them “hydras,” after the mythological beast that just kept sprouting new heads any time you chopped one off: in effect, a self-replicating monster.

The first large-scale field test of the hydras was scheduled to occur in just a few weeks.

Twelve hundred hydras would be released in a high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx. The test would be whether the hydras would propagate, locate hosts, and avoid detection. If they performed as expected, the neighborhood would experience a sudden drop in crime rate as thousands of residents were crudely rewired for diminished aggression.

A smaller test, just two hundred hydras bearing special radioactive tracking signatures, were to be released on the subway. They would be able to follow the spread. And these nanobots had a particular function: to do something the first generation of nanobots couldn’t even begin to pull off: the implantation of an image. Actually creating a memory.

And yet, despite those specialized abilities, the hydras were poor relations to regular nanobots. They were crude, rough, and slow. The self-replicating process meant using whatever materials could be found at hand: one form or another of living tissue.

The regular nanobots were made of sophisticated alloys, ceramics and textiles. They were the Ferraris of the nanotech world. These new tiny monsters were scarecrows by contrast.

Each hydra was serviced by dozens of much smaller micromachines, nicknamed MiniMites. These were very simple, very, very small devices whose sole purpose was to strip-mine living things for their useful minerals. They were tiny refineries, eating flesh and defecating iron, zinc, copper, calcium, magnesium, chromium, and the rest.

In the event that anything went wrong with the tests, the mayor of New York City, the governor of New York, and, if it came to that, the president of the United States should be under sufficient control to head off an effective investigation, let alone countermeasures.

Of course the whole thing had to be carefully managed. A fair amount of a human body could be consumed and turned into raw material without harming the host—most people had more than enough fat, extra bone, dead skin, resident bacteria, the contents of stomachs and intestines, and whatever brain cells were being liquefied. But uncontrolled, well, the process could be harmful. Even fatal.

To say nothing of what would happen if the MiniMites began to adapt and to chew away at buildings and bridges and so on.

But there were fail-safes and cutoffs and so on for all of that.

Foolproof stuff. And the hydras were being designed to reproduce only so many generations before dying off, and to consume only so much living tissue. The goal, after all, was to rewire the human race, not to obliterate it.

That was the plan.

That was not, however, Burnofsky’s plan.

Burnofsky carried his drink to his workstation. There he had a monitor attached to a scanning electron microscope. He pressed a remote control in his pocket and the surveillance camera on the wall switched seamlessly to file video. He doubted the Twins would understand what he was doing, but there was no point taking chances: they would see only what he wanted them to see.

On the monitor Burnofsky saw nanobots. They were rather different from the ones being so carefully created in the main lab. Burnofsky smiled to see them. Busy little creatures. Hydras busy doing what SRNs did: self-replicating.

But there were a number of differences between these and the hydras beyond his lab door. Some of those differences were visible, most not.

Funny, Burnofsky thought, gazing with pride at his creations, that people talk about the gray goo scenario, and in truth the hydras in the main lab were basically gray.